He frowned. “You want me to bring my shop foreman?”
“Don’t get nasty. I’ll take Clarisse.”
“Your cousin from the bank? The kind of soft one?”
“She joined an aerobics class. She’s a nice person.”
“Nice and big.”
“Hey, you want to talk to me?”
The phone seemed to glow in his hands. “Okay, okay. Where can we meet?”
It was a while before she said anything. “Big Gator. Tonight. They’ll have hot boiled crabs at seven.” She hung up.
The Big Gator. He wondered if he could call back and try to change her mind. The Big Gator was mostly an old folks’ dance hall, and between the noise from the Cajun band and the big bug zapper over the bar, it would be hard to carry on a conversation. He tried to think of a better place, maybe in the next town, but the whole region was much like Tiger Island, small villages spread out along the Chieftan River, peopled by Cajuns, Cajunized Germans, maudlin Italians, and a sprinkling of misplaced Bible Belt types, whom Paul’s grandfather called les cous rouges. Tiger Island was the most knuckle-knocked of the river towns: The only theater was the Silver Bayou Drive-In; the largest building was a metal shed where oil-field equipment was sandblasted. The best restaurant was in the Big Gator, next to the dance floor, where Nelson Orville’s band would sing French versions of old rock songs, accompanied by pawnshop guitars and a ten-button accordion. The favorite sport of the town’s young men was still fistfighting, which broke out as indiscriminately as swamp gas on Friday nights. Six thousand people lived inside the city limits, patronizing twelve churches and eighteen bars. Paul never could put his finger on it, but something about Tiger Island was slightly out of balance, a little too littered, sun-tortured, and mildewed. Most of the houses were old. A band of big weatherboard family places spread along River Street, but away from the levee, the houses were small, on small lots, as if they had been steamed and shrunk by the welding-hot morning sun and the daily afternoon thunderstorm.
Out on the machine-shop floor again, he pictured his wife and then the restaurant full of hotbloods from Tonga Bend and Pierre Part. All afternoon, he bit his cheek as he straightened the glaring blades on a tugboat’s bronze propeller.
After work he went to Bernstein’s, the only men’s store in town. In the old brick building on Dupuis Street, he bought an imitation designer shirt, violently striped. At his parents’ house he steamed the machine oil out of his skin and slapped on handfuls of his father’s spicy aftershave. Driving south on River Street, he came to the city limits, where the pavement dropped off with a bump into a wide shell road. He could see Colette from a great distance, waiting under the crimp-tin awning of the Big Gator, separate from and unlike everything around her. She wore a loose white blouse and tan slacks, her glossy dark hair waving down past the bone-white skin of her neck. Next to her was her cousin, Clarisse, slouching against the door frame like Marilyn Monroe. When he drove into the rutted parking lot, he saw a serpentine necklace lying against Colette’s skin, a golden reminder that she was the only drop-dead beautiful woman in Tiger Island. At twenty-three, she still owned the pearly glow of a child’s complexion, as though she had hardly changed from the girl he had first seen in kindergarten at St. Mary’s School.