Read DR10 - Sunset Limited for Free Online Page B

till they done wit' me."
    I looked at the electrical cord he had used for a tourniquet,
the proud flesh that had turned the color of fish scale around the fang
marks, the drainage that had left viscous green tailings on his shirt.
"I tell you what, I'll dress those wounds, hang your arm in a sling,
then we'll get a breath of fresh air," I said.
    "You cut that cord loose, the poison gonna hit my heart."
    "You're working on gangrene now, partner."
    I saw him swallow. The whites of his eyes looked painted with
iodine.
    "You're jail-wise, Breeze. You knew the Feds would take you
over the hurdles. Why'd you want to stick it to Alex Guidry?"
    This is the story he told me while I used a rubber suction cup
to draw a mixture of venom and infection from his forearm. As I
listened on one knee, kneading the puncture wounds, feeling the pain in
his body flicker like a candle flame under his skin, I could only
wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always
sending forth our
worst members as our emissaries.
     
    TWENTY YEARS AGO, DOWN the Teche, he
owned a dirt-road store
knocked together from scrap boards, tin stripped off a condemned rice
mill, and Montgomery Ward brick that had dried out and crusted and
pulled loose from the joists like a scab. He also had a pretty young
wife named Ida, who cooked in a cafe and picked tabasco peppers on a
corporate farm. After a day in the field her hands swelled as though
they had been stung by bumblebees and she had to soak them in milk to
relieve the burning in her skin.
    On a winter afternoon two white men pulled up on the bib of
oyster shell that served as a parking lot in front of the gallery, and
the older man, who had jowls like a bulldog's and smoked a cigar in the
center of his mouth, asked for a quart of moonshine.
    "Don't tell me you ain't got it, boy. I know the man from
Miss'sippi sells it to you."
    "I got Jax on ice. I got warm beer, too. I can sell you soda
pop. I ain't got no whiskey."
    "That a fact? I'm gonna walk back out the door, then come back
in. One of them jars you got in that box behind the motor oil better be
on the counter or I'm gonna redecorate your store."
    Cool Breeze shook his head.
    "I know who y'all are. I done paid already. Why y'all giving
me this truck?" he said.
    The younger white man opened the screen door and came inside
the store. His name was Alex Guidry, and he wore a corduroy suit and
cowboy hat and western boots, with pointed, mirror-bright toes. The
older man picked up a paper bag of deep-fried cracklings from the
counter. The grease in the cracklings made dark stains in the paper. He
threw the bag to the younger man and said to Cool Breeze, "You on
parole for check writing now. That liquor will get you a double nickel.
Your woman yonder, what's her name, Ida? She's a cook, ain't she?"
     
    THE MAN WITH BULLDOG jowls was named
Harpo Delahoussey, and he
ran a ramshackle nightclub for redbones (people who are part French,
black, and Indian) by a rendering plant on an oxbow off the Atchafalaya
River. When the incinerators were fired up at the plant, the smoke from
the stacks filled the nearby woods and dirt roads with a stench like
hair and chicken entrails burned in a skillet. The clapboard nightclub
didn't lock its doors from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night;
the parking lot (layered with thousands of flattened beer cans) became
a maze of gas-guzzlers and pickup trucks; and the club's windows
rattled and shook with the reverberations of rub board and thimbles,
accordion, drums, dancing feet, and electric guitars whose feedback
screeched like fingernails on slate.
    At the back, in a small kitchen, Ida Broussard sliced potatoes
for french fries while caldrons of red beans and rice and robin gumbo
boiled on the stove, a bandanna knotted across her forehead to keep the
sweat out of her eyes.
    But 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