James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

If my father was out of town on a Friday or Saturday night, she fixed our supper (sometimes meat on Friday, the fear in our eyes not worthy of her recognition), put on her blue suit, and sat by herself in the living room, listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hay ride, while she drank apricot brandy from a coffee cup. She always dropped cigarette ashes on her suit and had to spot-clean the cloth with dry-cleaning fluid before she drove off for the evening in her old Ford coupe. I don’t know where she went on those Friday or Saturday nights, but a boy down the road told me that Mattie used to work in Broussard’s Bar on Railroad Avenue, an infamous area in New Iberia where the women sat on the galleries of the cribs, dipping their beer out of buckets and yelling at the railroad and oil-field workers in the street.

Then one morning when my father was in Morgan City, a man in a new silver Chevrolet sedan came out to see her. It was hot, and he parked his car partly on our grass to keep it in the shade. He wore sideburns, striped brown zoot slacks, two-tone shoes, suspenders, a pink shirt without a coat, and a fedora that shadowed his narrow face. While he talked to her, he put one shoe on the car bumper and wiped the dust off it with a rag. Then their voices grew louder and he said, “You like the life. Admit it, you. He ain’t given you no wedding ring, has he? You don’t buy the cow, no, when you can milk through the fence.”

“I am currently involved with a gentleman. I do not know what you are talking about. I am not interested in anything you are talking about,” she said.

He threw the rag back inside the car and opened the car door. “It’s always trick, trade, or travel, darlin’,” he said. “Same rules here as down on Railroad. He done made you a nigger woman for them children, Mattie.”

“Are you calling me a nigra?” she said quietly.

“No, I’m calling you crazy, just like everybody say you are. No, I take that back, me. I ain’t calling you nothing. I ain’t got to, ‘cause you gonna be back. You in the life, Mattie. You be phoning me to come out here, bring you to the crib, rub your back, put some of that warm stuff in your arm again. Ain’t nobody else do that for you, huh?”

When she came back into the house, she made us take all the dishes out of the cabinets, even though they were clean, and wash them over again.

It was the following Friday that Sister Roberta called. Mattie was already dressed to go out. She didn’t bother to turn down the radio when she answered the phone, and in order to compete with Red Foley’s voice, she had to almost shout into the receiver.

“Mr. Sonnier is not here,” she said. “Mr. Sonnier is away on business in Texas City…No, ma’am, I’m not the housekeeper. I’m a friend of the family who is caring for these children …There’s nothing wrong with that boy that I can see …Are you calling to tell me that there’s something wrong, that I’m doing something wrong? What is it that I’m doing wrong? I would like to know that. What is your name?”

I stood transfixed with terror in the hall as she bent angrily into the mouthpiece and her knuckles ridged on the receiver. A storm was blowing in from the Gulf, the air smelled of ozone, and the southern horizon was black with thunderclouds that pulsated with white veins of lightning. I heard the wind ripping through the trees in the yard and pecans rattling down on the gallery roof like grapeshot.

When Mattie hung up the phone, the skin of her face was stretched as tight as a lampshade and one liquid eye was narrowed at me like someone aiming down a rifle barrel.

The next week, when I was cutting through the neighbor’s sugarcane field on the way home from school, my heart started to race for no reason, my spit tasted like pecans, and my face filmed with perspiration even though the wind was cool through the stalks of cane; then I saw the oaks and cypress trees along Bayou Teche tilt at an angle, and I dropped my books and fell forward in the dirt as though someone had wrapped a chain around my chest and snapped my breastbone.

I lay with the side of my face pressed against the dirt, my mouth gasping like a fish’s, until Weldon found me and went crashing through the cane for help. A doctor came out to the house that night, examined me and gave me a shot, then talked with my father out in the hall. My father didn’t understand the doctor’s vocabulary, and he said, “What kind of fever that is?”

“Rheumatic, Mr. Sonnier. It attacks the heart. I could be wrong, but I think that’s what your boy’s got. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“How much this gonna cost?”

“It’s three dollars for the visit, but you can pay me when you’re able.”

“We never had nothing like this in our family. You sure about this?”

“No, I’m not. That’s why I’ll be back. Good night to you, sir.”

I knew he didn’t like my father, but he came to see me one afternoon a week for a month, brought me bottles of medicine, and always looked into my face with genuine concern after he listened to my heart. Then one night he and my father argued and he didn’t come back.

“What good he do, huh?” my father said. “You still sick, ain’t you? A doctor don’t make money off well people. I think maybe you got malaria, son. There ain’t nothing for that, either. It just goes away. You gonna see, you. You stay in bed, you eat cush-cush Mattie and me make for you, you drink that Hadacol vitamin tonic, you wear this dime I’m tying on you, you gonna get well and go back to school.”

He hung a perforated dime on a piece of red twine around my neck. His face was lean and unshaved, his eyes as intense as a butane flame when he looked into mine. “You blame me for your mama?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I lied.

“I didn’t mean to hit her. But she made me look bad in front of y’all. A woman can’t be doing that to a man in front of his kids.”

“Make Mattie go away, Daddy.”

“Don’t be saying that.”

“She hit Weldon with the belt. She made Drew kneel in the bathroom corner because she didn’t flush the toilet.”

“She’s just trying to be a mother, that’s all. Don’t talk no more. Go to sleep. I got to drive back to Texas City tonight. You gonna be all right.”

He closed my door and the inside of my room was absolutely black. Through the wall I heard him and Mattie talking, then the weight of their bodies creaking rhythmically on the bedsprings.

When Sister Roberta knew that I would not be back to school that semester, she began bringing my lessons to the house. She came three afternoons a week and had to walk two miles each way between the convent and our house. Each time I successfully completed a lesson she rewarded me with a holy card. Each holy card had a prayer on one side and a beautiful picture on the other, usually of angels and saints glowing with light or ethereal paintings of Mary with the Infant Jesus. On the day after my father had tied the dime around my neck, Sister Roberta had to walk past our neighbors field right after he had cut his cane and burned off the stubble, and a wet wind had streaked her black habit with ashes. As soon as she came through my bedroom door her face tightened inside her wimple, and her brown eyes, which had flecks of red in them, grew round and hot. She dropped her book bag on the foot of my bed and leaned within six inches of my face as though she were looking down at a horrid presence in the bottom of a well. The hair on her upper lip looked like pieces of silver thread.

“Who put that around your neck?” she asked.

“My father says it keeps the gris-gris away.”

“My suffering God,” she said, and went back out the door in a swirl of cloth. Then I heard her speak to Mattie: “That’s right, madam. Scissors. So I can remove that cord from his neck before he strangles to death in his sleep. Thank you kindly.”