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“Don’t worry about it. We’ll just be a minute. Have you been anywhere tonight?” Helen said.
“To the show. I come home just a little while ago,” he replied.
“Then went right to sleep?” Helen said. She sniffed at the air. “You smell anything, Dave?”
“Smoke?” I said.
“Something burning in your house?” Helen said.
“No,” Marvin replied.
“It sure smells like it,” she said, and walked through the front room into the middle area of the house and opened his closet. “I’d swear it was coming from here. You want us to call the fire department?”
“No. What’s going on?” Marvin said.
Helen picked up a pair of cordovan cowboy boots from the bottom of the closet. “These are sure nice. You got any others?” she said.
“I don’t think y’all are s’pposed to come in my bedroom. You’re s’pposed to have a warrant or something,” Marvin said.
Helen set the boots back on the floor and casually glanced over the shelf above Marvin’s row of hanging shirts. She turned around.
“A greaseball named Frankie Dogs got popped tonight, Marvin. You own a gun?” she said.
“No. Why you telling me this?”
“Because he used your head for a toilet brush in McDonald’s,” she replied.
Outside, the yard was flooded and rain blew in a mist through the window screen onto Marvin’s bedsheets. He pushed the glass down and twisted the lock in the frame. His chest and stomach were flat, his nipples the size of dimes. He pulled the covers off his bed and sat on the dryness of the mattress and looked at nothing, his arms propped on the mattress, his eyes focused on thoughts inside his head.
“The Lord is my light, my sword, and my shield,” he said.
“That’s not a bad statement. If I were you, I’d get my side of the situation on record. In my opinion, nobody’s going to be missing Frankie Dogs,” I said.
But Marvin Oates was not easily manipulated. “I been bothering you since I looked the wrong way at your daughter, Mr. Robicheaux. That’s my fault, not yours. But I ain’t gonna hep y’all hurt me. And I don’t want y’all treating me like I’m stupid, either.”
“We’re sorry we woke you up, partner,” I said.
Outside, in the cruiser, Helen started the engine and clicked on the windshield wipers. The rain was sliding in torrents off Marvin’s roof, the banana fronds whipping in the wind against the side of his porch. The inside of his house was absolutely dark now.
“When’s the last time you saw somebody sleep in a damp bed?” Helen said.
“Marvin’s an unusual guy,” I replied.
Helen switched on the interior light and studied my face. I felt my eyes break.
“You’re not tired at all?” she said.
“No, I feel fine.”
“I saw you go into an aspirin bottle twice tonight. But I don’t think those were aspirins in the bottle. You doing whites on the half shell, Dave?”
When the man called Legion was much younger, he hung in Hattie Fontenot’s bar down on Railroad Avenue, a tin-roofed frame building that shook with nickelodeon music, the passing of trains, and the drunken shrieks of deranged whores. Cops hung in there, too, because the coffee and boudin and cracklings were free—sometimes the whores, too—and the bouree game at the big round green-felt table in back was in progress twenty-four hours a day. Negro shoeshine boys brought their wood shine boxes inside and knelt in the tobacco spittle and sawdust and cleaned and pol
ished shoes and boots for ten cents. The white women in the cribs were five dollars, the black ones three. A long-necked Jax or Regal was twenty cents, a shot of whiskey a quarter. A Negro shucked oysters out of the shell and slid them down the bar in a trail of melting ice, briny and cold, a nickel apiece, the sliced lemon free. All the pleasures of the earth were available to any white male who desired them.
Then the times changed, without visible cause or explanation, so rapidly the man the Negroes knew only by the name Legion guessed that forces far to the North, where he had never visited, were behind the events reshaping the Louisiana he had grown up in. The cribs closed and most of the prostitutes drifted away. The state police hauled off the slot machines and sunk them in a hundred feet of salt water. Cops no longer hung in Hattie Fontenot’s bar and the color line began to dissolve, then broke like a dam. Black men took the jobs white men had always considered theirs at birth and walked with white women on the street.
But the man named Legion did not change. He wore his starched khaki work shirts and trousers like a uniform, a Lima watch fob hanging from his watch pocket, his cuffs buttoned at the wrists, his straw hat slanted over one eye. He smoked his cigarettes unfiltered, drank his whiskey neat, disdained warnings about diet and lungs and liver, coerced a black girl into bed when he felt like it, and occasionally on a Friday afternoon sat at a back table in Hattie’s old bar on Railroad Avenue, a saucer and tiny spoon and demitasse of French coffee by his elbow, a hand of solitaire spread out on the felt cover, as though forty years had not passed and the building still shook with music and the rumble of trains and the disconnected laughter of deranged prostitutes.
