DR10 - Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

their
game. The stove filled the room with a drowsy, controlled warmth and
the smell of shaving cream and aftershave lotion and testosterone.
    "My wife ain't gonna be working at the club no more," Cool
Breeze said.
    "Okay," Delahoussey said, his eyes concentrated on the row of
dominoes in front of him.
    The room seemed to scream with silence.
    "Mr. Harpo, maybe you ain't understood me," Cool Breeze said.
    "He heard you, boy. Now go on about your business," one of the
other men said.
    A moment later, by the door of his truck, Cool Breeze looked
back through the window. Even though he was outside, an oak tree
swelling with wind above his head, and the four domino players were in
a small room beyond a glass, he felt it was he who was somehow on
display, in a cage, naked, small, an object of ridicule and contempt.
    Then it hit him:
He's old. An old man like that,
one piece of black jelly roll just the same as another. So who give her
the dress and wrap the gold chain around her stomach
?
    He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his canvas coat. His
ears roared with sound and his heart thundered in his chest.
     
    HE WOKE IN THE middle of the night and
put on an overcoat and
sat under a bare lightbulb in the kitchen, poking at the ashes in the
wood stove, wadding up paper and feeding sticks into the flame that
wouldn't catch, the cold climbing off the linoleum through his socks
and into his ankles, his confused thoughts wrapped around his face like
a net.
    What was it that tormented him? Why was it he couldn't give it
words, deal with it in the light of day, push it out in front of him,
even kill it if he had to?
    His breath fogged the air. Static electricity crackled in the
sleeves of his overcoat and leaped off his fingertips when he touched
the stove.
    He wanted to blame Harpo Delahoussey. He remembered the story
his daddy, Mout', had told him of the black man from Abbeville who
broke off a butcher knife in the chest of a white overseer he caught
doing it with his wife against a tree, then had spit in the face of his
executioner before he was gagged and hooded with a black cloth and
electrocuted.
    He wondered if he could ever possess the courage of a man like
that.
    But he knew Delahoussey was not the true source of the anger
and discontent that made his face break a sweat and his palms ring as
though they had been beaten with boards.
    He had accepted his role as cuckold, had even transported his
wife to the site of her violation by a white man (and later, from Ida's
mother, he would discover the exact nature of what Harpo Delahoussey
did to her), because his victimization had justified a lifetime of
resentment toward those who had forced his father to live gratefully on
tips while their cigar ashes spilled down on his shoulders.
    Except his wife had now become a willing participant. Last
night she had ironed her jeans and shirt and laid them out on the bed,
put perfume in her bathwater, washed and dried her hair and rouged her
cheekbones to accentuate the angular beauty of her face. Her skin had
seemed to glow when she dried herself in front of the mirror, a tune
humming in her throat. He tried to confront her, force the issue, but
her eyes were veiled with secret expectations and private meaning that
made him ball his hands into fists. When he refused to drive her to the
nightclub, she called a cab.
    The fire wouldn't catch. An acrid smoke, as yellow as rope,
laced with a stench of rags or chemically treated wood, billowed into
his face. He opened all the windows, and frost speckled on the
wallpaper and kitchen table. In the morning, the house smelled like a
smoldering garbage dump.
    She dressed in a robe, closed the windows, opened the air lock
in the stove by holding a burning newspaper inside the draft, then
began preparing breakfast for herself at the drainboard. He sat at the
table and stared at her back stupidly, hoping she would reach into the
cabinet, pull down a bowl or cup for him, indicate in some way they
were still