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“Hey, Jimmy Sty, come out here! You got to check this out!” another black man called out. Then he turned back to Marvin. “Run all that by us again, man.”
“Ain’t my purpose
to get nobody mad. I’m going back on my route now. Lessen one of y’all is interested in a magazine subscription or a discount Bible offer,” Marvin said.
“You believe this motherfucker?” the man with orange and purple hair said, then balanced his beer bottle on the oyster shells.
“You ask me a question, I give you a straight answer. The Bible is my road map, sir. You don’t like what you hear, that’s your dadburn problem,” Marvin said, and blotted his forehead on his coat sleeve. “It’s flat burning up, ain’t it?”
The group around the convertible was now joined by others from inside the bar, including Jimmy Dean Styles. They stared at Marvin in dismay.
“Somebody put you up to this? Or you just a dumb white motherfucker want to commit suicide?” said a man with a nylon stocking crimped down on his head.
Marvin looked innocuously at a cloud, his eyebrows raised. “Most of y’all got born ’cause your mama dint have money for an abortion. That’s why you call other people ‘motherfucker’ all the time. It’s ’cause y’all know everybody in town got in your mother’s drawers. So anytime you insult other folks with a bad name like that, it’s on your own self. I ain’t trying to hurt your feelings. It’s just a psychological fact.”
The tall man with rings in his eyebrows picked up his beer bottle from the oyster shells, tossed Marvin Oates’s hat into the crowd, and smashed the bottle across Marvin’s head. The crowd roared.
Marvin fell across his suitcase and took a kick in the ribs and another between his buttocks. He pushed himself up on the convertible’s bumper, his coat powdered with white dust, his eyes closing, then opening, as though a piece of sharp metal was buried deep in his bowels.
He felt the back of his head and swallowed, then walked unsteadily on the shells and found his hat and knocked it clean of dust on his leg.
“You still ain’t got the right to throw trash in old folks’ yard,” he said.
The crowd surged forward, but Jimmy Dean Styles stepped between Marvin and his adversaries and leaned over and retrieved the tow strap of Marvin’s suitcase from the dust and placed it in his hand.
“Don’t come around here no more,” he said.
Marvin stared into Styles’s eyes, as though looking for an answer to an ancient question about the nature of evil.
“Who are you?” Marvin asked.
“The man who know a nigger when he see one. You better hoof it, bro,” Styles replied.
Helen and I were on our way back from an inter-agency law enforcement meeting in Jeanerette when we passed the situation in progress in front of the Boom Boom Room. We pulled to the side of the road and told Marvin to get in the backseat of the cruiser, behind the steel-mesh screen. He threw his suitcase on the seat and pulled the coned brim of his hat down on his brow as we roared away, looking back through the window like a Pony Express rider who had been saved by friends from Indians.
“You crazy, Marvin?” Helen said, glancing in the rearview mirror.
“What’s the name of that guy, the one in charge back there?” Marvin asked.
“Jimmy Dean Styles. Why do you ask?” I said.
“I just feel sorry for them people, that’s all.” He sprayed his mouth with an atomizer.
Helen and I dropped him off downtown, by the Shadows, his face freckled with the sunshine that fell through the oak limbs overhead.
“He seems to have people of color on the mind,” I said.
“He should,” Helen said.
“Pardon?”
“His mother took on all comers. I always heard Marvin’s father was black,” she said.
That same afternoon Clete Purcel drove to the motor court on the bayou, where he used to live, and knocked on Joe Zeroski’s cottage door. “What’d you want, Purcel?” one of Joe’s men said. He was bald and wore slacks and a strap undershirt. Pieces of his sandwich were hanging from his mouth while he ate. A television set blared in the background.
“Where’s Joe?” Clete asked.
“He ain’t here.”
