Cajun Waltz (9 page)

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.

*   *   *

T
O CALL
A
NGEL
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.

*   *   *

O
N 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.

*   *   *

B
LOCK'S
H
OME
S
UPPLY
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.