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“Sherenda the drag queen wants to see you,” he said.
“It’s Saturday.”
“That’s what I told her. She pissed her panties and dropped them out in the corridor for me to pick up. Is it okay if she comes out to your house when she makes bail?” he said.
I asked Batist to watch the shop and drove to the lockup. Sherenda, whose male name was Claude Walker, was washing her underarms in the tin sink attached to the top of the commode. She blotted her face with a lavender handkerchief and stuck it down in her bra. She folded her hands around the bars, her pointed red nails clicking against the hardness of the steel.
“Legion give you a bad time?” I asked.
She buckled her knees and perched out her rump and started to grin, then gave up the act.
“Man talk shit all night. Couldn’t understand none of it. Ever hear a cat hissing inside a sewer pipe? Scare po’ Cheyenne to det’. Why Miss Helen and you done that to us?”
“He’s a Cajun. He was probably talking French,” I said.
“Darlin’, I know French when I hear it. I could have done ‘French’ for that boy on any level. But that ain’t what we talking ’bout,” Sherenda said.
Sherenda’s friend, whose female name was Cheyenne Prejean, took a deep breath in the back of the cell and lifted up her head. Her eyes were puffy with sleeplessness, red along the rims, her lipstick smeared like a broken flower on her mouth.
“My mother was a preacher. That man was calling out names from Scripture. He was talking to demons, Mr. Dave,” she said.
She stared into space, like a creature who heard sounds others did not.
CHAPTER 15
The sheriff lived in a rambling pale yellow house with steel-gray trim and a wide gallery up on Bayou Teche. The sky was rainwashed and blue when I pulled into his drive and he was raking leaves out of his coulee, stacking them in a black pile for burning. “The cross-dressers told you Legion Guidry talks to demons?” he said, his palms propped on the upended handle of his rake.
“Yeah, I guess that sums it up,” I replied.
“You drove out here on a Saturday to tell me this?”
“It’s not an everyday event.”
“Dave, you’re a toe-curlin’ delight. I never know when you’re going to drop one on me a sane person couldn’t think up in a lifetime. Let me call my mother-in-law out here. She’s in Eckankar. She teleports herself to Venus through a third eye in her head to check the records on her former lives. I’m not making this up.” His eyes were starting to brim with water. “Where you going?”
A moment of contrasts. That same afternoon a gumbo cook-off was in progress at City Park. The manicured and sloping lawns along the bayou were dark green in the shade, scattered with azalea bloom, the sky strung with strips of pink cloud. Three shrimp boats festooned with flags blew their horns near the drawbridge. The shouts of children and the twang of a diving board resonated from the park’s swimming pool like a collective announcement that this was indeed the first day of a verdant and joyous summer.
In the midst of the live oaks, the gaiety of the crowd, the smell of boudin and boiling shrimp and okra and pecan pie and keg beer swilled from paper cups, Tee Bobby Hulin mounted a knocked-together stage with his band, plugged the jack of his electric guitar into the sound system, and went into a re-created version of “Jolie Blon” I had never heard before.
It was like Charlie Barnet’s 1939 recording of “Cherokee,” a perfect moment in music that probably had no specific origin or plan, a deep rumbling of saxophones, a building percussion in the background, a melody and countermelody that were like a tongue-and-groove frame around the whole piece, and inside it all an innovative artist who took long rides on a score created extemporaneously in his own head without ever violating the musical intricacies at work around him.
Tee Bobby looked like a man back from the dead. Or maybe he was high again on meth or skag and had bought a temporary reprieve from the hunger that ate at his system twenty-four hours a day, but I couldn’t say. He wore shades and a purple fedora and a long-sleeved black shirt with garters on the arms and beige suede boots and lavender slacks flared and sewn with flowers at the bottom. After the first piece, he did two more numbers, conventional rock ’n’ roll pieces that he took no rides on and showed little interest in. Then he slipped off his guitar and went to the beer stand.
“What was that first piece you did?” I said behind him.
He turned around, lowering a beer cup from his mouth. “ ‘Jolie Blon’s Bounce.’ I just wrote it. Ain’t tried it on an audience before. Didn’t nobody seem real tuned in to it,” he said.
“It’s great.”
He nodded, his shades mirroring the crowd around us, the thick overhang of the live oaks.
“Jimmy Dean say he might take a demo out to L.A. for me. Soupedup zydeco’s hot in some clubs out there,” he said.
“Jimmy Dean is a parasite. He couldn’t shine your shoes.”
“Least he ain’t dumped me at a homeless shelter in the middle of the night.”
“Have a good life,” I said.
