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“I don’t know you. But I heard about you,” Vic said.
“What’d you hear?” Weldon asked.
“You’re a big oil man here’bouts.”
“I’ve got a record for dusters,” Weldon said.
“You only got to hit a pay sand one in eight. Ain’t that right?”
“You sound like you’ve been around the oil business, Vic,” Weldon said.
“I roughnecked some. But I ain’t ever run acrost you, if that’s what you’re asking. I seen her though.” He lifted a shriveled forefinger at Drew.
I saw the side of her face twitch. Then she recovered herself.
“I’m afraid I don’t recall meeting you,” she said.
“I didn’t say you’d met me. I seen you jogging on the street. In New Iberia. You was with some other people. But a man don’t forget a handsome woman.”
Her eyes looked away. Bama stared down at her hands.
“Lyle says you’re our old man, Vic,” Weldon said.
“I ain’t. But I don’t argue with it. People abide the likes of me for different reasons. Mostly because they feel guilty about something. It don’t matter to me. What time we eat? There’s a TV show I want to watch.”
“Yeah, those crabs ought to be good and red now,” Lyle said.
“You cook them in slow water, they taste better,” Vic said. “There’s people don’t like to do it ’cause of the sound they make in the pot.”
He took a long drink from his whiskey, his eyes roving over us as though he had just made a profound observation.
Batist and Lyle began dipping the crabs out of the boiling water with tongs and dropping them in the empty washtub to cool. Vic filled half of a paper plate with dirty rice, walked to the fire pit ahead of everyone else, picked up two hot crabs from the tub with his bare hand, and began eating by himself on a folding chair under an oak tree.
“Is that the man you saw at your window?” Drew said to Bama.
Bama’s pulse was quivering like a severed muscle in her throat.
“I’m not sure what I saw,” she said. “It was quite dark. Perhaps it was a man in a mask. To be frank, I’ve tried to put it out of my mind. I prefer not to talk about it, Drew. I don’t know why we should be talking about these things at a dinner party.”
Weldon smoked a cigarette and watched Vic Benson with a whimsical look on his face.
“Weldon?” Drew said.
“What?”
“Say something.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Is it him?”
“Of course it’s him. I’d recognize that old sonofabitch if you melted him into glue.”
BOOTSIE AND I got in the serving line, then tried to isolate ourselves from the Sonniers’ conversation. But Bama was having her troubles with it, too. She made a mess of shelling the crab on her plate, spraying her dress and face with juice when she squeezed a claw between the nutcrackers, then rushing from the table as though the deck of the Titanic had just tilted under her.
When she returned from the bathroom, her face was fresh and composed and her eyes were rekindled with an ethereal blue light.
“My, I didn’t realize it had gotten so late,” she said. “We must be running, Weldon.”
