Purple Cane Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

halls and crawfish boils and the fais-dodo in Breaux Bridge. While my father was in the parish prison, other men came to our house, and two of them offered my mother access to what she thought was a much better world than the one she shared with my father.
    Hank was a soldier stationed at Fort Polk, a tall, sun-browned man with a red, welted scar from Omaha Beach on his shoulder who told my mother he belonged to the stagehands union in Hollywood. In the morning he would go into the bathroom when my mother was already in there, and I would hear them laughing through the door. Then he would stay in there a long time by himself, filling the room with steam. When I went in to bathe before school, no warm water was left in the tank, and he would tell me to heat a pan on the stove and wash with a rag at the kitchen sink.
    “Mama wants me to take a whole bath,” I said one morning.
    “Suit yourself, kid. Scrub out the tub when you get finished. I don’t like sitting in somebody else’s dirt,” he replied.
    He smelled of testosterone and shaving cream and the cigarette he kept balanced on the lavatory while he combed Lucky Tiger into his hair in front of the mirror, a towel wrapped around his hips. He saw me watching him in the mirror and he turned and cocked his fists like a prizefighter’s.
    He and my mother boarded the Sunset Limited in 1946 and went out to Hollywood. On the platform she hugged me against her and kept patting me on the head and back as though her hands could convey meaning her words could not.
    “I’m gonna send for you. I promise, Davy. You gonna see movie stars and swim in the ocean and go on roller-coaster rides out over the water, you. It ain’t like here, no. It don’t never rain and people got all the money they want,” she said.
    When she returned to New Iberia on the bus, the ticket purchased with money my father had to wire a priest, she showed me postcards of Angel’s Flight and Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the beach at Malibu, as though these were magic places that had defined her experience in California rather than a garage apartment by a downtown freeway where Hank had left her one morning with the icebox empty and the rent unpaid.
    But it was a thin, small-boned bouree dealer named Mack who took her away from us permanently. He owned a car and wore a fedora and two-tone shoes and had a moustache that looked like it had been drawn above his lip with grease pencil. I hated Mack more than any of the others. He feared my father and was cruel in the way all cowards are. He knew how to inflict injury deep into the bone, and he always had an explanation to mask the nature of his real agenda, like a man who tickles a child incessantly and says he means no harm.
    My calico cat gave birth to her litter in the barn, but Mack found them before I did. He put them in a paper sack and weighted the sack with a rock and sank it in the coulee, pushing me away with his palm, then raising a cautionary finger at my face.
    “Don’t touch me again, no, ‘cause I’m gonna hit you,” he said. “Them kittens gonna grow up and kill the chicks, just like their mama been doin’. You gonna buy more chickens, you? You gonna put food on the table, you?”
    He and my mother drove away one summer’s day in a rooster tail of dust to Morgan City, where Mack got her a job at a beer garden. I didn’t see her again until many years later, when I was in high school and I went to a roadhouse on the Breaux Bridge Highway with some other boys. It was a ramshackle gambling and pickup place, where the patrons fought over whores with bottles and knives in the parking lot. She was dancing with a drunk by the jukebox, her stomach pressed into his loins. Her face was tilted up into his, as though she were intrigued by his words. Then she saw me looking at her from the bar, saw my hand lift from my side to wave at her, and she smiled back at me briefly, her eyes shiny and indolent with alcohol, a vague recognition swimming