The Next Step in the Dance

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Also by Tim Gautreaux

Praise

Copyright

For Florence and Minos

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank John and Renee Grisham, whose support of the Southern Writer in Residence program at the University of Mississippi enabled me to revise this novel. My wife, Win-borne, and my children, Robert and Tom, deserve credit for their patience and support. For advice on the manuscript, I owe a debt to both Reagan Arthur and Peter Matson. I would also like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and Southeastern Louisiana University for their support.

One

The electric sign on the roof of Tiger Island Bank showed a temperature of eighty-eight degrees at 9:00 P.M. When Colette got out of the tellers’ meeting, she glanced up at it and frowned. She drove the few blocks to her rent house and parked in the front yard, which smelled of the tall, bitter weeds that made her nose itch. It was the last Wednesday of the month, the night she had to stay late for the bald man from Baton Rouge to come and explain computers to the girls who worked behind the worn marble counters of the old bank. The bald man was tall, with a long neck like a marsh hen, and the only thing she remembered about his talk was his Adam’s apple going up and down like a bony elevator for words. She went into the small wooden house and sat on the sofa, brushing grass seed off her dark panty hose. Her husband had promised a week ago that he would cut the lawn. The phone rang, and it was Aunt Nellie Arnaud calling from her car phone.

“Colette?”

“Yes.” She pictured Aunt Nellie cruising through town in her old white Lincoln, an explosion of bleached hair brushing the roof.

“Paul’s not there, is he?”

She sighed. “Now what?”

“Well, I don’t want to spread gossip.”

Colette straightened her narrow back. “What?”

“I just passed the Silver Bayou Drive-In and saw him and a young woman turning there.”

She made a face, remembering that her aunt did not trust men in general. “You sure?”

“A fact is a fact.”

“It wasn’t his sister, Nan?”

Her aunt laughed long and loud. She had buried three husbands. “Colette,” she keened. “Colette.”

Colette could imagine her aunt accelerating toward Beewick, shaking her head. She yelled into the phone. “He’s done a lot of things, but not that.” Her aunt was gone in a stuttering crackle of static, and Colette looked around at the paneling and the dusty venetian blinds. She’d been married a year and a half and had hoped to do better than this by now. Paul, her husband, worked like a mule, but he also thought like a mule and pulled his plow in a straight line. He was a machinist and wanted to be a machinist. Ambition was not his long suit. His picture grinned from the top of the television, a big face, not bad-looking, the best fish in the pond, people said. But Colette read Cosmopolitan and Woman’s World and had begun to think that Tiger Island was a small, muddy pond. She put her shoes back on and got into her little brown Toyota to buzz down River Street to where it became a thin strand of blacktop plunging through a sugarcane field. Two miles southeast of town, she saw the broad clamshell entrance of the Silver Bayou Drive-In, the back of the screen an expanse of corrugated tin disappearing into the misty night sky. Russell LaBat handed her a ticket with a bony, pale hand and gave her a long look.

“Russell, is Paul inside?”

“Paul who?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Pope John Paul.”

“Ask me no secrets, I’ll tell you no lies.” He put her three dollars into a cigar box and went back to reading a copy of News on Wheels.

She cruised the dim shell lanes in front of the viewing humps, her parking lights glowering, and in their jaundiced beams she saw people she knew, cousins even. Working the grassy lot from back to front, she finally spotted her husband’s ten-year-old pickup in the front row, where the grass hadn’t been cut in weeks and jonc cupon and thistle sprang hood-high. The movie was a colorful rectangle rising out of a grassy plain. She backed onto an earthen ramp behind him. Her husband was turned toward a woman she did not recognize, and before she could stop herself, she sprang out into the grass. Her high heels buckled under her as she crossed the shell lane and jerked open the truck’s door, banging it into the metal pole that held the speaker.

“What the hell are you doing with her?”

Her husband seemed drowsy and only mildly surprised. He opened his mouth but managed only a sleepy smile. His hand went up as if to support something he would say, but he said nothing. The young woman with him put an elbow on her armrest and lowered her forehead into a palm. Finally, Paul Thibodeaux said, “This is Lanelle. She said she couldn’t find anyone to come watch this movie with her.”

Colette squinted at the screen. “This is The Train. It’s about a million years old, you fool.” She thrust a vicious chin at Lanelle. “She can rent it for a dollar if that’s what she’s so hot to see.”

A middle-aged man with Elvis sideburns leaned out of the car next to them and called, “Colette, baby, I can’t hear the movie.”

She turned like a released spring. “My husband is out with another woman and you want me to talk like I’m in church?” She gestured to the weedy lot stippled with dew-covered cars. “Does this look like a church, Mr. Larousse? What is it, the First Church of Messing Around?” The man rolled up his window as a car on the next row flashed its lights and a voice from the dark piped, “Give it a rest.”

Her husband put his big machinist’s hands palm-up in his lap. “Hey, c’mon. We wasn’t gonna do nothing but watch a movie.”

“Yeah. Right now. What about later?” She was winding up, her voice sailing. The locals liked to look at Colette because she was slim and fair-skinned, with dark hair, a straight nose, and eyes like little rain-soaked pecans, but her voice when she was angry was a diamond on glass. “What about now?” she yelled. “I’m sitting at home picking cockleburs off my panty hose because you won’t cut the damned lawn, and you’re kicked back in the drive-in watching Nazi movies with another woman.”

A voice came from two rows back: “Colette, shut your trap, baby.” Her head snapped around, but the speaker did not show himself.

Paul leaned out to her. “You better not raise too much racket. This place is full of bad asses from Tonga Bend.”

“Since when am I scared of levee rats?”

Even the blond woman looked at her. “You want to land us all in the hospital, keep talking like that.”

Colette put her face into the truck. “Why are you with my husband?”

“I wanted to see this old movie and nobody would bring me.”

“It’s a damned depressing movie. Who would want to watch this crap?”

“Colette.” He put a hand on her arm. “I promise I’ll cut the grass tomorrow.”

The blonde leaned over. “Bring me back to the lounge, will you, baby?”

Colette brushed off his hand as she would a spider. “So you picked her up in a bar? You brought her here where half the town could see what you were doing while I was at work?”

On the other side of the pickup, a cowboy stood up in his convertible. “Y’all hush up, now.”

“Go back to Texas if you don’t like my voice,” Colette told him.

“I paid three dollars to get in this movie. You gonna give me my money back?” His huge white hat was blocking a little patch of screen, and the car behind him flashed its headlights, so the cowboy sat down.

“I’m just watching a movie with a friend,” Paul said.

Colette stared at the woman’s big hair, her bulging silk blouse, and wondered how many times he had been out with other women while she was wrapping pennies at the bank after hours. Her heels sank into the dirt of the Silver Bayou Drive-In as she gathered a lungful of air. “That does it. I’m throwing your lying ass out. The next time I see you, it’ll be in divorce court.”

Paul slid partway out of the truck. “We’re not doing anything, you hear? It’s you who’s got your head in a toilet.”

A woman two cars down yelled, “Flush it.” Russell LaBat began struggling through the high grass, carrying a flashlight. The PA from the storm-wasted snack shack and projection room came alive in a deep vacuum-tube thunder. “Will the group by dat Ford pickup please refrain from makin’ any more noises.” Two cars flashed their lights and four began honking.

Colette started to cry. “You bastard. If you come home tonight, I’ll shoot you in the foot.” He began to step all the way out of his truck, but she slammed the door and jammed his leg, ducking away as he cried out at the pain. In a second she was in her Toyota, spinning out of the clamshell lot, peppering the parked cars with little sun-bleached shells and raising an obscuring cloud before the patched screen, drawing yells, horn blasts, flashes, and curses from the dark ridges of automobiles fanning out toward Zeneau’s swamp.

* * *

Colette drove back to the rent house and fixed a cup of tea, which she drank smoking-hot, straight down. When she finished, she looked at the empty cup and wondered where the tea had gone. She scoured the dishes in a cloud of steam, as though punishing them for their sins, and then looked around for something else to do. In the bedroom, she began sorting the pile of laundry on the mattress. She pulled out Paul’s machine-shop coveralls and threw them against the wall. She folded her panties and brassieres as if they were presents and placed them in her underwear drawer. While she was folding her husband’s briefs, she began thinking about the last time they’d made love; she stared at the bed, slowly folding six pairs of drawers and six T-shirts, tucking the smooth cotton under an elbow. She fished out his socks, which were all white and exactly the same, except for a dark pair he’d worn to go dancing with her Saturday night and to Mass on Sunday morning. These last, she snatched in a strangling hand before putting his things away. One thing he could do well was dance twelve different variations of the jitterbug. In fact, Colette thought he danced too well, and too long, as if dancing were a drug and he could never get enough. He moved in such a way that other people watched him, and that was all right; she could even match him for a couple of hours. Then she would get tired of all the motion and sweat. Sometimes she would drive home and leave him at the Big Bayou Club or at the Cypress Dance Hall, and he would come in at 2:00 A.M., smelling like an ashtray.

The last thing she picked up in the bedroom was a pair of Thom McAn loafers, which showed her their heels from under the dust ruffle of the bed. Lifting the shoes, she remembered the first time they had danced together, when they were fifteen, in the high-school gym. The sophomores had hired a ragtag band out of New Orleans that played mostly disco, now and then throwing in a country tune or an oldie so the chaperones could pretend to dance. Paul had hung back against a cinder-block wall, eyeing suspiciously all the no-touch wiggling, shoulder shaking, and hand clapping. Since first grade, he’d been in the corner of Colette’s eye, but she’d had no reason to exchange more than two sentences with him. She’d seen him dance before, though. He was from a blue-collar family, and he’d told her once that he’d learned to dance from his younger uncles when the family would go out to the Big Gator on Saturday afternoons to eat boiled crabs, drink beer, and twirl to a jukebox loaded down with Van Broussard, Tommy McLain, Rod Bernard, and the Boogie Kings, a type of Cajun rhythm and blues fit only for medium-paced jitterbug or a stutter-stepped belly rub.

Before long, the band broke out with “Hello, Josephine” and she walked over and asked him to teach her the bob step. He’d given her a slow smile, as though she’d asked for a secret drink of whiskey. “You want to learn some real dancing, huh?” And as though he’d been waiting fifteen years for her to ask him for a lesson, he took just the fingertips of her right hand and showed her the pattern of the dance. She watched his glossy shoes as he taught her to count steps in her head. He told her how to hold her arm stiff when she rocked back on her heel before a spin, and then they practiced turning her right, then left, then a double turn, and finally a behind-the-back pass. She asked the band to play another one with the same beat, and the two of them actually danced this time among their shoulder-jerking friends and two jitterbugging chaperones trying to stay away from each other’s feet. Colette found it easy to move with him. When she turned and looked down, their steps matched; when she put out her hand, it went right into his on the downbeat. They didn’t talk that night, but they did dance.

It was two months before they were out on the floor again, at the Big Gator with his aunts and uncles, where he twisted his Neolite-soled loafers in the cornstarch and fed off the good moves she learned from him. He began hanging around her house, fixing things for her father. Colette admired a boy who could make broken things work again. She wondered what it would be like never to be defeated by the mystical world of machinery: dead hair dryers, buzzing light fixtures, snickering automobiles. He even repaired her music box, realigning a button-sized gear and oiling a hairspring with the tip of a toothpick. She liked his sense of humor, though she seldom laughed because of it. She valued it mostly because it meant he was smart. Smart people eventually went places, her mother told her, and Colette wanted to go places.

She threw the polished loafers into the closet and slammed the door on them, wondering where he was, what he had on his feet. It had to be his work boots. This somehow comforted her. At least he hadn’t been dancing with that person she’d found him with. She grabbed a silky rope of her long black hair. She looked at it and narrowed her eyes, thinking of the blond woman. “She can wash his greasy clothes,” she said aloud, putting a hand over her eyes.

Two

Sometimes Paul Thibodeaux’s judgment was faulty, but he had enough understanding of Colette to make him sleep at his grand-père’s old house on River Street. He told himself before he dozed off in the iron bed in the front room that Colette would cool down, and he could go by the house and smooth things over before she left for work. He was used to her anger, had learned already to endure it, knew that sometimes he deserved the sting of her voice. His wife wanted a better rent house with a paved driveway, not a mud hole dotted with a few clamshells. He would get around to looking in a couple of months, when they’d saved enough.