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“Not me. Everything’s copacetic, big mon.” Clete’s eyes smiled at me while he snapped his gum wetly in his jaw.
A black Lexus pulled into the lot and Jimmy Dean Styles pulled the keys from the ignition and got out and looked at us, flipping the keys back and forth over his knuckles. He had close-set eyes and a nose like a sheep’s and the flat chest and trim physique of the middleweight boxer he’d been in Angola, where he’d busted up all comers in the improvised ring out on the yard.
“You’re looking good, Jimmy,” I said.
“Yeah, we all be lookin’ good these days,” he replied.
“Saw your picture in People magazine. A guy from the Teche doesn’t make it in rap every day,” I said.
“I’d like to talk wit’ y’all, but I got a call from my bartender. Some big fat cracker was inside, being obnoxious, rollin’ the gold on my customers like he was a real cop ’stead of maybe a P.I. does scut work for a bondsman. I better check to see he took his fat ass somewhere else.”
“Hey, that’s no kidding? You’re a rapper? You’ve been in People magazine?” Clete
said, turning around in the car seat to get a better look at Styles, his mouth grinning.
“You right on top of it, Marse Charlie,” Styles said.
Clete opened the Cadillac’s door and put one loafered foot out on the dirt, then rose to his full height, like an elephant standing up after sunning itself on a riverbank, his grin still in place, the skin on the back of his neck peeling like fish scales. A slapjack protruded from the side pocket of his slacks.
“Being in entertainment, you must get out on the Coast a lot,” Clete said.
I gave Clete a hard look, but he didn’t let it register.
“See, I travel to promote a couple of groups. That’s the way the bidness work. But right now I got to hep my man inside. So I’m cutting this short and telling you I ain’t shook nobody’s tree. That means they don’t be needing to shake mine.” Styles placed the flat of his hand on his chest to show his sincerity, then went inside.
“I’m going to join the Klan,” Clete said.
I followed Styles inside. The interior was dark, lit only by a jukebox and a neon beer sign over the bar. A woman sat slumped over at the bar, her head on her arms, her eyes closed, her open mouth filled with gold teeth.
She wore pink stretch pants and her black underwear was bunched out over the elastic waistband. Styles pinched her on the rump, hard, his thumb and forefinger catching a thick fold of skin on one buttock.
“This ain’t Motel 6, mama. You done fried your tab, too,” he said.
“Oh, hi, Jimmy. What’s happenin’?” she said lazily, as though waking from a delirium to a friendly face.
“Let’s go, baby,” he replied, and took her under one arm and walked her to the back door and pushed her out into the whiteness of the day and slammed and latched the door behind her.
He turned around and saw me.
“Sorry about my friend Clete Purcel out there,” I said. “But a word of caution. Don’t mess with him again. He’ll rip your wiring out.”
Styles took a bottle of carbonated water from the cooler and cracked off the cap and dropped it between the duckboards and drank from the bottle.
“What you want wit’ me, man?” he asked.
“Tee Bobby may go down on a bad beef. He could use some help.”
“I cut Tee Bobby loose. Zydeco and blues ain’t my gig no more.”
“You cut loose a talent like Tee Bobby Hulin?”
“Big shit in South Lou’sana don’t make you big shit in L.A. I got to piss. You want anything else?”
“Yeah, I’m going to ask you not to manhandle a woman like that again, at least not when I’m around.”
“She puked all over the toilet seat. You want to take care of her? Hep me clean it up. I’ll drop her by your crib,” he replied.
Two weeks later Perry LaSalle went bail for Tee Bobby Hulin. Virtually everyone in town agreed that Perry LaSalle was a charitable and good man, although some were beginning to complain about a suspected rapist and murderer being set free, perhaps to repeat his crimes. With time, their sentiments would grow. That same day a white woman named Linda Zeroski had a shouting argument with her pimp, a black man, on her pickup corner in New Iberia’s old brothel district. On the corner was an ancient general store shaded by an enormous oak. In a happier time the store’s owner had sold sno’balls to children on their way home from school. Now the apron of dirt yard around the store was occupied each afternoon and evening and all day Saturday and Sunday by young black men with jailhouse art on their arms and inverted ball caps on their heads. If you slowed the car by the corner, they would turn up their palms and raise their eyebrows, which was their way of asking you what you wanted, simultaneously indicating they could supply it—rock, weed, tar, China white, leapers, downers, almost any street drug except crystal meth, which was just starting its odyssey from Arizona to the rural South.
