The Best American Noir of the Century

“Has your father taken you to a doctor?”

I didn’t answer.

“Look at me and answer my question,” she said.

“He don’t — he doesn’t have money right now. He says it’s because I had the flu. He boiled some honey and onions for me to eat. It made me feel better. It’s true, Sister.”

“I need to talk to your father.”

She saw me swallow.

“Would he mind my calling him?” she asked.

“He’s not home now. He works all the time.”

“Will he be home tonight?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Who takes care of you at night when he’s not home?”

“A lady, a friend of his.”

“I see. Come back to the classroom with me. It’s too windy out here for you,” she said.

“Sister, you don’t need to call, do you? I feel OK now. My father’s got a lot on his mind now. He works real hard.”

“What’s wrong in your house, Billy Bob?”

“Nothing. I promise, Sister.” I tried to smile. I could taste bile in my throat.

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not. I promise I’m not.”

“Yes, I can see that clearly. Come with me.”

The rest of the recess period she and I sharpened crayons in the empty loom with tiny pencil sharpeners, stringing long curlicues of colored wax into the wastebasket. She was as silent and as seemingly self-absorbed as a statue. Just before the bell rang she walked down to the convent and came back with a tube of toothpaste.

“Your breath is bad. Go down to the lavatory and wash your mouth out with this,” she said.

* * *

Mattie wore shorts and sleeveless blouses with sweat rings under the arms, and in the daytime she always seemed to have curlers in her hair. When she walked from room to room she carried an ashtray with her into which she constantly flicked her lipstick-stained Chesterfields. She had a hard, muscular body, and she didn’t close the bathroom door all the way when she bathed, and once I saw her kneeling in the tub, scrubbing her big shoulders and chest with a large, flat brush. The area above her head was crisscrossed with improvised clotheslines from which dropped her wet underthings. Her eyes fastened on mine; I thought she was about to reprimand me for staring at her, but instead her hard-boned, shiny face continued to look back at me with a vacuous indifference that made me feel obscene.

If my father was out of town on a Friday or Saturday night, she fixed our supper (sometimes meat on Friday, the fear in our eyes not worthy of her recognition), put on her blue suit, and sat by herself in the living room, listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hay ride, while she drank apricot brandy from a coffee cup. She always dropped cigarette ashes on her suit and had to spot-clean the cloth with dry-cleaning fluid before she drove off for the evening in her old Ford coupe. I don’t know where she went on those Friday or Saturday nights, but a boy down the road told me that Mattie used to work in Broussard’s Bar on Railroad Avenue, an infamous area in New Iberia where the women sat on the galleries of the cribs, dipping their beer out of buckets and yelling at the railroad and oil-field workers in the street.

Then one morning when my father was in Morgan City, a man in a new silver Chevrolet sedan came out to see her. It was hot, and he parked his car partly on our grass to keep it in the shade. He wore sideburns, striped brown zoot slacks, two-tone shoes, suspenders, a pink shirt without a coat, and a fedora that shadowed his narrow face. While he talked to her, he put one shoe on the car bumper and wiped the dust off it with a rag. Then their voices grew louder and he said, “You like the life. Admit it, you. He ain’t given you no wedding ring, has he? You don’t buy the cow, no, when you can milk through the fence.”

“I am currently involved with a gentleman. I do not know what you are talking about. I am not interested in anything you are talking about,” she said.

He threw the rag back inside the car and opened the car door. “It’s always trick, trade, or travel, darlin’,” he said. “Same rules here as down on Railroad. He done made you a nigger woman for them children, Mattie.”

“Are you calling me a nigra?” she said quietly.

“No, I’m calling you crazy, just like everybody say you are. No, I take that back, me. I ain’t calling you nothing. I ain’t got to, ‘cause you gonna be back. You in the life, Mattie. You be phoning me to come out here, bring you to the crib, rub your back, put some of that warm stuff in your arm again. Ain’t nobody else do that for you, huh?”

When she came back into the house, she made us take all the dishes out of the cabinets, even though they were clean, and wash them over again.

* * *

It was the following Friday that Sister Roberta called. Mattie was already dressed to go out. She didn’t bother to turn down the radio when she answered the phone, and in order to compete with Red Foley’s voice, she had to almost shout into the receiver.