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“Run off wit’ a white man when she was sixteen. Left them two in a crib wit’out no food.”
“That’s what you meant when you said none of this was Tee Bobby’s fault?”
“No. That ain’t what I meant at all.”
“I see.” I stood up to leave. “Some people say old man Julian was the father of your daughter.”
“You come into the house of a white lady and ax a question like that? Like you was talking to livestock?” she said.
“Your grandson may end up in the Death House, Ladice. The only friend he seems to have is Perry LaSalle. Maybe that’s good. Maybe it isn’t. Thanks for your time.”
I walked outside, into the yard and the smell of flowers and the sun-heated salty hint of rain out on the Gulf. Across the road I could see peacocks on the lawn of the scorched three-story stucco ruins that had been Julian LaSalle’s home. I heard Ladice open the screen door behind me.
“What you mean, it ain’t good Perry LaSalle’s the only friend Tee Bobby got?” she said.
“A man who’s driven by guilt eventually turns on those who make him feel guilty. That’s just one guy’s observation,” I said.
The breeze blew a strand of her hair down on her forehead. She brushed it back into place and stared at me for a long time, then went back into her house and latched the screen door behind her.
At sunset an elderly black man named Batist helped me close up the bait shop and chain-lock our rental boats to the pilings under the dock. Heat lightning flickered over the Gulf and I could hear the distant rumble of thunder, but the air was dry, the trees along the road coated with dust, and a column of acrid smoke blew from a neighbor’s trash fire and flattened in a gray haze on the bayou. This was the third year of the worst drought in Louisiana’s history.
I pressure-hosed the dried fish blood and scales off the cleaning boards, then folded the Cinzano umbrellas that protruded from the spool tables on the dock and went inside the shop.
A few years ago a friend had given me a replica of the classic Wurlitzer jukebox, one whose domed plastic casing swirled with color, like liquid candy that had not been poured into the mold. He had stocked it with 45 rpm records from the 1950s, and I had never replaced them. I dropped in a quarter painted with red nail polish and played Guitar Slim’s “The Things That I Used to Do.”
I had never heard a voice filled with as much sorrow as his. There was no self-pity in the song, only acceptance of the terrible conclusion that what he loved most in the world, his wife, had become profligate and had not only rejected his love but had given herself to an evil man.
Guitar Slim was thirty-two when he died of his alcoholism.
“That’s old-time blues there, ain’t it?” Batist said.
Batist was well into his seventies now, his attitudes intractable, his hair the color of smoke, the backs of his broad hands flecked with pink scars from a lifetime of working on fishing boats and shucking oysters at one of the LaSalle canneries. But he was still a powerful, large man who was confident in himself and took pride in his skill as a boatmate and fisherman and was proud of the fact that all of his children had graduated from high school.
He had grown up in a time when people of color were not so much physically abused as taken for granted, used as a cheap source of labor, and deliberately kept uneducated and poor. Perhaps an even greater injury done to them came in the form of the white man’s lie when they sought redress. On those occasions they were usually treated as children, given promises and assurances that would never be kept, and sent on their way with the feeling that their problems were of their own manufacture.
But I never saw Batist show bitterness or anger about his upbringing. For that reason alone I considered him perhaps the most remarkable man I had ever known.
The lyrics and the bell-like reverberation of Guitar Slim’s rolling chords haunted me. Without ever using words to describe either the locale or the era in which he had lived, his song re-created the Louisiana I had been raised in: the endless fields of sugarcane thrashing in the wind under a darkening sky, yellow dirt roads and the Hadacol and Jax beer signs nailed on the sides of general stores, horse-drawn buggies that people tethered in stands of gum trees during Sunday Mass, clapboard juke joints where Gatemouth Brown and Smiley Lewis and Lloyd Price played, and the brothel districts that flourished from sunset to dawn and somehow became invisible in the morning light.
“You t’inking about Tee Bobby Hulin?” Batist asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Boy got a bad seed in him, Dave.”
“Julian LaSalle’s?”
“I say let evil stay buried in the graveyard.”
A half hour later I turned off the outside floodlamps and the string of electric lights that ran the length of the dock. Just as I locked the front door of the shop I heard the phone inside ring. I started to let it go, but instead I went back in and reached over the counter and picked up the receiver.
“Dave?” the sheriff’s voice said.
“Yeah.”
“You’d better get over to the jail. Tee Bobby just hung himself.”
CHAPTER 4
