Creole Belle by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

face seemed to float like a red balloon, estranged and full of pain. “I grew up around guys like Golightly and Grimes. You know how you deal with them? You take them off at the neck.” He put two aspirins in his mouth and bit down on them. “I’ve got this twisted feeling high up in my chest, like something is still in there and it’s pushing against my lung.” He took a deep drink from his vodka, the ice making a rasping sound against the glass when he set it down on the bar. “You know the biggest joke about all this?” he said.
    “About what?”
    “Getting shot. Almost croaking. I would have bought it right there on the bayou if the bullet hadn’t hit the strap on my shoulder holster. I got saved by my holster rather than by my piece. That’s the story of my fucking life. If anything good happens to me, it’s because of an accident.”
    “Sir, would you hold down your language, please?” the bartender said.
    “Sorry,” Clete said.
    “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
    “No, I like it here. I like the bar and the food and the company, and I have no reason to leave.”
    “Meaning I do?” I said.
    “You know anybody who goes to a whorehouse to play the piano?” He thought about what he had said and smiled self-effacingly. “I’m just off my feed. I’m actually very copacetic about all this. Is that the iPod you had at the recovery unit?”
    “Yeah, I was listening to Tee Jolie Melton’s songs. ‘La Jolie Blon’ is on there.”
    “Let me see.” He picked up the iPod from the bar and began clicking through the contents. “There’re only a few songs on here: Will Bradley and Taj Mahal and Lloyd Price.”
    “Tee Jolie’s songs are on there, too.”
    “They’re not, Dave. Look for yourself.”
    I took the iPod back and disconnected it from the headphones and put it in my pocket. “Let’s take a ride up to St. Martinville,” I said.
    “What for?” he asked.
    “I know where Tee Jolie’s house is.”
    “What are we going to do there?”
    “I don’t know. You want to stay here and talk about football?”
    Clete looked at the bartender. “Wrap me up an oyster po’boy sandwich and a couple of Bud longnecks to go,” he said. “Sorry about the language. I’ve got an incurable speech defect. This is one of the few joints that will allow me on the premises.”
    Everybody at the bar was smiling. Tell me Clete didn’t have the touch.

I T WAS RAINING when we drove up the two-lane highway through the long tunnel of trees that led into the black district on the south end of St. Martinville. A couple of nightclubs were lit up inside the rain, and flood lamps burned in front of the old French church in the square and shone on the Evangeline Oak in back, but most of the town was dark except the streetlamps at the intersections and the warning lights on the drawbridge, under which the bayou was running high and yellow, the surface dancing with raindrops.
    Tee Jolie had grown up in a community of shacks that once were part of a corporate plantation. The people who lived there called themselves Creoles and did not like to be called black, although the term was originally a designation for second-generation colonials who were of Spanish and continental French ancestry and born in New Orleans or close proximity. During antebellum times, there was another group of mixed ancestry called “free people of color.” During the early civil rights era, the descendants of this group came to be known as Creoles, and some of them joined whites in resisting court-ordered school integration, a fact that always reminds me elitism is with us for the long haul.
    Tee Jolie had lived with her mother and younger sister in a two-bedroom cypress house on the bayou, one that had a rust-stained tin roof and pecan and hackberry trees and water oaks in front andclusters of banana plants that grew above the eaves and a vegetable garden in back and a dock on the bayou. When Clete and I drove into the yard, I didn’t know