Thrown-away Child

the world.”
    “You don’t hear that kind of lovely song much these days. Sing me the rest of it, Ophelia, will you?”
    Ophelia sang:
     
    Jolie âme, jolies yeux
    Tellement douce et gentile
    T’es la reine de mon Coeur
    La raison de la vie.
     
    When she was through, Ophelia agreed with Miss LaRue about the shoddiness of contemporary popular music. “Anymore, nothing sounds like what you’d want staying in your heart. And you surely can’t huff any of that type of shit, you should pardon my French.”
    “You’re quite right, dear. I see all these kids carrying radios big as an ice box—right up on their shoulder wherever they go, rattling the walls with that horrible noise they put in their ears. Most of them are deaf to a normal voice.” Miss LaRue set down her parasol on the raft beside her, dipped her hands into the water, and paddled toward a shady side of the pool. “No offense, dear, but most of these kids with the big radios are colored.”
    “S’not my kind of music. Why’d I take offense?” Miss LaRue shrugged her bony shoulders, and crossed her long legs at the ankles. She reached for her eyeglasses, which were usually on a chain around her neck. She had forgotten about them this morning.
    “Tell me,” she said, “what’s my Hippo doing up there on the balcony? I can’t see.”
    “Oh, you know—eating his beignets, pretend he ain’t listening. Your mister, he sure do love the beignets.”
    “I swear, every one of them he ever ate is hanging on his belly and hips.” Miss LaRue made a noise with her lips to express disgust. “Beignets are mostly lard.“
    “My Lucius, he the same way. He just love his butter. Everything he like me to make, it go one stick of butter for this, two sticks of butter for that. Sometime he get a mind to pare himself down, all he got to do is lay off the butter and the flab going just melt clean off him.”
    “Hippo’s never going to change.”
    “I expect not. Ain’t nothing on earth more stubborn than a old white man.” Ophelia resumed her sweeping- “No offense, Miz El.”
    Hippo’s cellular telephone rang. Both the women heard, and looked up at the alderman in the Fu Manchu chair.
    “What?” Hippo answered. Then he spent about a minute listening, after which he said, “I don’t like hearing that. I surely do not!”
    “What’s he doing up there now? He agitated over something?” Miss LaRue was not so much worried by what she sensed as she was eager for details. “Sounds like be might have a gasket ripe for blowing.”
    “That is just not to be tolerated!” When Hippo pronounced the explosive t in tolerated, the powdered sugar on the beignet he was about to plop into his mouth went flying up into a little cloud. He went ahead and ate the naked beignet anyhow, and at the same time continued scolding his caller. “You so damnably dumb! Why, I’d do better having my old Ava and her hairy white crotch take over!”
    “Ophelia... ?”
    “I’m looking at him, Miz El, I’m looking.“
    “Looking’s one thing. What’s he saying?”
    “Hush now, ma’am.” Ophelia, irritated at missing a line, waved her arms, then remembered her place. “No offense. I’m trying my best to get a sense of it.“
    “Well...” Miss LaRue’s voice trailed off. She paddled into a patch of sunlight.
    Hippo barked, “You just take care of bidness! Hear me?” This time, Hippo’s explosive b and d brought up a few particles of sugarless beignet that had not managed to make it down to the pit of his belly. He put a hand to his mouth and belched.
    “Ophelia... ?”
    “Miz El, I think we here.” Ophelia staggered to a poolside chair and sat down. She pressed a hand to her forehead, wearily. “I believe we coming on the right time.”
    “Is it your knees?”
    “Ankles, too. They all starting to ache up.”
    “When can we start, Ophelia? Tonight?”
    “You sure that what you want?”
    “Oh, I’m very sure.”
    “You remember what I say happens.”
    “I remember.”
    “ ’Bout the sound he going to make, I mean. You can forget little Cajun songs, but once you hear it, you ain’t never going to forget that sound!”
    “I told you, Ophelia—I am sure.”
     

TWENTY-SEVEN

     
    “We got us complications. Godammit, I knew there’d be complications!”
    “Everything’s going to be perfectly all right according to the plan.”
    “Oh, yeah? What’d you think if I told you there’s kin of some visiting New York City detective on the