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I WENT UP LOREAUVILLE Road, my windows down, the rain ditches and cane fields and horse farms and nineteenth-century shotgun houses flying by me, and a vision in my mind I could barely resist. I saw a cool dark saloon with a long foot-railed bar and wood-bladed fans hanging from a stamped-tin ceiling, and domino and bourree tables, maybe a blackboard chalked with racing results, pool balls clattering on green felt, football betting cards scattered on the floor. I saw myself sitting in the shadows, starting the afternoon with a double shot of Jack poured on shaved ice with a sprig of mint, an ice-caked mug of draft or a sweating bottle of Bud for a chaser. I even saw the aftermath, the awakening at dawn to a bloodred sun and a flaming thirst and the first drink of the day, vodka and Collins mix and cherries and orange slices and half-melted ice sliding down the pipe with a beneficence I can only compare to a hit of morphine in a battalion aide station after you’ve been blown to shit.
There were any number of places in Iberia or St. Martin parish where I could get loaded with people who knew I shouldn’t be there but were wise enough to know that no power on earth can keep a drunk from drinking once he decides to take the asp in hand and twine it around his arm.
The bar I found was not like the one I just described. It was a lounge in St. Martinville, one as dark as black satin whose refrigerated air was as cold and unforgiving as a tomb’s. I sat at one end of a horseshoe bar and drank a Barq’s Red Creme Soda in a mug and tried to finish a ham sandwich that had too much mustard on it. I had never seen the bartender before. I spat a bite of sandwich into a paper napkin and put it on my plate.
“I got some chicken gumbo in the kitchen,” the bartender said.
“I’m halfway to the cemetery as it is,” I replied.
“It is what it is, Mac,” he said.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Dave. I really don’t like the name Mac. What’s that stink? You always leave the men’s room door open?”
He walked away, knowing a losing situation when he saw one. I looked down a hallway and out the back window and saw the sky darkening and a streetlight come on and then the rain beginning to fall, followed by hail that bounced on the asphalt in a white mist. I called the bartender back. “Give me four fingers of Jack in a mug, straight up, no ice. A Budweiser back, with a raw egg in a glass.”
“I think you’re in the wrong bar.”
I opened my badge. “Will this earn me the stool I’m sitting on?”
“We don’t serve eggs.”
“So forget the egg.”
“It’s your funeral.”
I watched him fill two double-shot glasses to the brim and snap the cap off a Budweiser. He set the shots and the longneck and a beer glass in front of me. My head was thundering. I squeezed my temples. The outside world seemed drained of color, a palm tree whipping across the street, the hail bouncing and rolling like mothballs.
“I asked for the Jack in a mug.”
“Are you going to be a problem?” the bartender said.
“Not me. You know what the Evangeline Oak is about?”
“No clue. I’m from Big D. That’s in Texas, in case you haven’t checked recently.”
“This is where the Acadians came by boat over two hundred years ago,” I said. “Evangeline lost her lover on the trip from Nova Scotia. She went insane and waited by that tree every afternoon the rest of her life.”
“You finished with your sandwich?” he said.
“Yeah. Why don’t you wrap it up and take it home for your dog?”
“Anything else?”
“For real, you never heard of Evangeline?”
He leaned close enough for me to feel his breath on my face. “Badge or no badge, we don’t take shit in here.”
I got off the stool and took my wallet from my back pocket. “What’s your name?”
?
??Harvey.”
I put twenty dollars on top of my half-eaten sandwich. “Tell you what, Harvey, give my drinks to the guy at the end of the bar. If there’s any change, it’s yours.” I winked at him.
He looked over his shoulder. “There’s no one at the end of the bar, asshole.”
I stared into the gloom. A faux-1950s Wurlitzer against the far wall glowed on the empty stools. “So you and your dog drink up for me,” I said. “If that’s not cool, maybe you and I can stroll outside and have a chat.”
