Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke

Cool Breeze secretly knew, even though he tried to deny it to himself, that Harpo Delahoussey had not blackmailed him simply to acquire a cook, or even to reinforce that old lesson that every coin pressed into your palm for shining shoes, cutting cane, chopping cotton, scouring ovens, dipping out grease traps, scrubbing commodes, cleaning dead rats from under a house, was dispensed by the hand of a white person in the same way that oxygen could be arbitrarily measured out to a dying hospital patient.
    One night she wouldn’t speak when he picked her up, sitting against the far door of the pickup truck, her shoulders rounded, her face dull with a fatigue that sleep never took away.
    “He ain’t touched you, huh?” Cool Breeze said.
    “Why you care? You brung me to the club, ain’t you?”
    “He said the rendering plant gonna shut down soon. That mean he won’t be needing no more cook. What you gonna do if I’m in Angola?”
    “I tole you not to bring that whiskey in the store. Not to listen to that white man from Miss’sippi sold it to you. Tole you, Willie.”
    Then she looked out the window so he could not see her face. She wore a rayon blouse that had green and orange lights in it, and her back was shaking under the cloth, and he could hear her breath seizing in her throat, like hiccups she couldn’t control.
     
    HE TRIED TO GET permission from his parole officer to move back to New Orleans.
    Permission denied.
    He caught Ida inhaling cocaine off a broken mirror behind the house. She drank fortified wine in the morning, out of a green bottle with a screw cap that made her eyes lustrous and frightening. She refused to help out at the store. In bed she was unresponding, dry when he entered her, and finally not available at all. She tied a perforated dime on a string around her ankle, then one around her belly so that it hung just below her navel.
    “Gris-gris is old people’s superstition,” Cool Breeze said.
    “I had a dream. A white snake, thick as your wrist, it bit a hole in a melon and crawled inside and ate all the meat out.”
    “We gonna run away.”
    “Mr. Harpo gonna be there. Your PO gonna be there. State of Lou’sana gonna be there.”
    He put his hand under the dime that rested on her lower stomach and ripped it loose. Her mouth parted soundlessly when the string razored burns along her skin.
    The next week he walked in on her when she was naked in front of the mirror. A thin gold chain was fastened around her hips.
    “Where you get that?” he asked.
    She brushed her hair and didn’t answer. Her breasts looked as swollen and full as eggplants.
    “You ain’t got to cook at the club no more. What they gonna do? Hurt us more than they already have?” he said.
    She took a new dress off a hanger and worked it over her head. It was red and sewn with colored glass beads like an Indian woman might wear.
    “Where you got money for that?” he asked.
    “Mine to know, yours to find out,” she replied. She fastened a hoop earring to her lobe with both hands, smiling at him while she did it.
    He began shaking her by the shoulders, her head whipping like a doll’s on her neck, her eyelids closed, her lipsticked mouth open in a way that made his phallus thicken in his jeans. He flung her against the bedroom wall, so hard he heard her bones knock into the wood, then ran from the house and down the dirt road, through a tunnel of darkened trees, his brogans exploding through the shell of ice on the chuckholes.
     
    IN THE MORNING HE tried to make it up to her. He warmed boudin and fixed cush-cush and coffee and hot milk, and set it all out on the table and called her into the kitchen. The dishes she didn’t smash on the wall she threw into the back yard.
    He drove his pickup truck through the bright coldness of the morning, the dust from his tires drifting out onto the dead hyacinths and the cattails that had winter-killed in the bayou, and found Harpo Delahoussey at the filling station he owned in