Taverns and saloons sit along the banks of Bayou Teche, where it runs parallel to Main Street, the reflections of their lights murky smudges on the brown water. The faint sounds of jazz and Cajun music murmur in the air as Seward and Lane walk from the truck to the door of Lou’s Tavern, where Seward promises the steak is fine. They leave the truck on Fulton Street, where it sits parked beneath a streetlamp, looking as ordinary as any other truck but for the extra muffler and the exhaust pipe rising from the roof.
Lane keeps his head low, eyes fixed on his own feet as they pass over the ground: concrete, cobblestone, and curb. The warden gave him shoes this morning, a pair of brown street loafers to replace the work boots he wears in the fields all day, and their unfamiliarity gives him the sense that he’s being transported by a body not his own. These are a version of the shoes they’d given him to wear the only other time he’d been let out, to attend his mother’s funeral; he remembers the smooth prints they left in the graveside dirt where he stood handcuffed, a prison guard by his side. Why the shoes, he doesn’t know; that first time, for the funeral, he wore the same T-shirt and denim he wears inside every day, and he does so again now.
The tavern is a single-story wooden building with a low aluminum-covered porch in front. Though it’s still early, the place is crowded inside, Friday night. The stools along the bar are taken and the dance floor is full, everyone waltzing to “Jolie Blonde,” played by one man with a fiddle and another with a squeeze-box over in the corner of the room. Seward and Lane sit down at one of the few empty tables, by a window overlooking the Teche.
Seward taps his fingers on the table in time to the music, hums along. “You know this song?” he asks.
“I think I might’ve heard it.”
“Written by an inmate at Port Arthur.” Seward raises his eyebrows. “You know that?”
Lane shakes his head.
“But I reckon when you’re in prison you’ve got that sort a time on your hands.”
Lane looks at the captain levelly. Seward has been drinking steadily from his flask since they arrived in New Iberia. He’s said more in the past hour than he has over the course of the afternoon, and Lane isn’t sure if he doesn’t prefer silence.
“I reckon.” He lets his eyes drift from the captain to the room beyond, to the dance floor. Faces come into and go out of focus, drunk, smiling, grotesque, and then one is coming closer, young, pretty, the white face of a girl. Lane lowers his eyes, as if that would make her stop, as if his gaze were reeling her in.
It is the waitress; he understands this when he sees a smooth hand slide a dish of peanuts onto the table, and an empty bowl for the shells. Her shoes are loafers, sensible. Her stocking has a run that disappears beneath the hem of her dress, and its suggested trajectory causes something inside him to tighten abruptly. “Evenin’, y’all,” she says.
Lane looks up. The girl’s features are as delicate as her voice; her hair is dark around a narrow face. Her eyes are dark, too, so dark Lane can’t tell where iris ends and pupil begins. She wears a checked dress with a white collar beneath her apron, and heavy makeup, though Lane thinks she can’t be much more than a girl.
Seward shifts his whole body in his seat to look up at her. “Thank you, baby doll,” he says.
“What can I get y’all?”
Seward pats the table. “Two whiskeys, two steaks. I like mine bloody.” He looks at Lane. “You?”
“Just regular. No whiskey.”
Seward reaches for the girl’s hand before she can turn to go. “Two whiskeys, two steaks,” he repeats.
The girl glances at Lane uncertainly, then nods.
Seward turns in his seat to watch her walk away across the room. Then he settles back into his chair with a comfortable sigh, and studies Lane. “So you the teetotaling type?”
“Not mostly.”
“Just every now and then.”
Lane shrugs. “Don’t seem right in the circumstance.”
“You don’t drink, I’ll drink it for you.” The captain slaps his thigh. “This here leg’s hollow.”
Lane lifts a peanut from the dish, squeezes the shell between his fingers. It’s cardboard soft, wrong for a nut that isn’t boiled, and he sets it down on the table.
“That’s a nice-looking scar,” Seward says. He’s looking at Lane’s hand, at the line that runs across the knuckles.
Lane traces the scar with his fingertips. “I reckon it oughta been stitched.”
Seward sniffs. “What you in for anyway?”
“You know what I’m in for.”
“Burglary. Murder.” Seward raises his hands. “Dime a dozen. What’s your story, boy?”
“Ain’t got one.”
“Bullshit. Why’d you do it?”
The girl returns with their whiskeys, and Seward takes a long sip of his. Lane looks down at his own drink; the ice cubes gleam in the amber liquid, and condensation beads on the glass. He doesn’t drink.
He looks at the captain. “I didn’t plan to kill the man. I was burgling his home.”
“Didn’t answer why.”
“You need money, you need money.”
The captain drinks some more, as if to quench his thirst. He grimaces, sets his glass down. “You need money, you work.”
“Sometimes,” Lane says, “working ain’t enough.”
Seward plucks a peanut from the bowl, tears open the shell with his teeth. For a moment, he just looks at Lane, slowly chewing his peanut. Then he throws back the rest of his drink, and Lane can see through the bottom of the glass the man’s crooked yellow teeth, his fat tongue. He puts his glass down and pushes back from the table. “Gotta take a piss,” he says.
Lane watches him limp across the room, one-two, one-two, one-two, his own father’s gait after he’d got caught up in the harvester. Lane remembers his shouts from the cane field, and trying to follow the sound through the soft muck soil among the stalks, the cane leaves slashing at his skin. Working wasn’t enough after that. One-two, one-two, one-two, his father’s drunken footsteps across the midnight floor.
The captain disappears in the crowd, and Lane turns toward the window and presses his head against the glass. Outside on the bayou, a man drifts by in a canoe, using his paddle only to steer. He vanishes into the tendrils of a willow tree hanging low over the surface of the water. Lane wishes he could vanish, too. He thinks of the crossroads earlier, how the roads stretched off in all directions, how if he ran he could have gone anywhere, yet how for him there wasn’t anywhere to go.