"Jolie Blon’s Bounce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 5

I walked with Perry LaSalle into the men's room and held his coat for him while he washed his face with cold water. There was a cluster of red bumps under his right eye and blood in his saliva when he spit.

"You cutting that guy loose?" he asked.

"Unless you want to press charges," I replied.

He felt his mouth and looked in the mirror. His eyes were still angry. Then, as though realizing his expression was uncharacteristic of the Perry LaSalle we all knew, he blew out his breath and grinned.

"Maybe I'll catch him down the road," he said.

"I wouldn't. Joe Zeroski was a hit man for the Giacano family," I said.

His eyes became neutral, as though he did not want me to read them. He took his coat from my hand and put it on and combed his hair in the mirror. Then he stopped.

"Are you staring at me for some reason, Dave?" he asked.

"No."

"You think I'm bothered because this guy was a meatball for the Giacanos?" he said.

"On my best day I can't even take my own inventory, Perry," I said.

"Save the Twelve Step stuff for a meeting, old pard," he replied.

A few minutes later I walked with Clete Purcel to his car. The top was down and a half-dozen fishing rods were propped against the backseat. We watched Perry LaSalle's Gazelle pull out of the parking lot and cross the train tracks and turn onto St. Peter Street.

"He's not going to file on Zeroski?" Clete asked.

"Perry's grandfather ran rum with the Giacanos during Prohibition. I don't think Perry wants to be reminded of the association," I said.

"Everybody ran rum back then," Clete said.

"Somebody else did his grandfather's time. You're not going to try to square that elbow in the nose, are you?"

Clete thought about it. "It wasn't personal. For a button man Joe's not a bad guy."

"Great standards."

"This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense," he said.

I worked late at the office that evening. The eight-by-ten death photos of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau were spread on my desk. The body postures and faces of the dead always tell a story. Sometimes the jaw is slack, the mouth robbed of words, as though the dying person has suddenly discovered the fraudulent nature of the world. Perhaps the gaze is focused on a shaft of sunlight through a tree, or a tear is sealed in the corner of the eye, or the palms lie open as though surrendering the spirit. I would like to believe that those who die violently are consoled by presences that care for and protect them in a special way. But the eyes of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau haunted me, and I wanted to find their killers and do something horrible to them.

On the way home I drove to the pickup corner where Linda Zeroski had gotten into an automobile under a spreading oak and driven off, without concern, into a sunset that looked like purple and red smoke against the western sky. The teenage crack dealers who had supposedly been her friends were bored with my questions, then irritated that I was interrupting the flow of business on the corner. When I did not leave, they glanced at one another, formulating a different response, as though I were not there. Their voices became unctuous, their faces sincere, and they indicated to a man they would certainly call my office if they heard any information that might be helpful.

I started to get back into my truck. Then I stopped and walked back under the oak tree.

"Does Tee Bobby Hulin ever swing by the corner?" I asked.

"Tee Bobby likes them when they sweet, white, and sixteen. I don't see nothing like that 'round here, suh," one kid said. The others snickered.

"What are you telling me?" I asked.

"Tee Bobby got his own thing. It just ain't got nothing to do wit' us," the same kid said.

They lowered their heads in the shadows, suppressing their grins, kicking at the dust, their eyes flicking with amusement at one another. I walked back to my truck and got in. The heat lightning in the south pulsed like quicksilver in the clouds.

Joe Zeroski had asked how many individuals in our area were capable of the crimes committed against the persons of his daughter and Amanda Boudreau. Could Tee Bobby have been involved in the abduction of Linda Zeroski? Tee Bobby's grandmother had said that Tee Bobby's present trouble had started before he was born. Maybe it was time to find out what she had meant.

I drove home and parked in the drive and went into the bait shop. Batist was by himself, eating a sandwich at the counter.

"How well do you know Tee Bobby?" I asked.

"Good enough so's I don't want to know him," he answered.

"You think he could rape and murder a young girl?"

"What I t'ink don't count."

"What do you know about Ladice Hulin's relationship to the LaSalle family?"

He finished his coffee and stared out the screen at the bream night-feeding on the moths that fried themselves on the floodlamps and fell into the water.

"Stories about white men and black field women ain't never good, Dave. You want to hear it, my sister growed up with Ladice," he said.

I told my wife, Bootsie, I'd eat supper late, and Batist and I drove to his sister's small house outside Loreauville, where I listened to a tale that took me back into the Louisiana of my boyhood.

But actually, even before Batist's sister began her account, I already knew much of the LaSalle family's history, not because I necessarily admired them or even found them interesting, but because their lives had become the mirror and measure of our own. In one fashion or another the town had been a participant in all their deeds, all their reversals of fortune, for good or bad, from the time the first cabins were hewn and notched out of cypress on the banks of Bayou Teche, to the federal occupation in 1863 and later the restoration of the old oligarchy by the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction, into modern times when Cajuns and people of color were deliberately kept uneducated and poor in order to ensure the availability of a huge and easily manipulated labor pool.

The LaSalles had believed colonial Louisiana would allow them to realize all the grandiose dreams that Robespierre's guillotine had denied some of their family members. But they soon learned that revolutionary France had not quite finished paying back their kind for centuries of royal arrogance. In fact, they were the bunch Napoleon Bonaparte selected as the target for his most successful large-scale swindle. They paid large sums to obtain land grants in Louisiana from his government, only to discover in 1803 that Napoleon had sold the land from under their feet to the Americans in order to finance his wars.

But the LaSalles were a resilient group, not to be undone by a Corsican usurper or their new egalitarian neighbors. They bought slaves whom James Bowie and his business partner, Jean Lafitte, were smuggling into Louisiana from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. They drained swamps and felled forests and later laid log roads and railway tracks for steam engines across acreage that was so black and rich with sediment from the alluvial fan of the Mississippi that any kind of seed would grow on it if the seed were simply thrown on the ground and stepped upon.

Like his predecessors, Julian LaSalle was a practical man who did not argue or contend with the world. Perhaps his family had built its wealth upon the backs of slave labor, but that had been the ethos of the times and he felt no guilt about it. He paid what was considered a fair wage to his field hands, saw to their medical care, always kept his word, and during the Great Depression never turned a man in need from his door.

As a little boy I saw him when my father took me with him to Provost's Bar and Pool Room. Mr. Julian, as we called him, was a dark-haired, handsome man with a cleft chin, who wore suspenders and linen suits and Panama hats and two-tone shoes, like an American you might see at a Havana racetrack. He never sat at the bar but always stood, a cigar in one hand, a tumbler of bourbon and ice in the other. On Saturday afternoons Provost's was always filled with both business and blue-collar men, the floor spread with green sawdust, sometimes littered with football betting cards. Mr. Julian treated all the patrons there with equal respect, bought drinks for the old men at the domino and bouree tables, and walked away when other men used racist language or told bawdy jokes. He was wealthy and educated, but his graciousness and good nature inspired in others admiration rather than envy.

There were stories about his involvement with black women, one in particular, but someone was always quick to offer that Mr. Julian's wife suffered from cancer and other illnesses and had been in a sanitarium in the North, that her hysterical behavior at Mass was such that even a sympathetic priest had reluctantly asked her not to attend. Who could expect Mr. Julian to abide what even the church could not?

But Batist’s sister did not begin her story with Mr. Julian. Instead she told of an overseer on Poinciana Island, a lean, rough-grained, angular man who wore sunglasses, western boots, a straw cowboy hat, and khaki clothes when he sat atop his horse and rode among the black workers in the fields. The year was 1953, a time when the white overseer on a Louisiana plantation had the same powers over those in his charge as his antebellum antecedents did. No one knew his origins, but his name was Legion, and the first day he appeared in the field one worker, who had been a convict on Angola Farm, looked into Legion's face and at first opportunity leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles back to New Iberia and never returned to ask for his pay.

"You say his name was Legion?" I asked Batist's sister.

"That's the name he give us. Didn't have no first name, didn't have no last name. We didn't even have to call him 'Mister.'Just 'Legion,'" she replied.

He believed clothes kept the heat off the body, and he buttoned his shirt at the throat and wrists, no matter how humid and hot the weather became. The back of his shirt was peppered with sweat by midday, and while the blacks ate their sandwiches of company-store balogna and potted meat in a grove of gum trees, he tethered his horse under a solitary live oak in the middle of a pepper field and sat in a folding chair a black man hand-carried to him for that purpose. He ate the boudin or pork chops and dirty rice the blacks said a prostitute at Hattie Fontenot's bar prepared and wrapped in wax paper for him each morning.

He took the girls and women he wanted from the field, indicating with a nod of the head for one of them to follow his horse into a canebrake or pine thicket, where he dismounted from the saddle and stripped nude and told me girl or woman to remove her underpants and lie down and open her legs, his language as mechanical and dehumanized as the violence of his copulation and the release of his animus as he plunged inside the girl or woman, his upper torso propped up stiffly on his arms, as though he did not want to touch any more of her body than was necessary.

Afterward the girl or woman had to wash him. His body was as rough as animal hide, they said, welted with knife scars, the insides of his forearms blue with tattoos that looked like the crudely drawn figures in old black-and-white movie cartoons.

Then the day came when his eyes settled on Ladice Hulin.

"Go up yonder in them gum trees and sit in the shade," he said.

"I got to pick to the end of the row, suh. Then I got the other row. Or I'm gonna come up short," she said.

He reached down and lifted the cloth sack out of her hand and tied its loose end to his saddle pommel.

"The pepper juice giving you blisters. You need to soak your hands in milk at night. It gonna take the sting right out," he said.

"They don't be hurting, Legion. I promise. I got to get my row," Ladice said.

This time he didn't reply. He turned his horse in a circle and came up behind her and let the horse's forequarters knock against her.

"Legion, my daddy expecting to see me this afternoon. He coming down from the quarters. I got to be out here in the row where he can see me," she said.

"You ain't got a daddy, girl. Don't make me ax you again, no," Legion said.

The other workers, bent over in the pepper bushes, never looked up from their own fear and grief with the sun and heat and blistered fingers and the ball of pain that grew steadily in the small of the back through the long afternoon. Ladice wiped the dust and sweat off her face with her dress and began the walk to the gum trees in whose midst was a thorn bush, one with deep green leaves and red flowers that looked like drops of blood in the hot shade.

She heard a car honk on the road. She turned and saw Mr. Julian in his Lincoln Continental, its whitewall tires and wirewheels gleaming in the sunlight, like a shining invention that had appeared out of a cloud. He got out in the road, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt with purple garters on the sleeves and seersucker pants and a Panama hat on the back of his head. His smile was wonderful, and he was looking at her, his face filled with goodness, the influence of his presence so immediate that Legion dropped her sack to the ground and dismounted from the saddle and led his horse toward the road, so his employer would not be forced to look up at him and address him on horseback.

The easy smile never left Mr. Julian's face, but she could hear his words drifting across the rows on the wind.

"I'm surprised to see you bump a young woman with your horse like that, Legion. I suspect that was an accident, wasn't it?" he said.

"Yes, sir. I tole her I was sorry about that," Legion said.

"That's good. 'Cause you're a good man. Let's don't have a conversation like this again."

Ladice picked up her sack and got back in the row and stooped over and began picking the peppers whose juice sometimes caused her hands to swell as though they had been stung by bumblebees. She glanced sideways at Mr. Julian, at the way he held himself, the cleft in his chin, the sheen on his hair when he removed his hat, his red tie blowing over his shoulder in the wind. Physically, Legion towered over Mr. Julian, but Legion stood in silence, like a chastised child, motionless, while Mr. Julian unsnapped the cover on his gold vest watch and looked at the time and snapped the cover shut again, then began discussing a deep-sea fishing trip he wanted to take.

While he talked his eyes remained fastened on Ladice.

"Don't be t'inking you special, girl. Don't be that kind of fool," an old woman in the next row said.

A week later Mr. Julian gave Ladice a job in the big house and new dresses to wear to work and the apartment over the garage to live in. She knew the price he would extract but did not think less of him for it. In fact, his obvious need, his male dependency, the fact that he wanted her, that he had chosen her out of all the women in the quarters, that any night he would come for her, all his weaknesses exposed, these thoughts made her cheeks burn and her breath rise like a shard of glass in her chest.

She entertained herself with fantasies as she worked in the ornate silence of his house, dusting the antique chairs that were never sat in, placing cut flowers in a large silver bowl on a dining room table that was never used, listening for the little bell by Mrs. LaSalle's bedside, the only lifeline the old woman had to the world beyond her bedroom. The Negro boys who had courted Ladice only a week earlier seemed part of a distant memory now, one of parked cars behind juke joints and insects humming in the hot darkness or a hurried coupling on a stale-smelling mattress in a corncrib.

She sensed a new power in herself among all those who lived by the rules and strange parameters that governed life on Poinciana Island. On her first visit to the plantation store after moving up to the big house, the clerk called her "Miss Ladice," and Legion and another white man stepped aside when she crossed the gallery to the parking lot.

It was during her second week at the big house, just after sunset, when she was fresh from her bath and dressed in clean clothes, that she heard the weight of Mr. Julian's footsteps on the garage apartment stairs. Her hand moved to the switch for the outside light.

"There's no need to turn that on. It's only I," he said through the screen door.

She stood still, her hands folded demurely in front of her, unsure whether she should act first by pushing open the door for him, wondering if even that small a courtesy would indicate a foreknowledge about his behavior that he would find insulting and presumptuous.

When she didn't speak, he said, "Am I disturbing you, Ladice?"

"No, suh, you ain't. I mean, you aren't." She held the door open. "Would you like to come in, suh?"

"Yes, I couldn't sleep. I left Miz LaSalle's window open so I could listen for her bell. I understand you've graduated from high school."

"Yes, suh. I went t'ree years at plantation school and one at St. Edward's."

"Have you thought about college?"

"The closest for colored is Southern in Baton Rouge. I ain't got the money for that."

"There're scholarships. I could help with one," he said.

But he was not hearing his own words now. His eyes lingered on her mouth, the thickness of her hair, her skin that was as smooth as melted chocolate, the lovely heart shape of her face. She saw him swallow and an expression like both shame and lust suffuse his face. His hands cupped her shoulders, then he bent toward her and kissed her cheek and let his hands slip down her arms and over her waist and onto the small of her back.

"I'm a foolish old man who has little in the way of a married life, Ladice. If you wish, I'll leave," he said.

"No, suh. You ain't got to go. I mean, you don't got to go," she replied.

He kissed her neck and touched the points of her breasts with his fingers and unbuttoned her shirt and blue jeans. He helped her slip her shirt off her arms and held one of her hands while she stepped out of her jeans, then walked her to the narrow bed in the room off the kitchen and unhooked her bra and laid her down on the bed and removed her panties.

"Mr. Julian, ain't you gonna use somet'ing?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, his voice hoarse, the folds of flesh in his throat red and bewhiskered in the moonglow through the window.

There was a sadness in his eyes she had never seen in a white person's before.

"You feel bad about somet'ing, Mr. Julian?"

"What I do is a sin. I've made you part of it, too."

She took his hand and flattened it on her breast. "Feel my heart beating? It ain't a sin when a woman's heart beats like that," she said, and held him with her eyes.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and kissed her stomach and the insides of her thighs and put her nipples in his mouth, then he entered her and came within seconds, his back shaking while she stroked the curly locks of hair on the back of his neck.

"I'm sorry. I didn't give you satisfaction," he said.

"It's all right, suh. Lie on your back. Let me show you somet'ing," she said.

Then she mounted him and lifted his sex and placed it inside her and closed her knees and thighs tightly against him. She looked into his eyes in a way she had never dared look at a white man, probing his thoughts, controlling his sensations with the movements of her loins, leaning down to kiss him as she might a child. She came at the same time as he and she felt a surge of power and electricity in her thighs and genitalia and breasts that made her cry out involuntarily, not as much in pleasure as with a sense of triumph she never thought she could experience.

Through the window she heard the tiny bell ring in Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom.

"I always fix Mrs. LaSalle a sandwich and a glass of milk at this time of night," he said.

"I can do it, suh."

"No, your duties are in the downstairs of the house. That's where you work and remain, Ladice, unless I'm away and Mrs. LaSalle calls you."

There was a sharpness in his voice that made her blink. She covered herself with the sheet and pulled her knees up in front of her. She had only to look into his eyes for a second to realize that a transformation had taken place in him since his moment of need had passed. He began dressing, his face composed now, his chin pointed upward while he buttoned his shirt. Ladice stared into the shadows and removed a strand of hair from her forehead, her lips slightly pursed, her eyes veiled.

Then she lay back on the pillow with one arm behind her head and watched him prepare to leave.

"Good night, Ladice," he said.

She looked at him indifferently and did not answer.

You gonna be back. Won't be long, either. See who talks down to who next time, she said to herself.

The following week the tiny bell on Mrs. LaSalle's nightstand rang when Mr. Julian was in town. Ladice climbed the stairs and stood in Airs. LaSalle's doorway in her maid's black dress and frilled apron.

"Yes, ma'am?" she said.

Mrs. LaSalle had forced her husband to put iron grill-work over the windows, although there had never been a burglary on the island, and she never allowed the windows to be unlocked or opened. The air in the room was oppressive and smelled of camphor and urine. Mrs. LaSalle's skin looked like candle wax, her hair like a tangled red flame on the pillow of her tester bed. Her eyes were dark, larger than they should have been, luminous with either the cancer in her body or the fits of insanity that took possession of her mind.

"What happened to the other nigra girl?" she asked.

"Mr. Julian said you wanted her sent away, ma'am," Ladice replied.

"That sounds like someone's fabrication. Why would I want to do that? Never mind. Come here. Let me look at you."

Ladice walked closer to the tester bed. Mrs. LaSalle's pink nightgown was sunken into her chest, where her breasts had been removed.

"Why, you're a juicy little thing, aren't you?" she said.

"Ma'am?"

"I'm incontinent. I want you to rinse my panties."

"Excuse me?"

"Are you deaf? Remove my panties and rinse them. I've soiled them."

"I cain't be doing that, ma'am."

"You impudent thing."

"Yessum," Ladice said. She turned and left the room.

That night Mr. Julian was at her door.

"My wife says you sassed her," he said.

"I don't see it that way," Ladice replied.

He opened the screen door and stepped inside without being invited. He was much taller than she, his shadow blocking out the evening light that shone through the trees outside. But she didn't move. She wore jeans and sandals and a blue V-necked T-shirt and a gold-plated chain with a small purple stone around her throat. Her body felt cool and fresh from the cold bath she had just taken, and she had put perfume behind her ears, and one lock of her hair hung down over her eye.

"I need to know what happened today, Ladice," he said.

"If Miz LaSalle want her clothes laundered, I'll be glad to carry them on down to the washing machine. I'll iron them, too," Ladice said.

"I see. I think maybe this was just a miscommunication in language," he said.

She didn't reply. His eyes softened and moved over her face and studied her mouth. His hand touched her arm.

"My momma and uncle are picking me up to go to town," she said.

"Will you be back later?"

She moved the lock of hair from her eyebrow. "I t'ink my momma want me to stay over wit' her tonight," she said.

"Yes, I'm sure she's lonely sometimes. I'm very fond of you, Ladice."

"Good night, Mr. Julian."

"Yes, well, I guess good night it is, then," he said.

But his words did not coincide with his immobility and the longing in his face. She held her eyes steadily on his until he actually blinked and color came into his throat. Then his jawbone flexed and he let himself out the door.

She watched him through the window as he crossed his yard to the back of his house, tearing angrily at the knot in his necktie.

Maybe your wife will let you rinse her panties, she said to herself, and felt surprise at the vitriolic nature of her thoughts.

In her naiveté she thought their arrangement, love affair, whatever people wished to call it, would aim itself at a dramatic denouement, like a sulfurous match suddenly igniting the dryness of her life, bringing it to an end in some fashion, perhaps even a destructive one, that would set her free from the world she had grown up in.

But the long, humid days of summer blended one into another, as did Mr. Julian's nocturnal visits and the depression and sleeplessness they engendered in her. She no longer thought about control or power or her status among the other blacks on Poinciana Island. Her familiarity with Mr. Julian made her think of him with pity, when she thought of him at all, and his visits for her were simply a biological matter, in the same way her other bodily functions were, and she wondered if this wasn't indeed the attitude that all women developed when they coupled out of necessity. It wasn't a sin; it was just boring.

Then it was fall and she could smell gas from the swamp at night and the faint, salty odor of dead fish that had been trapped in tidal pools by the bay. Sometimes she would lie awake in her bed and listen to the moths hitting on her screens, destroying their wings as they tried to reach the nightlight in the bathroom. She wondered why they were created in such a way, why they would destroy themselves in order to fly onto an electrically heated white orb that eventually killed them. When she had these thoughts, she covered her head with a pillow so she could not hear the soft thudding of the moths' bodies against the screens.

But the venal and pernicious nature of her relationship with Julian LaSalle and his family and Poinciana Island, and its cost to her, would reveal itself in a way she had never guessed.

In November she boarded a Greyhound bus and rode across the Atchafalaya Swamp to Baton Rouge. She stayed in the old Negro district called Catfish Town, where juke joints and shotgun shacks left over from the days of slavery still lined both sides of the streets. Her first morning in the city she took a cab to the campus of Southern University and entered the administration building and told a white-haired black woman in a business suit she wanted to pre-enroll in the nursing program for the spring semester.

"Did you graduate from high school?" the woman asked.

"Yessum."

"Where?"

"In New Iberia."

"No, I mean what was the name of the school?"

"I got a certificate from plantation school. I went to St. Edward's, too."

"I see," the woman said. Her eyes seemed to cloud. "Fill out this application and return it with your transcripts. You could have done this through the mail, you know."

"Ma'am, is there somet'ing you ain't telling me?"

"I didn't mean to give that impression," the woman replied.

When Ladice walked outside, the air was sunlit and cool and smelled of burning leaves. A marching band was practicing beyond a grove of trees, the notes of a martial song rising off the brass and silver instruments into a hard blue sky. For some reason she could not explain, the expectation of football games and Saturday-night dances and corsages made of chrysanthemums and gin fizzes in the back of a coupe had become the province of others, one she would not share in.

One month later the mail carrier told Ladice he had left a letter from Southern University for her at the plantation post office. She walked down the dirt road in the dusk, between woods that smelled of pine sap and dust on the leaves and fish heads that raccoons had strewn among the trunks. The sun burned like a flare on a marshy horizon that was gray with winterkill.

She took the envelope from the hand of the postal clerk and walked back to the garage apartment and put it on her breakfast table under a salt shaker and lay down on her bed and went to sleep without opening the letter.

It was dark when she awoke. She turned on the kitchen light and washed her face in the bathroom, then sat down at the table and read the two brief paragraphs that had been written to her by the registrar. When she had finished, she refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope and walked down to Julian LaSalle's front door, not the back, and knocked.

He was in slippers and a red silk bathrobe when he opened the door, his reading glasses tilted down on his nose.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

"My credits from plantation school ain't no good."

"Beg your pardon?"

"Southern will take my credits from St. Edward's. The ones from plantation school don't count. You must have knowed that when you said you would get me a scholarship to Southern. Did you know that, Mr. Julian?"

"We provide a free school on Poinciana. Most people would find that generous. I'm not familiar with the accreditation system at Southern University."

"I t'ink I'm gonna be moving back to the quarters."

"Now, listen," he said. He looked over his shoulder, up the curved stairs that led to the second floor. "We'll talk about this tomorrow."

She wadded up the envelope and the letter and threw it over his shoulder onto his living room rug.

The following Thursday, the one night he always spent playing gin rummy with his wife, Mr. Julian drove to Ladice's house, where she now lived with her mother on a dead-end, isolated road lined with slash pines. It was cold and smoke from wood fires hung as thick as cotton in the trees. She watched him through the front window as he studied her vegetable garden, thumb and forefinger pinched on his chin, his eyes busy with thoughts that had nothing to do with her garden.

When he entered the house, he removed his hat.

"There's a Catholic college for colored students in New Orleans. I had a talk with the dean's office this morning. Would you be willing to take some preparatory courses?" he said.

She had been ironing when he had driven up to the house, and she picked up the iron from the pie pan it sat in and sprinkled a shirt with water from a soda bottle and ran the iron hissing across the cloth. She hadn't bathed that day, and she could smell her own odor in her clothes.

"If I take these courses, how I know I'm gonna get in?" she asked.

"You have my word," he replied.

She nodded and touched at the moisture on her forehead with her wrist. She wanted to tell him to leave, to take his promises and manipulations and mercurial moods back to his home, back to the wife whose cancer of the spirit was greater than the disease that attacked her body. But she thought about New Orleans, the streetcars clattering down the oak- and palm-lined avenues, the parades during Mardi Gras, the music that rose from the French Quarter into the sky at sunset

"You ain't fooling me, Mr. Julian?" she said.

Then she knew how weak she actually was, how much she wanted what he could give her, and consequently, when all was said and done, how easily she would always be used either by him or someone like him. She felt a sense of shame about herself, her life, and most of all her self-delusion that she had ever been in control of Julian LaSalle.

"I passed your mother and uncle on the road. Will they be back soon?" he said, and rubbed her arm with his palm.

"No. They gone to Lafayette," she said, wondering at how easy it was to become complicitous in her own exploitation.

He removed the iron from her hand and put his arms around her and rubbed his face in her hair and pressed her tightly against his body.

"I'm dirty. I been on my feet all day," she said.

"You're lovely anytime, Ladice," he said. He led her to her bedroom, which was lit only by a bedside lamp, and pulled her T-shirt over her head and pushed her jeans down over her hips.

"It's Thursday. You don't have a sitter for Miz LaSalle on Thursday night," she said.

"She's taking a nap. She'll be fine," he replied. Then he was on top of her, his body trembling, his lips on her breasts.

She fixed her eyes on the smoke in the slash pines outside, the fireflies that lit like sparks in the limbs, the moon that was orange with dust from the fields. She thought she heard a pickup truck clanking by on the road, but the sound of its engine was absorbed by the distant whistle of a Southern Pacific freight rumbling through the wetlands toward New Orleans. She closed her eyes and thought of New Orleans, where the mornings always smelled of mint and flowers and chicory coffee and beignets frying in someone's kitchen.

She felt his body constrict and tighten and his loins shudder, then his weight left her and he was lying next to her, his breath short, his hair damp against her cheek. After a moment he widened his eyes, like a man returning to the world that constituted his ordinary life. He sat on the side of the mattress, his pale back sweaty and etched by vertebrae.

Then he did something he had never done in the aftermath of their lovemaking. He patted her on top of the hand and said, "In another time and place we might have made quite a pair, you and I. You're an extraordinary woman. Don't let anybody ever tell you otherwise."

The inside of the room seemed filled with mist or smoke, and the fireflies in the tops of the trees seemed brighter than they should have been. She wondered if she was coming down with a cold or if she had lost a part of her soul and no longer knew who she was. She rose from the bed, still naked, and went to the window.

"Turn out the light," she said.

He clicked off the lamp on the bedside table and the room dropped into darkness. She looked out the window and realized it was too late in the year for fireflies, that the red pinpoints of light in the pines were sparks tumbling out of the sky.

But it was not the threat of fire to her own house that made her heart stop. The narrow, grained face of Legion the overseer suddenly moved into her vision, no more than three feet on the other side of the glass. His eyes raked her nude body even as he was tipping his hat.