He pauses before he replies, his fingers splaying stiffly on his knees, the soles of his shoes clicking playfully on the f
loor. “Why you think that, man?” he asks.
“The ‘MS’ tattooed on one eyelid and the ‘13’ on the other were clues,” I say.
“You nailed me, man,” he says. He looks up into my face, grinning. But the black luster in his eyes is the kind that makes one swallow, not smile in return.
“I thought you guys were out on the West Coast or creating new opportunities in northern Virginia,” I say.
His eyes are fixed straight ahead, as though he can see meaning inside the cell’s shadows. Or perhaps he’s staring at images inside his own head, remembering deeds that are testimony to the theory that not all of us descend from the same tree. He bobbles his head back and forth on his shoulders, working out a kink, a prizefighter in the corner awaiting the first-round bell. “When’s chow?” he says.
“The caterer will be here at six,” Helen says.
The other man gets off the floor and begins touching his toes, a neat crease folding across his navel, his narrow buttocks turned toward us. I glance at the computer printouts attached to the clipboard in my hand. “Your street name is Chula?” I say to the man sitting on the bench.
“Yeah, man, you got it.”
“What’s your name mean?” I ask.
“‘Put it away,’ man. Like at jai alai? Before the guy slams the ball into the wall, everybody shouts out, ‘Chula! Put it away.’”
“Y’all got impressive sheets. Lewisburg, Pelican Island, Marion,” I say. “Why fool with a small-town pimp like Herman Stanga?”
“The black dude? We just stopped and asked for directions. Then cops was all over us,” the seated man says.
“Yeah, mistakes like that can happen,” I reply. “But here’s the deal, Chula. We’ve got a hurricane blowing in and we don’t have time for bullshit from out-of-town guys who haven’t paid any local dues. See, Louisiana is not a state, it’s a Third World country. That means we really get pissed off when outsiders come in and think they can wipe their feet on us. You guys are mainline, so I won’t try to take you over the hurdles. Stacking time at Angola can be a real bitch, particularly if we decide to send you up with a bad jacket. If you want to take the bounce for Herman Stanga, be our guest. But you either get out in front of this or we’ll crush your cookie bag.”
The man who has been touching his toes stops and faces me. “Watch this, man,” he says.
He leaps against the wall with one foot and does a complete somersault, in a wink returning to an upright position. “What you think about that? Learned it in El Sal from the guys who killed my whole family and took turns raping me before they sold me to a carnival. Come on, man, tell me what you think about that.”
“To be honest, I think you should have stayed with the carnival,” I reply.
The remark isn’t intended to sink the hook in. But inadvertently that is what happens. Just when Helen and I are almost out of the corridor, the man street-named Chula rakes a tin cup back and forth on the bars. “Hey, you, the guy with the maricona, my sister is fucking a junkie priest from New Iberia. You say we ain’t paid no dues here? That ain’t local dues, man?”
Helen returns to the cell door, her arms pumped. “What did you call me?” she says.
Chula shrugs and smiles self-effacingly. “It don’t mean nothing against you. Your friend there shouldn’t have made fun about somebody being sold to a carnival,” he says. He leans against the wall, detaching from the world around him, his face striped with the bars’ shadows.
BACK HOME, I try to forget the two men in the holding cell. Molly, my wife, is a former nun and once worked with the Maryknolls in Central America. She has freckles on her shoulders and dark red hair that is thick and clipped short on her neck. She and Alafair are picking up the garden tools in the backyard and locking them in a tin shed behind the porte cochere. The air is breathless, cool, rain-scented, the live oak and pecan trees and the bayou as still as images in a painting. “Did Clete call?” I ask.
“No, but I called him. He’s not going to evacuate,” Molly says. She studies my face. She knows I’m not thinking about Clete. “Did something happen at the jail?”
“A local priest named Jude LeBlanc fell through a hole in the dimension about a year ago. He has terminal cancer and a morphine addiction and three or four warrants out for his arrest.”
The truth is, I don’t want to talk about it. If age brings wisdom, it lies in the realization that most talk is useless and that you stay out of other people’s grief.
“What’s that have to do with the jail?” Molly asks.
“A member of an El salvadoran gang called MS-13 said his sister was in the sack with Jude.”
“Did you ask him where your friend was?”
“You never empower the perps, no matter how many aces they’re holding,” I say.
A hard gust of wind blows down the long corridor of trees that line Bayou Teche, wrinkling the water like old skin, filling the air with the smell of fish roe and leaves that have turned yellow and black in the shade. Katrina will make landfall somewhere around Lake Pontchartrain in the next seven hours.
“Let’s fix supper,” she says.