Near the schoolyard, beige children pressed against the fence, gawking, and Desiree gripped her daughter’s hand again. She’d laid out Jude’s nicest outfit, a white dress with a pink pinafore, socks with lace trim, and Mary Janes. “Don’t you have something brown?” her mother had asked, lingering in the doorway, but Desiree ignored her, tying pink ribbons around Jude’s braids. Bright colors looked vulgar against dark skin, everyone said, but she refused to hide her daughter in drab olive greens or grays. Now, as they paraded past the other children, she felt foolish. Maybe pink was too showy. Maybe she’d already ruined her daughter’s chances of fitting in by dressing her up like a department store doll.
“Why they all lookin at me?” Jude asked.
“It’s just cause you new,” Desiree said. “They just curious about you.”
She smiled, trying to sound cheerful, but her daughter glanced warily toward the schoolyard.
“How long we stayin out here?” she asked.
Desiree knelt in front of her. “I know it’s different,” she said. “But it’s just for a little bit. Just until Mama figures some things out, okay?”
“How long’s a little bit?”
“I don’t know, baby,” Desiree finally said. “I don’t know.”
* * *
—
THE SURLY GOAT rose lazily on stilts, moss trees dripping onto the reddened roof. Desiree carefully picked around the muddy pathway just to find the first dilapidated step. A small town in the shadow of an oil refinery, with no picture show or nightclub or ballpark nearby meant one thing: an abundance of bored, rough men. Marie Vignes was the only person in Mallard who hadn’t seen a problem with this. Instead, she’d turned the farmhouse her parents left her into a bar, put her four sons to work cleaning glasses and hauling kegs, and on occasion breaking up fights. She’d planned to leave the bar someday to one of her sons, but by the time she died, they were all gone. The twins rarely saw her after their father’s funeral. Their mother had never wanted anything to do with that speakeasy or the unrefined woman it belonged to. The two women had been polite enough when Leon was there to smooth things over, but now that he was gone, there was no space for both of them and their grief.
So the twins only heard stories about how Marie Vignes used to serve whiskey to the roughest men in Mallard, how she kept a shotgun under the bar that she named Nat King Cole, and when the roughnecks started shoving over a game of poker or fighting about a woman, she’d pull out ol’ Nat and those angry men, normally unmoved by a woman in a housedress, turned as docile as altar boys. But when Desiree stepped inside the Surly Goat for the first time, she felt almost disappointed. She’d always imagined the bar as a magical place that would, somehow, remind her more of her father. Instead, it was nothing but a country dive.
She was at a bar in the middle of the afternoon because she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. She’d spent the morning jostling in the front seat of Willie Lee’s truck all the way to Opelousas. She wanted to apply for a job, she told him when she’d spotted him outside his shop, loading his truck for deliveries. Could he give her a ride into town? As the meat truck pulled farther from Mallard, she was thinking still about her daughter, glancing back at her as she’d disappeared inside the schoolhouse. Those thin shoulders, hands clenched tight at her sides.
“Where you need me to drop you off?” Willie Lee had asked.
“Just at the sheriff’s.”
“The sheriff’s?” He turned to look at her. “What business you got down there?”
“Told you. A job.”
He grunted. “You can find cleanin work closer to Mallard.”
“Not to clean.”
“Then what you aim to do at the sheriff’s?”
“Apply to be a fingerprint examiner,” she said.
Willie Lee laughed. “So you just gonna walk in there and say what?”
“That I want a job application. I don’t know why you’re laughing, Willie Lee. I been examining fingerprints for over ten years now and if I can do it for the Bureau, I don’t know why I can’t do it here.”
“I can think of a few reasons,” Willie Lee told her.
But hadn’t the world changed a little since she’d been gone? And hadn’t she walked into the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Department with all the confidence in the world? She had stepped right inside that grimy tan building, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and told the sheriff’s deputy, a portly man with sandy blond hair, that she wanted to apply for a job. “The Federal Bureau, did you say?” he’d asked, raising an eyebrow, and she allowed herself to feel hopeful. She sat in the corner of the waiting room, racing through the latent print examiner test, grateful for a thinking activity for once, not the type of thinking she had done lately—logistics, like how long her money would last—but real analytical thinking. She’d finished quick, the deputy said, laughing a bit in amazement, might have been a record. He pulled out the answer guide from a manila folder to check her work. But first, he glanced at her full application, and when he saw her address listed in Mallard, his gaze frosted over. He slid the answer key back in the folder, returned to his chair.
“Leave that there, gal,” he said. “No use wasting my time.”
Now she stepped inside the Surly Goat, passing under the welcome sign—COLD WOMEN! HOT BEER!—and pressed past a row of men in greasy coveralls to find an empty booth.
“Well, look what the cat drug in,” Lorna Hebert, the old barmaid, said. She dropped off a shot of whiskey that Desiree hadn’t even asked for.
“You don’t look too surprised to see me,” Desiree said. She’d been in town two days by now, of course everyone knew.
“Got to come home sometime,” Lorna said. “Now let me get a good look at you.”
In the darkness of the bar, she was still wearing her blue scarf. If Lorna noticed anything, she didn’t say so. She disappeared back behind the bar and Desiree downed the shot, comforted by the burn. She felt pathetic, drinking alone in the middle of the day, but what else could she do? She needed a job. Money. A plan. But those children staring at her daughter. The deputy dismissing her. Sam gripping her throat. She waved over Lorna again, wanting to forget it all.
One shot then another and she was already tipsy by the time she saw him. He was sitting at the end of the bar wearing a worn brown leather jacket, a dirty boot kicked up on the stool. The man beside him said something that made him smile into his whiskey. Those high cheekbones pierced her. Even after all those years, she would know Early Jones anywhere.
* * *
—