“She didn’t say that?”
“I was testing you. She didn’t say that at all. She said you was nice.”
He wiped his mouth with his paper napkin and pushed his bowl of gumbo away. He seemed to study the zydeco men on the bandstand without actually seeing them. The lead player, a gargantuan black man, had an accordion that rippled like purple ivory. His fingers were as big as sausages, but they danced across the keys and buttons as delicately as starfish. He had gone into Clifton Chenier’s signature song, “Hey, Tite F’ee,” rocking back and forth, his voice a flood of rust into the mi
crophone. In the background, the rub-board man whipped the thimbles on his fingers up and down on the corrugated sheet of aluminum strapped to his chest.
“I’d like to do something for you, if you’d let me. But it’s up to you,” Weingart said.
“Do what for me?”
“Give you some exposure. Improve your life. Introduce others to your talent. What do you think we’ve been talking about, girl?” He paused. “I wrote novels and short stories for years. Nobody would touch them. I was dirt in the eyes of other people. Then I found somebody who believed in me.”
“Who?”
“Kermit Abelard.” He waited. “You don’t know who he is?”
“No.”
Weingart smiled. “Wonderful.”
“Why?”
“Nothing. Kermit needs a little humility once in a while. You’re something else. Want to take a ride?”
She smiled and shrugged. “You giving me a ride in the rain? ’Cause if you are, it’s not raining.”
“Girl, if you don’t have a career waiting for you, I’ll swallow a thumbtack. Cross my heart.”
She picked up her purse and looked at the bandstand as though saying either good-bye or hello to it. Weingart pressed his palm into the small of her back and walked outside with her under a blanket of stars that perhaps the girl believed had been created especially for her.
IN THE SHADOWS on the edge of the parking lot, a St. Martin Parish deputy sheriff was smoking a cigarette. She was short and slightly overweight and had gold hair, and her lipstick was thick enough to leave smears on the filter tip of her cigarette. The night was warm, and she wore a short-sleeved blue shirt turned up at the cuffs, exposing the plumpness of her upper arms. On nights when a band played at the club, she was one of several deputies who took turns doing security by the front door, primarily as a visual discouragement to parolees who could be violated back to Angola for drinking alcohol or keeping bad company. The job was boring, but the pay wasn’t bad, and it was also under the table.
One of the bartenders at the club was an elderly black twelve-string guitarist by the name of Hogman Patin. Both of his forearms were wrapped with scar tissue like flattened gray worms from knife beefs in Angola, where he had done time as a big stripe under the gun almost sixty years ago. He bore no animus toward whites or the system, and did not argue with others regarding his view of the world, namely that there was no difference between human beings except the presence or absence of money in their lives. But he had an animus, and it was one that went deep into his viscera. Hogman gave short shrift to those who exploited the innocent and the weak.
He wasn’t sure who Robert Weingart was and in fact could see only the clean lines of his profile and the shine of the tonic on his hair, but while Hogman poured the Diet Cokes and filled the bowls of gumbo Weingart had ordered, he studied Tee Jolie Melton and the glow on her face. It was the look of a girl who knew she was loved and beautiful and desired. Her eyes were bright, as though she was amused by the flattery she was hearing, as though the words of the well-dressed white man did not cause flowers to bloom in her cheeks. Hogman asked the waitress who the white man was.
“A famous writer,” she said.
“He drives that Mustang out front?”
“That’s him.”
“Ax Tee Jolie if she got a minute.”
“She came to his table on her own, Hogman. He ain’t picked her up.”
“I know, he’s probably researching a book. We get a lot of them kind in here.”
Hogman went to the restroom, then had to move two cases of beer from the storage room to the cooler. When he had finished loading the cooler, Tee Jolie and Weingart had left. He wiped his hands on a dish towel and went out on the front porch of the club.
Weingart escorted Tee Jolie to his Mustang and opened the passenger door for her. But instead of getting in, she rested one hand on top of the door and studied his face and the unnatural glaze it had taken on in the glow of the Christmas-tree lights stapled around the club’s front windows, as though the tissue in it had been injected with synthetics. “Can my sister come wit’ us?”
“I thought we got that situation out of the way.”
“I feel a li’l guilty about her not getting to audition, like maybe I’m taking her chance away from her.”
“There’re all kinds of legal problems when you start dealing with minors. Record companies will do it if the prospect is big enough, but they don’t like it. Besides, kids’ voices change.”