Lafayette Lyrics

He stood in my way, and it was deliberate. Undoubtedly he was on drugs. Threads of saliva ran over a manically grinding chin.

“Heard,” he said. It was more of a gurgle.

I had no desire to know what he had heard. I was at the rest area on the Atchafalaya Swamp Bridge, aka the Louisiana Airborne Memorial Bridge, a peculiar stretch of Interstate 10. I wanted to get to Lafayette to talk to Foreman. By now I considered him a ghost dog too; I was planning a report on the subject. I was tracking a version of the South no one in Germany knew anything about. Once again I would be the first, and the prospect sharpened the hunter’s fever.

There was a monument on the grounds honoring the 82nd Airborne Division. I associated the hick with a Dodge pickup that had cages on the truck bed. His cap said Detroit. He struck me as the ideal casting choice for the organizer of dogfights. Spit foamed at the corners of his mouth like dish soap. I was certain I could not get through to him. I believed he perceived me as a hallucination. How had he even made it this far? The bridge is nearly thirty kilometers long.

He tried speaking again, but some inner movement was stronger. I saw it rising up inside him; it produced a childlike astonishment. Someone called a name—I thought I heard Louis. A girl, no older than twelve, approached. She fixed her gaze on me as though I were the threat. She seemed to assume a complicated situation and to hold me responsible for it. She reached the hick, took him by the hand, and spoke to him in français cadien. The hick allowed himself to be led away without resistance. The girl turned around and shot me an animalistically furious look. Back home in the woods she would have shot me. I had been right about the Dodge. The girl climbed into the driver’s seat and drove the truck off the lot like an old redneck.

Foreman was not happy to see me. I was disturbing his cherished solitude. He probably talked to himself out loud. My interest in him struck him as absurd. He was filled with the mission of making a noiseless exit from life in the foreseeable future.

And yet there were traces of human contact that Foreman tried to conceal: a cave painting of affection. The man was not alone—at least not according to any strict definition of alone. There was an apple pie sitting on a sideboard, though not that Foreman offered me a slice. The pie was no mere formality. Someone had baked it with family feeling and cheerfulness. As I said, Foreman’s relatives, descendants of the swamp people, shimmered in the colors of an expanding subculture. Foreman made the claims of a lost sheep, but the condition of the property told a different story. This place was not being run by one man alone.

“As one can tell it,” writes Christa Wolf, “that is not how it was.” I could have asked Lance, perhaps even Mortimer, about Foreman. But I had driven to Lafayette without making inquiries. There were certain things I wanted to hear from Foreman first.

A manner of speech, a tone—strike the wrong note and the whole thing is ruined, and you never uncover its secret. Just as I associated Lance with firearms and Mortimer with lethally empty hands, I thought of knives and snares when it came to Foreman. Foreman’s totem animal was the snake. In his living room stood a shrine dedicated to his army years. Every exhibit had been polished to a high shine. I could not imagine Foreman ever going around with a polishing cloth. He had done his time in Korea. At least I got a mug of malt coffee more or less slammed down at my feet. It cost Foreman a hell of a lot to be friendly. As though friendliness would tear his back open.

I saw more and more clearly that he was respected. There had to be a community in which Foreman played a role. Maybe at night he tore the heads off chickens and drove disciples into ecstasy—who could know such things in daylight? Suddenly the disfigured waitress stood in the doorway.

See also: Genetic Short Circuit

Once Foreman and I got close enough that we ate jambalaya together while rats celebrated weddings beneath the floorboards. The place smelled like an old scrub rag. Somewhere nearby an enormous carcass was certainly rotting. I still enjoyed the food. The waitress was dramatically scarred, as though she had survived a plane crash. I asked Foreman about it. For the first time he answered in complete sentences:

“She hurt herself. She did it so she wouldn’t go crazy. As little as you understand that, you understand the South.”

“I didn’t know you had company,” she said simply.

Foreman growled in her direction, and the woman let out a sound of delight.

“I suppose I’ll have to introduce myself,” she said in an urban tone. “My name is Martha. I’m a friend of Foreman’s.”

“Did you bake the pie?” I asked.

“He didn’t offer you any, did he? Wait here, I’ll get you a piece.”

It was obvious that Martha not only took no offense at Foreman, she positively worshipped him. That only deepened my suspicion that Foreman was hiding a great deal.

Martha wore a sarong, a Caribbean garment. Yellow was the dominant color, a whipping yellow that worked narratively upon the senses.

Martha served me a slice. The pie itself was a denial of isolation. Halved apples soaked in cinnamon had been baked into it. A roof of sugar collapsed at the first touch of the fork.

Martha’s appearance reminded me of a story that had made it difficult for me to fall asleep as a boy. The story concerns a traveler who is taken captive in a desert. They cut out his tongue and place a stone on the wound. The man descends into madness, but the wound heals. They keep him in a pit, leading him around now and then like a dog. His captors live a sparse cave existence in karst country. Hardly even a thistle grows there. They keep goats in a profoundly miserable condition, and the goats are tended by slaves. The slaves wear little bells on iron collars. They are simply small, while their masters, without exception, all scrape the two-meter mark. The masters are robbers by profession, and so effective at it that no higher authority has ordered a punitive expedition in a very long time. One night they summon the mutilated man to a religious ceremony in a cave. The hero discovers drawings on the walls depicting a water-rich life full of crocodiles and wading birds. During the ceremony the hero undergoes a transformation that turns him into the mute bearer of a joyful message.

I always found the ending of the story too optimistic, but the motif of the enslaved man’s special position fascinated me. His exotic origins spare him the fate of a goatherd without human rights. You cannot imagine the lives of these herdsmen as bleak enough. The folk community humiliates them. Sometimes they are degraded from morning till night. For the master race this is what television is for us. There is almost nothing to do. So what do the gentlemen do? They squat in the shade, masturbate their muzzle-loaders, and watch the younger generation torment the slaves. The free men have no functions other than to sire and to kill. And then Martha came around the corner, and I saw not merely my memories of that story in color; rather, it felt as though Martha herself were watching the same film.

“Would you like another piece? It would make me happy,” Martha encouraged me. Her scars had red edges that, in certain moods of light, looked like ornamental trim.

I didn’t want any more pie. The peasant living room might well have received its first furnishings in the 1860s. A hunting scene on the wall still suited the tastes of reluctantly reunified Germans. Foreman had fallen asleep.

I asked, “Do you know what a ghost dog is?”

“What do you know about ghost dogs?” she asked in return.

“I know two, and I’m hoping Foreman is the third I can ask questions. In Germany nobody knows anything about ghost dogs.”

“Maybe I can help.”

As unsecured as a lover, I descend into everyone’s mine.

I am inclined toward gullibility. At first I believe everything. Which means I believe nothing. But I do not know that. Only hours after an encounter do my doubts begin orchestrating the balance sheet. While the person I portrayed still imagines himself in possession of my approval, my system is already chopping him to pieces. Then he wonders what he ends up reading about himself. I wonder too. Presumably I am gullible even toward myself.

Intimacy with Martha seemed inevitable. I regarded it as initiation. Martha experienced the process as decipherment. She wanted to find me out. Naturally she could not grant her everyday life the mythical significance with which I wanted to charge my report. Martha was a Black woman with Slavic features; the delta sweated out the emanations of a migration of peoples. She reached for a Marlboro. The bed might have stood in a brothel around 1900. Above us the fan turned lazily. I did not believe the course of events escaped Foreman.

Martha remained unconcerned. She probably found me cute. Yet my reptile brain had already hauled her onto the dissecting table. She brought me a glass of water with the swing of a victor. There lay the prey like an unsuspecting child. (A whitebread boy with an accent like jam.)

I drove a Ford F-150 pickup; the model had only been on the market for weeks. The sun hammered against the windshield. Martha had suggested the excursion. By now I already knew quite a bit. The first ghost dogs had attracted attention in the 1870s as an ethnic and social fringe phenomenon. They may have existed for centuries. In every generation they were people with difficulties adapting, people who disregarded fixed notions of belonging and legality.

The Ford smelled of fresh registration. Martha’s broad-seated thighs opened into an inviting triangle. I considered her sincere and yet had no doubt about her willingness to hand me over to the knife under certain circumstances. I stood at the provisional end of a long chain of successful omnivores. The air smelled of evening, salt, and pine. We passed through the Atchafalaya Basin; refineries in the marshlands burned off gas picturesquely.

“Let’s turn back,” Martha asked.