Lisa did not lie to Tookie about her appointment at the state employment office. The problem was the three hundred people ahead of her when she arrived and the piano wire that someone is now tightening around her head with a wood peg. She lasts forty-five minutes in the waiting room, vomits in the bathroom, then drives down Railroad Avenue to the first liquor store she can find. The short-dog she buys may smell like a mixture of hair tonic and kerosene, but it goes down with a rush that is one notch south of the orgasmic moment she experienced when she first shot up with brown skag.
She finishes the bottle under the shade of a spreading oak by a small grocery store. Gangbangers with black kerchiefs tied down on their heads are taking turns at a weight set under the tree, curling the bar in to their bare chests, their steroid-swollen muscles almost popping out of their skin. Lisa screws the cap on the empty bottle and stares vacantly into space, then takes her time getting out of the car and dropping the bottle in a trash barrel. She has no reason to remain under a lichen-encrusted tree, in New Iberia’s old brothel district, on a morning she should seek work, on a morning that somehow seems like a crossroads that has been set in her path. But the sun-spangled shade under the tree is a pleasant place to be, with her car door open to the wind, on a day that is both warm and cool at the same time, while the boys clank iron and leaves drift down on her windshield like gold coins.
She shuts her eyes and breathes the heavy odor of the fortified wine in and out of her lungs, and for just a moment, as though she is outside of her body, she sees Gerald kiss her cheek and place the flat of his hand on her belly.
Without invitation, a grinning man wearing a striped brown suit and an oxblood Stetson opens the passenger door and slides in beside her. He has two sweating cans of Budweiser balanced in his left palm and a fat package of warm boudin in the other. “Hey, darling, want to join me in a li’l snack?” he asks, already spreading the butcher paper open on the seat, filling the car with the delicious smell of ground sausage and spice and onions.
“I ain’t here to score, Herman,” she replies.
“I respect folks’ choices. When they get clean, I say more power to them. But that don’t mean I ain’t their friend no more.”
He peels the tab on one of the beer cans and lets the foam rise through the hole and well over the top and slide down the back of his hand. “Here you go, baby. Sip this while I cut you some boudin chunks. You found a job yet? All them evacuees is kind of messing up the labor market, ain’t they?”
She is an evacuee, flooded out of the Lower Ninth Ward in Orleans Parish by Hurricane Katrina, shuttled from the Superdome to a shelter in New Iberia’s City Park. In fact, she’d still be there or in a FEMA trailer camp if her aunt hadn’t given her the use of the shotgun cabin in the Loreauville quarters. But Herman already knows that. Herman knows how to flatter, to indicate his listener is different, special, not part of a categorical group whose presence is starting to be resented and feared.
“That Budweiser is good and cold, ain’t it?” he says. “Lookie here, drive me to my crib and let me make some calls. Can you do receptionist work, answer the phone, maybe seat people in a restaurant, stuff like that?”
“Sure, Herman.”
“Then let’s motivate on out of here, baby,” he says, lifting his chin, indicating she should start the engine and drive the two of them to his Victorian home on Bayou Teche.
Herman acquired the house from a black physician who, for unknown reasons, signed over the deed and left town. No one ever knew where the physician or his family went, nor were they ever heard from again. The wood columns are eaten by termites, the ventilated green shutters askew on their hinges, the second-story rain gutters bleeding rust down the walls. The oak and pecan trees are so thick that sunlight never enters the house and no grass grows in the yard.
But Herman is not concerned with historical preservation. The swimming pool in his backyard is a glittering blue teardrop, coated with steam, where his girls float on inflated latex cushions, where bougainvillea drips as brightly as drops of blood on his latticework, where potted lime and Hong Kong orchid trees bloom year-round and assure his guests the season is eternal.
“Sit here and relax while I call in a couple of favors from some business associates,” he says out on the terrace. “Have some of them veined shrimps. Ignore the ladies in the pool. They nice, but they ain’t in your league, know what I mean? Hey, if I get you on in a hostess position, it’s probably gonna be twelve or t’irteen dol’ars an hour. You all right wit’ that?”
Lisa sits in the coolness of the sunshine and tries to concentrate on what she is doing. It’s only noon and she has gone from the comfort of the fog at sunrise into the meeting at the church, then to the employment office and the liquor store and the shady oak tree where boys clanked iron and admired one another’s bodies as though anatomical perfection were a stay against mortality. No
w she is at the home of Herman Stanga, watching women she doesn’t know swim in a sky-blue pool, while Herman paces back and forth behind the French doors, talking on the phone, undressing down to a thong, kicking his trousers in a rattle of change across the room.
The bayou is chocolate-brown, the sun a wobbling balloon of yellow flame trapped under its surface. The bayou conjures up images and memories she does not want to revisit. In her mind’s eye she sees people wading in chest-deep water, the surface iridescent with a chemical sheen, fecal clouds rising from the bottom, a stench crawling into her nostrils that makes her gag. Then the knocking sound starts in her head and she has to press both fists against her temples to make it stop.
Why has she come to Herman’s house? Does she really believe he wants to help her? What would Tookie say if she knew?
“I’m telling you, this is a nice lady, man,” she hears Herman saying. “No, she ain’t on welfare. No, she ain’t got no personal problems or bad habits. What she got is my recommendation. Don’t give me your trash, Rodney. I’m sending her over. You treat her right, nigger.”
Herman clicks off the phone and slips on a robe that hangs on his lithe frame like blue ice water. He motions Lisa inside and tells her to sit on a stool at a counter that separates the living room from the kitchen. “My cousin Rodney owns a couple of clubs in Lafayette and caters parties and banquets for rich people out at the Oil Center. All you got to do is supervise the buffet table and the punch bowl and make sure everybody getting the drinks they need. They want somebody know how to deal with the public. I told Rodney that’s you, baby.”
He’s talking too fast for her. Her ears are popping and she thinks she hears voices yelling and the downdraft of helicopter blades. She realizes Herman is staring at her, his face disjointed. “You gonna get crazy on me?” he says.
“The Coast Guard helicopter took me off the roof. The blades was so loud nobody could hear. I was shouting and nobody could hear.”
“Shouting what?” Herman asks. “What you talking about?”
“The Coast Guard man grabbed me around the chest and pulled me up on a cable. I couldn’t t’ink. I could see trash and bodies in the water all the way to where the levee was broke. I cain’t get that noise out of my head.”
“What noise?”
“The knocking.”
Herman brushes at a nostril with one knuckle and huffs air out his nose, his eyes flat, as though he’s studying thoughts of a kind no one would ever guess at. He begins to massage the tendons in her shoulders. “You’re tight as iron, Lisa. That ain’t good for you. Come upstairs.”
“No.”
For just an instant, in the time it takes to blink, she sees the light in his eyes harden. Then he bites his lip softly and smiles to himself. “I respect you, darling. Wouldn’t have our relationship no other way.”
Now he’s the pixie again, his tiny mustache flexing with his grin. He places a mirror on the corner, back side flat, and begins chopping up lines on it with a razor blade, shaping and sculpting each white row like an artwork. “I still got the best product in town. I don’t force it on nobody. They hurting, need some medicine, I hep them out. But I ain’t the captain of nobody else’s soul.”