Lousiana Hotshot

flight in her stomach. She thought that she was frightened, that she somehow remembered these sensations, as if she were having another déjà vu— but frightened of what, she couldn’t imagine. She was in a nice restaurant with nice Darryl Boucree, beloved by everyone from his students to Miz Clara. It was hard to imagine anything safer.
    Her first thought was to hide what was happening to her. She drank some beer, hoping to open up her throat, and it worked, a little. But it made her feel queasy.
    Darryl looked at her critically. He said, “You don’t look so good.”
    She forced a quarter smile. “Just tired. I think I better go home.” It wasn’t a real date, anyhow— just a friendly supper. Darryl had a gig in a while, and she was planning an evening in cyberspace.
    Once they were in the car, her throat closed again, and her eyes felt oddly tight. She didn’t speak, which was unusual for her, and later she couldn’t remember anything about the ride home. When he pulled up at Miz Clara’s, she turned to kiss him and felt herself withdrawing instead. She went through the motions rather than give away the fact that anything was wrong, but once in the door, the flood began. She’d barely gotten to her room before the sobs rolled out along with the tears. It was exactly the same as before— like being possessed. What the hell was wrong with her?
    She lay for a long time on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, not only unable to answer the question, but even to wrestle with it. When she finally stirred an hour later, she couldn’t name a single thing she’d thought about. Yet she hadn’t been asleep or even in some state of semi-consciousness. The whole time she’d been dimly aware of her mother puttering in the kitchen, turning off the kitchen light, turning on the television— and then the rhythmic bursts from the TV itself.
    She turned on the computer and went to Baron Tujague’s website, which was considerably more elaborate than Tony Tino’s. Carefully, she read every word, and not once did the word “Toes” appear. Next, she did a search on Tujague and printed out everything that had been written on him in the last year or two— about a pound and a half of material to read at her leisure. She scanned it quickly, noticing that it was all celebrity puff stuff— no reports of arrests or other nastiness.
    She had drunk no more than half her beer at supper, and, frankly didn’t care much for beer at the best of times. A nice glass of wine was what she wanted now— something to take the edge off the weirdness her psyche was putting her through. She rummaged in the kitchen, hollering out to the living room. “Mama, you want a glass of wine?”
    “Why, I b’lieve I would,” Miz Clara answered in a tone of delicious surprise, as if she just couldn’t imagine anything quite so odd and yet so delightful. “It’s so hot in here.”
    She was fanning herself when Talba brought her the wine, though it wasn’t hot in the least. But Miz Clara was a church lady; a glass of wine was at least as much a sin as chocolate cake for dessert.
    “Mama, have I ever been to a funeral before?”
    Her mother wore neither wig nor scarf, just a close-cropped cap of wiry hair. She had on a kind of muumuu thing with short, bell-shaped sleeves and her favorite floppy slippers. The elegant wineglass seemed to perk up the outfit. “Why you askin’ me? If you don’t know, who does?”
    “I mean when I was tiny, maybe. Something I might not remember.”
    “You ain’t never been to no funeral.” Miz Clara spoke huffily, as if this was a subject simply not discussed in the Wallis home. And yet she and Talba’s Aunt Carrie dissected in detail every funeral they ever went to.
    “Mama, why don’t you ever talk about my father?”
    “What? What’d you say to me?” She was way beyond huffy. She was mad. Really mad.
    Talba couldn’t remember it, but maybe that was a subject that really had been forbidden. She stood her ground. “I said why don’t you ever talk about my father?”
    Miz Clara turned back to the television, her mouth set tight, teeth clenched so no crumb of information, however tiny, could possibly escape. “Ain’t worth talking about,” she said.
    “Would you just answer one thing for me? Is he dead or alive?”
    Miz Clara whirled, nearly knocking over the wine she’d set down on the table next to her chair. “What’s wrong with you, girl? You ain’t
got
no father. Don’t make no