Cajun Waltz (8 page)

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.”

*   *   *

R
ICHIE 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.

*   *   *

O
F 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.