When I got back to New Iberia I showered, shaved, put on fresh clothes, and ate lunch with Bootsie in the backyard. I should have felt good about the day; it wasn't hot, like yesterday, the trees were loud with birds, the wind smelled of watermelons, the roses in my garden were as big as fists. But my eye registered all the wrong things: a fire burning in the middle of the marsh, where there should have been none; buzzards humped over a dead rabbit in the field, their beaks hooked and yellow and busy with their work; a little boy with an air rifle on the bank of the bayou, taking careful aim at a robin in an oak tree.
Why? Because we were on our way back to the specialist in Lafayette. The treatment of lupus, in our case, had not been a matter of finding the right medication but the right balance. Bootsie needed dosages of corticosteroid to control the disease that fed at her connective tissue, but the wrong dosage resulted in what is called steroid psychosis. For us her treatment had been like trying to spell a word correctly by repeatedly dipping a spoon into alphabet soup.
There were times I felt angry at her, too. She was supposed to avoid the sun, but I often came home from work and found her weeding the flower beds in shorts and a halter. When we went out on the salt to seine for shrimp, she would break her promise and not only leave the cabin but strip nude, dive off the gunnel, and swim toward a distant sandbar, until she was a small speck and I would have to go after her.
We got back from Lafayette at 4 Pm. with a half-dozen new prescriptions in her purse. I sat listlessly on the front porch and stared at the smoke still rising into the sky from the cypress trees burning in the marsh. Why had no one put it out, I thought.
"What's wrong, Dave?" Alafair said.
"Nothing, little guy. How you doing?" I put my arm around her small waist and pulled her against me. She had been riding her horse, and I could smell the sun in her hair and horse sweat in her clothes.
"Why's there a fire out there?"
"Dry lightning probably hit a tree during the night," I said. "It'll burn itself out."
"Can we go buy some strawberries for dessert?"
"I have to go by the office a few minutes. Maybe we'll go to town for some ice cream after supper. How's that?"
"Dave, did the doctor say something bad about Bootsie?"
"No, she's going to be fine. Why do you think that?"
"Why did she do that with those, what d'you call them, those things the doctor gives her?"
"Her prescriptions?"
"Yeah. I saw her dump her purse all over her bed. Then she wadded up all those 'scriptions. When she saw me she put them all back in her purse and went into the bathroom. She kept running the water a long time. I had to go to the bathroom and she wouldn't let me in."
"Bootsie's sick, little guy. But she'll get better. You just got to do it a day at a time. Hey, hop on my back and let's check up on Batist, then I have to go."
She walked up on the steps and then climbed like a frog onto my shoulders, and we galloped like horse and rider down to the dock. But it was hard to feign joy or confidence in the moment or the day.
The wind changed, and I could smell the scorched, hot reek of burnt cypress in the marsh.
I drove to the office, talked briefly with the sheriff about my visit to New Orleans, my search through biker bars for Eddy Raintree, and my conversation with Joey Gouza.
"You think he's pulling the strings on this one?" the sheriff said.
"He's involved one way or another. I'm just not sure how. He controls all the action in that part of Orleans Parish. The guys who beat up Clete wouldn't have done it without Gouza's orders or permission."
"Dave, I don't want you putting a stick in Gouza's cage again. If we nail him, we'll do it with a warrant and we'll work through New Orleans P.D. He's a dangerous and unpredictable man."
"The New Orleans families don't go after cops, sheriff. It's an old tradition."
"Tell that to Garrett."
"Garrett stumbled into it. In 1890 the Black Hand murdered the New Orleans police chief. A mob broke eleven of them out of the parish prison, hanged two from street lamps, and clubbed and shot the other nine to death. So cops like me get bribe offers and guys like Clete get brass knuckles."
"Don't start a new precedent."
I went to check my mailbox next to the dispatcher's office. It was five-fifteen. All I had to do was glance at my mail and thumb through my telephone messages and make one phone call, and I was sure that when Drew picked up the phone she would be calm, perhaps even apologetic for her distraught behavior of yesterday, and I would be on my way home to dinner.
Wrong.
The dispatcher had written Drew's message in blue ink across the first pink slip on the stack: Dave, don't you give a damn?
Her house was only two blocks from the drawbridge that I would cross on my way home, I told myself. I would give myself fifteen minutes there. Friendship and the past required a certain degree of obligation, even if it was only a ritualistic act of assurance or kindness, and it had nothing to do with marital fidelity. Nothing, I told myself.
She was barbecuing in the backyard. She was barefoot, and she wore white tennis shorts and a striped blue cotton shirt. Her face looked hot in the smoke, and the back of her tan neck was beaded with perspiration. The picnic table was covered with a flowered tablecloth, and in the middle of it was a washtub filled with crushed ice and long-neck bottles of Jax. The oaks and myrtle trees in the yard were full of fireflies, and through the gray trunks of the cypresses along the bank I could see some kids waterskiing behind a motorboat on Bayou Teche.
"Maybe I dropped by at the wrong time," I said.
"No, no, it's fine. I'm glad you're here," she said, waving the smoke away from her face. "Weldon and Bama are coming over at eight. Stay for supper if you like."
"Thanks. I have to be getting on in a minute. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you, but I had to go to New Orleans. Did a uniformed deputy come out yesterday?"
"Yes, he read magazines in my living room for three hours."
She picked up an opened bottle of beer from the table and drank out of it. The bottle was beaded with moisture, and I watched the foam run down inside the neck into her mouth.
"There's some soda in the refrigerator," she said.
"That's all right."
She put the bottle in her mouth again and looked at me.
I glanced away from her, then picked up a fork and flipped one of the chickens on the grill. The sauce piquante flared in the fire and steamed off in the breeze.
"Why didn't you report the break-in, Drew?"
"I don't know who it was. What good would it do?"
"Was it your father?"
"If he's alive, he'd have no interest in me."
"Do you think it was one of Joey Gouza's people?"
"That gangster in New Orleans?"
"That's right. I have a feeling he and Weldon are on a first-name basis."
"If I knew who it was, I'd tell you."
"Cut it out, Drew. You can't get strung out one day, then the next day go back to the deaf-and-dumb routine."
"I don't like you talking to me like that, Dave,"
"You made a point of relaying your feelings through the dispatcher. It's a small department, Drew. It's a small town."
"I don't have those kinds of concerns, thank God. I'm sorry if you do."
She took a bandana from her pocket and wiped the perspiration off the back of her neck. Her face suddenly looked soft and cool in the mauve-colored light off the bayou.
"I wasn't doing very well yesterday," she said. "Maybe I shouldn't have called you. I shouldn't have made it so personal, either."
"Look, when somebody creeps your house, it's for one of two reasons: either to steal from you or do you bodily harm, or perhaps both. When it happens, it frightens you. You feel violated. You want to take everything out of your closets and dresser drawers and wash them."
She unsnapped the cap on another bottle of Jax and sat down on the picnic bench. But she didn't drink from the bottle. She just kept drawing a line down through the moisture with her finger.
"I was in northern Nicaragua," she said. "When the contras 'violated' someone, they cut the person up in pieces."
"I was just trying to say that your reaction was understandable, Drew."
"I bought a pistol this morning. The next time someone breaks into my house, I'm going to kill the sonofabitch."
"That's not going to make the bigger problem go away. You're protecting Weldon from something, and at the same time you know if he doesn't get help, he's going to take a fall. I think you've got another problem, too. Weldon's done something that goes against your conscience, and somehow he's pulled you into it."
"I wish I could be omniscient. It must be wonderful to have that gift."
"Has he been mixed up with the contras?"
"No."
I looked her steadily in the eyes.
"I said no," she repeated.
"I'm going to say something you probably won't like. Weldon worked for the CIA. Air America flew in and out the Golden Triangle. Sometimes they ferried around warlords, who were in reality transporting narcotics. The station chiefs knew it, the pilots knew it. Weldon's been involved in some nasty stuff. Maybe it's time he took his own fall. I think he's a chickenshit for hiding behind his sister."
"Why'd you let everything go between us?"
"Excuse me?"
"You were talking about chickenshit. I thought you were the sun coming up in the morning. That's what I thought you were."
I felt the skin of my face tighten in the humid air.
"I went to Vietnam. Do you remember what you thought about people who went to Vietnam?" I said.
"That wasn't it at all, and you know it. You blew it with Bootsie, and I was 'just passing through. That's what chickenshit means."
"You're wrong."
She took a drink from the bottle and looked away toward the bayou so I couldn't see her face.
"I always respected you," I said. "You got upset yesterday because under it all you have a tender heart, Drew. Nobody is expected to be a soldier every day of his life: I start every other day with a nervous breakdown."
Her face was still turned away from me, but I could see her back shaking under her shirt.
I put my hand lightly on her shoulder. Her fingers came up and covered mine, rested there a moment, then she lifted my hand up and released it.
"It's time for you to go, Dave," she said.
I didn't reply. I walked across the thick Saint Augustine grass, through the shadows and the tracings of fireflies in the trees. When I turned and looked back at her, I didn't see a barefoot woman pushing at her eyes in the smoke but a little Cajun girl of years ago whose bare legs danced in the air while a switch whipped across them.
Early the next morning I sent two uniformed deputies to check the missions and the shelters in Iberia and Lafayette parishes for a man who had been disfigured in a fire. I also told them to check the old hobo jungles along the S.P. tracks.
"What do we do when we find him?" one deputy said.
"Ask him to ride down with you."
"What if he don't want to come?"
"Call me and I'll come out."
"Half the guys in that hobo camp look like their mothers beat on them with a baseball bat."
"This guy's face looks like red rubber."
"Can we take him out to lunch?" He was grinning.
"How about getting on it?"
"Yes, sir."
Then I called Clete's hospital room in New Orleans, but was told by a nurse that he was in X-ray. I asked her to have him call me collect when he got back to his room. Fifteen minutes later I was drinking coffee, eating a doughnut, and looking out the window at a black man who was selling rattlesnake watermelons and strawberries off the back of his pickup truck, when my phone extension rang. It was Weldon Sonnier.
"What's the idea of leaning on my sister?" he said.
"I think you've got it turned around."
"What did you say to her?"
I set my doughnut down on a napkin.
"I think that's none of your business," I said.
"You'd damn well better believe it is."
"Then why don't you stop dumping your garbage in her life?"
"Listen, Dave-"
"I got a bribe offer from an anonymous letter writer. This guy mentioned your name. He also said you're a prick and a welsher."
He was silent.
"Then I talked with Joey Gouza. He also called you a welsher."
"Consider the source."
"The interesting question is why I keep seeing or hearing the word 'welsher' when your name is mentioned."
"When did you see Gouza?"
"None of your business."
"He's a candidate for a lobotomy. I wouldn't mash on his oysters."
"Why are you mixed up with Gouza?"
"Who says I know him? The guy's notorious. Gouza is to New Orleans what monkey flop is to a zoo."
"Weldon, the real problem is you've tracked through your own shit and you're laying it off on other people. I think you've put your sister in jeopardy. In my opinion that's a lousy thing to do."
"Yeah? Is that right? Maybe if you ever get your nose out of the air long enough, I'll clue you in on the facts of life down in the tropics."
"I think you've sought out the trouble in your life. Nobody forced you to fly for Air America. You were dirty in Indo-China, I think you're dirty now."
"I wish I had the patent on righteousness. I guess you never called in any 105s on a ville. Stay the fuck away from my sister if you can't handle it any better than you did yesterday."
He hung up. This time I was the one whose words and anger were caught in my throat like a tangle of fish hooks.
Unconsciously I wadded up a sheet of paper on top of my desk and threw it toward the wastebasket, then realized it was my time log for my paycheck.
It was just after one o'clock and it had started to rain again when Clete returned my call. I had opened my windows, and the wind blew a fine spray through the screens.
"Can you come to New Orleans this evening?" he asked.
"I was coming tomorrow."
"How about today?"
"What's up?"
"I got some information on Bobby Earl that might lead us to those farts who worked me over."
"Wait a minute, where are you?"
"At home."
"The hospital cut you loose?"
"I cut myself loose. Somehow the smell of bedpans just doesn't go together with mashed potatoes and boiled carrots. Forget about the hospital. Look, you remember Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater?"
"The bondsmen?"
"That's right. I chase down jumpers for them sometimes. So I called them this morning to see if they might have some work for me, since I don't have any medical insurance and my hospital bill is a nightmare. But these guys are also a gold mine of information on the lowlifes of New Orleans. So when I had Nig on the phone I asked him what he knew about the buttwipes who put stitches all over my head. No help there, though. In fact, he said he thought Raintree and Fluck weren't around the city anymore, because when they're in town you hear about it. Fluck in particular. Evidently he likes beating the shit out of people.
"So I asked Nig what kind of action Bobby Earl might be involved in, and he told me this interesting story. Nig went a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond for this broad over in Algiers. The broad got nailed with four kees of pure Colombian nose candy. But Nig's not worried about her. She's got a high-priced lawyer, it's her first bust, and she knows she can cut a deal and not do any time, so Nig's money is safe. It's her two brothers who are the problem. Nig put up big bucks to get them out on a robbery beef, and they both skipped on him.
"Smart businessman that he is, Nig tells the broad that she either delivers up her brothers or he yanks her bond and she waits for her trial in the parish jail. Which is not what she envisioned for herself, because this broad is one beautiful hot-assed piece of equipment who the bull dykes will cannibalize. So Nig thinks he's got her and she'll have both her brothers in his office in twenty-four hours. But the broad pulls one on Nig that he doesn't expect.
"She says if he messes with her bond, threatens her again, or gets in her face about anything, she'll have a bed time chat with Bobby Earl, and Willie and Nig's state license is going to be hanging out in the breeze. Nig checked it out. She's Bobby Earl's regular punch across the river. Once a week he's at her pad like clockwork. She brags it around among the lowlifes that she fucks him cross-eyed on the ceiling."
"I'm not following you, Clete. Who cares? This doesn't get us any closer to Fluck, Gates, or Raintree. Tell Nig to give his story to the Picayune about election time."
"Here's the rest of it. Nig says the broad's brothers are bikers and they were both in the AB in Angola and Huntsville."
"I don't know if that's a big lead."
"You got anything else? It's Thursday. Nig says Thursday is poontang night for Bobby in Algiers. We tail him over there and see what happens. Come on, Bobby Earl's an amateur. We'll make drops of blood pop on his forehead."
I looked out at the rain denting the trees and thought for a moment. The rain was blowing across the truck awning of the black man selling strawberries and watermelons, and in the south, against a black sky, lightning was striking against the Gulf.
"All right," I said.
"Why all the thought?"
"No reason. I'll be at your apartment in about three hours."
Clete had enough problems of his own and didn't need to know everything about a police investigation, I told myself.
I called Bootsie and told her that I had to go to New Orleans, but I promised to be back that night, no matter how late it was. I meant it, too.
We used Clete's battered Plymouth for the tail. It was 7:30, and we were parked a block down the street from Bobby Earl's driveway; the sky was still black with clouds and rainwater ran high and dark in the gutters. Out on Lake Pontchartrain I could see the lighted cabins of a yacht rocking in the swell. Clete smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke out his window into the rain-flecked air. He wore his porkpie hat over the scalped divots and stitches in his head, and a purple-and-white-striped shirt and seersucker trousers that rode up high on his ankles. He kept rubbing the back of his thick neck and craning his head.
"Is something wrong?" I asked.
"Yeah, there is. I hurt from head to foot. Man, I must be getting old to let punks like that take me down."
"Sometimes you lose."
"You're always quoting Hemingway to me. Do you know what he told his kid when his kid asked something about the importance of being a good loser? He said, 'Son, being a good loser requires one thing-practice.' "
"Clete, we do it by the numbers tonight."
"Who said different? But you got to make 'em sweat, mon. When they see you coming, something inside them should try to crawl away and hide."
"There he goes. Try to stay a block behind him," I said.
Clete started up the Plymouth's engine. The rusted-out muffler, which was wired to the frame with coat hangers, sounded like a garbage truck's. The white Chrysler headed up the street with its lights on and turned at the corner toward Lakeshore Drive.
"Don't worry, he's not going to make us," Clete said. "Our man's got his mind on getting his Johnson serviced. I've got to scope out this broad. Nig says she looks like a movie star. When I was in Vice-"
"He's not going to Algiers. He's turning the wrong way."
"He's probably picking up some rubbers."
"Clete-"
"I didn't drag you down here just to fire in the well. Take it easy."
We watched the Chrysler speed down the wet boulevard along the lakefront, then slow and turn through the iron gates of the yacht club. The taillights disappeared down a palm-lined drive that led to an enormous white glass-domed building by a golf course. Clete pulled to the curb and stared glumly through the windshield. The waves out on the lake were dark green and blowing with strips of froth. He breathed loudly through his nose.
"It's all right," I said.
"The hell it is. I'm going to take that cocksucker down."
"We don't need him to talk to the girl."
"I don't know where she is. He meets her in different bars, then they go to a motel."
"We'll give it a little while. Maybe he'll head over to Algiers later."
"YeA, maybe," he said. His eyes moved over the rolling fairways and oak trees, the parking lot in front of the main building, the sailboats rising and falling in their slips.
"There's two or three exits to this place. We'd better park inside. I'm going to have a talk with Nig later about credibility. That's the problem with this PI stuff, you've got about the same clout as the lowlifes. I always feel like I'm picking up table scraps."
We drove through the gate and parked at the back of the lot, where we could see the Chrysler two rows away, under a sodium lamp. Clete reached into the back seat for his Styrofoam cooler, pulled out two fried-oyster poor-boy sandwiches, a can of Jax for himself, and a Dr. Pepper for me. He kept brushing crumbs off his shirtfront while he ate.
When he finished a beer he crushed the can in his huge hand, threw it out onto the parking lot, and snapped open another one. He squinted one eye at me.
"Dave, have you got something else on the agenda?" he said.
"Not really."
"You're not going to see Joey Meatballs again and forget to invite your old partner to the party, are you?"
"Gouza doesn't rattle. We're going to have to take down somebody around him."
"It's been tried before. They're usually a lot more afraid of Joey than they are of us. I heard he busted out a snitch's teeth in Angola with a ballpeen hammer. Every punk and addict and pervert in New Orleans knows that story, too."
"How heavy do you figure he's into the crack trade?"
"He's not. It's pieced off too many times before it gets to the projects. Gouza's on the other end. Big shipments, pure stuff, out of Florida or South America. I hear his people distribute to maybe four or five guys in Orleans Parish, they make their profit on quantity, then they're out of the chain with minimum risk. Even the greaseballs won't go into the welfare projects. I had to go after a jumper for Nig at the St. Thomas. Two kids on the roof filled up a thirty-gallon garbage can with water and dropped it on me, bottom end down. It missed me by a foot and flattened a kid's tricycle like a half-dollar… But you didn't really answer my question, noble mon. I think you've got something else on the dance card and you're not cutting ole Cletus in on it."
"This case has been all dead ends, Clete. When I learn something, I'll tell you. My big problem is the Sonniers. I feel like locking them all up as material witnesses."
"Maybe it's not a bad idea. Taking showers with child molesters and mainline bone smokers helps get your perspective clear sometimes."
"I couldn't make it stick. They weren't actually witness to anything."
"Then let them live with their own shit."
"I'm still left with a dead cop."
We sat for a long time in the rain. The band of cobalt light on the horizon gradually faded under the rim of storm clouds, and the take grew dark and then glazed with the yellow reflection of ballroom lights in the club. I could taste salt in the wind. I pulled my rainhat down over my eyes and fell asleep.
I see Bootsie when she's nineteen, her hair as bright as copper on the pillow, her nude body as pink and soft as a newly opened rose. I put my head between her young breasts.
When I awoke the rain had stopped completely, the moon had broken through a rip in the clouds over the lake, and Clete was not in the car. I could hear orchestra music from the ballroom. Then I saw him, in silhouette, his wide back framed in the opened driver's door of Bobby Earl's Chrysler, his elbows cocked, both his arms pointed down toward his loins. He rotated his head on his neck as though he were standing indifferently at a public urinal. Even at that distance I could see the spray splashing on the dashboard, the steering wheel, the leather seats. Clete shook himself, flexed his knees, and zipped his fly. He cupped his Zippo in his hands, lit a cigarette, and puffed it in the corner of his mouth as he walked back toward the car and squinted up approvingly at the clearing sky overhead, "I don't believe it."
"You got to let a guy like Bobby know you're around," he said, slamming the door behind him. "Ali, lookie there, our man scored after all. I think he's one of these guys who plans on marrying up and screwing down."
Bobby Earl walked across the parking lot in a white suit charcoal shirt, and white-and-black striped tie. A red-headed woman in a sequined evening gown held on to his arm and tried to step across the puddles in her high heels. Both she and Bobby Earl balanced champagne glasses gingerly in their hands. The woman was laughing uncontrollably at something Bobby Earl was telling her.
Earl opened the passenger door for her, then got behind the wheel. The light from the sodium lamp shone through his front window, and I saw his silhouette freeze, then his shoulders stiffen, as though he had just become aware that a geological fissure had opened up below his automobile.
Then he got out of the car, staring incredulously at his upturned palms, the wet streaks in his suit, the damp imprints of his shoes.
Clete started the engine, and the rusted-out muffler thundered off the asphalt and reverberated between the rows of cars. He turned out into the aisle and drove slowly past the Chrysler, the engine and frame clanking like broken glass.
"What's happenin', Bob?" he asked, then flipped his cigarette in a high, sparking arc, punched in a rock tape, and gave Bobby Earl the thumbs-up sign.
Bobby Earl's face slipped by the window like an outraged balloon. The woman in the sequined evening gown walked hurriedly back toward the clubhouse, her spiked heels clicking across the puddles.
All men have a religion or totems of some kind. Even the atheist is committed to an enormous act of faith in his belief that the universe created itself and the subsequent creation of intelligent life was simply a biological accident. Eddy Raintree's votive attempt at metaphysics was just a little more eccentric than most. Both the gunbull in Angola and the biker girl in Algiers had said that Raintree was wired into astronomy and weirdness. In New Orleans, if your interest ran to UFOs (called "Vology" by enthusiasts), Island voodoo, witchcraft, teleportation through the third eye in your forehead, palm reading, the study of ectoplasm, the theory that Atlanteans are living among us in another dimension, and herbal cures for everything from brain cancer to impacted wisdom teeth, you eventually went to Tante Majorie's occult bookstore on Royal Street in the Quarter.
Tante Majorie was big all over and so black that her skin had a purple sheen to it. She streaked her high cheekbones with rouge and wore gold granny glasses, and her hair, which was pulled back tightly in a bun, had grayed so that it looked like dull gunmetal. She lived over her shop with another lesbian, an elderly white woman, and fifteen cats who sat on the furniture, the bookshelves, and the ancient radiator, and tracked soiled cat litter throughout the apartment.
She served tea on a silver service, then studied the photo of Eddy Raintree. Her French doors were open on the balcony, and I could hear the night noise from the street. I had known her almost twenty years and had never been able to teach her my correct name.
"You say he got a tiger on his arm?" she asked.
"Yes."
"I 'member him. He use to come, in every three, four mont's. That's the one. I ain't forgot him. He's 'fraid of black people."
"Why do you think that?"
"He always want me to read his hand. But when I pick it up in my fingers, it twitch just like a frog. I'd tell him, It ain't shoe polish, darling'. It ain't gonna rub off on you. Why you looking for him?"
"He helped murder a sheriff's deputy."
She looked out the French doors at the jungle of potted geraniums, philodendron, and banana trees on her balcony.
"You ain't got to look for him, Mr. Streak. 'that boy ain't got a long way to run," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"I told him it ain't no accident he got that tiger on his arm. I told him tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. Just like in the Bible, glowing out there in the trees. That tiger gonna, eat him."
"I respect your wisdom and your experience, Tante Majorie, but I need to find this man."
She twisted a strand of hair between her fingers and gazed thoughtfully at a calico cat nursing a half-dozen kittens in a cardboard box.
"Every noon I send out astrology readings for people on my list," she said. "He's one of them people. But Raintree ain't the name he give me. I don't 'member the name he give me. Maybe you ain't suppose to find him, Mr. Streak."
"My name's Dave, Tante Majorie. Could I see your list?"
"It ain't gonna he'p. His kind come with a face, what they get called don't matter. They come out of the womb without no name, without no place in the house where they're born, without no place down at a church, a school, a job down at a grocery sto', there ain't a place or a person they belong to in this whole round world. Not till that day they turn and look at somebody at the bus stop, or in the saloon, or sitting next to them in the hot-pillow house, and they see that animal that ain't been fed in that other person's eyes. That's when they know who they always been."
Then she went into the back of the apartment and returned with several sheets of typing paper in her hand.
"I got maybe two hundred people here," she said. "They're spread all over Lou'sana and Mississippi, too."
"Well, let's take a look," I said. "You see, Tante Majorie, the interesting thing about these guys is their ego. So when they use an alias they usually keep their initials. Or maybe their aliases have the same sound value as their real names."
Her list was in alphabetical order. I sorted the pages to the "R's."
"How about Elton Rubert?" I asked.
"I don't 'member it, Mr. Davis. My clerk must have put it down, and he don't work here anymore."
"My name is Dave, Tante Majorie. Dave Robicheaux. Where's your clerk now?"
"He moved up to Ohio, or one of them places up North."
I wrote down the mailing address of Elton Rubert, a tavern in a small settlement out in the Atchafalaya basin west of Baton Rouge.
"Here's my business card," I said. "If the man in the photo shows up here again, read his palm or whatever he wants, then call me later. But don't question him or try to find out anything about him for me, Tante Majorie. You've already been a great help."
"Give me your hand."
"I beg your pardon?" She reached out and took my hand, stared into my palm and kneaded it with her fingers. Then she stroked it as though she were smoothing bread dough.
"There's something I ain't told you," she said. "The last time that man was in here, I read his hand, just like I'm reading yours. He axed me what his lifeline was like. What I didn't tell him, what he didn't know, was he didn't have no lifeline. It was gone."
I looked at her.
"You ain't understood me, darling'," she said. "When your lifeline's gone, his kind get it back by stealing somebody else's." She folded my thumb and fingers into a fist, then pressed it into a ball with her palms. I could feel the heat and oil in her skin. "You hold on to it real hard, Mr. Streak. That tiger don't care who it eat."
I had had trouble finding a parking place earlier and had left my pickup over by Rampart Street, not far from the lberville welfare project. When I rounded the corner I saw the passenger door agape, the window smashed out on the pavement, the flannel-wrapped brick still in the gutter. The glove box had been rifled and the stereo ripped out of the panel, as well as most of the ignition wires, which hung below the dashboard like broken spaghetti ends.
Because First District headquarters was only two blocks away, it took only an hour to get a uniformed officer there to make out the theft report that my insurance company would require. Then I walked to a drugstore on Canal, called Triple A for a wrecker, and called Bootsie and told her that I wouldn't be home as I had promised, that with any luck I could have the truck repaired by late tomorrow.
"Where will you stay tonight?" she asked.
"At Clete's."
"Dave, if the truck isn't fixed tomorrow, take the bus back home and we'll go get the truck later. Tomorrow's Friday. Let's have a nice weekend."
"I may have to check out a lead on the way back. It might be a dud, but I can't let it hang."
"Does this have to do with Drew?"
"No, not at all."
"Because I wouldn't want to interfere."
"This may be the guy who tried to take my head off with a crowbar."
"Oh God, Dave, give it up, at least for a while."
"It doesn't work that way. The other side doesn't do pit stops."
"How clever," she said. "I'll leave the answering machine on in case we're in town."
"Come on, Boots, don't sign off like that."
"It's been a long day. I'm just tired. I don't mean what I say."
"Don't worry, everything's going to be fine. I'll call in the morning. Tell Alafair we'll go crabbing on the bay Saturday."
I was ready to say goodnight, then she said, as though she were speaking out of a mist, "Remember what they used to teach us in Catholic school about virginity? They said it was better to remain a virgin until you married so you wouldn't make comparisons. Do you ever make comparisons, Dave?"
I closed my eyes and swallowed as a man might if he looked up one sunny day and felt the cold outer envelope of a glacier sliding unalterably into his life.
When I was recuperating from the bouncing Betty that sent me home from Vietnam, and I began my long courtship with insomnia, I used to muse sometimes on what were the worst images or degrees of fear that my dreams could present me with. In my innocence, I thought that if I could face them in the light of day, imagine them perhaps as friendly gargoyles sitting at the foot of my bed, even hold a reasonable conversation with them, I wouldn't have to drink and drug myself nightly into another dimension where the monsters were transformed into pink zebras and prancing giraffes. But every third or fourth night I was back with my platoon, outside an empty ville that stunk of duck shit and unburied water buffalo; then as we lay pressed against a broken dike in the heated, breathless air, we suddenly realized that somebody back at the firebase had screwed up bad, and that the 105 rounds were coming in short.
The dream about an artillery barrage can be as real as the experience. You want to burrow into the ground like an insect; your knees are pulled up in a fetal position, your arms squeezed over your pot. Your fear is so great that you think the marrow in your skull will split, the arteries in your brain will rupture from their own dilation, blood will fountain from your nose. You will promise God anything in order to be spared. Right behind you, geysers of mud explode in the air and the bodies of North Vietnamese regulars are blown out of their graves, their bodies luminescent with green slime and dancing with maggots.
I had seen Vietnamese civilians who had survived B-52 raids. They were beyond speech; they trembled all over and made mewing and keening sounds that you did not want to take with you. When I would wake from my dream my hands would shake so badly that I could hardly unscrew the cap on the whiskey bottle that I kept hidden under my mattress.
As I slept on Clete's couch that night, I had to deal with another creation of my unconscious, one that was no less difficult than the old grainy filmstrips from Vietnam. In my dream I would feel Bootsie next to me, her nude body warm and smooth under the sheet. I would put my face in her hair, kiss her nipples, stroke her stomach and thighs, and she would smile in her sleep, take me in her hand, and place me inside her. I would kiss the tops of her breasts and try to touch her all over while we made love, wishing in my lust that she were two instead of one. Then as it built inside of me like a tree cracking loose from a riverbank, rearing upward in the warm current, she would smile with drowsy expectation and close her eyes, and her face would grow small and soft and her mouth become as vulnerable as a flower.
But her eyes would open again and they would be as sightless as milk glass. A scaled deformity like the red wings of a butterfly would mask her face, her body would stiffen and ridge with bone, and her womb would be filled with death.
I sat up in the darkness of Clete's living room, the blood beating in my wrists, and opened and closed my mouth as though I had been pulled from beneath the ocean's surface.
I stared through the window and across the courtyard at a lamp on a table behind a curtain that was lifting in the breeze from a fan. I could see someone's shadow moving behind the curtain. I wanted to believe that it was the shadow of a nice person, perhaps a man preparing to go to work or an elderly woman fixing breakfast before going to Mass at St. Louis Cathedral. But it was 4 A.M.; the sky overhead was black, with no hint of the false dawn; the night still belonged to the gargoyles, and the person across the courtyard was probably a hooker or somebody on the down side of an all-night drunk.
I put on my shirt and slacks and slipped on my loafers.
I could see Clete's massive form in his bed, a pillow over his face, his porkpie hat on the bedpost. I closed the door softly behind me. The air in the courtyard was electric with the smell of magnolia.
The bar was over by Decatur, one of those places that never closes, where there is neither cheer nor anger nor expectation and no external measure of one's own failure and loss.
The bottles of bourbon, vodka, rum, gin, rye, and brandy rang with light along the mirror. The oak-handled beer spigots and frosted mugs in the coolers could have been a poem.
The bartender propped his arms impatiently on the dish sink.
"I'll serve you, but you got to tell me what it is you want," he said. He looked at another customer, raised his eyebrows, then looked back at me. He was smiling now.
"How about it, buddy?"
"I'd like a cup of coffee."
"You want a cup of coffee?"
"Yes."
"This looks like a place where you get a cup of coffee? Too much, too much," he said, then began wiping off the counter with a rag.
I heard somebody laugh as I walked back out onto the street. I sat on the railway tracks behind the French Market and watched the dawn touch the earth's rim and light the river and the docks and scows over in Algiers, turn the sky the color of bone, and finally fill the east with a hot red glow like the spokes in a wagon wheel. The river looked wide and yellow with silt, and I could see oil and occasionally dead fish floating belly up in the current.