James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"I got my period this morning."

But he didn't even acknowledge her deceit. "I sent the boy on an errand in Orange. He's gonna bring us back some fried-chicken dinners and blackberry cobbler. You'll like them dinners, believe me. But no more excuses. One way or another, you're gonna take care of ole Dale."

The nakedness of his desire made his face feral. He put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars, chewing hard, as though he could relieve himself of the passion that made him rotate his neck against his collar. "Don't just sit there, woman. You know what you got to do," he said.

"I got my period at three o'clock this morning," she said, ignoring the implication of his last words.

That's when he ripped her out of the chair and hit her with the flat of his hand across the face, breaking her upper lip, streaking blood from her nose on the wall. Then he smashed her mandolin on the chair and threw it to the floor, grinding the delicate wood of the sound chamber into splinters with his heel, snapping the tuning pegs from the head like broken teeth.

Lou Kale returned to the farmhouse that afternoon and put ice on her face and brought her strawberry ice cream from the kitchen. He swept the broken pieces of her mandolin and the tangle of strings into a dustpan, sliding them into a garbage sack. Outside, the men were popping skeet with a shotgun, the clay disks exploding into puffs of orange smoke above the sawgrass.

"I'll buy you a new one. Or a guitar. You're always talking about a Martin guitar," he said.

"Why'd you leave me alone, Lou?"

He sat next to her on the bed and spoke to her with his hands clenched between his knees, his voice lowered. His hair was shiny and black, combed in a wet curl on the back of his neck. His profile looked like a sheep's. "I heard some talk, Ida. They know you're smart. You've seen important people at the house and you know their names and who they are. They think you'll run off again. They think you're gonna cause a shitload of trouble. They make examples, Ida. Sometimes it's out there in the Gulf with the crabs."

"Just give me some money and get me to a train station or airport," she said.

"You're not hearing me. It takes guts to be a whore or a pimp. I'm proud of what I am. We were born on the hard road, Ida. Them cops out there couldn't hack it. I'm not gonna let them push us around. I got us a way out."

"How?" she said.

"I called this big plantation man over in Louisiana. I used to chop bait on his old man's boat when I was a kid. He's got money with the Giacanos, but he's not like the Giacanos. His name is Raphael Chalons. He's a classy guy and those Vice roaches know it. One thing, though?"

"What?"

"The Giacanos got long memories. As long as we stay under Mr. Raphael's protection, we're gonna be okay. But you owe money and so do I. In the life, that's the dog collar around your neck. It don't go away easy."

"You?" she said.

"I owe every sports book in Houston and New Orleans. People like us all got some kind of Jones. That how come we're pimps and whores. Who wants to be normal, anyway? It's a drag."

He thought he had both reassured her and lightened her mood.

"Lou?"

"What?"

"You're not gonna try to hurt Jimmie Robicheaux, are you?"

He stood up from the bed, screwing his fingers into his temples, a squealing sound leaking from his teeth.

During the next hour, Lou paced the floor, hyperventilating, drinking ice water, blowing out his breath as though he had pulled a freight car up a grade.

"Stop climbing the walls," she said.

"If this don't work, bucketloads of shit are going through the fan."

"Maybe we end here. Maybe our names are written in water and one day the water just dries up," she said.

"Don't say stuff like that. We're not living inside a country-and-western song."

"Come on, sit down," she said. She took him by the arm and guided him to the wood chair by the window. His arm was as hard as a log in her hands. He was chewing gum rapidly in one jaw, snapping it loudly, his throat cording with blue veins.

"I got a confession to make. I was gonna let them hang you out to dry," he said.

"But you didn't."

She pushed her fingers deep into his shoulders. His eyes closed briefly, then he surged to his feet, like a man who believed the Furies awaited him in his sleep.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"Coming apart. I ain't up to this." He jammed a chair under the doorknob and shot himself up with enough heroin to blow the heart out of a draft horse, his mouth rictal when the rush took him.

That afternoon Ida heard the strangest conversation she had ever heard in her life, one that would always remain with her as a testimony to the efficacy of fear.

Another rainfront had swept across the wetlands, smudging out the woods and the fleet of mothballed ships rusting in the bay. She heard the engine of a powerful car coming up the road, then a black Cadillac driven by a Negro chauffeur turned into the yard, the hood steaming in the rain. A tall man got out of the back and walked quickly under an umbrella into the house, lifting his shined shoes out of the puddles like a stork. It was obvious the men drinking beer in the living room had not been expecting him. The rhythm of their conversation faltered, the loud laughter fading, then trailing into total silence. Through a space in the door, she saw them all rise as one from their chairs while the tall man folded his umbrella and hung the crook on a hat rack.

The tall man's cheeks were lean, his hair freshly clipped and as black as India ink, the press in his suit impeccable. He removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and read silently from it, then replaced it in his pocket. Lou Kale watched from the kitchen door, the China white he'd shot up singing in his blood, his face incapable of forming a definable expression. Oddly, Lou was the only person in the room the tall man acknowledged.

Then he said, "I understand there's a woman here by the name of Ida Durbin."

"Yes, sir, she's back yonder," the voice of Bob Cobb said.

"Why are you keeping her here?" the tall man said.

"She's just visiting, helping clean and such, Mr. Chalons," Cobb said.

"That's not my understanding," Raphael Chalons replied.

"I was gonna fix her lunch, but she didn't want -" Dale Bordelon began.

"Would you ask her to come out here, please?" Chalons said.

Ida heard a chair creak, then footsteps approaching the bedroom. She stepped back from the door just as Bordelon opened it. A smile was carved on his face, like a crooked gash in a muskmelon. "Mr. Chalons wants to know if everything is okay," he said. "We was telling him you can leave anytime you want."

He tried to hold her with his eyes and to force her to make his words hers. But she walked past him into the living room as though he were not there. The men who only moments earlier had been relaxed and confident about their place in the world were still standing, afraid to sit down without permission.

"You're Miss Ida?" Chalons asked.

"My name is Ida Durbin, yes, sir. It's nice to meet you," she replied.

"What happened to your face?" he asked.

She knew the most injurious response she could make would be none at all. She lowered her eyes and folded her arms on her chest. Inside the boom of thunder and the slap of rain against the window, she became a replica of the medieval martyr, abused and bound and waiting for the bundled twigs to be set ablaze at her feet.

"Do any of you gentlemen care to tell me what happened here?" Chalons said.

"Somebody got carried away. There's no good hat to put on it," Bob Cobb said.

"I won't abide this."

"Sir?" Bob Cobb said.

"I won't have a young woman held in captivity or beaten on my property," Chalons said, his eyes lighting in a way that made Bob Cobb blink. He mentioned the name of an infamous Cosa Nostra figure in New Orleans, a man who was literally given the state of Louisiana by Frank Costello and United States Senator Huey P. Long. "This woman and Lou Kale are going to leave with me today. You gentlemen can use the house through tonight. But by ten in the morning you'll be gone. I have no hard feelings against any of you. But you will not have use of this property again. Thank you for your courtesy in listening to me."