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A drop of rain struck the window glass.
“Let me get my hat,” I said.
We signed out a cruiser and drove out past the city limits, crossed a drawbridge spanning the Teche, next to a leafy pecan orchard, and entered the black slum community where Jimmy Sty operated the Boom Boom Room. When Helen got out of the cruiser, she slipped her baton into the ring on her gun belt. Styles was inside, behind the bar, his face still swollen from the beating I had given him. The room was dark except for the lit beer signs on the wall and the glow of a jukebox in the corner. Two black women sat at the end of the bar, their mouths thick with lipstick, their hair in disarray, glasses of bulk synthetic wine in front of them.
“Hey, my man Lou’sana Chuck, I hear you lucking out. My charge against you being dropped,” Styles said.
“News to me,” I said.
“My lawyer got the word. Marse Purcel say he saw me pull a switchblade knife. Funny how a big fat pig like that can see a knife when he wasn’t even there.”
“Marvin Oates been giving you a bad time?” I said.
“Passing out religious tracts in a bar? Trying to hide the boner in his pants at the same time? You tell me, Lou’sana Chuck.”
“Watch your language,” Helen said.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Think he met a girlfriend. He be converting her now,” Styles said. He reached into the cooler behind him and unscrewed the cap on a bottle of chocolate milk. In the light of the beer sign above his head, his gold-textured face seemed grotesque, a blood knot on the ridge of his nose, the skin puckered where it had been stitched. He drank until the bottle was half empty, then rested his hands on the bar and lowered his head and belched.
“Can you give us a minute?” I said to Helen.
“No problem. I just hate to give up the eau de caca coming from the bathroom,” she said, fitting on her sunglasses, stepping out the front door into the hazy midday glare, her baton at a stiff angle on her left side.
Styles looked at me curiously.
“I think you’re a sorry sack of shit, Jimmy. But I didn’t have the right to take you down the way I did. I also think you’re getting a lousy deal with the St. Martin D.A.’s office. But you know the rules. Cops take care of their own. Anyway, I apologize for busting you up,” I said.
“Lookie here, Chuck, you want to feel good about yourself, go somewhere else to do it. You want to shut my bidness down, come back wit’ a court order. In the meantime, get the fuck out of my life.”
“You helped Tee Bobby get on the spike, Jimmy. How’s it feel to ruin one of the greatest musicians ever to come out of Louisiana?” I said.
“Had about all this I can stand,” he replied. He walked to the front door and called outside. “Gots a problem in here!”
Helen came through the door, pulling off her sunglasses, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness.
“What’s the trouble?” she said.
“I hear you a dyke who’s straight up and don’t take shit from nobody. ’Preciate you being a witness if Chuck here decides to assault me again,” Styles said.
“Say again?” Helen said.
Styles blew out his breath and made an exasperated face. “Lady, I ain’t give you the reputation. You walked in here wit’ it. Yesterday, in the McDonald’s on Main, male cops was laughing about you. I ain’t lying. Ax Chuck here they don’t do it.”
Styles upended his bottle of chocolate milk. He had worked the hook in deep, with a good chance of getting away with it. Except he let his eyes light on Helen’s while a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Helen pulled her baton from the loop on her belt and swung it backhanded across his face. The bottle shattered in Styles’s hand, speckling his face with chocolate milk and fragments of glass.
She placed her business card on the bar.
“Have a nice day. Call me if you need any more assistance,” she said.
We drove through the neighborhood, past shacks with rusted screen galleries that were still hung with Christmas lights, and crossed a coulee that was shaded by pecan trees and whose banks were green and raked clean and sprinkled with periwinkles. Then, back among the trees, we saw a pale yellow shotgun house and Marvin’s suitcase on the porch. Music came from the windows, and, incongruously, a bright red Coca-Cola machine sat in the carport, the refrigeration unit vibrating, the exterior beaded with fat drops of moisture. We pulled into the yard and walked up on the porch. The inside door was open and a heady, autumnal odor, like wet leaves burning, drifted through the screen. I knocked, but no one answered.
Helen stayed in front and I walked around to the rear door. Then, through the screen, I witnessed one of those scenes that makes us wish we knew less about the human family’s potential for deceit and the manipulation of those who are weaker than ourselves.
Marvin Oates sat at a bare kitchen table, his shirt off, his eyes pinched shut, his balled fists trembling with anxiety or perhaps visions that only he saw on the backs of his eyelids. His forehead was barked and there was a bruise along his jawbone like the discoloration in an overripe banana. A pair of marijuana roach clips sat in an ashtray, smoldering at the tips.
A young black woman, her short hair curled and peroxided at the ends, stood over him, kneading his shoulders, letting her breasts touch his head, her loins rub against his back, blowing her breath in his ear. She wore white shorts rolled up into her genitalia, a denim shirt embroidered with flowers, a rose tattooed on her throat, bracelets that jangled on her ankles, and pink tennis shoes, like a little girl might wear.
