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“I can’t get Amanda Boudreau out of my mind. I see her in my sleep. Does she bother you at all?” I said.
“Amanda hurt me, man, but it wasn’t me shot her.” His voice was squeezed in his throat, his eyes wet.
“Hurt you how?”
“Made like we couldn’t have no kind of relationship. She say it was ’cause I was so much older. But I knowed it was ’cause I’m black.”
“You want to come down to the department and make a statement?”
He tried to open the truck door, even though I was up on the Loreauville Road now, speeding past a rural slum by the four corners. I reached across the seat and pulled the door shut, then hit him on the side of the face with my elbow.
“You want to kill yourself, do it on your own time,” I said.
He cupped one hand over his ear and cheek, then he began to shake, as though his bones were disconnected.
“I’m gonna be sick. I got to fix, man,” he said.
I drove him out in the country to the home of a black minister who ran a shelter for alcoholics and homeless men. When I left, heading up the dirt track toward the highway, the sky was still black, bursting with all the constellations, the pastures sweet with the smell of grass and horses and night-blooming flowers.
It was one of those moments when you truly thank all the spiritual powers of the universe you were spared the fate that could have been yours.
My partner, Helen Soileau, was eating outside at the McDonald’s on East Main later the same day when she saw Marvin Oates towing his suitcase filled with his wares up East Main, his powder-blue, long-sleeved shirt damp at the armpits. He paused in the shade of a live oak in front of the old Trappey’s bottling plant and wiped his face, then continued on to the McDonald’s, took his sack lunch and a thermos out of his suitcase, and began eating at a stone table, outside, under the trees. An unshaved
man with jowls like a St. Bernard was eating at another table a few feet away. He picked up his hamburger and fries and sat down next to Marvin without being invited, sweeping crumbs off the table, flattening a napkin on the stone, knocking over Marvin’s thermos. Marvin righted his thermos but remained hunched over his sandwich, his eyes riveted on a neutral spot ten inches in front of his nose.
“You bring your own lunch to a restaurant?” the unshaved man asked.
“I don’t know you,” Marvin said.
“Yeah, you do. They call me Frankie Dogs. Some people say it’s because I look like a dog. But that ain’t true. I used to race greyhounds at Biscayne Dog Track. So the people I worked for started calling me Frankie Dogs. You like greyhound racing?”
“I don’t gamble.”
“Yeah, you do. You’re trying to put moves on Zerelda Calucci. That’s a big gamble, my friend. One you ain’t gonna win. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
“I dint hear Miss Zerelda say that.”
“Take the shit out of your mouth. You got a speech defect? Here, I’ll give you the short version. Joe Zeroski don’t want no peckerwood magazine salesman coming around his niece. You do it again, I’ll be paying you a visit.”
Marvin nodded solemnly, as though agreeing.
“Good man,” Frankie said, and got up from the table and patted Marvin on the back. “I’ll tell Joe we don’t got no problem. You have a good day.”
Frankie started to walk away.
“You forgotta your Bigga Mac,” Marvin said into the dead space in front of him.
Frankie stopped, straightening his shoulders above the enormous breadth of his stomach. He walked back to the table and propped one arm on it and leaned down toward Marvin’s face.
“What’d you say?” he asked.
“You lefta a bigga mess. It don’ta looka good.”
“That’s what I thought you said. Check you out later. Say, I like your tie,” Frankie said.
“Later” turned out to be a passage of five minutes, when Marvin finished eating and went into the men’s room. Frankie Dogs came through the door right behind him and drove Marvin’s face into the tile wall above the urinal, then wheeled him around and buried his fist in Marvin’s stomach.
A middle-aged man was exiting the toilet stall, belting his trousers.
