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Moleen drove straight from the girl's house to Wirtz's and didn't even bother to cut the engine or close the door of his Buick behind him before he strode through the unpainted picket gate and up the narrow path lined with petunias to the gallery, where Wirtz, his face cool and serene in the shade, was eating from a box of Oreo cookies, his leather cap suspended on a nail above his head.
“The girl's too scared and ashamed to bring charges against you, but I want you off my property. In fact, I want you out of the parish,”
Moleen said.
“Out of the parish, huh?” Wirtz said, and smiled so broadly his eyes were slits.
“Why in God's name I hired some white trash like you I'll never know,”
Moleen said.
“White trash, huh? You hear this, cap'n. Befo' I'd put mine in that nigger, I'd cut hit off and feed hit to the dog.”
“Clean your house out. I want you gone by nightfall.”
Moleen started toward his car.
“You're a piece of work, Bertrand. You fuck down and marry up and don't give hit a second thought,” Wirtz said. He bit down softly on a cookie.
The blood climbed into Moleen's neck. He leaned inside the open door of the Buick, pulled the keys, and unlocked the trunk.
Noah Wirtz stared at him impassively, brushing his hands with a sound like emery paper, as Moleen came toward him with the horse quirt. He barely turned his face when the leather rod whipped through the air and sliced across his cheek.
“You ever speak to me like that again, I'll take your life,” Moleen said.
Wirtz pressed his palm to the welt, then opened and closed his mouth.
His eyes seemed to study a thought inches in front of his face,
then reject it. He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles between his knees.
“I got me a contract,” he said. “Till the cane's in, I got a job and I got this house. You're trespassing, cap'n. Get your automobile off my turnaround.”
“The shooting,” I said to Luke, as he sat across from me at a picnic table under the pavilion in the park.
“I don't want to talk about that,” he said. He tried to light a cigarette, but the match was damp with his own perspiration and wouldn't ignite against the striker. “They was gonna electrocute me. I still wake up in the middle of the night, I got the sheets tangled all over me, I can feel that man drawing his razor across my scalp.”
“Tell me what happened in that saloon, Luke.”
“He said it in front of all them men, about a woman ain't done anything to him, ain't ever hurt anybody.”
“Who?”
“Noah Wirtz, he talk about her at the bouree table like ain't even niggers gonna take up for her.”
“Said what, Luke?”
“
”That bitch got a pumpkin up her dress, and I know the name of the shit hog put it there.“ That's what he say, Mr. Dave, looking me right in the eyes, a li'l smile on his mouth.”
Then he described that winter night in the saloon, almost incoherently, as though a few seconds in his life had been absorbed through his senses in so violent a fashion that he now believed the death he had been spared was in reality the only means he would ever have to purge and kill forever the memory that came aborning every night in his sleep.
It's the first Saturday of the month, and the bar and tables are crowded with blacks, mulattos, red bones and people who look white but never define themselves as such. The air smells of expectorated chewing tobacco and snuff, animal musk, oily wood, chemically treated sawdust, overcooked okra, smoke, and unwashed hair. The video poker machines line an unadorned fiberboard wall like a magical neon-lit instrument panel that can transport the player into an electronic galaxy of wealth and power. But the big money is at the round, felt-covered bouree table, where you can lose it all-the groceries, the rent on a pitiful shack, the installment on the gas-guzzler, the weekly payment for the burial insurance collector, even the food stamps you can discount and turn into instant capital. The man at the table with the cash is Noah Wirtz, and he takes markers in the form of bad checks, which he holds in lieu of payment on his loans and which he can turn over to the sheriff's office if the borrower defaults. Sometimes he uses a shill in the game, a hired man who baits a loser or a drunk and goads him into losing more, since bouree is a game in which great loss almost always follows recklessness and impetuosity. Wirtz consoles, buys a drink for those who have lost all their wages, says, “Come see me at the store in the morning. We'll work something out. ” He knows how far to press down on a nerve, when to give it release. Until tonight, the cane harvest in, the contract with Bertrand finished, when perhaps his own anger, the quiet residual rage of his kind (and that had always been the word used to describe his social class), passed down like an ugly heirloom from one generation to the next, begins to throb like the blow of a whip delivered contemptuously across the face, and the name Moleen Bertrand and the world he represents to Wirtz and which Wirtz despises and envies becomes more important than the money he has amassed through stint and self-denial and debasing himself to the servile level of the blacks with whom he competes. “Whatyou got to say about it, Luke?” Wirtz says. Luke's eyes can't focus, nor can he make the right words come out of his throat. His face contains the empty and deceptive intensity of a scorched cake pan. “A certain white man didn 't have to pull you off hit to get to hit his self did he?”
Wirtz says. Luke's one-inch nickel-plated .38 revolver, with no trigger guard and electrician's tape holding the handles together, is one step above scrap metal. But its power and shor
t-range accuracy are phenomenal. The
