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Then Jimmie couldn't hold it in any longer. "Who is this guy?" he asked, pointing sideways at Lou Kale. "What are you doing here?"
"Connie, two Panamanian tankers docked this morning. Go finish your nap," Lou Kale said. "Everything is solid. Believe me, I like this guy. He's a cute boy, that's what he is."
She went up the stairs, glancing back once at Jimmie. Lou Kale moved into Jimmie's line of sight. "You've done your good deed. That's reward enough, right?" he said. "Right?"
"Yeah," Jimmie said. But he didn't move from his position.
"We don't want insincerity here," Lou Kale said, resting his hand on Jimmie's shoulder, his breath touching Jimmie's skin.
Then Lou Kale walked him to the door, as though Jimmie had no volition of his own, and before Jimmie knew it, he was back outside, the door shutting loudly behind him.
The sun was white and hot in the sky, and the humidity felt like damp wool on his skin. For a moment he could hear no sound, as though he were trapped inside a glass bell. Upstairs, someone turned on a radio, and from the window he heard the adenoidal voice of Kitty Wells singing "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels."
After Jimmie told me of his visit to Post Office Street, I took him to breakfast and thought our misadventure with Ida Durbin was over. But I was wrong. She called him that afternoon and asked to meet him on the amusement pier.
"Leave her alone," I told him.
"She paddled through sharks to get us off a sandbar," he said.
"She's a prostitute. You can't change that. Act like you have a brain," I said.
Once again, I had spoken without thinking. Our father, known as Big Aldous Robicheaux in the oil patch, had been a good-hearted, illiterate Cajun and notorious barroom brawler whose infidelities had included a prostitute in Abbeville. The prostitute died of Hansen's disease in a federal facility at Carville, Louisiana. She was also Jimmie's mother.
I went to the pier with Jimmie and listened to Ida Durbin's story about her background, a story that neither Jimmie nor I had the experience to deal with or even evaluate in terms of veracity. She told us she had been raised by her grandmother in a sawmill town just south of the Arkansas line, and that she had borrowed twenty-seven hundred dollars from the mortgage holder of their house to pay for the grandmother's cancer treatment in Houston. When Ida couldn't pay back the loan, she was offered a choice of either eviction or going to work in a hot pillow joint.
"Stuff like that doesn't happen, Ida.
At least, not anymore," Jimmie said. His eyes clicked sideways at her. "Does it?"
She turned one cheek into the light. It was layered with makeup, but we could see the swelling along the jawline, like a chain of tiny dried grapes. "I talked to Lou Kale about getting out. He said if I worked what they call special trade, that's girls who do everything, I can be even in a month," she said.
"He put those bruises on your face?" Jimmie said.
"A cop did. He was drunk. It's nothing," she said.
We were on the end of the pier, and we could see gulls dipping sand shrimp out of the waves. The sun was hot on the boards., the wind blowing, and blood had dried on the railing where someone had chopped up fish bait.
"A cop?" Jimmie said.
"They get free ones sometimes," she said.
I didn't want to listen to it anymore. I went back to the motel by myself. Later., I heard Jimmie outside with Ida, then the two of them driving away in our convertible.
Jimmie didn't go back on the job with me the next day and instead hung out with Ida in Galveston. He bought her clothes and paid four dollars apiece for four recordings of her songs in a recording booth on the amusement pier. This was in an era when we were paid one dollar and ten cents an hour for work that, outside of building board roads in swamps, was considered the lowest and dirtiest in the oil field. He also withdrew his one hundred and twelve dollars in savings from the bank, money put away for his college tuition, and gave it to Ida. When I came back off the hitch, I wanted to punch him out.
"What'd she do with it?" I said. He was doing push-ups on the floor in his underwear, his feet propped up on the window-sill. His hair was black and shiny, his wide shoulders as smooth as tallow.
"Gave it to this guy Lou Kale to pay off her debt," he replied. He dropped his feet from the sill and sat up. From outside I could hear the surf crashing on the beach. "Quit looking at me like that."
"Nobody is that stupid," I said.
"We sent one of her recordings to Sun Records in Memphis. That's where Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley got started. Jerry Lee Lewis, too," he said.
"Yeah, I heard the Grand Ole Opry has a lot of openings for singing prostitutes."
"Why don't you show a little respect for other people once in a while?" he said.
Was I my brother's keeper? I decided I was not. I also decided I did not want to be held hostage by what I considered the self-imposed victimhood of others. I let Jimmie take the convertible and I went back to Louisiana until it was time to rejoin the doodlebug crew on the quarter boat. I hoped by the end of the next hitch, Jimmie would be free of his entanglement with Ida Durbin.
