ONE

Richie, Esther, Angel



Imagine the odds against a traveling musician from East Texas and the spinster daughter of an elderly French widower meeting across a store counter in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1928 and each thinking that here might be someone for me. But it happened.

Neither was much to look at. Richie Bainard’s face was often in shadow under his wide-brim Stetson, and he carried himself with the twitchy presumption of an undersized bird at a feeder. Esther Block was blond as a Bavarian milkmaid and easily sixty pounds overweight, though her forebears were Jewish peddlers from Alsace-Lorraine with a long history of going hungry.

Being thirty-six and unmarried was fine by her but for her father’s sighs whenever young couples browsed for cradles and nursing bottles at Block’s Dry Goods on Ryan Street. In the years since Esther’s mother died his desire for a grandchild had become a grumpy lament. Things took a pitiful turn when after a recent doctor’s appointment he’d declared that his tacky heart was frail as paper and how sad it was that he wouldn’t live to see his daughter become a wife and mother. Now whenever lone male customers came into the store, Esther found herself sizing them up like a judge at the Brahma bull competition in the Lake Charles country fair. The abstraction that filled her face at those moments was the first thing Richie saw after adjusting his squint from the bright morning outside. He tipped his hat blearily. “Ma’am.”

“Miss,” she corrected.

Richie had been fairly sober after last night’s show. The damage came afterward at a house party whose tribal crush of dancing and moonshine ran past four A.M. He hadn’t slept, the notion of this morning’s errand nagging him as he’d scrunched on the seat of his Model T runabout. Finally he’d said screw it and driven around till he found a colored fry shop to kill time over coffee and waffles in wait for the shops to open. “Heard me a squeeze box first time last night,” he said. “Was thinkin’ I gotta get one.”

“An accordion,” Esther said.

“Place down the way said you had ’em.”

“We do. A couple.” There was a stack of straw boaters for sale on a table in the center aisle. An open umbrella hung upside-down from a crossbeam above it, neckties and kerchiefs draped over the ribs like harem veils. Esther possessed no eye for prettiness and had conceived the display for its efficient hawking of mixed accessories. Her father said it made his shop look like a Bourbon Street speakeasy, though positive receipts had calmed his complaints.

“Thing played louder’n a brass band,” Richie said. “A hunnert frogs couldn’t squash it.”

“A hundred bullfrogs?”

“Frenchies.”

“Ah,” she said. “You mean Acadians.”

“Bull’s-eye. Barnful o’ Cajuns…” She glanced sideways as he spoke. A white-haired gentleman in a banker’s suit sat on a rocker in the back corner. The chair’s motion had slowed. “… dancin’ like goddamn monkeys till the sun come up.”

The old man snorted. “Acadian no French! We are French.”

Richie looked over. “They talked it plenty last night. Talked and sung both.”

“C’est patois. Illettré.”

“Be nice, Papa.” With age, Esther’s father increasingly fell back into his childhood tongue, aggravating and worrying her in equal amounts. “They work hard, same as us.”

The old man swatted the air. He was right about Cajuns insofar as their roots lay less in France than in French-speaking Canada, from where the British had expelled them as seditious vagrants in 1755. The reputation endured—how they kept to themselves, talked their muddy dialect, caroused like gypsies, and persisted in living like bucolic refugees rather than normal Americans.

Richie leaned over the counter toward Esther. “He okay?”

“Oh, he’s just getting on.” Her dress collar was unbuttoned. A swell of flesh, possibly more fat than bosom, drew his eye down. He wondered if it was hard carrying that weight around. And he wondered how soft she must feel against you.

Leopold Block pulled himself out of his rocking chair. He was stooped but imperious in his charcoal suit, as if he wore this casket attire specifically as a dare to the reaper. He’d left Alsace-Lorraine as a boy after the province was ceded as war booty to the hated Prussians in 1871. New Orleans was a haven for French émigrés. There he’d got his start in retail and belatedly into marriage and fatherhood. But the city’s rude vitality intimidated him, and he’d moved with his wife and daughter to Lake Charles on the benignly featureless coastal plain of southwest Louisiana. A rural backwater by New Orleans standards, Lake Charles was home to a small Jewish community that had worshiped at a Masonic lodge till Leopold and some fellow businessmen built Temple Israel near the middle of town. The structure’s bell tower was felled by a hurricane in 1918. Subsequent years saw its congregation likewise cut down, members leaving or marrying outside the faith. The synagogue lacked a full-time rabbi now and offered only a puny remnant of Jewish sons to court his aging daughter. Leopold had abandoned his religious hopes and was ready to receive any man short of a criminal as a potential son-in-law. He said to Richie, “You purchase accordion.”

“Thinkin’ maybe. Course I don’t know how to play it.” Richie turned to Esther. “Can’t hardly play guitar neither, but don’t tell my band.” He knew three chords total, and usually got so caught up in his vocals that he stuck with just one, damping the strings with his fingers and scratching along in rhythm.

“I’m not much for music,” she said.

Two women entered the store. Leopold went to intercept them.

“Name’s Richie Bainard.”

“Esther Block.”

He spun a finger around the room.

“Yup. Block’s is me,” she said.

“And Papa sweeps the floors?”

“He’s the owner. Obviously.”

“Be yours in time, though.”

The tease went too far. “You want an accordion, we got ’em for sale. You wanna talk like a jackass, move along.”

Richie took the jab in stride. He wasn’t sure why she intrigued him; he never looked twice at the large girls in the bordellos. But no question this Esther had grabbed his attention. He was tired of hustling town to town with the Texas Ramblers, a cowboy trio of two guitars and a fiddle whose thirty-dollar bookings were getting fewer and farther between. Early success had bought him the Ford, but dry spells of late made the motorcar his home and bed, no money to spare for a room. He was open to alternatives.

Richie was twenty-eight. His father, a Houston oil speculator with grand ambitions based on blind luck, had bet all he had on a mineral lease near the Spindletop gusher in Beaumont. When the money ran out at a thousand feet down, he’d cleared his debts by selling to the fledgling Texas Fuel Company and persuaded his son to enlist with him to go fight the Germans in 1918. They went overseas as a couple of doughboys whose family patriotism was praised in the Beaumont Enterprise the day they shipped out. Only the son came back. Richie disembarked in Port Arthur under a serrated skyline of oil containers emblazoned with TEXACO in big block letters, his father’s old well now one of the company’s top producers. His next several years as an oil rigger deepened his sense that great fortunes had come out of his hide.

Prohibition enforcement, never rigorous, ran thin as near beer south of the Bible Belt and was all but a joke by the time you reached the Gulf. Noisy nights in the saloon gave rise to someone’s observation that Richie could carry a tune. Two local players asked him to form a string band with them. They worked the East Texas boomtowns before venturing into Louisiana, where people went for music like nobody’s business. Now more acts were crowding the circuit along with any number of pickup groups of family and friends. The Ramblers increasingly had to set aside their instruments for stints canning shrimp on the coast or working the sulfur mines along the state line. His bandmates talked about quitting the road and taking oil jobs back home. It was hard to disagree.

Leopold returned, leaving the ladies at the cookware table. He slapped his hands together. “Now we get accordion.”

“See it first. Buy it maybe.”

“Have special for you, make right here in Lake Charles.”

“No,” Esther said. “Show him the Hohner.”

Leopold frowned. “Is German. Very bad.”

“Papa! C’est faux.”

With a petulant grunt Leopold fetched the Hohner accordion from a shelf and placed it on the counter. It was the size of a carpenter’s toolbox. When he undid the straps that clamped shut the bellows it sprung open lazily, white and black keys on one side, multiple rows of pewter buttons on the other. “Lot bigger’n what I seen last night,” Richie said.

“Acadian ones are smaller and noisier,” Esther explained.

“That’s what I’m lookin’ for. Cajun style. Had the crowd goin’.”

“We can order you a Monarch. It’s the brand they like.”

“From Germany,” her father scowled. “Junk.”

“Gettin’ the idea you don’t like Germans,” Richie said to him. “I done my part, if it makes you feel better.”

“In war?”

“Was a while ago.”

“Not for him,” Esther said.

“You kill Boche?” Leopold pressed.

“I did try.”

Leopold returned the Hohner to its shelf. He pushed aside some boxes till he found what he was looking for. It seemed a child’s toy, less than half the size of the Hohner, its cardboard bellows covered with burgundy cloth and boxed with varnished red pine, a row of brass-plated buttons on each side. “No German,” he said. “America.”

Richie asked Esther, “Why’nt you show me this first?”

“The Hohner costs twenty dollars, the Monarch sixteen, and we guarantee them both. This one’s made local from scrap parts.”

“How much?”

“Twelve dollars.”

“Ten,” Leopold said. “My cost.”

“You mean it?”

“He does not,” Esther said. “It’s twelve dollars.”

“Ten,” Leopold insisted. “And tonight you dine at my house. We will discuss the dead Boche.”

“Papa,” Esther warned. “Ne soyez pas sournois.”

His voice turned impish. “Je meurs, me rappelle?”

“You’ll live forever.”

“Il est beau.”

“Papa!”

The ladies from cookware approached, one brandishing a cast-iron skillet. Leopold said to Richie, “Come tonight. My daughter is superior cook.”

Richie removed his hat, placed it over his stomach, and cocked his head toward Esther’s pie face. “Bull’s-eye.”

* * *

MORE THAN A quarter million French soldiers and civilians died as a result of Prussia’s invasion of France in 1870. The carnage accounted for Leopold’s vengeful joy in Richie’s tales of fighting Germans on the western front in World War I. After Esther’s meal of andouille sausage with peas and brown rice, the three of them passed the evening on the porch of the Blocks’ dollhouse Victorian on the east bank of Lake Charles. Father and daughter listened as Richie deployed every tavern trick of witty narration he knew to describe a wartime experience that in reality had been six months of tedium and one morning of fright until shrapnel in his leg put him in a hospital where he convalesced through Armistice six weeks later.

Esther had changed to a sleeveless dress in the summer humidity. Her bare arms drew Richie’s gaze like a magnet. She was no beauty, but her slender wrists and ankles refined the heft spilling over her chair into something classically ripe.

“Boche,” her father mumbled sleepily. “Sauvage.”

“Got him a one-track mind, huh?”

“Not always,” she said. “There’s the store. There’s me.”

Richie lucked into a perfect response. “Fathers fret for their daughters.”

“You know from experience?”

“Not a bit. But what I seen, men want sons. Me, I want a lil girl. Way they love their daddies.”

Leopold drowsed in his chair. Cicadas creaked in the trees at the edge of the property. A ruffle of moonlight glittered on the lake beyond. “I imagine that could be so,” Esther said.

Leopold’s breathing deepened. Richie perked his ear. “You hear that?” He went to the porch railing.

“There’s your accordion.”

The sound of the instrument floated bare on the breeze—someone playing in solitude before an open window in one of the cottages nearer the lake. It was reedy and alternately faint and full, like a city siren heard from a distance. Its underlying drone mingled with high notes in a melody more drifty than tuneful. “Remind me of France,” Richie said. In Westlake on the far shore of Lake Charles, fires flickered atop the exhaust stacks of the town’s chemical factory. “We heard it at night on the German side.”

“Probably Hohner,” she said. “Like the one today.”

Her practicality popped his reverie. The accordion sound faded.

Esther’s face had lifted to his with the same dull and willful combination he’d observed in the store that morning. I’m not much for music, she’d said. Factual, capable, steady—just what he needed in many ways. But looking down at her, he knew he’d end up mistreating her for being too boring, too nice, too fat. “Ramblers playin’ Pinefield tomorrow,” he said. That part was true. The band was opening for a local act at the Pinefield City Auditorium. “We get done, I’d like to call on you again.” That part wasn’t true.

“I’ll be at Block’s, same as ever.”

“Maybe I’ll know some songs on my new accordion.”

“Either way, we don’t take returns.”

Her brisk tone almost turned him around. It was like a challenge, daring him to try and get her mind off commerce and onto unfurling her sweeter self. He shook off the notion. “Tell your daddy thanks from me.”

Esther’s expression didn’t show her disappointment at Richie’s noble exit. She would have liked him to make a pass, if only just to see, for her own curiosity, how she would have reacted.

* * *

A MONTH EARLIER, a publicity photo of the Texas Ramblers had come into the hands of the promoter putting on the Pinefield show. They were posed beside Richie’s motorcar, the band’s name chalked on the spare tire along with the exchange number of the fiddler’s mother. Worried that a strictly Cajun bill might not fill the place, the promoter had booked the Ramblers based on the cowboy getups they wore in the photo, big hats and chaps and tasseled vests borrowed from a high school theater’s costume trunk.

Pinefield was far from the Ramblers’ usual turf. The drive east from Lake Charles took half a day, the three men crammed in the Ford with guitars on their laps and duffels strapped to the running board. Their mood wasn’t helped by the promoter complaining, when they got to the auditorium, that he’d expected them to perform in the Tom Mix outfits they’d worn in the publicity shot. Surveying their matching white shirts and white trousers, a spiffy look Richie had pressured the group to adopt to widen its appeal, he growled that tonight’s crowd was expecting the Texas Ramblers so they’d best put some cowboy into their act. “We playin’ more hillbilly now,” Richie explained.

“Hillbilly? Y’all look like a damn glee club.”

The other band members glowered at Richie. They’d hated the change of style. Right now he pretty much hated them.

The promoter lit a cigarette and exhaled with purpose. A sheriff’s deputy stood at his shoulder. The young man’s name was Hollis Jenks. He was muscular-stout with buzzed hair and a forehead broad as a tractor cowl. The florid bulbs of his nose and scalp suggested things cooking inside him. “Let’s see how the show goes,” the promoter said.

It turned out that most of the patrons had no interest in the opening act, preferring to picnic on the grassy lot behind the building until the headliner came on. Knowing they’d be facing an empty house freed Richie’s mates to go hard on their pharmacy liquor backstage. Richie pushed through “John Henry” and “Wreck of the Old ’97,” but sloppy play behind him and no pretty girls in front made it hard to give a damn. When “Red River Valley” came around on the set list, he sang the chorus lyric, “and the cowboy who loved you so true,” with a wink at the promoter watching in the wings, who understandably took it as snotty.

Applause came in pockets from folks who’d wandered in to find seats for the main performance. Richie knew he was done with the Ramblers before the clapping stopped. He slung his guitar over his shoulder and edged toward a side door on the calculation that letting his bandmates split tonight’s meager take was a fair swap for leaving them flat. A rush of incomers swept him back—families with grandparents and little kids, teenagers in packs, couples out on the town and done up for Saturday night in clean shirts and stubby neckties, the gals in patterned frocks and shiny shoes, most of them chattering in the same French drawl he’d heard at the house party in Lake Charles. He retreated down the aisle to slip out the rear of the building, feeling now totally foolish in his soda shop whites. But curious about the cause of the fuss, he paused backstage to get a glimpse of the headliner.

The promoter should have known that Joe Falcon could sell out any venue in south Louisiana without help from of an out-of-state string band. Joe and his fiancée Cleoma Breaux, him on accordion and her on guitar, had recorded two sides for Columbia Records in a hotel suite in New Orleans last spring. Now every area jukebox featured the thirty-five-cent 78 of “Allons à Lafayette” and “The Waltz That Carried Me to My Grave,” as did all the tumbledown households that had found dollars to buy a hand-cranked Victrola from the Montgomery Ward catalog or a Silvertone Super Deluxe from Sears Roebuck so they could hear Joe and Cleoma’s Cajun crooning whenever they wanted.

Smoking cigarettes and sharing discreet sips from a flask, the couple looked like Jazz Age swells from New York or Chicago rather than the sharecropper and housemaid they’d been before social sing-alongs brought them together and led Cleoma to leave her husband and hit the road with Joe last year. He was Richie’s age; his tailored suit and rimless glasses made him seem older. And Cleoma was nothing but cute with her red lipstick, black curls spilling out from under a slanted hat, and tiny feet in audacious heels that pushed her height to barely five feet, putting her eyes level with Richie’s slack mouth as he stared at the couple.

“Mes compliments.”

It took him a moment to realize she was talking to him.

She continued in English, “You sung real good, we like so much.”

Joe nodded beside her. “Mon amour was dancin’, she was.” Their accents were burred and smoky—Cajun accents, which next to Richie’s Texas twang was like weathered driftwood compared to Formica.

“Nice o’ you to say, pros like yourself.”

“We play,” Joe said. “It pay some, we happy.”

Joe removed his jacket in preparation to go on, smoothed down his shirtsleeves and straightened his tie. Resembling a stockbroker holding a toy, he fitted his right thumb through a leather loop on one side of his black-lacquered Monarch and his left hand under a strap on the other side. It was as precise and comfortable as a ballplayer donning his glove, Joe’s pull on the bellows while playing a reflex riff equivalent to a last smack of the pocket before taking the field. Cleoma was equally dapper in unpinning her hat and passing her guitar strap over her head without mussing her hair. The guitar, a National steel resonator, looked big as a cotton bale in her arms. She strummed a chord and tuned the strings to Joe’s accordion notes.

A dispute broke out at the back of the room. Richie’s bandmates were bitching to the promoter about tonight’s fee. The man scornfully pulled bills from his clip. Richie saw his mates take the money and scoot out the far door, dumping him before he could dump them. The promoter pocketed his clip. Seeing Richie watching him, he gave a snide wink to match Richie’s earlier—paid in full, it said. Richie wasn’t upset and in fact felt bleakly affirmed, like a priest watching sinners behave as expected.

Joe and Cleoma had observed the exchange. “Not right,” she said.

Richie shrugged. It was time to get a real job. “He hated me from the start.”

“Us same,” Joe said.

“Come on. You sold out the joint.”

“’Cept he say Walter can’t play with us. We ain’ go for that.”

“Don’t know no Walter.”

“Be me.” A young man dressed in a suit and white shirt had come up behind them. “I’m the Neg in the show.” It was an amiable term in Cajun circles. “Walter Dopsie.” He carried a scuffed cardboard suitcase in one hand and in the other a flour sack holding—you could tell by the mismatched shapes inside—a violin, bow, and corrugated washboard. He set the bags down and reached out.

They shook hands. Richie liked black women but preferred the men at a distance—though this Walter was black only if you looked for it. His hair was brushed in slick waves against his temple and his color was like the fingerboard on Richie’s guitar, originally dyed dark to mimic the ebony of pricier instruments but which heavy use had worn back to maple. A girl slouched beside him in a pleated white dress and brown Oxfords. Europe infused her features—green eyes, honey skin, raven hair in loose ringlets so shiny they seemed oiled. Twelve or thirteen, she was stunning by any measure. “My daughter,” Walter said, watching Richie. “Angela. Go by Angel mos’ time.”

“Pretty.”

“Talk about. Need me a shotgun soon.”

Richie, unable quite to pull his eyes off her, directed the only words he could think of to a vague spot above her head. “You love your daddy?”

“Nope. Wanna go back Shreveport.”

Her father laughed. “Shreveport? You a Creole girl. B’long in a field, or a pogie plant makin’ that fish meal all day long.”

Her mouth formed a tough pout. “Not gonna.”

“Oh no?” Walter tried to look mad but couldn’t sustain it. He said to the others, “Twenty dollar a month cuttin’ ’cane, packin’ fish? She hate that shit much as me.”

Hollis Jenks, the young deputy sheriff, was scanning the house from behind the curtain. He barked over his shoulder, “Cut that talk, boy.” His glance hung a second too long on Angel, Richie thought.

“Yes, sir,” Walter said. “My ’pologies.”

The promoter announced it was showtime. When Joe and Cleoma didn’t respond, he got the hint, licked his thumb, and pulled bills from his clip, leaving each one wet with saliva. “How I be sure you gimme the full hour?”

“They our people,” Joe said. “We go all night for them.”

Cleoma slid her guitar to one side to give Walter a parting embrace. “Come see us in Eunice. We make a new song for the radio.”

“I needa do a little earnin’ first.”

“I know, an’ we so sorry for this.”

“Boss make the rules.”

An idea came to Cleoma. She whispered in Joe’s ear.

He nodded. “Après ‘Lafayette.’”

She turned back to Walter. “La seconde,” she promised. “Pour vous.”

* * *

THE CROWD CLAPPED politely when the two musicians took the stage. The cheering swelled when they commenced “Allons à Lafayette,” the popular side they’d cut in New Orleans. Without spotlight or amplification they held every eye and filled the hall with sound. Joe’s accordion, its effortless volume, dominated, the flight of his fingers contrasting with his torso’s imperceptible flex as he worked the bellows in and out. Cleoma was barely more animated as she strummed, the sway of her body visible to the first few rows at most. Yet the tune bounded along in cheerful two-four time that soon jammed the aisles with handholding Cajuns twirling in a snug little mob. Joe and Cleoma seemed not to notice. They gazed out from the stage with blank intensity, like blind people hearing their names called across a room.

Joe sang in a clipped, almost conversational tenor whose plaintive cast would have made even good-time lyrics sound bleak. Cleoma came in on the chorus with a whiny warble that shimmered at the high end. They looked spellbound and slightly embarrassed by the dynamic effect of their sound. Richie had no idea what the French lyrics were saying. Walter sighed beside him. “Sad, sad.”

“The song? Coulda fooled me.”

“Tha’s Cajun. Broken hearts, bound for the graveyard, still they gonna dance.”

“What’s it about?”

“Man wanna marry his girl even he know she trouble.”

“You know French?”

“I am French. Much as them.”

“Lafayette” ended and the applause was loud. “Boy!” It was Deputy Jenks. He’d been jiggling to the music and now in the lull reverted to previous fixations. “No nigras allowed back here.”

“Okay we listen one more?” Walter asked.

Jenks sighted over his pointer finger. “One and git.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Onstage, Joe and Cleoma conferred before starting the next number. She gave Walter a warm glance over her shoulder. From the song’s first notes it was clear the crowd wasn’t sure how to take it. Cleoma played a progression of minor and seventh chords, and her vocals, in French, were mournfully strained. Joe added bits here and there, accordion fills behind the melody that echoed her ragged wail. The song’s volume was low. People leaned toward the stage, trying first to determine what the music was and second to decide if they liked it.

Certainly Hollis Jenks didn’t like it. At the sound of Walter singing along behind him, he dealt him a nasty glare. “‘Blues Negres,’” Walter said, answering the question before it was asked. He put an arm around his daughter. “‘Nigger Blues.’”

Jenks pointed to the exit door.

Walter took up his suitcase and flour sack. “Blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man beat down,” he said to Angel. “Them’s the words Miss Cleoma singin’. My words.” And to Jenks: “My song.”

He put his shoulder to the steel exit door. He was on the scrawny side, and Richie reached across to help push it open. Then Richie followed Walter and his daughter outside, somehow sure he’d regret it if he didn’t.

* * *

WALTER DOPSIE HAD first met Joe Falcon and Cleoma Breaux at the Columbia sessions in New Orleans last April. Occasionally crossing paths since then, they’d done a broadcast together at Shreveport’s KWKH two days ago. Walter got fifteen dollars for backing them on fiddle while they did “Lafayette” for the radio audience, a nice payday he’d blown on a room at the colored hotel and a thrift-shop dress for his daughter. Shreveport was Paris as far as Angel knew; she’d never been out of Hancock Bayou down on the Gulf where she lived with her mother. Now it was time to get her home—Walter liked liquor and women and she wasn’t an asset in those pursuits. When Richie mentioned he had a vehicle after they left the Pinefield Auditorium, Walter calculated that free transportation and access to any fais do-dos on the way were good reasons to befriend him.

“Fais do-do.” Richie had heard the term before. “Be a dance hall, right?”

“Dance party,” Walter said. “One settin’ up on the highway I seen comin’ in.” He unlatched Richie’s trunk to put his suitcase inside. Angel climbed onto the leather seat from the passenger’s side. “Pay good, too.”

The notion that these two expected to ride with him settled on Richie agreeably. On the brink of quitting music, he found Walter’s zeal for it encouraging. Too, there was something about Angel that made him reluctant to look at her but also reluctant to give up the chance, as if maybe proximity would build up his immunity to whatever hazard she posed.

“What you got here?” Walter lifted Richie’s new accordion out of the trunk. “Hooboy, we make some money now.”

“Ain’t learned it yet.”

“Leave that to me.”

“Thought you was a fiddle player.”

“I play it all, boy.”

“No colored call me boy, we straight on that?”

Walter doffed his jacket and laid it atop his suitcase in Richie’s trunk. He slipped his hands into the straps of the accordion and peeled off a giddy melody as he walked around to the front of the vehicle.

Richie was too bewildered to be angry. Apparently they were a duo now, heading off to play some damn barn dance. “Least tell me you got dough for the pump,” he said, but again received no reply.

Walter and Angel had caught a ride here from Shreveport earlier today in Joe Falcon’s touring car. On the road into Pinefield, Walter had noticed a tin-roofed meeting hall with hurricane shutters hinged over its windows. Men were hoisting the shutters and hooking them open. That was the signal, plain as neon, that a fais do-do was on tap tonight. Two bits a head, children in free, homebrew for sale by the dipperful, music by whichever act, out of the several that invariably showed up at these things, best filled the dance floor and drew the biggest cheers.

“They pass the hat, do they?” Richie asked as he climbed in and punched the starter. Angel was squeezed between him and her father. Richie’s guitar in its case lay across their knees. She folded her arms on top and rested her head. Her dark hair fanned across her face and touched Richie’s wrist as he shifted gears on the steering column.

Walter noodled on the accordion as he directed Richie down the road. Twilight washed the trees and buildings gray in the Model T’s headlamps. “Best band take the pot,” he said.

“Don’t tell me us. With no kinda practice.”

“You be white. I do the rest.” At Richie’s look, Walter explained, “Got to be. No Neg gettin’ in ’cept a white man vouch for him. But ain’t nobody play Cajun like me.”

“Even Cajuns,” Angel said drowsily.

Richie looked down. Her face on her arms was turned his way, the curve of her mouth reflecting passing lights from outside. She easily, her father too if he worked at it, could have passed for white. Richie wished they’d give it a try, drop the “Neg” and the “Nigger Blues” at least while traveling with him. When Angel moved in her sleep, her hair tickled his forearm. He slid his hand up the steering wheel to make it stop.

There were more wagons and horse buggies than motorcars outside the meeting hall. Folks milling about in the dusk had a spectral glow from the yellow-lit windows and the flare of cigarette lighters. Ladies collected admission at a front table. Walter told Richie it was early yet, the music wouldn’t start till nine or ten, after the heat of the day subsided. Richie parked beside a shallow flood gully, grabbed his guitar and got out. Walter removed his fiddle and bow from the flour sack and put Richie’s accordion inside to go along with the washboard. He slung the sack over his shoulder like a hobo. Angel fished six thimbles from the suitcase and gave them to her father to keep in his pocket. “Who play the washboard?” Richie asked.

“Rubboard, we call it,” Walter said. “She feel it more’n she play it.”

“It’s easy,” Angel said.

“Easy ’cause you good at it.”

“Tellin’ me she on with us?” Richie said.

“Girl lay a spell,” Walter said. “You’ll see.”

Walter found the fais do-do’s organizers, introduced Richie and himself, and asked where they could store their instruments till the show started; where, too, they might get a sip of something beforehand. The head man’s face and forearms were leathery from outdoor work. “I seen you in Ville Platte one time,” he said. “Played good.”

Walter scanned around. “Crowd pretty thin.”

“Joe Falcon in town. He done, all them folks be here.”

“What you think, then?”

“Fill the place, we get you twelve, fifteen.”

“Throw in some hooch?”

The man put it straight. “Neg need his own cup.”

Walter made his way to a parked flatbed where booze was being dispensed from jugs off the back. Men standing around it took slugs from shared containers. Before they could react to Walter’s intrusion, he removed a tin cup from his sack and held it out. They flicked their eyes twice from his face to the cup before obliging him with a pour. He raised his hand in a genial toast before taking a good long drink.

Richie and the fais do-do organizer watched the exchange. “You an’ him partners long?”

“Not long,” Richie said.

The man’s voice turned stern. “Keep him sober.”

* * *

UNTIL JOE AND Cleoma’s performance ended in Pinefield and their fans began showing up to continue the party at the fais do-do, the crowd inside the meeting hall remained sparse. Walter opted to let a local combo go on first—mom and dad on guitar, daughter on fiddle, son on accordion. Watching through a side door as they twanged away, Richie appreciated Walter’s strategy, for the dance floor was mostly kids horsing around and oldsters getting in a few steps before heading home to bed.

Kerosene lamps slung from nails in the wood framing threw greasy light this way and that. Birds nested in the rafters. Smelling of sawdust and creosote, the hall was built on blocks off the ground. There was no raised performance stage. The band stood level with the dancers just a few feet away from them, as if playing in somebody’s parlor. “Get any fuller,” Richie said over the clattering floorboards, “how people gonna hear us?”

Walter pointed to some large wood crates by the wall behind the band. “Git up on ’em, shout it over they heads.”

“Stand on them things an’ play?”

“Feel like you flyin’.”

Walter took a swallow of moonshine. He passed the cup to Richie, who, in trying to avoid touching his lips to the rim, poured more into his mouth than he’d meant to. Shuddering with the 140-proof burn, he handed the cup to Angel.

She took a sip, clamping her eyes till the fire subsided. Her forehead was damp with perspiration and strands of hair stuck to her skin. Richie reached over unthinking and brushed them aside. Her glance caught his before he looked away. In the corner of his eye he saw her smile, which annoyed him because she was mixed race for one thing and a mere child worse than that. When she handed back the cup he accepted it brusquely to remind her of her place.

The next hours passed in a blur. People came from the Falcon show and filled the hall. Late as it was, mothers with infants and children repaired to a side chamber that had chairs to sit on to nurse the babies and cots for sleepy kids; the mothers spelled each other babysitting in order to take turns with their men on the dance floor. Benches lined the sides of the hall. Older women, the widows and matriarchs, sat chaperone as teenagers touched hands and whatever more they could manage in the dim-lit whirl, the twining of arms, the soft collision of hips and torsos. Spouses kissed on the dips, the music breezing overhead like fresh air after rain. Young men and women, nervous hawks and willing prey, surveyed the scene from opposite corners.

Richie observed it all from his perch on a produce crate between Walter and Angel, his center position dictated by Walter so no one would doubt that a white man headed the band. Richie’s balance was wobbly at first—from the moonshine and also the strangeness of the scene. He was strumming tunes he didn’t know, chasing the lead of Walter’s accordion and Angel’s rubboard rhythm. He looked at her often. Her silver board hung from a cord around her neck, clasped to her front like makeshift armor. Her eyes were shut as she played and her body moved in waves. She wore a thimble on each thumb, pointer, and middle finger. Her hands flew across the board’s rippled surface, giving smacks on the downbeat and a syncopation of zips and runs that made the music jump. Glancing down, he saw that sweat at the small of her back was making her dress cling in the cleft.

They made a peculiar sight—a white man dressed like a soda jerk playing alongside a Creole dandy and a Spanish-looking girl with the allure of French Quarter jailbait. People refused with hoots and hollers to let them yield to another group. The sea of celebrants thickened and the action grew frenetic. Richie had only to fumble along while Walter did the work of singing and playing. He was free to enjoy the booze in his blood, the music fueling his uplift rather than weighting it with any need to be coherent. Only when Angel looked over in amusement did Richie realize he was grinning.

He didn’t know the song titles or the words. They were Cajun, with traditional lyrics that no doubt changed every time Walter sang them. But Walter’s vocals, like something cried from a scaffold, gave Richie all he needed to know about “Mon Coeur T’Appelle,” “La Valse Criminelle,” and “L’Amour Indifferent.” At the end of each number, Walter would immediately start the next. The accordion was tuned in C, a fortunate thing since the key incorporated the only chords Richie knew: C, F, and G. So off they’d go, Walter setting the pace, Angel hopping aboard, Richie hanging back till he got the chord sequence and joined in.

At some point he became aware of the Pinefield deputy sheriff watching from the side of the dance floor. Hollis Jenks had heard about the fais do-do after the Falcon show and come by with some pals, swapping his khaki uniform for dungarees and madras short sleeves. They stood in a huddle whose dour contrast to the prevailing mood few but Richie noticed. For Jenks and his friends, seeing Walter excite the room killed any fun they might have found here. Walter’s skin shone darker in the lamplight. He sweated like a field hand through his suit and his greased hair had loosened into wiry coils. Cajuns showered him with cheers that seemed to give the deputy personal offense. Richie played on, trying not to let foreboding dampen his good time.

A young woman brought them alcohol between songs. Walter yipped, “Oh darlin’!” each time she appeared, no one caring anymore whose lips touched the communal cup. The moments seemed a ripple in the room’s noisy wash until Richie noticed Jenks watching with stony reproach. He hoped that Walter would smarten up and let the woman be. She didn’t make it easy, lingering in front of him with her eyes cast dreamily upward. Richie glanced again at Jenks. The deputy’s attention had switched to Angel, where it remained as if hypnotized.

People waited for Walter to start the next tune. He called out to the room, “Y’all gonna let a Neg take a leak?” Laughter erupted. Walter hopped off the crate and darted through the side door to relieve himself outside. Tonight’s celebration was nothing if not a call of nature.

Angel took the moment to lift the rubboard from around her neck. It got warm under that sheet of metal. Perspiration had turned her dress wet and sheer across small pointed breasts naked beneath the material. She seemed unaware of the nubile vision she made. Holding the rubboard in one hand, she raked the fingers of her other hand through her hair to cool the back of her neck. Richie turned away in embarrassment. His eyes fell on Jenks, who was still staring at Angel. The deputy looked lost in wonder till he realized Richie was watching him. His reaction might have been milder if he’d only been leering. But getting caught in a state of rapture over a nigger’s daughter was something else again.

Walter bounded back inside like a vaudevillian taking an encore. The room’s energy had cooled. Families and couples made to leave, thanking him as they headed out. The moonshine woman went up to him. She withdrew a handkerchief from under her bodice and dabbed his brow. There was cause for surprise in this—white woman, black man. But the real rarity came when she refolded the hankie and returned it inside her dress, his sweat against her skin. Few saw the exchange; she rejoined her kin leaving the hall and disappeared into the night. But Deputy Jenks took note.

He and his friends waited till the wagons and motorcars thinned out around the hall. It was after midnight. Walter and Richie had collected their pay and were loading up the Ford. Angel had climbed in and was already half asleep with her head on her arms. The plan was to stop at an all-night diner and then continue southwest toward her home on the Gulf, resting at roadside and hopefully hitting another fais do-do somewhere on the way tomorrow. Richie and Walter stood by the trunk of the motorcar, counting out the money. “Turn you Cajun yet,” Walter laughed.

“Or colored,” Richie said, taking his half.

Footsteps hissed in the long grass behind them. Richie and Walter were turning to the sound when blows came down with thuds and cracks, hardwood hitting muscle and bone. Driven to the ground, Walter received extra pounding while Richie sprawled facedown beside him with his brain ringing and someone’s boot on his neck. Men stood over them in the dark, panting and grunting as if breaking rocks. Walter curled up to shield himself but his forearm was snapped by one swing of an ax handle and the side of his head was next.

It was too dark to see much blood. The men threw Walter limp into the gully. They got behind the Ford and with a rowdy heave pushed that in, too, Angel still inside; Richie later wondered if he’d heard her scream or was it in his head? Walking away, one of the attackers gave Richie a last kick that caught him square in the throat. Meanwhile Walter was drowning in six inches of swamp water at the bottom of the gully, though he never knew it.

* * *

RICHIE WOKE TO a woman’s voice somewhere in the air above him. “You in Lake Charles Hospital. Been here three days.” It hurt to open his eyes, the lids leaky and crusty both.

He couldn’t form words. She bent over him and he smelled the bleach in her uniform. He tried moving his tongue. He pushed air through his lips. “Lake Charles?” came out in a whisper.

“Lake Charles, yes. You got people here? Must be worried sick.”

Lake Charles. The words took meaning slowly. A name came to mind. “Esther Block,” he murmured before falling back into sleep.

* * *

THEY WERE MARRIED four months later at Lake Charles City Hall. It seemed a natural next step after he convalesced at Esther and her father’s house and began helping at their store as his health returned. Before long they were as good as husband and wife but for the paperwork and wedding night. Leopold witnessed, paid for the license and dinner for three at the Majestic Hotel. Esther went straight to her room after they got home. Leopold poured cognacs for him and his son-in-law until enough time had passed to assume she’d got herself ready. His goodnight wink about killed Richie with embarrassment.

Though it was her first time compared to maybe a dozen for him, all with professionals in their establishments or in his motorcar, he was the nervous one. He’d rarely done it without protection. The feel of Esther’s fingers slotting him in place and the yielding clasp when he pushed inside brought him to a fast finish. Propped on his elbows in the dark above her, his mouth fell open and some saliva dropped onto her cheek. She teased him about it afterward, saying she took it as a compliment that he’d lost himself that way. Humiliated, he curled to the wall. She lay on her back with her knees up as instructed in her pregnancy pamphlet.

Being Esther’s husband turned out okay. Thanks to the store, there was ample food and money around, and scented powder she ordered from New York always aroused him when he undid her nightgown at night. Damage to his throat had left Richie’s voice a sandpaper rasp good for telling funny stories but unable to sing a note. His memory of performing with Walter Dopsie at the fais do-do was like an itch at the end of a severed limb, not terribly hard to put out of mind once he accepted that it always would be there. Feel like you flyin’, Walter had said before they’d climbed on those crates to play. True at the time, but never again.

The sheriff’s inquiry into Walter’s death had come to a finding of drunken mishap. The details of the attack were lost to Richie. He had a dim recollection of one face at the scene, swollen and shiny with a nervous mean look that makes for the worst kind of bully, but it was no more substantial than a ghost glimpsed in a window. Pinefield teenagers had hauled his vehicle out of the gully and picked it clean of its tires, upholstery, and engine; it was a rusting skeleton by the time Richie got back there weeks afterward. And his concern for Walter’s daughter was too awkward to bring up. Someone said she’d been returned to her mother down on the coast. Her face he pictured clearly.

* * *

THE TWINS WERE born the next summer. Justine first, followed moments later by Richard Junior. Richie was absent due to unloading deliveries at Block’s, he said, though being unmissed at the occasion by his wife and father-in-law made their doubt a non-issue. Esther’s pregnancy had been her and Leopold’s show from the start. Richie had assumed he was forever golden in their eyes for having rescued Esther from spinsterhood; their acceptance of his drinking and carousing throughout her pregnancy seemed almost amiable. But coming home to find his wife in bed with an infant at each breast and her father and the midwife looking on with pride, he realized he was extraneous here. He turned on a heel and went back to the bar.

He and Leopold worked at the store while Esther stayed home with the children. Leopold kept him at laborer status, barely letting him talk to customers much less man the register or deposit the day’s cash at the bank. Richie reminded himself that marriage and fatherhood were a game he was running—no money problems ever again, freedom when he wanted it, and a wife who let him have relations with her if he bathed and shaved and treated her nice that day. Condescension from some old Jew was nothing he couldn’t handle.

Those relations predated Esther’s pregnancy. Hands off during it he’d understood; the continued halt in the weeks and now months afterward was vexing. She’d become gigantic carrying the twins and had stayed that way since, but her size in daylight gave way to splendor at night when the press of her knee or backside under the covers posed a cushiony promise. He’d wait for a hint confirming that it wasn’t by accident. Sometimes he thought Esther too was waiting, lying there with breath held just like him. Then sleep would take over and the moment would pass unregretted.

Lately she’d become careless of the sour milk smell that attached to her after nursing. Richie in turn didn’t bother to rinse the bourbon from his mouth or pass a washcloth under his arms before bed. She would jolt awake when the babies cried in their nursery at night. He’d hear the floorboards groan under her weight and think malicious thoughts. Leopold would appear in the hallway in his robe and slippers, holding the latest electric lantern he’d purchased from some supplier or other. Their silent collusion as they went to tend the children irritated Richie more than if he’d heard them whispering about his faults. He accepted that they thought he was useless. He disliked that they preferred it that way.

His chance to assert himself came when his father-in-law brought up religion one day at the store. “Jewish from the mother,” Leopold said. “Her children.”

“Our children,” Richie said.

“You not religious, what I can see.”

“Your daughter neither.”

“We are a people. Hébreu. Justine and Richard, same.”

Richie shook his head. “I gave in on her name, that’s it.”

“Justine?”

“Wanted Bonnie, you know that.”

“Justine is beautiful.”

“Ain’t American. They’re Bainards. American. And the boy,” Richie said, “want him called R.J., not Richard.”

“I no like.”

“R. J. Bainard is a rich man’s name.”

“You not rich. I not rich.”

“Look around, Mr. Block. You made a nice business. I can take it big.”

Richie, who’d only been trying to get under Leopold’s skin, was surprised when the old man seized his arm. “You will do? For the children?”

“Just said, didn’t I?”

“I have worried on this.”

Richie tried to keep up. “Talkin’ about your store, right?”

“Maybe your store.”

Leopold’s meaning sunk in. “Bull’s-eye,” Richie said.

Expanding Block’s had been Esther’s idea originally. She didn’t care which faith if any her children adopted and seemed not to care much about them except as a point of duty. She couldn’t wait to get back to the business. She wanted to improve the space and open locations in other towns, make Block’s the popular stop for household goods and also farm tools, feed, and fertilizer. Hearing her excited plans when they came home after work was the one time each day that Richie and Leopold laid off bickering to share agreement in dismissing her.

She began interviewing prospective help, ladies endorsed as righteous and non-thieving by their pastors or previous employers. It was inconceivable to Leopold that she might so abandon her children—his grandchildren, raised by a stranger! Richie dreaded the idea of Esther bossing him around at work. He was relieved that Leopold was of the same mind to keep her home. That he might put Richie in charge, make him the owner, was an unexpected bonus.

A small law office had recently opened a few doors down from Block’s. Leopold had gathered from its fancy sign that it was a firm of two attorneys, Abelard & Percy. He’d seized on the idea that the former was of French and possibly Jewish descent. But when he asked inside for “Monsieur Abelard,” the lone gentleman there rose from his desk chair and said with drama, “While I’m honored to be on a first-name basis with you, sir, I confess that Messrs. Abelard and Percy are but one humble soul.” He gestured toward his front window and the shingle displayed outside. “My middle initial was rendered a virtual Chinese ampersand by the so-called calligrapher and as a consequence I’ve endured no end of confusion about my business, my name, and my very identity.”

None of this got through to Leopold. “You make will?”

Abelard “Abe” Percy—in his forties, portly, with a red pocket square peeking out from his threadbare suit—gave a bow. “But of course.” Seemingly full of display, the gesture in truth was grateful. This was Abe’s first client since setting up shop in Lake Charles after being expelled from his position as a state attorney in New Orleans. By his own admission in retrospect, he’d become overkeen in giving shelter and comfort to street waifs thrown to charity while their parents did time in jail. Shelter and comfort he considered it still, but people had whispered revolting things. Out here in the sticks, he hoped to leave all that behind.

* * *

LEOPOLD, WHEN CUSTOMERS entered the store, had developed a tendency to rock aggressively in his chair in order to propel himself to his feet. Richie got a kick out of seeing him, at the ring of the front bell, gather momentum with his face turning red and his white hair flying. One day the old man launched and kept going, hurtling forward like a toppled tree and smacking the floor face-first. The comedy of the pratfall preceded its seriousness by several seconds. Richie was still laughing when the realization dawned that his father-in-law was badly hurt. It was markdown day at the store. The crowd of shoppers recoiled in horror from Leopold’s lifeless body and Richie’s pealing laughter.

Block’s Dry Goods was a Lake Charles fixture and Leopold an eminent figure. Dozens of mourners came to Orange Grove Cemetery to pay respects. Richie felt them eyeing him at graveside as the lout who’d found this funny. The feeling got worse during the reading of the Kaddish prayer of mourning. The strangeness of the Hebrew spoken by Leopold’s temple colleagues brought home to Richie how bizarre it was that he should have wound up connected to this old dead foreigner.

He studied Leopold’s uncovered granite casement. It was built half out of the ground on account of the region’s high water table, the varnished casket inside looking like a long shiny shoe in a shoebox. He wondered what he was doing here, how in hell he’d fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, and did he really see himself running a department store for the rest of his life? The questions posed their own answer. He would escape first chance he got.

The Kaddish was gibberish to him, what he imagined Apaches or Zulus talked like around their heathen fires. The lingual murk set his thoughts adrift. He heard a woman’s murmur inside the Kaddish’s monotone. He turned to the sound with hazy joy that some angel had come to save him. It was only Esther whispering, “I don’t get a word of it.” He blinked at her as if unsure who she was.

“Amen,” several men said abruptly. Richie thought the Kaddish was over and chimed in, “Amen.” But the responses were part of the ritual, standard avowals of something, and the prayer resumed with no end in sight.

“Lord,” Esther said under her breath. “Could it be any drearier?”

“That kinda day,” Richie said.

“Was Papa’s time. Gotta accept it.”

Her composure spooked him. “Your time now,” slipped out accidentally.

She put her hand inside his. “Thanks for saying that, Richie.” She rarely addressed him by name; it seemed a warning of sorts. “But really it’s our time.” She brought his hand to her lips and kissed his fingers one by one.

Two hours later they were having intercourse in their bedroom at home with clothes thrown around and Esther heedless of the bedsprings groaning or the nanny she’d hired being just down the hall with the kids. Richie was torn between self-consciousness over their racket and fright at his wife’s weird passion on this fraught afternoon. She clamped him so hard into her breasts that he had trouble getting air. Things were slippery down there as never before. Her cries in his ear became continuous. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the door was shut. He caught a glimpse of her bare legs, thick, pale, bent at the knees, jutting upward around his hips in the afternoon light. The sight astonished him, her open thighs flexing each time he pushed into her. He heard his own cries mingle with hers.

They retreated to separate sides of the bed. At length he asked, “Gonna tell me why?”

“A wife needs a reason?”

“A daughter kinda do, day like today.”

“Not one no more. Could be that’s why.”

Dusk in the window signaled the end of a long day. Richie pictured the fresh-laid slab on Leopold’s tomb going dark on this first night of many. A baby’s yelp in the nursery startled him. Esther began to get up before falling back on the pillow. “Help’s here now, I forgot.”

“Who she again?”

“Sallie Hooker. Told you ten times.”

“Surprised you went with a colored.”

“She’s half only. Bayou gal. Up from trouble, lookin’ for better.”

“You know some man got to do with it.”

“Long as she’s straight now.”

“Ain’t like we need her,” Richie said.

“I’m back the store tomorrow.”

“Your father did not want that.”

“He’s got no say anymore, God rest him.”

“I don’t want it neither.”

Esther tucked against him. “Don’t start, Richie. Not after such sweetness.” One breast lay huge across his chest. Moments ago he’d been trying to inhale it into his mouth. Now it made him feel queasy.

“You know he seen a lawyer.” Esther rose on one elbow as Richie spoke. Her blond hair framed her face and he appreciated how flawless her complexion was up close. This accounted for his hesitation, as of a gently applied knife, when he added, “’Bout me takin’ over the business.”

After a pause she said, “Please tell me that’s a lie.”

* * *

LEOPOLD’S WILL STIPULATED that Block’s proceed under Richie’s control with Esther as a limited partner. When the children turned twenty-five, they would share in the operating profits or the net proceeds should the business be sold. Abe Percy, wearing his usual linen suit with a pastel shirt and matching pocket square, explained the terms to Richie and Esther in his office.

Richie had expected to inherit the store outright. In his mind he’d already sold it and banked the money after leaving, as he saw it, a fair fraction to his wife and kids; now he’d have to stick around to gather his cut piecemeal. Esther saw betrayal where her father had seen tradition. “I don’t understand how he can reach out the grave and make me do what he wants even then.”

“You could file an objection with the court,” Abe said.

“Kinda shit is that?” Richie said. “You wrote the will, now you wanna tear it up?”

“I say it because I wrote it and because it’s a fact. I warned Mr. Block that churches and government can mandate perpetual property rights, but not always individuals.”

Esther clasped Richie’s hand. “Then we’ll fight it.”

Richie pulled free. “Your father had a right—”

“Block’s is my right!”

Richie turned to Abe, a fellow man in the room, like-minded and sensible. The lawyer acknowledged, “Be hard for her to prevail without your consent.”

The subsequent silence said everything. Richie talked anyway. “I run it. Kids get it. Wife stays home.” He turned to her with the calm of a man holding aces. “Like Papa wanted.”

“Let me just work the store like I always done.” Tears came. “You need me there, you’ll see.”

It occurred to him she was talking sense. “Long as I’m boss.”

Her sniffling quieted.

“Make suggestions, okay. No opinions.”

She nodded.

“Because I will be the goddamn boss.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want.” Richie pointed at Abe. “You heard it.”

“I did.” Overweight himself, Abe had sympathy for Esther on many levels, marriage to this grabby hayseed heading the list.

“Little test,” Richie said. “We been callin’ her Justine, don’t ask me why.”

“Her? You mean your daughter.”

“Well, that’s just it. I wanted Bonnie, but I got overruled at the time.”

“Because you were out drinking,” Esther said.

“I’m talkin’ to the lawyer here.”

She lowered her eyes. Abe hurt at the sight of it.

Richie went on, “And I cannot get right with Justine. Bonnie’s my girl. Miss Bonnie Bainard from Lake Charles, USA.”

“You’re saying you want the name changed,” Abe said.

“In the paperwork, yes I do. Make it official here on out.”

Abe looked to Esther. Her face was splotchy from crying earlier, as if slapped by a clumsy master. “Justine was my mother’s name,” she said.

“Then surely out of respect—” Abe began.

“No,” she cut in. “Bonnie’s fine.” Abe saw that she had little choice but to feed her husband this concession, but that she felt obliged to sweeten it with “In fact I like it better” made his heart sink.

“See,” Richie grinned. “I was right all along.”

Abe leaned back in his chair. When Richie took Esther’s hand in a possessive grip, Abe’s gaze was there to meet hers as she mutely begged him to pity her plight. Recognition lit their faces too tenderly for Richie to notice. You could say Abe and Esther found each other at that moment, as friends rather than lovers—but either way, for life.

* * *

WITHIN A YEAR of taking over Block’s, Richie opened stores in Shreveport and Baton Rouge, closing the latter after a few months but opening three more around the state in 1937 and 1938, when the worst of the Depression seemed past. Tailoring their wares to the needs of each locale, he otherwise patterned the establishments after the original. The sign and outside façade were indistinguishable among them. Even their staffs were alike. Richie hired female managers, an idea he got from watching his wife run the main store while he concentrated on the big picture. He judged candidates on the basis of his image of Esther. Salesmen needed charm and brass. Managers had to be diligent, organized, and invisible. Like her.

He let underlings do the daily retail slog while he hobnobbed with bankers and local bigwigs, a crowd he was pleased to discover enjoyed a drink and a laugh same as him. Esther planted herself at the Lake Charles store, squeezed into her father’s old rocking chair with a ledger in her lap, monitoring accounts from throughout the Block’s chain. Richie did the hands-on management, driving store to store in a canary Packard, striding in slick as a Federal agent and peppering staff with questions supplied by his wife. His black workers out back in the storage yards enjoyed his banter and the dollar bills he put in their hands. Whites in the front showroom remained gratifyingly cowed. His wife urged him to fire weak performers, but at worst he only cut their wages. Letting them keep their jobs allowed him to think well of himself and less of Esther, the heartless sow.

Neither had any touch for parenting. Richie’s affection for his daughter began with her name, “Bonnie Bainard” meeting his ideal of the saucy all-American gal that any daughter of his surely must be. Esther’s sense that the girl was a sourpuss was closer to the truth. The genetic misfire that caused Bonnie to shoot up in height to where she stood a head taller than the tallest boys in her class didn’t help. Being neither cute nor popular despite belonging to one of Lake Charles’s most successful families was bound to promote a glum attitude.

Her brother R.J. was more personable but rare to show it, a genuine loner but for interaction with the nanny, Sallie Hooker, who stayed on as the Bainards’ live-in help as the children grew. Sallie, out of fondness, mistook R.J.’s quiet for introspection and his time spent with her in the kitchen and laundry as showing sensible regard for her hard-won country wisdom, rather than what it was, a way to hide out from his family. R.J.’s one certifiable virtue concerned the money she mailed each month to her home in Hancock Bayou down on the coast, the purpose of which, she let slip one afternoon, was to help her daughter being raised there by Sallie’s mother. It didn’t occur to R.J. to ask about the girl’s father, but Sallie told him anyway. “He gone. Dead in a ditch.”

“Fell?”

“Or got push. The drink done it either way, you can bet.”

R.J. was too young to give this fact its full due. But keeping secrets was natural for him, and, compelled by Sallie’s grave expression, easy in this case.

* * *

RICHIE WASN’T ONE to mark turning points or reflect on the past. His memories of the war in 1918 meant no more to him than the steak he had last night or the whiskey he shortly would quaff. A whore, afterward, was the same as his hand, and the esteem of his family was less a factor in maintaining his mood than having a nice automobile to drive and at least twenty bucks in his pocket at all times. But in the summer of 1938 he received two jolts that put him in mind of regrets and desires not even a new car could assuage. It felt like the hand of fate in action, spurring him to better his life while giving pardon in advance for any outside hurt it caused. Like a dog that somehow learns to read, Richie underwent a miracle. A simple man became less so.

It was a Wednesday in August when Joe Falcon entered the Lake Charles Block’s with a guitar in one hand, a suitcase in the other, and a length of rope looped around one wrist. Richie, who rarely came to the store and was only there to get some petty cash out of the register, recognized him at once despite the musician’s thinning hair and ratty suit. Joe’s singing partner Cleoma Breaux walked a few steps behind him. Richie wouldn’t have recognized her if they hadn’t been together. Her hair was a tangled bird’s nest and she wore an ill-fitting dress and dirty tennis shoes. She carried a baby of maybe six months in the crook of one arm, carried it with unnerving vigilance, like a girl so afraid of dropping her doll that she almost breaks it from squeezing. Cleoma’s free hand gripped the rope tied around her waist, by which Joe led her as if on a leash.

Richie stood behind the store’s front counter. Joe dropped his end of the rope to the floor and stepped on it while he opened the guitar case. Cleoma continued past him with a rapt expression until the rope tightened and tugged her back like a balloon on a string. Richie wondered what had happened to the lively girl with the knowing smile he’d met ten years ago. Her gaze drifted to his. “Mes compliments,” she said before looking off elsewhere. He felt sick to see such strangeness.

“My wife tell that to everyone,” Joe said. “She mean only kindness by it.”

“You got married,” Richie said.

“We acquainted?”

“I seen you two play. After ‘Lafayette’ come out.”

“Them days done.” Was this a reference to Cleoma? Richie regarded her worriedly, taking in once more the vacant gaze and rope around her waist. “Hard times,” Joe said, reading his thoughts. “Same as everywhere.”

“True that.” Richie’s suggestion of shared struggle rang false even as he spoke it. The Depression hadn’t touched him. His life had never been easier. “New baby?” he asked to fill the space.

“Lil girl, yes sir. Lulu. Near lost ’em both right after she born. Wife snagged up her shawl in a Greyhound door. Drug her a quarter mile, her holdin’ the child whole time.”

“You pullin’ my leg now.”

“God’s truth. Lulu, not a scratch. Cleoma took the hurt.”

Richie looked at her again. “Seem okay now.” He looked harder. Brain damage, plain as day. Retarded. He’d met her only once in his life, still it horrified him to see what bad luck had dealt her. “Damn.”

The rope around her waist was the obvious next question. “She wander some,” Joe explained. “Forget what she about. Not on Lulu. With Lulu she sharp.”

Richie shook his head in utter sorrow. “You got a heavy load.”

“Oh no, we fine. Grateful every day.” Behind his glasses Joe’s eyes told another story. He set the guitar on the countertop. Richie recognized Cleoma’s National resonator, fingerboard ebony with pearl inlays, its metal body polished, cut with a pair of tapered f-holes, and etched with magnolia blossoms. Joe, watching Richie’s admiring eyes, ran his hand along the neck. “She make a pretty noise, I guarantee.”

Joe’s drawl returned Richie to that evening backstage at the Pinefield Auditorium when he and Walter Dopsie had watched Joe and Cleoma perform “Allons à Lafayette.” Walter had translated: Man wanna marry his girl even he know she trouble. A love song that Richie, it occurred to him now, could never sing on account of his voice and whatever else about him was broken. “Still got your accordion?” he asked.

“Still got me, better to say. But the National no need, so here go.”

“Not interested.” Esther had lumbered up from the rear of the store. It was the exact wrong person for Richie to see. He hated her right then. It had nothing to do with her size. He’d reveled enough in her lushness to know it could work him up every bit as much as the skinny girls he paid for in East Lake Charles, though they were available whereas Esther, by mutual indifference, no longer was. “Block’s don’t take consignments,” she told Joe.

“Prefer a straight sell anyhow.”

“We’re not a pawnshop here.”

“Forty’ll get it. Worth double at least.”

“It’s not about the money, sir.”

It was the “sir” that set Richie off, so upright and professional. Plus he’d had a couple drinks, it being past noon. He banged open the register, removed two twenties, and thrust them at Joe.

Esther whirled on him. “Dammit, Richie!”

He slapped her hard with his open palm. A first for him, it felt and sounded perfect. She buckled but didn’t go down. Her eyes filled from the sting and her cheek burned red around the redder shape of his hand. Store patrons gaped in shock. Down the passway to the storeroom Richie saw his nine-year-old son and daughter watching with frozen faces, Bonnie taller, her head a brunette bulb on a stalk, R.J. wiry like his father but on the way to being handsomer thanks to his mother’s blue-blue eyes. Richie marveled at the coincidence of the family all present to see this. It confirmed that a crossroads was at hand.

Esther’s friend, the lawyer Abe Percy, pushed through the Block’s front door carrying a stewpot wrapped in a towel. The pot held whatever kitchen concoction the two were sharing today. Both liked to cook. Lunching together on obscure recipes was one of their pleasures, others being coffee and pastry each morning and tea and more pastry each afternoon. Abe froze midstep as he took in the scene.

“Mes compliments,” Cleoma chirped to him, the greeting now as spooky to Richie as a talking skull. Her baby started to fuss and she jiggled it. Something unseen beckoned her and she ambled after it down one aisle until the rope gently called her back.

Abe rushed to Esther, setting the pot on the counter and putting his arm around her. “Essie! What’d he do to you?” Only now did she begin to cry.

Richie’s first thought was that the food smelled good, some kind of pepper stew. His next thought was a notion ludicrous but usefully rude: “Essie? Whatsat, lil pillow talk ’tween you two?” He felt the eyes of his children shift between himself and their sobbing mother.

Abe glared at him. “I told her it was only a matter of time.”

Joe laid the two twenties on the countertop and started to put away his guitar. “Keep the money,” Richie snapped. “And the National.”

“Ain’t lookin’ for charity.” Joe pocketed the bills, left the guitar, picked up his suitcase and led his wife and baby out the front door. Cleoma waved airy good-byes to all. Through the store window, people inside saw her husband kneel on the sidewalk to untie her. Their business at Block’s concluded, he took her hand and led her down Ryan Street to catch a bus going wherever, forty dollars to the better in the quest to rebuild their lives.

Esther stopped crying. A shopper picked up an item in a show of considering to buy it. Richie lifted the National’s strap over his head. Though he hadn’t played in a decade, the G chord came instantly to his left hand; it sounded awful when he strummed. R.J. sidled over to see the guitar up close. On impulse he silenced its tuneless clang by grabbing the neck in a wraparound grip. His thumb clamped the strings to the fingerboard. When Richie strummed again, the sound was beautiful.

The boy let go and his father plucked a perfect G chord with open strings. “I’ll be damned. Open tuning. That’s a colored thing.” For a moment Richie lost himself in playing, sliding his left hand in a flat bar up and down the neck, sometimes dragging a finger to turn a major chord into a sixth or seventh, fluid touches he’d never tried in his days with the Ramblers. His rhythm took a shuffle pattern as a melody returned faintly to mind. R.J. had never seen his dad with a guitar, had no idea he played. Richie’s dreamy expression made the boy not nervous to be with him.

Richie paused and looked around sheepishly. “‘Nigger Blues,’ give or take. Walter be proud.” That no one knew what he was talking about sharpened the revelation that struck him: his present life stunk and change was required.

He handed the guitar to R.J. “Pawn it or play it. Yours either way.” He beckoned Bonnie, who froze when he reached to embrace her but relaxed when it proved benign. Richie opened the register and gave her two twenties. “R.J. get the guitar, you get the cash. Been thinkin’ you got a head for business.” He’d thought no such thing but wanted to make the gifts even. “Turn it double, I bet.”

“Bribing their loyalty,” Abe said. “How touching.”

“Best you not address me or my kids,” Richie said to him. “The wife you can talk till you’re sick of it.”

Esther’s face had begun to bruise. Richie caressed her shoulder. “I am sorry. I’ll try never to do that again.” He clapped his hands to conclude the matter and she flinched as if from a gunshot. Only Abe, his arm still around her, realized Esther was trembling.

All this was preamble to the second jolt that hit Richie that summer, the first half of a one-two punch that softened him up to the idea that coincidence doesn’t happen by chance. Seeing Joe and Cleoma brought low by misfortune seemed a sign meant directly for him, a warning to get out and get satisfied while he still could. He wouldn’t hesitate when the chance came.

* * *

HANCOCK BAYOU IS on the Gulf beach highway on the western end of Cameron Parish, fifty miles south of Lake Charles. It’s the kind of place called nowhere by people who would never go there by choice—seashell roads, scrub-covered flood plains, few trees or structures predating the leveling crush of water and wind that had been the 1918 hurricane. Hundreds of thousands of wetland acres lie north of the town, laced with wooded cheniers and dark twisty channels spilling into the Gulf of Mexico on one side of the highway and wide, brackish bays on the other.

Hancock Bayou owed its existence to a commercial marina and adjacent pogie plant that rendered the inedible baitfish down to oil, fishmeal, and fertilizer, fouling the air if the breeze blew wrong though disagreeably only to visitors, who didn’t appreciate the jobs and wages it signified. The town had a filling station, a movie house, two cement churches—Baptist and Catholic—and a combination druggist and general store where Richie agreed to drop Sallie Hooker when he drove her home a week after the scene at Block’s with the Falcons.

Usually Sallie took a bus there on her breaks, but Richie had business in Cameron Parish. Last year the government had claimed vast tracts of Louisiana wetlands as protected habitats for fish, wildlife, and waterfowl. Richie and his cronies were furious at the Federal grab. They didn’t golf or travel or do anything leisurely beyond private vice or public churchgoing except to hunt and fish. Hunting’s high holiday was duck season from November to January. You could pay rice farmers for access to their ponds and paddies, but lately out-of-towners had started buying property and building private lodges. Most were tin-roofed bunkhouses with chicken-wire kennels for the barking retrievers; the hunting was spectacular but the accommodations strictly Jim Beam in a jelly jar and steel cots from army surplus. Richie’s group of business partners planned something finer, with veteran guides and gourmet food along the lines of Scottish estates that offered shooting in the royal style to Hollywood stars and Texas oilmen. They’d bought ten thousand acres of marsh near the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge—like owning a bar next door to a brewery, Richie said—in order to construct a plush refuge of their own to be called the Section Eight Gun Club.

Richie had come to Hancock Bayou with one of his Section Eight partners, a Lake Charles builder named Burt Meers, to begin laying out the project. The men rode up front in Richie’s Packard. Sallie sat quiet as a mouse in back with a travel case on the seat beside her and her hair pinned up under a Sunday hat. A larger bag was in the trunk. She’d tried to smile when Richie teased her about how much stuff she’d packed for a week. The Bainards had treated her decently, after all, and she’d raised the twins from infancy. It’d be a lie to say she wouldn’t miss them.

The years of having Sallie living under his roof had taught Richie that ignoring servants on a personal level was how they seemed to prefer it. When Burt Meers started quizzing Sallie over the noise of the motor about whether Lake Charles blacks needed a public school or couldn’t they just get their learning at home, her unease at being brought into the conversation made Richie cut in sympathetically, “Got no kids, what she gonna know?”

“They talk. In the hair shop, church.”

“You just lookin’ to get the project.”

“Build a nigger school? Pay me, I’ll build ’em a damn palace.”

Richie drummed up a laugh but couldn’t help glancing at Sallie in the backseat. The splash of sunlight through the car window turned her complexion almost creamy. With mild surprise he was reminded that she was part white. Mixed blood was common in these parts, and in any event his indifference to matters outside himself freed him of social prejudice. He turned frontward and drove on.

“I got a child.” Sallie’s declaration was nervous and quick. “Growed now.”

Richie looked back around. “And you ain’t never said a word?”

“Girl too much for me. My mama raise her.”

“My wife know?”

“No, sir.”

“Smart.”

“Oughtn’t keep secrets from the lady of the house,” Meers said.

Richie asked him, “Would you’a hired her to raise your kids with a child no daddy back home?”

“She didn’t say no daddy.”

“She ain’t got to.”

“Then be a couple reasons I don’t hire her. Good Christian number one.”

Sallie turned her face to the window as they discussed her. The last stretch of road into Hancock Bayou wound through a patchwork of rice and sugarcane fields mostly worked by tenant families like the Hookers. She’d left almost a decade ago on the excuse that her prospects were better in Lake Charles to earn wages to support the daughter she’d had with a no-account tomcat who’d drunk himself to death upstate. In truth she’d left her in her mother’s care after painful reminders of the man started showing up in their child, teenaged by that time, in the form of allure combined with uncaring. The girl was selfish and blithe yet people adored her, a mystery that made sense once you took her looks into account. “Beauty” didn’t capture it. “Knockout” was more the effect.

Sallie said nothing to Richie about quitting the Bainards when she exited his car at the general store. A letter could say it later, silence just as well. He retrieved her bag from the trunk. She lied that she would return by bus to Lake Charles next week, and took a seat on a sidewalk bench awaiting her kin to come fetch her.

Richie was about to back his car into the street when a Chevy flatbed rumbled up on his left. An old lady drove, gray hair, nut-colored skin, her head barely higher than the steering wheel. The passenger on Richie’s side was a young woman with dark ropy tresses that flew like a pennant over her bare elbow jutting out the truck window. Pulling alongside, she surveyed Richie’s Packard as if sure it was stolen. Her expression turned sly when she met him eye to eye, the message being that no way did he rate such a classy ride but to his credit had swung the trick. Meanwhile his expression showed near religious amazement.

He recognized Walter Dopsie’s daughter at once, though her eyes were hooded and her hair had taken copper glints that spoke of southern sun and not the smoky music hall in which she’d first impressed him. Ten years had puffed and rounded her features—she was in her early twenties now—but oh, it was her. “Angel,” popped from his mouth like a gulp.

She cocked her head. “You.”

His joy at being remembered didn’t even embarrass him. Surely it proved that his feelings were pure, his miracle girl now probably some sharecropper’s wife and still he’d surrender his soul to win her. “Just down for a visit,” he said. The explanation rang absurd in his ears.

“Didn’t imagine you here permanent.”

His thoughts hit a wall. Acknowledgment was called for. “Was a bad night we had. At the end.”

“I don’t think about it.”

“I guess me neither.”

She was silent. Evidently it was his job to do the talking.

“So it’s your mama been workin’ for me all these years?”

“News to me.”

He nodded, stymied again. It annoyed him to have to make small talk when fate clearly had big things in store for them.

Angel Hooker (her parents hadn’t married) peered down at the Packard as though at a lifeboat she might deign to let save her. Her softening expression suggested she was starting to sense how much her life might change in the next moments. She wasn’t a wife, let alone one tied to a sharecropper. But she was, like Richie, in the market for rescue.

Her mother had risen from the bench and was watching from nearby. Sallie hesitated to approach, her daughter’s long intimidation of her now reinforced by Angel’s strange bond with Mr. Bainard. Her own mother stood beside her, hand resting on Sallie’s arm for support and in unspoken gratitude that her daughter had finally come home for good. Old Mrs. Hooker was full of the cancer but still the family’s proud matriarch, driving a truck, scolding the men, farming rice for landowners she’d never met. Her one failure, she would have said, was in not getting her granddaughter to value herself above whatever slick piece of traveling trash came through town. But then Sallie too had been a handful in her day, getting pregnant by that charmer Walter Dopsie, who was as wrong for faithful fatherhood as he was for tilling dirt in Hancock Bayou all his life.

Richie shut off his motor and climbed out of the Packard. The move was unwelcome to Meers, who wanted the hell out of there, but also to Sallie and her mother, whom Richie approached with an earnest stride. They recoiled warily. He belonged here no more than did his big fancy car all covered in dust in front of a ramshackle storefront. But the car spoke money, he had plenty, the Hookers much less. It gave him the courage to be direct. “Ma’am. Sallie. I knew Angel’s daddy. I knew Angel some, and I hope to reacquaint if she’ll have it.”

The Hooker ladies were speechless.

“And if she’s married,” he said, “well, no secret—so am I.”

There was silence till Angel broke it. “Shouldn’t you be talkin’ to me?”

Richie turned and put his hand on his heart. “Afraid what you might say.”

“How about take me to Shreveport?”

The questioned staggered him thrillingly, like being hit with a handful of rose petals. “Wherever you say, pretty girl.”

Angel’s smile, cute as it was, held a sliver of letdown, his ardor too predictable, too easy, another man with a teenage brain. She rested her chin on her arm but kept her eyes on him. They were a paler green than what he recalled, like a new seedling before it buds with flowers or prickers. “Now remind me your name again,” she said.

* * *

HE INSTALLED HER in a suite at the Youree Hotel in Shreveport and spent so much time there the staff took to calling them Mr. and Mrs. When she gave birth to his son fourteen months later, he got her a cottage with a trellis and carport not far from the Block’s on Texas Street. She was electric in his arms from their first time together, giggly and coarse and just a natural to do things to. She gave weepy cries during lovemaking that hardened him whenever he replayed them in his head. She liked to drink and even when she was pregnant would dance naked for him to the wireless. She laughed at jokes that made him blush and dared him, though he refused in appalled disbelief, to let her give him an orgasm with her hand while they waited for her doctor to arrive in a taxicab to deliver the baby. Afterward, Richie wanted to name the boy Walter, but Angel insisted on Seth.

“Seth? Where you get that?”

“It come to me.”

“Now goddamn, Angel, if it some ol’ boyfriend—”

“Stop. I like the name.”

“I’d kill the guy, you know that.”

“Big talk.”

He smiled, mostly. “Thought you’d want him called for your daddy.”

“I hardly knew the man. Took me travelin’ a couple times when my mama tired o’ fightin’ me.”

Propped on feather pillows in bed, she shifted the baby to her other breast. Richie glanced down warily but found it not so bad. “Lookit that sonofabitch work! And still you want every time I see him I got to wonder who he named for?”

“If you so worried, don’t see him.”

“You know I will, whatever he called.”

“In the Bible, Richie! Seth is Adam and Eve’s number three child. Sent by the Lord after Cain killed Abel.”

“Well, if it out the Bible, okay.”

“Little gift from me to you. No matter what else. ’Cause you been good to me and I love you.”

In that moment Richie loved her back a hundredfold. He beheld the vision of her and their child with cosmic wonder that men like him often aren’t built to acknowledge. But he knew it the instant he felt it, and he knew that it was rare and he would never let it go. In the shaded glow of her bedside lamp Angel’s caramel shoulders and the slope of her breasts were something out of a classic painting he’d never seen. His baby’s pink head made him want to cry for its preciousness. In fact he did cry a little, Angel too, and when he bent low to give her a kiss their lips made a beautiful fit.

* * *

THE COMPANY’S GROWTH slowed only a little during the war years, with Block’s stores opening in Houston and Jackson. Esther, from her father’s rocking chair relocated to a headquarters office near the Lake Charles city hall, oversaw the selection of sites and distribution centers and the standardization of products and services throughout the chain. Richie was her eyes and ears, making the rounds from place to place in a performance mixing the strut of a corporate boss with the skitter of a traveling salesman. It was an efficient partnership in which they spent little time together, and it came to an end just after New Year’s in 1946, when Esther choked on a mouthful of crawfish pie and died at age fifty-four.

Abe Percy had prepared the dish as a pick-me-up for his friend, who was nursing a cold at home. He was sitting beside her while she ate in bed when something caught in her throat and caused a spasm that took her life right there in a blue-faced thrashing silence. He would never get over it. He would never forgive himself. Richie made a special trip to his office a week after the funeral to let Abe know that he wouldn’t forgive him either. “I loved the woman,” Richie said. “Now you gone and orphaned her children.”

“They’re not orphans. They have their father.”

“Listen to you, talkin’ legal at such a time.”

Abe clasped his hands in front of his face to keep them from shaking. “What do you want from me? I can’t feel worse than I already do.”

Richie had specific wants in mind. Sympathy intruded. “Hell, everyone knows it was an accident. Show me a crawfish pie ain’t got a shell in it. Woman ate like a damn horse.”

Abe’s hands tightened.

“I’ll be straight,” Richie went on. “I didn’t love Esther that much. Not like I love my gal in Shreveport and it’s a magical thing, lemme tell you.”

“Come again?”

“Gonna marry her. Our boy, gonna be his daddy official.”

“You have a son with another woman?”

“Almost seven now. Seth. Smart as a whip.”

“Poor Esther.”

“She not part o’ this.”

“Clearly.”

“Don’t be smart or we done here.”

“Done for what, Richie?”

“The store. The paperwork. Who know that shit more?” Abe had drafted most every legal contract for the Block’s chain since Leopold’s death. Cutting loose such a client would mean starting over in his profession, a humiliation at middle age after he’d been sacked from the state attorney’s office almost twenty years ago, a death sentence if it happened again. “I need you to school Bonnie on the business,” Richie said. “The whole shootin’ match.”

A fantasy teased Abe’s mind of continuing to work for Block’s in order, like a secret saboteur, to hurt Richie someday for his mistreatment of Esther. But he knew he’d lose fire once the money kept coming. “She’s in high school,” he protested halfheartedly.

“No more. Asked her to quit, she jumped on it. Hates that goddamn place. Girl likes makin’ money.”

“You don’t?”

“I like havin’ it.”

“And your son? Esther’s son.”

“He out the toy army come spring.” The term was Richie’s take on Esther’s insistence that R.J. enter the East Texas Military Academy as an eighth grader in 1942. Wartime conscription had been revving up and she’d wanted to shield him from the draft on an education deferral. A military education, so nobody could call him a shirker—first at high school and then, she’d hoped, in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M, giving him eight years out of harm’s way should the fighting drag on in Europe and the Pacific. The precaution had proved unnecessary once the war ended last summer. “I reckon it’s college next,” Richie said. “Stay drunk at the fraternity on my dime.”

“You can afford it.”

“Yeah? That your money gone for piss at that prep school?”

“It’ll be his money eventually.” The lawyer smiled, knowing it would annoy. “Leopold’s will, remember? The grandchildren become owners at age twenty-five.”

“Why I got to get on it, make my plans.” Richie leaned forward. “For Angel and my lil boy.”

“Her name is Angel?”

“It fit, trust me.”

“You’re serious about this.”

“Best you be, too.”

“May I ask, have you told Bonnie and R.J.?”

Richie nodded, though it didn’t mean yes. “That’s got to come, I know.”

* * *

HE PREPARED FOR introducing his elder children to Angel and Seth by buying a residence big enough for them all. He called it Georgia Hill after being informed it was of Georgian revival design and thinking it needed a plantation name. Located outside town not far from the lakefront, the place rather strained for glamor, its whitewashed pillars and portico overmatching the brick façade like too much icing on a cake. But it appealed to Richie for its view—the view of it, from the road. The main house sat among several outbuildings on a rise overlooking lawns and established plantings. Two southern live oaks guarded each side of the driveway entrance, trunks gray and hefty as an elephant’s hindquarters. Entering between them in a long-hooded limousine and seeing the Georgia Hill grounds unfurl before you was to understand that nothing beats money sometimes. It was a lesson that his daughter Bonnie, the older twin by minutes and by temperament, instinctively endorsed. Not so her brother. The difference went far to explain why they’d never got along.

Rather than warm to the child most like them—one prudent, one feckless—their parents had each favored their opposite. There’d been something poignant about this in Esther’s case. Her feelings for her son held a bit of whatever once had been positive in her marriage to Richie. She’d wanted mainly to give Leopold a grandchild, but Richie had attracted her with his energy and chatter. He was even romantic when he made the effort. Their early times together, he would slide down her big body and lay his head between her legs, her pubic hair a tickly pillow under his cheek, and declare, “I could die here with a smile.” She would pull him on top to stop him from talking. Embarrassment felt like love in those moments.

Where R.J. disappointed was in traits he shared with his father—his evasiveness, his third-rate friends. But Esther tapped the same indulgence toward him that she’d shown Richie in the beginning. It wasn’t easy; she was happiest when working in solitude at matters of business. Nor was it easy to ship him off to boarding school at age thirteen. Eluding the draft had been only one reason. Esther had begun contemplating removing R.J. from his father’s influence the second Richie had hit her that first time in Block’s. Subsequent incidents—slaps on her cheek or backside much harder than playful, maybe a grip on her arm tight enough to remind her that he could draw blood if he wanted—had made fierce her desire to give R.J. a life beyond Richie. She’d done it in small ways already, letting the boy dabble at playing guitar and slipping him catalogs to purchase the race records he liked listening to, frivolous wastes of time in her view but worth allowing if it made him think of his mother as not some all-business robot. She did hope military school would sharpen him up some. More than that, she wanted it to happen away from her husband.

Esther didn’t miss R.J. in his absence; nor did he miss her. But when each on occasion thought of the other, it was with generosity enough to suppose that mother and son might have become close in the future. R.J.’s were the only moist eyes at Esther’s funeral other than Abe Percy’s. Richie had arranged the event to be held at the Baptist church; accommodating his wife’s Jewish heritage was too much trouble given her non-practice and the continuing dreary news out of Europe about death camp survivors and hollow-eyed peasants that no one knew what to do with. Richie was well known in Lake Charles, but few of the funeral attendees had any sense of Esther beyond her being plainspoken and obese. R.J., on bereavement leave from the military academy, was praised by his father’s friends for showing maturity in the face of what everyone agreed was his mother’s pathetic death by gluttony. He knew their praise was based mostly on his cadet uniform, its crisp formality an improvement on his hometown reputation as a rich man’s shiftless son. The contempt this aroused in him tempered his sorrow and enabled him to keep tears at a minimum.

At just under six feet, R.J. was taller than his father. He had his grandfather Leopold’s high forehead and long nose that gave an intellectual effect not borne out in the classroom. The look was enhanced by his cigarette habit, the hang on the lip, the curling blue cloud, the clack of his Ronson lighter contributing to the impression that he was a young man of world-weary mind. He’d been aware from childhood that his family was well fixed. He knew that in time he could claim his share of Block’s. It didn’t matter if he deserved it or not.

His father had bought Georgia Hill after R.J. returned to the academy following Esther’s funeral. R.J.’s first visit there was on his midwinter break. Bonnie, employed full time at Block’s now, met him at the Lake Charles bus depot in an MG convertible that Richie had recently bought her. She was striking rather than pretty, with an angular jaw and thick hair that fought the aluminum curlers she applied grudgingly at night. Teenage vogues of pleated skirts and square-shouldered blouses gave her the appearance, because of her height, of a librarian who might also coach basketball. She was taller than her brother and much taller than any girl she knew, an unwelcome distinction that made leaving high school a relief and gave sweet satisfaction to zipping around town in a ragtop roadster and pointedly not waving to former schoolmates standing like fools at the bus stop.

Bonnie loved working at Block’s. Her father had assured her that she would run the operation eventually, a pledge he’d reiterated to allay her concern, earlier that afternoon, on meeting the “houseguests” he’d invited down from Shreveport. In her car at the depot waiting for R.J., she recalled today’s introduction with a smile, sort of, as she pictured R.J.’s shocked face a few minutes from now, when he too would meet his new mom and little brother.

“What’s funny?” He climbed into the MG beside his sister, his rucksack on his lap. “That you got a car and I don’t.”

“Just all the changes.”

“Like the house?”

“Well, it’s big. We’ve got staff now.” She pulled onto the road. “We come from a rich family, R.J. More than I knew.”

“You’re the expert.”

“Getting there. I met bankers, suppliers, store managers, and I’ve been sitting with the lawyer to learn the particulars.”

“Suppose I want some of that?” He didn’t, but was curious what she’d say.

“To work in retail? I thought college for you. Go be the smart one.”

“Let you be the boss.”

“I do the work, you get the money. Not so bad.”

He bent to light a cigarette. “Could be I’ll just stay home, play guitar on the porch. Maybe summon the staff now and then.”

“We don’t have a porch, R.J. We have a terrace.” Bonnie wheeled into the driveway, the live oaks like dark sentinels at each side. “Georgia Hill,” she said, her expression losing its humor. “Home.”

* * *

RICHIE HAD ARRANGED Angel and Seth on a sofa in the front parlor awaiting R.J.’s arrival with Bonnie. There was an endearing quality to his agitation that was lost on Angel. She didn’t like seeing Richie fret over something in which he held the power. A month from thirty (he was forty-six), she wondered why he couldn’t just command his older children to love their new family. She wanted nothing from them that wasn’t in her possession already. She was Mrs. Richie Bainard, married in the Shreveport courthouse with little Seth passing the wedding ring after his daddy gave him the high sign. Issues of inheritance and hierarchy that had leaped to Bonnie’s mind when they’d met today didn’t trouble Angel at all. She expected her husband to take care of her and their child in proper fashion whether the others liked it or not. Ultimately she was sure they would like it. She’d never met anyone she couldn’t charm.

And really, things went pretty well that night. Bonnie had absorbed the news already, and shocks in general tended to register with R.J. as interesting breaks from boredom. Their father made introductions even before R.J. laid down his bag. Angel hopped off the sofa and approached so fast that R.J. had time to discern only a beaming face of almond complexion and jade-colored eyes. She threw her arms around him in her habitual way of pushing good things to the limit. He was almost seventeen and alert to her curvy shape and the scent of her hair as he awkwardly returned her embrace. Fearing to look past her lest he have to acknowledge the kid sitting in the chair, he let his gaze drop over her shoulder. She arched slightly and lifted one foot off the carpet. The small of her back tightened under R.J.’s hands. Her upraised calf flexed in its stocking and her bottom did the same in its tight skirt. He looked up dizzily and found himself gazing at a neatly dressed boy sitting erect and dutiful on the sofa behind her. They stared at each other for maybe two seconds. R.J., at a loss for what to do, winked. Seth winked back.

The two of them—half brothers, odd as that sounded—had another exchange at the end of the evening. It turned out their rooms, new to each of them at Georgia Hill, were on opposite sides of the third-floor landing. Angel went to say bedtime prayers with Seth. R.J. waited till she returned downstairs to say goodnight to his father, sister, and Angel; he kept the last standoffish in case she made a move to hug him again. He grabbed two bottles of Jax and an opener from the kitchen. He opened his bedroom window and put the beers on the sill alongside a lighter, ashtray, and cigarettes. The movers had brought his guitar and Philco from the old house. A gift from his mother last Christmas, the Philco doubled as a radio and record player. His 78s were in a box on the floor and he took one out and inserted it in the front slot. Big Joe Williams’s “Crawling King Snake” came out grainy and raw, a lone guitar and an evil voice.

I’m a crawlin’ king snake, woman, gonna drag all ’round your door,

You had the nerve to tell me, baby, you don’t want me ’round no more …

R.J. picked up his guitar, Cleoma Breaux’s old National steel, and began noodling to the music. It was his first time playing in months. He was more than pretty good, and in any case the guitar’s open tuning complemented Williams’s Delta style. It could make mistakes sound like slick improvisations, make an off note sound soulful instead of bad—and R.J. only played for himself anyway, a few beers in the better.

Seth appeared in the doorway wearing red pajamas with feet. R.J. lowered the volume. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Not asleep.” The boy had a compact, earnest face that resembled their father’s more than did R.J.’s. “I didn’t know what it was,” he said, glancing at the record player.

“Blues music. Negro blues.”

This made no impression.

“Easy to play. Hard to play good.” R.J. swigged his beer self-consciously. “You should go back to bed. I’ll stop.”

Seth fiddled with the door latch.

“How about this house, huh?” R.J. ventured. “Big as two houses.”

“Will you live here?”

“I’ll be away mostly. You’ll have the run of the place.” R.J. had no idea how to talk to children, so went with something that mattered: “You like your daddy, Seth?”

The boy nodded.

“Why?”

“He’s nice to my mother.”

“Good reason.”

“Your mother’s dead.” It wasn’t a question.

“She is,” R.J. said. “He wasn’t too nice to her.” He saw this troubled the boy and added quickly, “It’s different now. He’s gonna be fine with you.”

Seth dropped cross-legged to the floor, eyes upraised.

“Guess we ain’t sleepy.” R.J. lit a cigarette, flipped the platter to the B-side and reinserted it in the player. “Meet Me Around the Corner” had a country bounce with lyrics murky and ribald. R.J., amused by Seth’s vexed expression, explained over the music, “Guy likes a chubby woman, you get that? More she wobbles, more he wants her.” He blew smoke out his window. “No one we know, of course.”

The song ended. R.J. took some 78s from the box and shuffled through them on his lap. He opened the other beer. They listened to Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, and Reverend Gary Davis. R.J. invited his brother to slide the empty beer bottle along the strings of the National, creating a fluid beebuzzy hum that wove easily through the blues chords. He resumed playing himself only after Seth fell asleep and he’d carried him to bed. He didn’t want the kid telling his father, their father, about R.J. enjoying such foolishness as playing along to a record. Not because Richie would mock it; on the contrary, he would declare with smug vindication that R.J.’s mother would not have approved. What’s more, Bonnie would agree with him, making R.J. further resent them for what they’d never known.

* * *

OF EVERYONE IN the snapshot taken in front of the Houston Municipal Airport in June 1952, R.J. showed the least change in appearance from the night the family had first gathered at Georgia Hill six years earlier. This may seem odd since he was still in uniform and looking thin after seven months on the line in Korea. But consider the others. Richie was a full-blown alcoholic now, though late hours, rich food, and frequent expeditions of hunting and fishing were as much to blame as bourbon for his rheumy eyes and ruddy complexion. Bonnie’s rising authority in the Block’s store chain had awakened a cool regality almost avant-garde in style. She’d discarded the makeup and pleated skirts in favor of silk blouses, cuffed slacks, and jeweled barrettes the size of a jackknife to hold back her side-parted hair, everything serving to dramatize her height, long legs, and masculine features. Then there was Angel. Her hair was flipped at the shoulder and dyed silver-blond. In a further nod to Marilyn, the few pounds she’d put on had gone to good places; if her earlier allure, dusky and wild, was diminished by this conventional sexiness, there weren’t many men making that argument in 1952. As for twelve-year-old Seth, he was perfectly average, perfectly nice, yet shone like a movie star in his parents’ eyes, a distortion that applied to their sense of his overall brilliance and which, to his credit, he realized was much inflated. He was smarter than they were. It led him to doubt their praise and drew him to people he deemed better than he, more talented, more magnetic, more heroic. His brother topped this list. R.J.’s absence away at college and at war had burnished the boy’s spotty impression of him, turning obscurity into legend and mere survival into storybook gallantry. In the photo taken at the Houston airport, Seth isn’t smiling. He’s staring across at R.J. with wonder, still not believing that his idol is home at last.

How he’d wound up leading a rifle platoon in the Korean War was a story R.J. later was able to make amusing because he’d survived and because memories of fallen marines and of enemy he killed, two in the latter case, by a single short burst of a BAR midway through his deployment, recurred to him only rarely; he was a solitary person but not a brooder, one of those who can truly think about nothing while pondering the night sky. During his college sophomore summer in 1947, it had been announced that the draft, suspended since the end of World War II, would be reinstated. Richie imagined nothing better than for his elder son to serve in the enlisted ranks, but Angel, eager to be helpful, had noted R.J.’s alarm and proposed a clever alternative. A marine program called the Platoon Leaders Class invited college boys to spend summers training at Quantico, Virginia, in order to become second lieutenants in the Marine Corps Reserve. A few years of monthly meetings and field exercises would exempt them from conscription into active duty in the peacetime service. Bonnie had pegged the plan as too good to be true, but there was no way her brother could resist Angel’s giddy encouragement. So the PLC it was.

He graduated in May 1950 and was duly commissioned in the reserves. The North Koreans invaded south across the 38th Parallel a month later. Angel was more upset than R.J. about his subsequent mobilization; he took it as fair comeuppance whereas she saw it as a fateful trick hatched to make her look unfit as a loving stepmother. “Come back to me safe,” she’d told him in tears, arms tight around him, when he’d left to join his unit. That “to me” was confusing, a private clue of remorse or endearment, and lingered in his mind more than it should have.

He’d unpacked his rucksack and seabag in a fortified bunker on the reverse slope of a snowy Korean ridgeline in November 1951. The ground leveled at the floor of the valley before ascending to mountains on the far side. The mountains held dug-in Chinese and North Koreans who through the winter of 1951–52 faced off against forward elements of the First Marine Division. Each side eyed the other while diplomats worked out international peace terms. Heavy combat was over. The previous year’s huge swings of momentum, of attack and retreat up and down the Korean peninsula at the cost of thousands of casualties, had slowed to a stalemate of fitful barrages and small unit probes. For R.J.’s platoon, the mission to keep the resistance line static until the final boundaries were demarcated meant night watch, sentinel duty, and staying alert while mostly staying in trenches within the wire perimeter.

He led roughly one recon patrol per week across no-man’s-land during his seven-month stint. They would move out at sunset and return at dawn. On his first one, he stepped on a mine under deep snow, was thrown ten feet with a concussion but nothing broken or bleeding. The legs of the marine behind him were shredded. R.J.’s consciousness returned with the image of his men’s faces lifting from their stricken comrade to the rookie lieutenant who’d fucked him up. It was a bad start to R.J.’s tour that might have been worse had not his platoon sergeant blamed himself for not noticing that the men had bunched too close as they’d walked. The sergeant’s name was Alvin Dupree. He’d fought in the Pacific in the last war and was from New Orleans. You couldn’t call him and R.J. close; officers and noncoms don’t do that. But Alvin came to respect the lieutenant’s diligent command. And he appreciated that R.J. liked Negro blues, which Alvin played on harmonica, played well, with the tender restraint of someone trying not to cry, though the sergeant would never have made the claim himself.

Sergeant Dupree took the photo of the Bainard family that day at the Houston airport. He and R.J. had flown from San Diego where they’d disembarked from the troopship General M. C. Meigs, which soon would return to Korea with the next replacement draft. R.J. had already been processed back to reserve status. Alvin was to finish out behind a desk at a Marine Corps recruiting office in New Orleans before being discharged next year. They addressed each other as in the field, “Sergeant” for Alvin and “Mister Bainard” for R.J. This confused Richie when he heard it. “Ain’t it Lieutenant Bainard?” he asked Alvin after they’d shaken hands.

“We use ‘mister’ sometime,” Alvin explained. “Marines do.”

“Army here. World War One. Rough stuff.”

“Sergeant Dupree was in the Pacific in 1945,” R.J. said to his father over Angel’s shoulder. She’d rushed to embrace him and it took time to peel her off.

“’Forty-five? So you missed Iwo Jima an’ all that.”

“I did,” Alvin said. “Okinawa was all I seen.”

“Can we least get a picture?” Angel said. “These boys won’t never look finer. I’ll mail it,” she told Alvin. “Give it to your girl, she’ll thank you good.”

“Not necessary, ma’am.” He offered to photograph them.

Angel gave him the camera and lined everyone up. Alvin looked down in puzzlement. “Dog,” he muttered.

Bonnie came over. “It’s a Rolleiflex. The top pops open.” She showed him. “They’re complicated. I doubt my stepmother can work it either.”

“Brownie’s more my speed.”

“That’s why they’re popular.”

They stood close. Bonnie liked not having to look down at him. She was over six feet but he was much taller, a huge fellow with a sleepy face and shoulders like sandbags stuffed inside his olive tunic. His dark hair was so thick it was opaque where it was buzzed at the temples. She returned to the family group. In the resulting photo her eyes aren’t on the camera or on anyone in particular. They’re adrift, skittish of where to land.

The sergeant would take a bus to New Orleans from here. He gave R.J. a sharp salute. Seth watched in pride, glad to see his brother’s stature affirmed.

The Greyhound idled nearby. The two marines walked over together. “You ever need a job, Alvin,” R.J. said, “my dad could help.”

The sergeant ignored the switch to first names. “Most kind, Mr. Bainard.”

He slid his seabag into the luggage compartment and stepped aboard the bus. Cigarette smoke clouded the air. Almost all the seats were taken, none available on the side facing the airport. Alvin made his way up the aisle, head bowed below the nicotine-stained ceiling. There was chagrin on his face until he came to a young Asian couple. “Speak English?”

“Of course,” the man said, though it seemed from his wife’s silence that perhaps she didn’t.

“Gonna need you to move from there.”

“There are single seats left.”

“All yours.”

“We’re together,” the man said. “You must see that.”

“I see two gooks and a U.S. marine. Two live gooks, not even burned to death.”

The couple moved. Alvin helped the wife stow her bags in the overhead rack. He eased into the seats they’d vacated and draped one leg over the armrest, reclining against the window. He cocked his head for a view outside. The Bainards were walking toward the parking lot. Alvin tracked them through a squint; tracked Bonnie, that is, as she strode apart from the others. “Dog.” His sigh fogged the glass.

As the bus lurched ahead he took his mouth harp from his breast pocket and blew something soft and aimless. The Asian woman, in her seat a couple rows back, heard the music and liked it, not knowing what sort of man was playing.

* * *

TO CALL ANGEL Bainard flighty would be unfair. Her whims resisted alternate fancies until they were accomplished. Nor was she a tease; what she promised, she gave. Her life was a series of passion projects achieved through deliberate steps often as unwise as they were brave. Becoming Richie’s mistress, for example, had all but guaranteed that she would bear his child. Becoming his wife after Esther died had likewise assured that she would be Mrs. Bainard to the hilt—mom to the children, smoking hot on his arm, bitchy or nice to his friends and underlings as the mood, her mood, dictated. By 1953, she’d done all those things. It was time for something new.

The first project that seized her was to revamp the Kilties, Lake Charles High School’s all-girl marching drum corps. Founded on the eve of World War II to promote school spirit and female fellowship, the outfit performed at parades and football halftimes. Angel wasn’t a sports fan and only attended the game because Richie was being honored for funding school repairs from a lightning fire the previous year. Led by three blond “colonels” flashing silver batons, the Kilties high-stepped onto the field to a patter of drumbeats. They wore Scottish kilts, white trim, and red plumes in their hair, and pranced around in choreographed columns that formed eagles and stars and other national symbols to the crowd’s enthusiastic applause. Angel watched with dismay. They looked pathetic. She was the person to help them.

Something raw in her blood reacted against the Kilties’ dewy propriety. Emboldened by her looks and her husband’s prominence, she blew into the office of the school’s athletic director with a load of suggestions, none of which could have passed school codes or the sensibilities of the Kiltie parents. She wanted the girls to add horns and cymbals for pizzazz and wanted the hem of the skirts raised to the knee with six inches of fringe below. “That way, when they march they look proper and when they kick they look sexy.”

The AD’s name was Frank Billodeau. The varsity basketball coach in addition to this job, he had a reputation and also a look of rectitude, like Lincoln before the beard. “Not sure sexy’s what they’re after,” he said from behind his desk.

“I’ll pay for the changes. Or make my husband. He’s Richie Bainard.”

“My wife works at his store. On Ryan Street.”

“I’ll put in a good word for her.”

“Mary can take of herself.”

Angel smiled. “Sounds like a sweetheart.” She’d heard her husband complaining that the original Lake Charles Block’s had become a poor performer. Area commerce was shifting away from lumber and agriculture. Chemical production was flat, and expanded refineries for the Humble and Union oil companies remained in the talking stage. Bonnie, Richie’s co-boss these days, urged closing the store and opening new ones in Alabama’s peanut belt and the poultry cradle of central Arkansas. Angel said to Frank, “Your wife comes to trouble, keep me in mind.”

“I’ll do that, ma’am.”

“Now here’s my other idea,” she went on, returning to topic. “W. O. Boston? They got marchin’ girls, too?” She was referring to the Negro high school that had opened two years ago in East Lake Charles.

“Probably just a band, be my guess.”

“So put ’em together. Their band, your girls.”

Frank gave a laugh. “Maybe my daughter’d join up in that case.”

“Too boring now, right? Like little soldiers. What the hell is a Kiltie anyway?”

“From the skirts.”

“You get my drift.” She placed her hands on his desk and bent toward him, hair down, a button undone, provocative but in no way pretend.

“I do. But you realize that can’t happen—black boys and white girls.”

“Be a better show.”

“I’d pay to see it.”

Angel straightened. “You’re a nice man,” she said.

He crossed his arms as if to protect himself. “Not always,” he said kind of sadly.

Persuaded that her plan to jazz up the Kilties couldn’t fly, Angel moved on to another project. Next time she heard her husband and Bonnie discuss closing down the Ryan Street Block’s, she suggested they refurbish the store and use the occasion to rechristen the entire chain Block’s Home Supply. “No more o’ this farm baloney. Your biggest sucker is a young family man with a crappy-built house in a hardware store on a Saturday. That’s whose coin you’re after.” Rebranding was only part of her new idea, but Richie liked the bit she told him—postwar growth across the South would bring many such men to many such houses. He approved the plan over a raised glass at Georgia Hill. Bonnie gave her approval as well, though no one exactly had asked it.

* * *

ON THE NIGHT that Richie made the decision to transform the Block’s business, his older son was meeting Alvin Dupree in New Orleans, where R.J. often visited for what he couldn’t get in Lake Charles. Alvin had contacted him after his marine discharge, and R.J. proposed they meet at an upscale parlor house on Conti Street. The venue illustrates R.J.’s social clumsiness, for Emily Post surely advises that one shouldn’t visit a brothel with a colleague one doesn’t know well. Alvin was from the city’s Ninth Ward, reared by the state after his mother died. He was quite aware of such establishments but had never been a customer. It turned out that R.J.’s choice of a congenial spot made the sergeant intensely uncomfortable, putting a crimp in their reunion.

Alvin didn’t drink. He sat stiff as a vestryman in the chintz-papered lounge, sipping seltzer and listening to the Victrola. It rankled other gentleman-visitors suspicious of virtuous company. A street cop came in to collect the monthly Police Board donation. He asked R.J. if his friend worked for the district attorney. Thinking it a joke rather than a comment on his starched demeanor, Alvin attempted a clever reply: “Sure, and you’re busted.” It brought no laugh. Blows ensued, furniture was broken, and the policeman wound up apologizing with Alvin’s hands on his throat. The madam roundly cussed R.J. for bringing such a thug to her place. She declared them banished, adding in a gratuitous jab that R.J. would never see “Miss Katie” again.

Miss Katie was a prostitute. Alvin caught a glimpse of her when she came downstairs with the other girls to see what was the ruckus. She was buxom, had platinum hair, and was painted with makeup and powder to lighten her mocha skin. Seeing the lieutenant’s distress when told he’d been cut off filled Alvin with remorse for not getting into the swing of things earlier.

His chances of finding work with the Bainards seemed shot. They walked down the street toward what Alvin figured would be good-bye. R.J. surprised him by offering to arrange a job interview with his father. “He’ll like you. He prefers people around him with clean habits. It lets him be the show.”

Alvin gushed thanks and apology until R.J. waved him off. “I’m just sorry ’bout your girl,” Alvin insisted.

“Who?”

“That Katie girl there. Pretty lil thing.”

“Are you blind? She’s forty if she’s a day.”

“Dog! I’m thinkin’ she eighteen, nineteen.”

“In 1935 maybe.” R.J. was embarrassed. “She reminds me of someone, is all. Guess I’m back to the genuine article now.”

“Give you trouble, that one?”

“Other way round, I’m afraid.”

“That I cannot believe, Mr. Bainard. Fine gentleman like you.”

“I just took you to a whorehouse, Sergeant.”

“An’ I made a mess of a nice evening.”

It touched R.J. to see the superbly sharp noncom he’d depended on in Korea so flummoxed in a civilian setting, a natural-born warrior now awkwardly costumed in a cheap suit and steel-toed shoes. “The only mess here is me,” he assured the sergeant, “as you oughta know better than anyone.”

They walked east toward Bourbon Street. It was well into night, but passersby, even those walking eyes-down as if fearing to be identified, moved with the quickness of a day just beginning. Scarves and veils, grandiose cloaks and eccentric jewelry gave an air of mannered disguise that was R.J.’s favorite thing about the Quarter, a constant passing parade performed under balconies arrayed like theater boxes on the upper floors of stucco row houses. Alvin, with no mystery about him, seemed out of place despite being a city native. It made R.J. uncomfortable, like the host of a party whose honored guest refuses to mingle. “Got something in mind you’d care to do?” he asked.

Alvin considered. “Still like them nigger blues, Mr. Bainard?”

“I do.”

Alvin turned down a dark alley. “I know some places,” he said.

* * *

BLOCK’S HOME SUPPLY in Lake Charles held its grand reopening in February 1953. Richie blocked off the street and made it a party, with punch and hard cider, hush puppies and horseradish, shrimp creole, red beans and rice; and for dessert, hot candied yams with cinnamon glaze and praline ice cream, all served free to any who cared to partake. The weather had warmed enough for men to shed their jackets and ladies to slide up their sweater sleeves, pale arms entwining and separating like pulled taffy as the band out front of the store played banjo bluegrass and accordion waltzes. Kids stayed home from school to attend. A magician did card tricks and took burning balls of cotton into his mouth. A troupe of foreign gymnasts tumbled on a horsehair mat while their women hawked shawls and potholders to people looking on. The black folks in attendance kept apart in cautious deference. They carried tin plates to the food tables in lulls between waves of whites, as if worried a bill might yet be presented them.

Richie presided over the festivities with Angel on his arm. Strolling about with his necktie loosened and his houndstooth fedora tipped back, he resembled a politician working a county fair—though that’s a poor description given whose eyes we’re looking through here. Seth Bainard, like most fourteen-year-olds, had no notion of politics beyond the popularity feuds of high school. He likened his father to a football coach or, what he was, a small-town bigwig with a gravel laugh and a trailing scent of cigars and whiskey; his mother to a butterfly, flimsy and buoyant on breezes of breathless impulse. Seth was fond of his parents. But lately he’d got the sense that loving one more required loving the other less. He detected no rift between them, no side to take in a domestic dispute. His allegiance felt tested nevertheless. He spent more and more time on his own as a result.

He trailed them as they toured the store’s widened aisles and new ladies’ section, the latter featuring kitchenware and housecleaning items as well as a selection of “hits for hubby” such as fishing gear and auto parts. Richie had confided to Seth that he had zero expectation of the store’s success and likely would end up closing it—it was a playtoy for Angel, who’d overseen the renovation as a diversion to keep her busy. Seth resented being drawn into dismissing his mother’s pride in the project. Bonnie was worse. She openly ridiculed Angel on the presumption that all agreed she was a silly goose. His resentment intensified whenever that presumption was borne out by his mother’s behavior. Like now.

Angel’s arm not linked with her husband’s encircled the waist of a prim-looking lady anyone could have told was her opposite. The lady’s name was Mary Billodeau, and Seth observed from her body language, her torso tilted away as from a wall of wet paint, that she disliked being clutched so familiarly. He sympathized. His mother had drunk quantities of “special punch” in the rear of the store, fueling her usual emotiveness to operatic heights. Mary Billodeau by contrast was on duty today. She was the store’s new manager. Richie usually reserved such positions for women unmarried and severe. Mrs. Billodeau failed on the first count, but Angel, for reasons unclear, had lobbied her husband on Mary’s behalf and now was pleased to tell everyone that Mary owed her job to her.

Mary’s husband didn’t mingle. Frank Billodeau, “Coach” to everyone in town, huddled with some earnest old-timers to discuss an upcoming basketball game between Lake Charles High and a reform school team from Baton Rouge. Basketball surpassed even football as a life-or-death matter around here; the men worried those prison boys might be ringers or possibly black. Frank had a chiseled, hawkish look at odds with his mild voice. “We play any squad what shakes our hand and honors the Stars ’n’ Stripes,” he said to the men pestering him.

The comment brought an eye roll from Adele Billodeau, Frank’s daughter, watching nearby. From the moment Seth first spotted her today he’d tried not to stare lest she catch him. Sixteen and looking powerfully slutty in a party dress and jean jacket, Adele wore her hair in a pixie cut as if to keep it unmussed on a motorcycle. She was a Lake Charles junior even the lords of the locker room circled cautiously. Seth, a year behind her, was one of the school’s invisible nobodies. He was fascinated by her and needed only to be in her vicinity to feel the pull of her presence, like an unseen moon that draws all tides toward it.

Concluding their inspection of the store, his mother seemed to have toned down her patronization of Mary Billodeau, who strode beside Richie pointing out this or that display in a rapture of incontestable competence. Seth saw Angel slip away to the back where the booze was. He followed, determined to be the grown-up to her perennial child. Outside the storeroom he heard a sigh and saw shadows against the wall. He inched closer. His mother was embracing Frank Billodeau, their open mouths together, her hand gripping his crotch in a rhythmic squeeze. Like a movie played backward he lurched in reverse to the front of the store. He had no idea how to handle what he’d just seen, only knew it was bad and that it made his heart crack in his chest. He crashed into Bonnie by the entrance. “Another drunk,” she said. He used the idea—swaying, summoning a burp—to repel her in the other direction.

Not yet twenty-five, Bonnie seemed almost middle-aged to Seth. The arrival of R.J. and Alvin Dupree at the Block’s event introduced another opinion. It was shortly after their big night in New Orleans, and it was the second time Alvin saw R.J.’s sister. The impact amplified his first impression, for qualities about Bonnie that gave some men the willies answered Alvin’s every dream. He stared at her like a dog tracking pork ribs from platter to plate. When R.J. went to find his father, Alvin summoned every bit as much nerve as he’d shown in combat and asked if she was in the hardware biz or just here for the grub. She recognized him at once from Houston last year. “Do I know you?”

“Sergeant Dupree. From Korea.”

“Alvin.”

Big smile. “Miss Bonnie. The boss’s daughter.”

“I prefer to think of him as the boss’s father.”

“Maybe I talk to you instead.”

“About what?”

“A job, ma’am. Your brother’s tryin’ to work it.”

She didn’t like being leapfrogged in the hierarchy. “What are your skills?”

“Can fix a motor and clean a carbine, but none like you mean.”

“How do you know what I mean?”

“Sayin’ you need a fella can fix a motor and clean a carbine?”

“I’m saying don’t count on my brother. The guy needs a job himself.”

“Count on you then?”

“Unless you have obligations elsewhere.”

“I need work, ma’am. Only obligation’s myself and my future employer. Dog! Whassat ol’ whore doin’ here?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He pointed. “Miss Katie from the bordello!”

Angel was approaching with Richie. With flaxen hair and figure like an hourglass seen in a funhouse mirror, she was the spitting image of R.J.’s Conti Street favorite. Bonnie smiled. “That would be my stepmother.”

“Dog, but it’s a likeness.”

“I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to hear it.”

R.J. walked next to his father on the opposite side from Angel. Seth shuffled behind them, his thoughts lost in wondering which was worse, his love life or that of his parents. The group was nearly in earshot of Bonnie and Alvin when Bonnie told the sergeant one more thing:

“By the way…”

“Ma’am?”

“You’re hired.”

* * *

HE BECAME THE Bainards’ general assistant, living in the carriage house at Georgia Hill, on call to the family twenty-four hours a day. In time his duties came to include assignments for Block’s. He was management’s designated deliverer of bad news to sub-par employees in stores across four states. His large physical size helped in the role, as did his being of exceedingly deliberate mind. It lent him a calm, implacable poise that discouraged excuses or protest.

Another of his tasks was to drive Seth to and from school each day. They grew familiar as a result. Conversations in a Cadillac with the stolid ex-marine were the closest thing Seth had to a social life. Many times when they were alone together he almost blurted the secret of seeing his mother in Frank Billodeau’s arms. The urge hit hardest when watching her behave in ways that screamed of her infidelity now that he knew to notice the clues, the casual excuses and credible reasons for her lateness, flushed cheeks, or buoyant mood that no one but Seth understood were bald lies.

That December, his parents were to spend a weekend at Richie’s hunting lodge, the Section Eight Gun Club. Completed down in Cameron Parish several years earlier, it was a swanky setup, its members local high-achievers fond of spending self-made money. Angel backed out at the last minute. She urged Richie to go alone. It was that insistence more than her change of plan that upset him; he couldn’t fathom wanting to do anything or be anywhere without her. Their subsequent argument shook the house. Though ignorant of her full betrayal, Richie’s resentment of her inattentiveness to him had been simmering for some time, needing only the prospect of a few days apart to trigger its eruption.

He complained, she called him an ass, and he took a roundhouse swing at her that missed only because of the bourbon. Alvin restrained him as Seth whisked his mother away. Within an hour the lovebirds were smiling and smooching as they apologized for their ugly display. They’d decided to stay home together, and wanted Seth and Alvin to take their place on the trip.

Seth’s knowledge of his mother’s affair with Frank Billodeau made a farce of her perky façade, how she clung to Richie’s arm and wiped lipstick from his cheek. Picturing her hand on Frank’s dick, Frank’s knees buckling under her touch, Seth wanted to be rid of the sight of her, to flush her from heart and mind. The Section Eight marsh, where he’d often hunted with his father and R.J., was a good place to do that. But it also invited some careless unburdening as he scrunched next to Alvin in a frozen duck blind that weekend. “You like my sister,” he began.

“Respect more the word,” Alvin said.

“I can tell. Way you watch her.”

There was an old guide in the blind with them, his torn canvas jacket spilling insulation from the elbows, a duck call hanging from his lips like a stogie. He scanned the horizon in gruff irritation at his chattering clients. Their three shotguns aimed skyward as if awaiting enemy bombers. At length Alvin said, “She outta my class, Miss Bonnie.”

“That don’t stop people, what I’ve seen.”

“You fifteen. You seen nothin’.”

“Yeah?” From there it was automatic for Seth to say what he’d seen, if only to hold up his end of a dialog about what’s bad about love. It was also automatic that Alvin, out of loyalty dating back to Korea, would tell R.J. first chance he got.

Tipped off by Angel’s resemblance to Miss Katie of Conti Street, Alvin had detected in countless hangdog stares that R.J. was spellbound by his young stepmother, feelings lustful at minimum yet possibly stupid with real affection. He took care to be sensitive in reporting Angel’s affair, maintaining a respectful veneer of obliviousness to his lieutenant’s secret stake in the matter. “I figured you the one to handle this,” he said, “bein’ your daddy’s namesake an’ all.”

R.J.’s face had gone to stone. “My father’d kill for love of that woman.”

“You’ll talk to her?”

“Talk to someone.”

“Don’t wanna see nobody hurt.”

“Better close your eyes,” R.J. said.

Next stop was the library at Georgia Hill, a masculine, wood-paneled sanctuary housing, if not many books, a firearms cabinet full of shotguns, rifles, and pistols. Opening the cabinet’s glass doors, R.J. inhaled the tangy scent of solvent and gun oil and was seized by the poetry of using one of his father’s weapons on the man cuckolding Richie and, in his mind anyway, cuckolding R.J. as well. He selected a lady-size snubnose .22, stuck it in his belt under his shirt, and went off to visit Frank Billodeau in his athletic office at Lake Charles High School.

He never drew the gun. Frank stared him down, shamed him with righteous indignation, an impressive maneuver considering Frank was a two-timing skunk who hated himself every day. “You’re drunk,” he said after R.J. accused him of seducing Angel. “Go home.”

R.J. indeed had stopped off at a bar. He felt embarrassed to have needed the boost, though it was probably to his credit that he couldn’t take up a pistol and run around making death threats cold sober.

“Angel told me you watch her,” Frank said. “Stare at her like a damn pervert. Your daddy’s wife! Now git the hell outta here ’fore I call Richie myself.”

“Stay away from her or I’ll kill you.” The words sounded idiotic to R.J. the instant he spoke them.

Frank stood up at his desk as if to make a better target of his heart. “Go on now. Get some coffee. Be all over come mornin’.”

R.J. left, driven back inside his doubts like a bear into its cave. Frank sat down and put his hands to his temples as if to crush his skull. He picked up the telephone and dialed Angel at home, an act that in its directness doesn’t fit a man looking to continue an illicit affair. But the question of whether he intended to end things with Angel can’t be resolved because Alvin, vigilant in his household duties, answered the phone at first ring. Recognizing the voice of the husband of Mary Billodeau, manager of the Lake Charles Block’s, he informed Frank that Mrs. Bainard wasn’t at home. It would prove a consequential lie.

* * *

THERE WAS A basketball game at the high school that night. R.J. sat in the bleachers behind the Wildcats’ bench with the .22 jammed in his pants. The raucous gym was a conducive environment for a troubled man to sit and stew. Picture him studying the back of Coach Billodeau’s head while caressing the pistol under his shirt and you get the gist of his state of mind.

The game proceeded in a fog. R.J. stared at Frank as if at the sun until red spots appeared and replicated. The crowd noise yielded to a clocklike tapping of his upper and lower teeth. He didn’t want to shoot anyone. It was about confronting a cliff he must jump off or not. Mooning over his stepmother had to stop. Lying around Georgia Hill drinking beer and playing music had to stop. The Korean War was over, his reserve commitments concluded. Next year he would inherit a major interest in a million-dollar enterprise. He ought to accept his good fortune and go be content for a while.

His attention fell on Adele Billodeau, Frank’s high school daughter, sitting by herself nearby. She wore blue jeans tighter than the fashion and cuffed at the ankles above a new pair of Keds. She had a slight double chin and dimples across the pale tops of her knuckles, suggestions of succulence she highlighted with a jazzy hairdo and clothes she spilled out of by choice. She leaned on her elbows and studied the game until she turned to the guy watching her. “What?”

“Your ma runs Block’s.”

“So.”

“Must have a lot of gumption.”

Adele gave no reply.

“You got good genes, is my point.”

She glanced down uncertainly. “They’re Lees.”

R.J. smiled. “And Daddy’s the coach.”

“Hope he loses, too.”

“What’d he do?”

“Not him. My boyfriend. The center.”

R.J. surveyed the court. “Big fella.”

“It ain’t everything.”

They gazed forward for a bit. R.J. slid down the bench next to her.

She asked him, “How do you know me?”

“Your parents, not you. Yet.” It doesn’t get much plainer than that. Unless next you ask, “How old are you?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four. I feel older.”

“How come?”

“Sitting here alone on a Friday night watching a high school basketball game? I’d say it’s about over for me.”

“I seen you before.”

“I’m Richie Bainard’s son.”

“Then my mom—”

“Works for my father. Poor woman.”

These asides were too slippery for her. Part of their meaning seemed a fair warning to run. “I’m Adele.”

“Nice.” They shook hands. “Nice,” he said again.

“Gonna tell me your name?”

“I’m Lieutenant Bainard.”

“An army man.”

“Marines.”

“Ooh. Scary.”

“Korea kinda was.”

“You’re braggin’ now.”

He laughed. “You’re pretty fast.”

“My boyfriend’s mom says that.” She scowled. “Bitch.”

“Wanna go?”

Adele looked at him.

“Said you don’t care about your daddy’s team.”

“I care. He’s the best man in the world. It’s my boyfriend I wanna kill.”

“Come on with me anyhow.”

“Where?”

“Does it matter? You know I’m respectable. I’m R. J. Bainard.” He raised his hands and turned the palms upward to show they were clean. “Could be your chaperone.”

“I seen a few of them was worse’n their sons.” If further deliberation occurred to her, it didn’t show on her face. Adele stood and strode down the bleachers and out of the gym in a manner almost royal. He waited before following on the assumption that she wanted him to—to wait and to follow, that is.

He was driving one of his father’s Cadillacs; it felt like a carriage to her when he opened the door to invite her inside. He took her dancing and drinking. Secure that she was running the show, Adele expected him to make a move before the night was over. Her wariness when he parked on a side street was that of an athlete confronting a challenge. She knew her way around the back end of a date. She knew how to say yes and no, how to deploy her body to amaze and intimidate. In a clinch with a boy she held all the cards, nervous but never afraid.

Except R.J. wasn’t a boy. He knew he didn’t have to take no for an answer. He reached over and grasped her wrist. Gentle at first, but still odd—that he took her wrist not her hand; bones, not soft flesh, in his grip. “Okay,” he said. “We’re gonna do it now.”

He drove her home afterward. At curbside he tried to kiss her goodnight. Her snarling rebuff warned him that she might do something reckless. “Call you tomorrow?” His breezy tone was a reflex toward charm under pressure. She bit back defeated tears, got out of the car, and climbed her front steps like any teenager home too late.

* * *

ADELE NEVER WOULD have told anyone if she’d had time to collect herself. She tried to lift the latch quietly, to cross the floor with a weightless tread as if literally lightened by what she’d lost tonight. But ambushed by her mother’s angry relief to have her home safe, she lost the will to lie.

Under the bright hallway bulb her red eyes and beginning bruises on her upper arms couldn’t be explained away. The truth blew out like a drowning man’s last air. “He raped me, Mommy. I’m sorry.” Mary Billodeau’s expression curdled, for her daughter was now a certified tramp. The next question came from Adele’s father, who’d fallen asleep in his chair while compiling stats from tonight’s basketball game. To hear “R. J. Bainard” in answer was as stunning to Frank as the violence his daughter had suffered. He took her in his arms. His gaze over her heaving shoulders was directed far away. “Jesus Christ, forgive me.”

Before going to wash off R.J.’s filth, the girl and her mother exchanged looks so probing the moment would stay with Adele all her life. The understanding was that they would never speak “rape” again. It would only hurt Adele’s future in this town and in this house—hurt, too, it didn’t need to be said, Mary’s management position at Block’s Home Supply. Adele got beat up by a boy—that was the story. It happened more than people admitted, and Mary trusted that in the eyes of God a woman is ennobled for enduring it.

Frank helped his daughter undress for a bath under a quilt he draped around her. Seeing the abrasions on her skin brought a wave of fury. He yanked her from the edge of the steaming tub and threw her clothes at her. “We’re going to the doctor and we’re going to the police. They gonna see you like he left you.”

“No one’ll believe it,” Mary said.

“Look at her!”

He dragged Adele out the front door. “You’re hurting me,” she said.

His face looked distorted in the light from the kitchen window. “You swear it happened like you said?”

“Daddy, it did.”

He shook her by the shoulders, her head snapping back and forth. “You swear it was R. J. Bainard?”

“Why’s it matter him?”

“It matters!”

She tried to embrace her father for both their sakes but he wanted an oath from her, something solid he could defend and lean on, like a wall to a wounded soldier. “It was him, Daddy. I wouldn’t lie.” He lifted her into the cab of his truck and closed the door with grim resolve more frightening than if he’d slammed it.

On the drive to the doctor’s house, Adele’s head lolled with the road’s rhythm. She hurt between her legs, inside her jeans. She studied herself sluggishly. How had R.J. removed her jeans? They fit so tight, she’d had to lie flat on her bed to zip them before going out. Uncertainty seized her. The liquor that had clouded her night threw confusing clues. A teenage dossier of feels and fingerfucks made shame the surest thing.

The doctor, a white-haired gentleman whose office was decorated with Norman Rockwell prints that he could have modeled for, examined Adele through her clothes. Nothing broke or bleeding, go home and rest with a wet cloth over the eyes. Outside in the waiting room he told her father, “You wanna claim her boyfriend thumped her, I’d say you got a case.”

Frank remembered his argument with R.J. earlier that day and accepted that his only honorable course was to kill him; the thought was exhausting, like last chores to do before bed. First there was more to ask about his daughter’s condition, if he could get the words out. He couldn’t.

“He raped me,” Adele whispered in the next room.

The doctor’s wife, who attended all her husband’s examinations of women, was folding towels by the sink. “Dear?”

“R. J. Bainard raped me. In his car.”

“Do you know what you’re sayin’?”

Adele’s eyes tilted upward to keep tears from spilling. “I know what’s rape.”

The woman handed her a robe from a hook on the door. “Bottoms off. Put this on.” She summoned her husband. “Girl says there’s something more.”

He examined her closely this time. Wincing as he straightened his back, he closed her robe and asked without looking at her, “Were you a virgin before tonight?”

Her mouth crumpled. “I’ve had … I’ve let them…”

The doctor’s wife cut in. “Have you gone the limit, dear? He needs to know.”

There was a split-second interval, as between the plunger and the dynamite, before Adele answered, “Never.”

Frank was brought in to hear it from his daughter’s mouth. He asked to use the phone to dial the chief of police at home. It was late. The Chief was a recent appointment by the Lake Charles City Council, brought in after a long stint with the sheriff’s office in Pinefield. There he’d gained a reputation as a lawman who’d bend the rules for those that deserved it and never for those who didn’t, exactly the discretion the elite of Lake Charles preferred in their public officials.

Hollis Jenks, yawning and scratching his hairless head, listened to Frank without urgency until he heard R. J. Bainard named as the perpetrator. Though new in his position at the department, Chief Jenks was aware that the Bainards were big in Lake Charles and that sex accusations against an heir to the Block’s retail chain would reverberate statewide. He told Frank to stay put until he and his deputy arrived to question his daughter. Showing keen understanding of how things worked around here, the Chief then called Richie Bainard, whom he knew by reputation if not yet personally, to tell him what had happened and that his son better get his story together. It was a short conversation on account of Richie smashing his handset through the telephone dial.

Richie had composed himself by the time he addressed reporters outside the Block’s headquarters after Adele’s story came out. He was lavish in praising Mary Billodeau, assuring that he bore no ill will toward the woman on account of her crazy daughter. Bonnie stepped forward to add that if Mary wished to stay on as manager of the Lake Charles Block’s, the company would welcome it. Abelard Percy, the family lawyer, formally denied all charges against R. J. Bainard. The accused, out on bail, stayed home.

* * *

ABE PERCY LOST sleep and gained weight as he became ever more nervous that this case would crown his career. He wasn’t a trial lawyer. State law permitted him to conduct the defense if his client so desired. Richie, who was paying the bills, did; R.J. didn’t care. Abe took it on out of loyalty to R.J.’s late mother, whose death he blamed himself for.

He deposed Adele Billodeau gently, presenting his questions like a benevolent uncle seeking to clear up a misunderstanding. He knew he’d have to attack her in court. She must admit to drinking that night, to having welcomed the prospect of backseat foolery with a handsome older man and semi–war hero. Her thighs and pubic area had been bruised; her jeans and underwear, stained from when she’d put them back on after intercourse, were otherwise clean and not torn. A minor point alongside other evidence, Abe planned to highlight it on grounds of common sense. You don’t remove pants that tight without a struggle or help from the girl. She should have thrashed like a deer in a trap. She should have seized the moment of his trying to get her pants off to break free and save herself, had she wanted to. Her reputation suggested she hadn’t.

Adele began to doubt her own memory. From a distance she saw R.J. on a street corner one afternoon. In bed that night she remembered how, before he turned scary, he’d kissed her neck, his hand warmer than the skin of her breasts as he’d caressed them under her blouse. She might have let him go further had he kept that tender tack. She squirmed under the covers almost feeling his embrace, almost tasting his tongue. R. J. Bainard on a winter night in her seventeenth year—why not? She’d pleased enough boys other ways, it seemed silly to withhold, not least to satisfy her own curiosity, the prize contained inside her.

And she felt sorry for him. Dropping offhand clues of melancholy and solitude, he’d behaved nicely through much of that evening. Her deepest dread was that she may have invited the assault, tempted him somehow. Had she ruined his life even more than he’d ruined hers? She went to her father with her fears. Frank shook his head fiercely. “Bastard raped you. Never doubt it.”

“It’s just sometimes I wonder if boys think with me it’s okay.”

“I told you he done it. Now drop it.”

“He’s not the first to try.”

“Goddamn you, girl!” Frank raised his fist before burying it in shame behind his back. He leaned into his daughter, pressing roughly against her to force from inside his chest the secret he didn’t want to reveal. “R.J. done it in revenge against me.” His voice was spooky at her ear. “I am so sorry for that.”

He’d told no one about his affair with R.J.’s stepmother. Nor had he followed through on his impulse to kill R.J. out of fatherly duty. He’d rationalized his lapses in honorable terms. Adele had suffered for his misdeeds, but Mary, his wife, was unscathed. Richie had retained her as store manager—finding out about Frank and Angel’s affair would surely change that. Wouldn’t it be better if Richie and Mary never learned of their spouses’ betrayal, if the whole lousy business faded away quietly and R.J. was convicted on evidence already at hand? Frank thought it a fair hope until his daughter’s self-blame broke his heart and forced him to come forward. He sat down with state prosecutors and explained that R.J. had somehow discovered his and Angel’s affair and threatened to take revenge. He gave the same statement to Defense Attorney Percy. He resigned as Wildcat coach and after a difficult dialog with his wife, packed a bag for a room in town.

Abe telephoned Richie with these revelations, prompting a savage reaction that gratified Abe with its vision of the Bainard world collapsing. Richie’s vow to Abe that he would see Frank Billodeau dead was a forgivable reflex. It turned out that Frank was exactly that by dawn the next day. From the sprawl of his body beside his truck outside town, investigators judged that he’d been leaning against the radiator when he put the pistol to his head. He left no suicide note, though the care he took to spare his family from finding his body suggests contrition for disappointing them so.

It shattered Adele. She couldn’t face a trial supported only by a mother she distrusted and lawyers she didn’t know; she decided to drop the rape charge against R.J. It never happened officially, however. He jumped bail before she notified the court of her change of mind. Informed about it afterward, she was so offended by his gutless flight that she decided to let the charge stand and make him run like a dog for the rest of his life.

Frank’s testimony would have sealed the verdict—that was R.J.’s thinking when he bolted. The decision proved overhasty, since Frank’s suicide and Adele’s second thoughts came less than twenty-four hours later. It also proved tragic following another call from Abe on that same confused day, this time to tell Richie that in light of the new evidence the prosecution, citing a motive, would base its case on R.J.’s hatred of Adele Billodeau’s father.

“No crime in that,” Richie growled.

Abe, in his Ryan Street office with the phone sweaty at his ear, savored the moment joylessly. “R.J.’s jealous hatred, I should say.”

Richie had taken the call in the library. Seth was home and heard cursing, steps bounding upstairs, and his mother’s shrieks in the master bedroom. He rushed in and was shocked by the scarlet smears across the wallpaper. His mother’s face was already pulp. His father’s continued blows threw vivid spatters such as Seth had never seen. He pulled Richie off her and pinned him to the floor. Angel crawled like a drunk toward the door. Seth screamed for her to get the car while in his ear his father howled about knowing she was Frank Billodeau’s whore, but now with my own fucking son! Misunderstanding obviously figured here. That’s why it might have helped if R.J. had been available to clarify things. He wasn’t. He was bombing out of Lake Charles in his sister’s car with some clothes, his guitar, and a remarkably positive outlook.

Alvin and Bonnie drove up Georgia Hill’s driveway just as Seth and Angel were commandeering one of the family Cadillacs. Richie stormed out the front door carrying a shotgun from his library cabinet. Peeling away in a screech of tires, Angel was in the driver’s seat, Seth on his knees on the seat beside her, reaching over to man the wheel because she couldn’t see for blood in her eyes. Richie fired into the air after them. The Cadillac roared past Alvin’s car and fishtailed down the hill. Richie fired again. Angel mashed the gas pedal. Bonnie and Alvin watched in dismay. The Cadillac was doing forty when it rammed the live oak at the base of the driveway, killing Angel instantly and sending Seth through the windshield into the tree.

* * *

THE UPSHOT OF all this was multifold. Frank Billodeau was dead, likewise Angel Bainard. Richie, ravaged by guilt, became obsessive in caring for his now handicapped younger son, who despised him for obvious reasons. R.J. was hiding in exile somewhere. Bonnie took over running Block’s with Alvin’s able assistance. Abe Percy and Hollis Jenks, bit players so far, were alive and keeping well.

Then there was Mary Billodeau. Her life was never so good as after her husband killed himself. She kept her management position at Block’s while enjoying a peaceful home life now that misfortune had chastened her daughter into utter subservience. Her daughter, interestingly, changed her name. Nothing major, just “Delly” instead of Adele. It seemed she preferred the feeling, when called by that, of being someone else.



Copyright © 2016 by Robert H. Patton