Crusader's Cross (3 page)

Jimmie stepped closer to her. “Listen, if this girl works in a place for white people, where would I —” he began.

Then Jimmie felt rather than saw a presence at the window behind him. The black girl picked up her basket of wash and walked quickly away. “You don’t look like the gas man,” the man in the window said.

He was white, with small ears, sunken cheeks, and hair that was as black and shiny as patent leather, oiled and combed into a slight curl on the neck.

“I’m looking for Ida Durbin,” Jimmie said.

The man leaned on the sill and thought about it. He wore a creamy cowboy shirt with stitched pockets and chains of roses sewn on the shoulders. “Four doors down. Ask for Connie. Tell you what, I’ll walk you there.” he said.

“That’s all right,” Jimmie said.

“I’m here to serve,” the man said.

On the way down the street, the man extended his hand. It was small and hard, the knuckles pronounced. “I’m Lou Kale. Connie’s your heartthrob?” he said.

“The girl I’m looking for is named Ida.”

“On this street, nobody uses their own name. That is, except me,” Lou Kale said, and winked. “I was gonna call her Ida Red, after the girl in the song. Except she didn’t think that was respectful, so she made up her own name. What’s
your
name?”

Jimmie hesitated, touching his bottom lip with his tongue.

“See what I mean?” Lou Kale said. “Soon as people set foot on Post Office Street, their names fly away.”

Lou Kale escorted Jimmie through the front door of a two-story Victorian house with hollow wood pillars on the gallery and a veranda on the second floor. The shades were drawn in the living room to keep out the dust, and the air inside the heated walls was stifling. The couches and straight-back chairs were empty; the only color in the room came from the plastic casing of a Wurlitzer jukebox plugged into the far wall. Lou Kale told a heavyset white woman in the kitchen that Connie had a caller.

The woman labored up a stairs that groaned with her weight and shouted down a hallway.

“Look at me, kid,” Lou Kale said. He seemed to lose his train of thought. He touched at his nostril with one knuckle, then huffed air out his nose, perhaps reorganizing his words. He was shorter than Jimmie, firmly built, flat-stomached, with thick veins in his arms, his dark jeans belted high on his hips. His face seemed full of play now. “You’re not here to get your ashes hauled, are you?”

“Who cares why I’m here. It’s a free country, ain’t it?” Jimmie replied. Then wondered why he had just used bad grammar.

Lou Kale made a sucking sound with his teeth, his eyelids fluttering as he watched a fly buzzing on the wall. Then he jiggled his fingers in the air, as though surrendering to a situation beyond his control. “You give your present to Connie, then you beat feet. This place is off limits for you and so is Connie. That means you find your own girlfriend and you don’t try to get a punch on somebody else’s tab. We connecting here?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought!” Lou Kale said. “Connie, get down here!”

When Ida Durbin came down the stairs she was wearing a pair of tight, blue-jean shorts and a blouse that looked made of cheesecloth that outlined the black bra she wore underneath. She had been asleep, and her face was flushed from the stored-up heat in the upper levels of the building and marked with lines from the pillow she had been sleeping upon. Even in the gloom Jimmie could see the injury in her eyes when she realized who her visitor was.

“Let’s have a quick exchange of pleasantries, then your friend is gonna be on his way,” Lou Kale said to her.

Jimmie stepped toward her, his arm brushing Lou Kale’s shoulder. “I paid off your loan on the mandolin,” he said.

“Jimmie, you shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“I just thought I’d drop the mandolin by, that’s all!” he said. He handed it to her, his movements stiff, his voice tangled in his throat. Lou Kale clicked a fingernail on the glass cover of his wristwatch.

“Thank you. You better go now,” she said.

Then Jimmie couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Who is this guy?” he asked, pointing sideways at Lou Kale. “What are you doing here?”

“Connie, two Panamanian tankers docked this morning. Go finish your nap,” Lou Kale said. “Everything is solid. Believe me, I like this guy. He’s a cute boy, that’s what he is.”

She went up the stairs, glancing back once at Jimmie. Lou Kale moved into Jimmie’s line of sight. “You’ve done your good deed. That’s reward enough, right?” he said.
“Right?”

“Yeah,” Jimmie said. But he didn’t move from his position.

“We don’t want insincerity here,” Lou Kale said, resting his hand on Jimmie’s shoulder, his breath touching Jimmie’s skin.

Then Lou Kale walked him to the door, as though Jimmie had no volition of his own, and before Jimmie knew it, he was back outside, the door shutting loudly behind him.

The sun was white and hot in the sky, and the humidity felt like damp wool on his skin. For a moment he could hear no sound, as though he were trapped inside a glass bell. Upstairs, someone turned on a radio, and from the window he heard the adenoidal voice of Kitty Wells singing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.”

After Jimmie told me of his visit to Post Office Street, I took him to breakfast and thought our misadventure with Ida Durbin was over. But I was wrong. She called him that afternoon and asked to meet him on the amusement pier.

“Leave her alone,” I told him.

“She paddled through sharks to get us off a sandbar,” he said.

“She’s a prostitute. You can’t change that. Act like you have a brain,” I said.

Once again, I had spoken without thinking. Our father, known as Big Aldous Robicheaux in the oil patch, had been a good-hearted, illiterate Cajun and notorious barroom brawler whose infidelities had included a prostitute in Abbeville. The prostitute died of Hansen’s disease in a federal facility at Carville, Louisiana. She was also Jimmie’s mother.

I went to the pier with Jimmie and listened to Ida Durbin’s story about her background, a story that neither Jimmie nor I had the experience to deal with or even evaluate in terms of veracity. She told us she had been raised by her grandmother in a sawmill town just south of the Arkansas line, and that she had borrowed twenty-seven hundred dollars from the mortgage holder of their house to pay for the grandmother’s cancer treatment in Houston. When Ida couldn’t pay back the loan, she was offered a choice of either eviction or going to work in a hot pillow joint.

“Stuff like that doesn’t happen, Ida. At least, not anymore,” Jimmie said. His eyes clicked sideways at her. “Does it?”

She turned one cheek into the light. It was layered with makeup, but we could see the swelling along the jawline, like a chain of tiny dried grapes. “I talked to Lou Kale about getting out. He said if I worked what they call special trade, that’s girls who do everything, I can be even in a month,” she said.

“He put those bruises on your face?” Jimmie said.

“A cop did. He was drunk. It’s nothing,” she said.

We were on the end of the pier, and we could see gulls dipping sand shrimp out of the waves. The sun was hot on the boards., the wind blowing, and blood had dried on the railing where someone had chopped up fish bait.

“A cop?” Jimmie said.

“They get free ones sometimes,” she said.

I didn’t want to listen to it anymore. I went back to the motel by myself. Later., I heard Jimmie outside with Ida, then the two of them driving away in our convertible.

Jimmie didn’t go back on the job with me the next day and instead hung out with Ida in Galveston. He bought her clothes and paid four dollars apiece for four recordings of her songs in a recording booth on the amusement pier. This was in an era when we were paid one dollar and ten cents an hour for work that, outside of building board roads in swamps, was considered the lowest and dirtiest in the oil field. He also withdrew his one hundred and twelve dollars in savings from the bank, money put away for his college tuition, and gave it to Ida. When I came back off the hitch, I wanted to punch him out.

“What’d she do with it?” I said. He was doing push-ups on the floor in his underwear, his feet propped up on the window-sill. His hair was black and shiny, his wide shoulders as smooth as tallow.

“Gave it to this guy Lou Kale to pay off her debt,” he replied. He dropped his feet from the sill and sat up. From outside I could hear the surf crashing on the beach. “Quit looking at me like that.”

“Nobody is that stupid,” I said.

“We sent one of her recordings to Sun Records in Memphis. That’s where Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley got started. Jerry Lee Lewis, too,” he said.

“Yeah, I heard the Grand Ole Opry has a lot of openings for singing prostitutes.”

“Why don’t you show a little respect for other people once in a while?” he said.

Was I my brother’s keeper? I decided I was not. I also decided I did not want to be held hostage by what I considered the self-imposed victimhood of others. I let Jimmie take the convertible and I went back to Louisiana until it was time to rejoin the doodlebug crew on the quarter boat. I hoped by the end of the next hitch, Jimmie would be free of his entanglement with Ida Durbin.

It was a hot, windblown day when Jimmie picked me up at the dock. A storm was building, and in the south the sky was the blue-black of gunmetal, the inland waters yellow with churned sand, the
waves capping as far as the eye could see. Jimmie had the top down on the convertible, and he grinned from behind his shades when he saw me walking toward him with my duffel bag over my shoulder. A bucket of iced-down Pearl and Jax sat on the backseat, the long-neck bottles sweating in the sunlight.

“You look like a happy man,” I said.

“Ida’s getting out of the life. I’m moving her out of that house tonight. We’re going to Mexico,” he said. He reached in back and slid a beer out of the ice. He cracked off the cap with a bottle opener that hung from a cord around his neck and handed the bottle to me. “You don’t have anything to say?”

“It’s a little more than I can think my way through right now. How do you get somebody out of the life?” I said.

“I went to the cops. This is a free country. People can’t make other people work in whorehouses,” he said.

I didn’t speak until after he started the engine and began backing out of the parking area, the sun hot on the leather seats, the palm trees clattering in the wind. “The cops who get free ones are on the side of the good guys now?” I said.

“There was one little bump in the road,” he said. “Remember the hundred and twelve bucks Ida and I gave this guy Lou Kale? He says the guys he works for consider that the interest, so Ida still owes the principal. I don’t quite know what to do about that.”

He lifted a beer out of a wire holder on the dashboard and drank it while he steered with one hand, his sunglasses patterned with the reflected images of trees, sky, and asphalt, all of it rushing at him, like a film strip out of control, as he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

That evening Jimmie went off with Ida in the car, supposedly to confront Lou Kale about the one hundred twelve dollars Kale had obviously stolen. I walked down on the amusement pier and ate a burrito for supper. The thunderheads in the south rippled with electricity and I could see the lights of freighters on the horizon and I wondered if Jimmie was actually serious about going to Mexico with Ida Durbin. In three weeks the fall term would be starting at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, in Lafayette, where we were both enrolled. We were three weeks away from normalcy and football games on crisp Saturday afternoons, the booming sounds of marching bands, the innocence of the freshman sock hop in the school gym, the smell of leaves burning and barbecues in the city park across the street from the campus. In my mind’s eye I saw my self-deluded half brother sinking in quicksand, while Ida Durbin sat astride his shoulders.

My own mother had long ago disappeared into a world of low-rent bars and lower-rent men. Big Aldous, our father, had died in an oil well blowout when I was eighteen. Jimmie’d had little or no parental authority in his life, and I had obviously proved a poor substitute for one. I threw my burrito in a trash can, went to a beer joint down the beach, and drank until 2:00 a.m. while hailstones the size of mothballs pelted the surf.

I woke before dawn, trembling all over, the distorted voices and faces of the people from the bar more real than the room around me. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten back to the motel. Water was leaking through the ceiling, and a garbage can was tumbling end over end past the empty carport. I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands shaking, my throat so dry I couldn’t swallow. The window curtains were open, and a network of lightning bloomed over the Gulf, all the way to the top of the sky. Inside the momentary white brilliance that lit the clouds and waves I thought I saw a green-black lake where the naked bodies of the damned were submerged to their chests, their mouths crying out to any who would hear.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just booked my first passage on the SS
Delirium Tremens.

I buried my head under a pillow and fell into a sweaty dream. Thunder shook the walls and sheets of rain whipped against the windows. I thought I heard the door open and wind and a sudden infusion of dampness blow into the room. Maybe Jimmie had returned, safe and sound, and all my fears about him had been unjustified, I told myself in my sleep. But when I looked up, the room was quiet, his bed made, the carport empty. I felt myself descending into a vortex of nausea and fear, accompanied by a dilation of blood vessels in the brain that was like a strand of piano wire being slowly tightened around my head with a stick.

When I woke a second time, I could hear no sound except the rain hitting on the roof. The thunder had stopped, the power in the motel was out, and the room was absolutely black. Then a tree of lightning crackled over the Gulf and I saw a man seated in a chair, no more than two feet from me. He wore sideburns and a striped western shirt, with pearl-colored snap buttons. His cheeks were sunken, pooled with shadow, his mouth small, filled with tiny teeth. A nickel-plated automatic with white grips rested on his thigh.