Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

Now he worked, mostly on commission, for one used car lot or another, as Bert told it. He had not gone bankrupt in the collapse of the Rambler business, but had sold his small house on the west bank and had paid off his debts, almost all of them dollar for dollar, fifty here, ten there. When I heard that, I decided against offering them coffee. I got out whiskey. You serve a man what he’s worth, even if he invades your fantasies.

As Bert talked on, only pausing to sip his bourbon, Bedlow sat staring into his glass, his large hands cupping it, his fingers moving restlessly around its rim, listening to Bert as if he himself had no stake in all that was passing. I had once known a musician who had sat that way when people caught him in a situation where talk was inevitable. Like Bedlow, he was not resentful, only elsewhere, and his hands, trained to a mystical perfection, worked over and over certain passages in some silent score.

Bedlow looked up as Bert told about the house trailer he, Bedlow, lived in now — or had lived in until a week or so before. Bedlow frowned almost sympathetically, as if he could find some measure of compassion for a poor man who had come down so far.

— Now I got to be honest, Bert said at last, drawing a deep breath. — Howard, he didn’t want to come. Bad times with lawyers.

— I can see that, I said.

— He can’t put all that car franchise mess out of mind. Bitter, you know. Gone down hard. Lawyers like vultures, all over the place.

Bedlow nodded, frowning. Not in agreement with Bert on his own behalf, but as if he, indifferent to all this, could appreciate a man being bitter, untrusting after so much. I almost wondered if the trouble wasn’t Bert’s, so distant from it Bedlow seemed.

— I got to be honest, Bert said again. Then he paused, looking down at his whiskey. Howard studied his drink too.

— I told Howard he could come along with me to see you, or I had to take him up to Judge Talley. DWI, property damage, foul and abusive, resisting, public obscenity. You could pave the river with charges. I mean it.

All right. You could. And sometimes did. Some wise-ass tries to take apart Millie’s Bar, the only place for four blocks where a working man can sit back and sip one without a lot of hassle. You take and let him consider the adamantine justice of Jefferson Parish for thirty days or six months before you turn him loose at the causeway and let him drag back to St. Tammany Parish with what’s left of his tail tucked between his legs. Discretion of the Officer. That’s the way it is, the way it’s always been, the way it’ll be till the whole human race learns how to handle itself in Millie’s Bar.

But you don’t do that with a friend. Makes no sense. You don’t cart him off to Judge Elmer Talley who is the scourge of the working class if the working class indulges in what others call the curse of the working class. No, Bert was clubbing his buddy. To get him to an Officer of the Court. All right.

— He says he wants a divorce, Bert said. — Drinks like a three-legged hog and goes to low rating his wife in public and so on. Ain’t that fine?

No, Bedlow acknowledged, frowning, shaking his head. It was not fine. He agreed with Bert, you could tell. It was sorry, too damned bad.

— I’m not going to tell you what he called his wife over to Sammie’s Lounge last night. Sammie almost hit him. You know what I mean?

Yes I did. Maybe, here and there, the fire is not entirely out. I have known a man to beat another very nearly to death because the first spoke slightingly of his own mother. One does not talk that way about women folk, not even one’s own. The lowly, the ignored, and the abused remember what the high-born and the wealthy have forgotten.

— Are you separated? I asked Bedlow.

— I ain’t livin with the woman, he said laconically. It was the first time he had spoken since he came into my house.

— What’s the trouble?

He told me. Told me in detail while Bert listened and made faces of astonishment and disbelief at me. Bert could still be astonished after seventeen years on the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s squad. You wonder that I like him?

It seemed that there had been adultery. A clear and flagrant act of faithlessness resulting in a child. A child that was not his, not a Bedlow. He had been away, in the wash of his financial troubles, watching the Rambler franchise expire, trying hard to do right. And she did it, swore to Christ and the Virgin she never did it, and went to confinement carrying another man’s child.

— When? I asked. — How old is...?

— Nine, Bedlow said firmly. — He’s... it’s nine...

I stared at Bert. He shrugged. It seemed to be no surprise to him. Oh, hell, I thought. Maybe what this draggle-assed country needs is an emperor. Even if he taxes us to death and declares war on Guatemala. This is absurd.

— Mr. Bedlow, I said. — You can’t get a divorce for adultery with a situation like that.

— How come?

— You’ve been living with her all that... nine years?

— Yeah.

— They... call it reconciliation. No way. If you stay on, you are presumed... what the hell. How long have you lived apart?

— Two weeks and two days, he answered. I suspected he could have told me the hours and minutes.

— I couldn’t take it anymore. Knowing what I know...

Bedlow began to cry. Bert looked away, and I suppose I did. I have not seen many grown men cry cold sober. I have seen them mangled past any hope of life, twisting, screaming, cursing. I have seen them standing by a wrecked car while police and firemen tried to saw loose the bodies of their wives and children. I have seen men, told of the death of their one son, stand hard-jawed with tears running down their slabby sunburned cheeks, but that was not crying. Bedlow was crying, and he did not seem the kind of man who cries.

I motioned Bert back into the kitchen. — What the hell...

— This man, Bert said, spreading his hands, — is in trouble.

— All right, I said, hearing Bedlow out in the parlor, still sobbing as if something more than his life might be lost. — All right. But I don’t think it’s a lawyer he needs.

Bert frowned, outraged. — Well, he sure don’t need one of... them.

I could not be sure whether he was referring to priests or psychiatrists. Or both. Bert trusted the law. Even working with it, knowing better than I its open sores and ugly fissures, he believed in it, and for some reason saw me as one of its dependable functionaries. I guess I was pleased by that.

— Fill me in on this whole business, will you?

Yes, he would, and would have earlier over the phone, but he had been busy mollifying Sammie and some of his customers who wanted to lay charges that Bert could not have sidestepped.

It was short and ugly, and I was hooked. Bedlow’s wife was a good woman. The child was a hopeless defective. It was kept up at Pineville, at the Louisiana hospital for the feebleminded, or whatever the social scientists are calling imbeciles this year. A vegetating thing that its mother had named Albert Sidney Bedlow before they had taken it away, hooked it up for a lifetime of intravenous feeding, and added it to the schedule of cleaning up filth and washing, and all the things they do for human beings who can do nothing whatever for themselves. But Irma Bedlow couldn’t let it go at that. The state is equipped, albeit poorly, for this kind of thing. It happens. You let the thing go, and they see to it, and one day, usually not long hence, it dies of pneumonia or a virus, or one of the myriad diseases that float and sift through the air of a place like that. This is the way these things are done, and all of us at the law have drawn up papers for things called “Baby So-and-so,” sometimes, mercifully, without their parents having laid eyes on them.