The Neon Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

a roof.
    But there were other things there that leaped at your eye when you walked through the door: a color television set, an imitation Bavarian clock above the woodburning stove, plastic flowers set in jelly glasses, a bright yellow Formica breakfast table next to an ancient brick fireplace filled with trash.
    The parents would tell me little. The mother stared vacantly at a game show on television, her huge body stuffed in a pair of lime-green stretch pants and a man’s army shirt cut off at the armpits. The father was gray and old and walked with a cane as though his back were disjointed. He smelled of the cob pipe in his shirt pocket. His eyes were scaled over and frosted with cataracts.
    “She gone off to New Orleans. I tolt her a colored girl from the country dint have no business there, her,” he said, sitting on the couch, his hand curved along the top of his cane. “She only a country girl. What she gonna do with them kind of people they got in New Orleans? I tell her that, me.”
    “Who did she work for, Mr. Deshotels?”
    “What I know about New Orleans? I ain’t got no truck there, me.” He smiled at me, and I saw his toothless blue gums.
    “Do you believe she drowned?”
    He paused and the smile went out of his face. His eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time.
    “You think they care what some old nigger say?” he said.
    ” I do.”
    He didn’t answer. He put his dead pipe in his mouth, made a wet sound with his tongue, and stared blankly at the television screen.
    “I’ll be going now,” I said, standing up. “I’m sorry about what happened to your daughter. I really am.”
    His face turned back toward me.
    “We had eleven, us,” he said. “She the baby. I call her tite cush-chush cause she always love cush-cush when she a little girl. He’p me walk out front, you.”
    I put my hand under his arm and we stepped out into the bright sunlight on the porch. The wind was ruffling the green fields of sugarcane on the opposite side of the road. The old man’s arm was webbed with veins. He limped along with me to my automobile before he spoke.
    “They kilt her, them, dint they?” he asked.
    “I think they did.”
    “She just a little colored jellyroll for white mens, then they throw her away,” he said. His eyes became wet. “I tolt her ‘Jellyroll, jellyroll, rollin’ in the cane, lookin’ for a woman ain’t got no man.’ She say ‘Look the television and the clock and the table I give Mama.’ She say that, her. Little girl that don’t know how to read can buy a five-hundred-dollar television set for her mama. What you gonna do when they nineteen? Ain’t no listenin’, not when she got white men’s money, drive a big car down here from New Orleans, tellin’ me she gonna move us up North, her. Little girl that still eat cush-cush gonna outsmart the white mens, her, move her old nigger daddy up to New York. What she done they got to kill her for?”
    I didn’t have an answer for him.
     
    I was on an empty stretch of road bordered on one side by a flat, shimmering lake and on the other by a flooded woods, when I saw the blue and white patrol car in my rearview mirror. The driver already had on his bubblegum light, and when he drew close to my bumper he gave me a short blast with his siren. I started to pull to the shoulder, but there were shards of beer-bottle glass like amber teeth shining in the weeds and gravel. I tried to drive on to a clear spot before I stopped, and the patrol car leaped abreast of me, the engine roaring, and the deputy in the passenger’s seat pointed to the side of the road with an angry finger. I heard my tires crunch over the beer glass.
    Both deputies got out of the car, and I knew it was going to be serious. They were big men, probably Cajuns like myself, but their powerful and sinewy bodies, their tight-fitting, powder-blue uniforms, polished gunbelts and holsters, glinting bullets and revolver butts made you think of backwoods Mississippi