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He pared out the detritus from each of his fingernails with a penknife and brushed it off the knife blade on the table and watched a loud black man at the bar, the black man knocking back shots, joking with the white barmaid, yelling at people out on the porch. The black man’s hair was mowed into his scalp, his skin shiny, his face beaded with either sweat or rainwater. He went to the rest room and reemerged, an idiot’s grin on his mouth, flicking his hands to the music playing on the jukebox.
“What’s happenin’, cap?” he said to Legion.
The black man went to the bar, picked up his shot glass, and was about to drink from it when he looked at the expression on the barmaid’s face and saw her eyes riveted on someone behind him.
“You shook piss off your hands on my neck,” Legion said.
“Say what?” the black man said.
“Don’t you pretend wit’ me, nigger.”
“You out of line, man.”
The black man turned to set down his shot glass, raising his eyebrows at the barmaid, as though she and he were both witness to an aberration from out of the past that had to be temporarily tolerated. Then the black man made a serious mistake. He grinned at Legion.
Legion seized the black man’s throat with his left hand and drove him against the wall, shutting down his air, almost lifting him from the floor. Then he inserted the blade of a penknife into the black man’s left nostril.
“Mr. Legion, he ain’t meant you no harm,” the barmaid said.
“Pick up that phone, I’ll be back later,” Legion said.
Ropes of spittle drained from the corners of the black man’s mouth. Legion tightened his grip and pushed the black man’s head and neck harder into the wall, then worked the knife blade higher into the nostril, wedging the sharpened edge against the rim.
“You ready for it? Tell people your girl closed her legs,” he said.
Legion looked deeply into his victim’s eyes, his own face tangled with a twisted light that caused the black man to lose control of his sphincter.
Legion hurled him into a chair.
“I’m gonna finish my coffee, me. You clean that chair befo’ you go,” he said.
Helen Soileau and I were at the city police station when the anonymous 911 call came in from a passerby who had witnessed the scene in Hattie’s old bar through a window. We got in the cruiser and drove down Main toward Railroad, past the Shadows and Perry LaSalle’s office. “Why you want to take a city call?” she asked.
Rainwater was over the curbs now, rippling back from the tires of passing cars into the bamboo that bordered the Shadows.
“The assailant is that guy Legion Guidry we checked out at the casino,” I replied.
“So what? Let the city guys pick him up. We have our own collection of assholes to worry about,” she said.
“He’s the guy who used a blackjack on me.”
She turned, fixed her eyes on me. Water flew up under a fender. I heard her fingernails clicking on the steering wheel.
We drove down Railroad, bounced across the tracks, passed a crack house, clapboard bars, shacks without doors or glass in the windows, and yards that were covered with litter. Helen pulled under a spreading oak by a small general store with an ice locker in front that steamed in the rain.
“Why you stopping?” I asked.
“I’m tired of you deciding what I should know and not know. Or in this case when I should know it.”
“He put his tongue in my mouth. He’s an old man who took me apart in front of my own house. It’s not a story many people would believe.”
“We tell rape victims they have to meet it head-on if they ever want any peace. What makes you different?”
“Nothing,” I said.
A swath of rainwater and leaves blew out of the tree across the windshield.
“You going to tell the old man?” she asked.
