Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Page A

town, playing dominoes with three other white men at a table by a gas stove that hissed with blue flame. Delahoussey wore a fedora, and a gold badge on the pocket of his white shirt. None of the men at the table looked up from their game. The stove filled the room with a drowsy, controlled warmth and the smell of shaving cream and aftershave lotion and testosterone.
    “My wife ain’t gonna be working at the club no more,” Cool Breeze said.
    “Okay,” Delahoussey said, his eyes concentrated on the row of dominoes in front of him.
    The room seemed to scream with silence.
    “Mr. Harpo, maybe you ain’t understood me,” Cool Breeze said.
    “He heard you, boy. Now go on about your business,” one of the other men said.
    A moment later, by the door of his truck, Cool Breeze looked back through the window. Even though he was outside, an oak tree swelling with wind above his head, and the four domino players were in a small room beyond a glass, he felt it was he who was somehow on display, in a cage, naked, small, an object of ridicule and contempt.
    Then it hit him: He’s old. An old man like that, one piece of black jelly roll just the same as another. So who give her the dress and wrap the gold chain around her stomach ?
    He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his canvas coat. His ears roared with sound and his heart thundered in his chest.
     
    HE WOKE IN THE middle of the night and put on an overcoat and sat under a bare lightbulb in the kitchen, poking at the ashes in the wood stove, wadding up paper and feeding sticks into the flame that wouldn’t catch, the cold climbing off the linoleum through his socks and into his ankles, his confused thoughts wrapped around his face like a net.
    What was it that tormented him? Why was it he couldn’t give it words, deal with it in the light of day, push it out in front of him, even kill it if he had to?
    His breath fogged the air. Static electricity crackled in the sleeves of his overcoat and leaped off his fingertips when he touched the stove.
    He wanted to blame Harpo Delahoussey. He remembered the story his daddy, Mout’, had told him of the black man from Abbeville who broke off a butcher knife in the chest of a white overseer he caught doing it with his wife against a tree, then had spit in the face of his executioner before he was gagged and hooded with a black cloth and electrocuted.
    He wondered if he could ever possess the courage of a man like that.
    But he knew Delahoussey was not the true source of the anger and discontent that made his face break a sweat and his palms ring as though they had been beaten with boards.
    He had accepted his role as cuckold, had even transported his wife to the site of her violation by a white man (and later, from Ida’s mother, he would discover the exact nature of what Harpo Delahoussey did to her), because his victimization had justified a lifetime of resentment toward those who had forced his father to live gratefully on tips while their cigar ashes spilled down on his shoulders.
    Except his wife had now become a willing participant. Last night she had ironed her jeans and shirt and laid them out on the bed, put perfume in her bathwater, washed and dried her hair and rouged her cheekbones to accentuate the angular beauty of her face. Her skin had seemed to glow when she dried herself in front of the mirror, a tune humming in her throat. He tried to confront her, force the issue, but her eyes were veiled with secret expectations and private meaning that made him ball his hands into fists. When he refused to drive her to the nightclub, she called a cab.
    The fire wouldn’t catch. An acrid smoke, as yellow as rope, laced with a stench of rags or chemically treated wood, billowed into his face. He opened all the windows, and frost speckled on the wallpaper and kitchen table. In the morning, the house smelled like a smoldering garbage dump.
    She dressed in a robe, closed the windows, opened the air lock in the stove by holding a