Say You're Sorry Read online

  “Somebody might break into the house,” she said. “Someone from the quarters.”

  It didn’t do any good to remind her that the only person who’d ever bothered her over all those years was blue-eyed and blond-haired. Momma knew what she knew.

  When I was emptying out the house after her death a few years ago—at eighty-four of a heart attack while she was hoeing in her garden out behind the house—I thought about that Colt. I hadn’t run across it, and I wondered when she had gotten rid of it. How? And why?

  Still, I gasped a little, surprised, when I spied the old gun lying beneath her bed among a tangle of hoses and dust bunnies and long-discarded magazines. How many years had it been resting there? Was it loaded? Rusted? Might it go off at a jiggle?

  I placed a call to the police station, which was no longer downtown but farther out where younger people were building houses. No hurry, I said, but in no time at all, a bright and shiny officer appeared, young enough to be the grandson of one of those policemen speeding past our store forty years earlier. I knew he wasn’t, though, because there’d been no black police officers back then. Polite, but clearly amused at my concern, he pulled the Colt from its resting place.

  “Wow!” he said, holding the pistol up. “This is an old one. A beaut.”

  It was a beauty, as guns go. Darkened with age but just as I remembered it, long-barreled like pistols in the Westerns I’d grown up on. Heavy. A plate on either side of the grip of some pre-plastic material, crosshatched and scrolled with the word Colt inscribed within a graceful oval.

  The handsome young policeman flipped the chamber open. “It’s loaded, all right. Your momma was ready. Except…” He eyed the revolver closely. “Come on outside. Let me show you something.”

  We stepped out into the backyard. Along our side of the ditch bloomed an eight-foot-high wall of red roses that Momma had planted before I was born. The young policeman in the crisp navy uniform aimed Momma’s Colt toward the ditch and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing. The barrel revolved and the trigger clicked, but the Colt didn’t fire.

  He pulled again, to the same result.

  No shot, no bullet, no nothing.

  “The firing pin’s bent,” he said. “It’s a good thing your momma never needed to shoot anybody ’cause this gun never would of fired in a million years.”

  I thanked the young policeman kindly, and after he was gone, packed the Colt in a box of mementos I intended to take back to the big city with me. Just in case, I told myself, I might ever forget the long-ago night when that good neighbor, a man named Joe, made a giant step across the line that separated our lives from his for just long enough to save us and then stepped back to the other side again.

  Say You’re Sorry

  Down in Baton Rouge darkness had fallen, and the official State of Louisiana fireworks display could finally begin. An expectant, sunburned crowd filled the Capitol lawn. Children sat on their fathers’ shoulders dribbling half-eaten ice-cream cones down their backs. Teenaged couples held hands, willing their palms not to sweat. Then, for the fifth time that day, the Capital City High School Marching Band struck up the opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and everyone rose, some more proud than others to be Americans in this summer whose television stars included Senator Sam Ervin and the whole panoply of Watergate crooks.

  As the crowd sang the words bombs bursting in air, red, white, and blue rockets shrieked across the clear evening sky, exploding into mushrooms of light that reflected in the clear eyes of children and then floated, trailing off into vapor. The fireworks would continue for half an hour, each barrage of sound and light more spectacular than the one before, punctuations of oohs and ahs joining the growing roar until the grand finale that smothered all reverberations except its thunderous self, reminding more than one Vietnam veteran, who leaned against a crutch or sat in a wheelchair, of sounds he’d just as soon forget, but couldn’t.

  Across town from the Capitol lawn on a narrow street that intersected Front, Loubella Simms sat alone on her porch steps and watched the lights above the treetops. She lighted one long cigarette off another and sipped iced tea from a sweating glass.

  Inside the darkened living room, her battered hi-fi repeated the same record over and over, Sweet Emma and her band from the New Orleans Preservation Hall playing Dixieland. Slide- man, a trombone player and one of Loubella’s friends and admirers, had brought her the record, which was now worn scratchy, but she didn’t mind. It didn’t have all that much further to go.

  With that thought, she ran a hand inside her faded pink seersucker housecoat and trailed her fingers across her pendulous left breast.

  The sweet man named Isaac was the one who had found the spot first.

  Now who was Isaac? He was the one who bought the River City Hotel (read “whorehouse”) from the sheriff who had bought it from Blanche, the former mistress of River City and the woman who, out of misplaced jealousy, had had Loubella locked up.

  “Honey,” Isaac’d said to her one night when they were lying in bed together, nothing serious, just sipping bourbon and messing around. “Honey, I…” And then he’d hesitated as he’d realized he was about to drop a stone into waters whose circles might never stop.

  “What?”

  “I think I feel something here.”

  “’Course you do, sugar. You feel what you always feel when you get the mood on you.”

  “No, I don’t.” His voice had become serious so that Loubella had sat up in bed and switched on the light.

  She’d put her hand atop his, and together their hands moved in a slow circle.

  Then she’d slipped her fingers beneath, and she, too, felt what he was talking about. The lump was about the size of her smallest fingernail, but round like an egg yolk.

  She took a deep breath, and when she let it out the lie came with it: “Oh, that’s been there for a long time. I get them all the time, little old lumps like chicken fat.”

  “That’s not true, Loubella. You know it’s not.”

  She’d waved off his words and pulled him to her, smothering his worrying with her mouth.

  But after he’d gone, after he’d looked her straight in the eye and ordered her to see a doctor the very next day, and after she’d nodded that she would, she’d lain awake for a long time tracing her fingertips over and over the spot.

  It wasn’t gone the next morning or the one after that. In fact, it grew larger all the time, as if it were a child inside her doubling and redoubling until it could draw its own breath.

  “The doctor said nothing, it’s nothing, just as I told you,” she answered her lover when he asked her about it.

  Actually the doctor had said nothing because she had never gone to see him. A couple of times she had picked up the phone to call for an appointment, but then had dropped it back into its black cradle as if it were a snake.

  There was no way that she was going to let anyone cut off her breast.

  Why, she said to herself this Fourth of July night as she watched the fireworks explode into the air, she’d be so lopsided she’d fall off the sidewalk into the street. And she managed a crooked smile at the thought of that.

  When she’d been a young girl and these ridiculous things had sprouted themselves like ever-larger fruit—oranges, cantaloupes, then finally watermelons—on her chest, she’d been ashamed. The boys had opened their legs as she’d passed, touched themselves, and sniffed after her as if she were a dog permanently in heat. But then when she’d seen that her breasts were to be her meal ticket, as no other opportunity had presented itself, she’d said, “So be it.” She’d never loved her bosoms even though she’d named them Lou and Bella and had pretended that she appreciated the men who looked at her chest. But in time she’d grown used to her bounty, and parting with half of it was something that she simply couldn’t bring herself to do.

  She knew the consequences. She didn’t need a doctor to tell her that. And before long she could feel the sickness growing, reac
hing out beneath her armpits, putting feelers into her groin. Now there was no call to remove her breast; it was already too late.

  Loubella leaned her back against the step and lit another cigarette, watching the smoke curl into the night air. In a moment she’d get up and flip the record to the other side and put on a pot of water. It was too hot a night for coffee, but she wanted it anyway—sweet and black, the perfect end to a perfect day.

  And she couldn’t imagine one more perfect. Isaac had come over about noon and they’d had a long, gentle time in bed. Then they’d taken a cool shower together and she’d spread out their holiday dinner: fried chicken, potato salad with sour cream (her secret ingredient), baked beans, and pineapple upside-down cake.

  “Honey,” Isaac had said, “you should have been a cook.”

  “I should have been lots of things. But I’m stuck with what I’ve been. It’s a little too late.”

  “It’s never too late, Loubella.”

  But she’d seen the look in his eyes, and she knew he could see what looked back at her from her mirror these days. She could smell it too. They both knew she was already holding hands with a bad-breathed lover, Mr. Death.

  Then they’d sat for a while on the porch playing gin rummy, right out in the open, not caring who came by. Not that Isaac had ever been big on sneaking and hiding, but in some ways he was circumspect. Not this day. Not this Fourth of July, which was also Loubella’s birthday. She was forty-six.

  “Lordy, lordy, who’d of thought I’d be getting so old?”

  “And so beautiful.” He’d kissed her and placed among the cards before them a little jeweler’s box.

  Inside was a diamond solitaire, a big sparkling beauty of an engagement ring.

  They smiled at each other, Loubella’s gold tooth shining like a ray of sunlight. They smiled, for they both understood the symbolism and yet knew that in that sense the ring didn’t mean a goddamned thing.

  For her lover was married, a Baton Rouge businessman who carried considerable weight, and he wasn’t about to toss over everything to marry a retired whore. Not that they would have had time to do that anyway, even though divorces could be had now in only six months. Both of them knew that Loubella didn’t have that much time left.

  She held her hand out before her now that he was gone, watching the diamond catch the fireworks’ light, admiring the token of his love like a sixteen-year-old girl. She savored both it and the favor she’d asked of him, which he’d granted—making the phone call without missing a beat.

  Loubella, she said to herself now, all in all you’ve had a good life.

  The whoring hadn’t gotten her, nor the drugs, nor the time in jail. She’d risen above them all like cream coming to the top. And these last few years with Isaac, tending her little house and the bar in his now respectable River City, they’d been all she’d ever hoped for, more than she’d ever dreamed.

  And in just a little while it would be over. For Loubella was not waiting for Mr. Death to name the time. She would do that herself. Not for her the long hoping and the slow snipping, a breast here, a womb there, all her hair falling out, what was left of her fading beauty gone, till there was nothing left but the tubes and high hospital bed and the drugs dripping into her veins, the drugs that didn’t quite smother the smells or the pain.

  She heard the big car coming even before she saw its headlights. She sat up straight and a tingle ran right down the back of her neck.

  Oh, it had been such a while since she’d seen her enemy’s face. This time was going to be so sweet.

  Now the heavy door of the Cadillac slammed, just once, which meant Blanche hadn’t brought her husband Aces with her. Well, it would have been nice to have them both, but Aces didn’t really matter. Blanche had been the hand behind the hand that turned the key that locked the door that kept her imprisoned eleven and a half years, almost one quarter of her life.

  “Evening, Blanche,” Loubella called from the steps. She had been sitting there for a while growing cats’ eyes and could see into the night.

  “Loubella?” Blanche stopped dead still as she recognized the voice.

  “Sure ’nuff. Come on in.”

  Blanche came closer now. Good Lord have mercy, how she’d aged! The golden girl was gone. And here in her place stood a middle-aged pouty pigeon in a blue dress that was too tight, stretched across the bulging stomach and the spreading butt. Ah, beautiful Blanche, Loubella thought, has all that barbecue caught up with you at last?

  “Isaac called and gave me this address. Said he wanted to talk some business.” Blanche’s voice was wary.

  “He does.”

  “Well, where is he?” Blanche stood uneasily, shifting her considerable weight.

  “Inside.” Loubella gestured up toward the porch, pointing at a wicker chair. “But why don’t you sit out here with me for a minute first ’fore you go in? Give yourself a rest.”

  Loubella watched Blanche’s mouth open and close. No, not a pouty pigeon. Now she reminded Loubella of a chicken, an old rusty hen, ready for the pot.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Loubella kept her voice ever so light.

  “Why, yes,” said Blanche, smoothing her dress across her stomach with nervous little hands. She hadn’t seen Loubella since before she’d been sent away. “I guess I would. Yes, that would be awfully nice.”

  Loubella smiled her still-pretty smile, full lips pulled back from teeth that were perfect and white except for that one spot of gold, which was nothing but vanity. Then she disappeared into the house.

  Blanche fidgeted in the wicker chair. She smoothed and resmoothed her lap, adjusted her rings, tried to find a place to plant her twisting feet. Though age had slowed her down, now she felt fourteen again, flighty as a bird just this moment locked in a cage. She hadn’t expected Loubella gliding toward her now, carrying a tray with two pretty china cups, so delicate that, between the pattern of violets, they were translucent.

  “Oh,” Loubella said then, just as her rear end touched her chair. “I forgot the cake. Would you like some?”

  “No, I just couldn’t. Thank you.” Blanche listened to herself playacting that she wasn’t unnerved. Woman, she thought, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.

  “Sure you could.” Loubella smiled. “Have some cake.”

  Blanche wondered if the other woman were mocking her little jelly rolls of fat. She really must go on a diet, but then it always had been hard for her to deny herself anything she wanted to put in her mouth.

  “You’ve got to have some of my birthday cake.”

  “Your birthday. Why, of course it is. The Fourth. I’d forgotten.”

  And she had, but she remembered now.

  When they were girls, even though Loubella was almost ten years younger than she, she’d never missed Loubella’s birthday party. It was the event of the summer. Loubella’s grandmother, who was her entire family, had taken her in when everyone else, for one reason or another, had disappeared, would churn peach ice cream for the whole neighborhood, spread tables with ham and chicken, once even saved to pay a three-piece band who’d played for dancing in the street beneath Japanese lanterns until the last pair of happy feet stopped. After that night Blanche had said to her mother that Loubella was going to grow up thinking the entire country celebrated her birthday, not knowing it belonged to the whole United States.

  “That little girl has no family but her Mamaw, Blanche, who gives her this one day. Begrudging her that, child, you ought to be ashamed.”

  And Blanche had been. She’d tried to make up for her jealousy by pretending to be the big sister Loubella had never had.

  She remembered holding Loubella, a dark-haired little girl, a doll baby, balancing her on her knees while she divided her hair into sections and braided her pigtails. She taught her to swim at the edge of the river, along with a couple of other little kids. She’d baptized them first, pouring water over their heads with a handleless cup, making up the words as she went along.

 
; “And the Baby Jesus watch over you and carry your little soul straight to heaven without no detours if you drown,” she’d said. Loubella’s brown eyes had grown wide like saucers plopped into her face.

  Yes, there’d been a long time when she’d truly loved the girl Loubella, had mothered her and smiled proudly at the mention of her name.

  Now, from atop her coffee cup, she slid a look toward the woman and felt a flash of regret, then shame. How fragile friendship could be. How was it you spent years with someone—your minds so intertwined you didn’t even need to pick up the phone but could just transmit thoughts—laughed together, loved each other, and then things changed? There was a misunderstanding, an angry word that grew into a great wrong as you carried it around in your hand, blowing on it to give it life until, like a flame, it had a will of its own. But it had been more than a cross word, hadn’t it, that thing that had turned her love for Loubella to hate?

  It had begun one July when Parnell, then Blanche’s husband and owner of River City, decided to pick up where Loubella’s mamaw had left off and in a fit of flamboyance treated his girls to a trip on a paddleboat all the way down the river to New Orleans. He’d said that his girls didn’t have to work on the Fourth, but Blanche had known that that was just his excuse to throw a party for Loubella.

  Before that, when Blanche had come back to Baton Rouge to marry Parnell and had found Loubella in his stable of whores, it had made her sad for a bit, but then a woman had to do what she had to do. For a while she and Loubella had carried on together like they had when they were girls. They’d run into each other on the back stairs, Loubella in a yellow silk wrapper that glowed like fireflies, and then they’d sit right down on the steps, their legs tucked back against them within their encircling arms, gossiping and giggling with no mind for the passing hours, reaching their hands out and patting one another on a knee or a shoulder, little butterflies of affection, easy, easy, old love.