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Tee Bobby had loaded Rosebud in the car and roared across the bridge that separated Poinciana Island from the rest of Iberia Parish, his anger burning in his chest, the words of Perry LaSalle like a dirty presence in his ears. “Let’s see if I understand this correctly, Tee Bobby. You want money to go to California? To make a record?” Perry had said. He had been stripped to the waist, combing his hair in a mirror by his wet bar, his gaze wandering through the sliding doors to the bass pond, where a woman in shorts and a halter was fly-casting on the water’s surface.
“Yes, suh. I got a shot with a recording company in West Hollywood. But I got to have money to go out there, stay at a hotel for a week, maybe, buy meals, front a few dol’ars wit’ this agent setting up the gig,” Tee Bobby said.
“You sure this agent isn’t throwing you a slider?” Perry said, his eyes watching the woman in the mirror.
“No, suh. It’s just the way they do things out there.” “It sounds interesting, Tee Bobby, but if you’re looking for a loan, my income is a little down right now. Maybe another time.”
“Suh?”
“I’m short of cash, podna,” Perry said, and grinned at him in the mirror.
“I ain’t never made no claim on the estate,” Tee Bobby said.
“You haven’t what?”
“Never claimed no kind of inheritance. Neither my mother or my gran’mama, either. We ain’t never axed money from your family.”
“You think you’re owed something by my family, do you?”
“Everybody know old man Julian was sleeping wit’ my gran’mama.”
“Ah, I get your drift now. We both share the same grandfather? Is that correct?” Perry said.
Tee Bobby shrugged and looked at the woman by the pond. She was lovely to watch, her skin unblemished by the sun or physical work, her body firm and graceful as she whipped the popping-bug over her head.
“You shouldn’t refer to my grandfather as ‘old man Julian,’ Tee Bobby. That said, the child your grandmother had out of wedlock was not his. Mr. Julian had been dead over a year when Miss Ladice’s baby was born. There was an overseer here named Legion Guidry. He did things he shouldn’t have. But that was the nature of the times.”
“The man people call ‘Legion’ is my grandfather?”
“Better talk to Miss Ladice,” Perry said, slipping his comb into his back pocket and drawing the sleeve of a silk shirt up his arm.
Then Perry, with a grin on his face, still tucking his shirt in his slacks, opened the sliding doors and walked down to the bass pond to join his companion.
In the neon-lit darkness of the Boom Boom Room, Tee Bobby and Jimmy Dean smoked some high-octane Afghan skunk and snorted up a half-dozen lines of Colombian pink from Jimmy’s private stock, so pure and unstepped on it roared up Tee Bobby’s nostril with the white brilliance of a train engine inside a tunnel. “Tell me that ain’t righteous, my man. It put the snap in yo’ whip, don’t it? Forget that cracker on Poinciana Island. I’ll introduce you to a lady down the road make you fall in love,” Jimmy Dean said.
“I got Rosebud out
front. Can you give me the money to go to California, Jimmy Dean?”
“If we talking about recording contracts, I got to have my lawyer draw up some papers, make sure you protected. Let’s take a ride, drink some beer, make a house call on a couple of bidness associates later. It gonna be all right, man. The Sty got yo’ ass covered, bro. Hey, go a li’l easy on my stuff. You slam a gram and you fry yo’ Spam. You heard it first from Jimmy Style. Come on in back wit’ me a minute.”
Tee Bobby followed Jimmy Dean into the back room of the bar, where Jimmy Dean knelt down in front of a cabinet with a burlap bag spread by his foot.
“What you doing wit’ that shotgun and them watch caps?” Tee Bobby asked.
“Sometimes you got to put a li’l scare into people. A couple of my artists think they gonna dump me for some Los Angeles niggers got more gold chains than brains. It ain’t gonna happen.”
“I ain’t up for no guns,” Tee Bobby said.
Jimmy Dean rested on one haunch, the barrel of a cut-down, pistolgrip pump shotgun propped at an angle on his shoulder, a box of twelve-gauge double-ought buckshot by his foot.
“Ain’t nobody gonna get hurt, Tee Bobby. It’s all show. But you want me to back your play, you got to back mine. Tell me what you want to do. Tell me now,” he said, his eyes burrowing into Tee Bobby’s face.
A few minutes later they drove across the bridge over the Teche and stopped at a convenience store that sold gas. They bought a twelve-pack of beer and a bucket of microwave fried chicken and a soda for Rosebud, who sat belted in the backseat, staring at the pecan orchards, the dust blowing out of the cane acreage, the carrion birds circling in a hot, brassy sky that gave no promise of rain, a truck filled with oil-field workers at the gas pumps.
“You gonna take Rosebud to California?” Jimmy Dean asked, glancing at the oil-field workers. He had tied a black silk scarf on his head, and the tails of the scarf hung from the knot down the back of his neck.
“Yeah,” Tee Bobby replied.
