The AA meeting room upstairs in the Episcopalian Tchurch is foul with cigarette smoke. On the walls are framed photographs of our founders, whom we still affectionately call Dr. Bob and Bill W., as though their anonymity need be protected even in death. Also on the wall are the twelve steps of AA recovery and the simple two axioms that we attempt to live by: ONE DAY AT A TIME and EASY DOES IT.
The meeting is over now, and volunteers are washing coffee cups, emptying ashtrays, and wiping down the tables. I sit by a big floor fan that is blowing the smoke out the windows into the early-morning air. My AA sponsor, Tee Neg, who looks like a mulatto, sits across from me. Before he bought the bar and poolroom that he now owns on East Main, he was a pipeliner and oil-field roughneck, and three fingers on his right hand were snipped off by a drilling chain. He's uneducated, can barely read and write, but he's tough-minded and intelligent and unfailing in his loyalty to me.
"You mad at somet'ing again, Dave. That ain't good," he says.
"I'm not mad."
"We get drunk at somebody. Or maybe at somet'ing. That's the way it works. It's them resentments mess us up. Don't be telling me different, no."
"I know that, Tee Neg."
"It ain't worrying about Bootsie this time. It's somet'ing else, ain't it?"
"Maybe."
"You want to know what I Cink's on your mind, podna?"
"I have a feeling you're going to tell me, anyway."
"You're studying on this case all the time. You Cink that's it, but it ain't. You bothered by the way Cings are, the way we got trouble with the colored people all the time, you bothered 'cause it ain't like it used to be. You want soul' Lou'sana to be like it was when you and me and yo' daddy went all day and went everywhere and never spoke one word of English. You walk away when you hear white people talking bad about them Negro, like that bad feeling ain't in their hearts. But you keep pretend it's like it used to be, Dave, that these bad Cings ain't in white people's hearts, then you gonna be walking away the rest of yo' life."
"That doesn't mean I'm going to get drunk over it."
"I had seven years sobriety, me. Then I started studying on them fingers I left on that drill pipe. I'd get up with it in the morning, just like you wake up with an ugly, mean woman. I'd drag it around with me all day. I'd look at them pink stumps till they'd start throbbing. Then I went fishing one afternoon, went into a colored man's bait store to buy some shiners, told that man I was gonna catch me a hunnerd sac-a-lait before' the sun get behind them willow tree. Then I told him I changed my mind, just give me a quart of whiskey and don't bother about no shiners. I got drunk five years. Then I spent one in the penitentiary. Get mad about what you can't change and maybe you'll get to do just what Tee Neg done."
He looks at me reflectively and rubs his palms in a circular motion on his thighs. I twirl my coffee cup on my finger, then one of the cleanup volunteers reaches down and takes it from me.
"That doesn't mean you always have to like what you see around you," I say.
"It don't mean you got to be miserable about it, neither."
"I'm not miserable, Tee Neg. Give it a break, will you?"
"It ain't never gonna be the same, Dave. That world we grown up in, it's gone. Palti avec le vent, podna."
I look down from the window at the brick-paved street in the morning's blue light, the colonnades over the sidewalks, a black man pushing a wooden cart laden with strawberries from under the overhang of a dark green oak tree. The scene looks like a postcard mailed from the nineteenth century.
I went out to Weldon's home on Bayou Teche at 9 A.M. the morning after he was attacked in his boathouse. When he opened the door he was dressed in Levi's, a pair of old tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. A folded baseball glove protruded from his back pocket.
"You're headed for a game or something?" I asked.
A red welt ran around his throat, like half of a necklace.
"I've got an apple basket nailed up on the barn wall," he said. "I like to see if my fork ball's still got a hop on it."
"You've been throwing a few?"
"About two hours' worth. It beats smoking cigarettes or fooling around with early-morning booze."
"How close was it?" I said.
"He came across my throat and I remember I couldn't breathe, that I was trying to get my fingernails under the wire. Then the blood shut off to my brain, and I went down on the deck like I was poleaxed. It all happened real quick. It makes you think about how quick it can happen."
"Walk me down to your boathouse."
"I don't know who it was, Dave. I didn't see him, he didn't say anything, I just remember that wire popping tight across my windpipe." He blew out his breath. "Man, that's a hard feeling to shake. When I was overseas and I thought about buying it, I always figured I'd see it coming somehow, that I'd control it or negotiate with it some way, maybe convince it that I had another season to run. That's a crazy way to think, isn't it?"
"Let's see if we find anything down at your boathouse."
We strolled across the lawn toward the bayou. When we were abreast of the old barn on the back of his property, he stooped down and picked up a scuffed baseball with split seams.
"Watch this, buddy," he said.
He wet two of his fingers, took a windup, and whipped the ball like a BB into the apple basket.
"Not bad," I said.
"I should probably get out of the oil business and start my own baseball franchise. You remember the old New Iberia Pelicans? Boy, I miss minor-league ball." He picked up another baseball from the ground.
"The report says some kids scared the assailant off."
He threw the ball underhanded against the barn door, stuck his hands in his back pockets, and continued walking with me toward the boathouse.
"Yeah, some USL kids ran out of gas on the bayou and paddled in to my dock. Otherwise I would have caught the bus. But they couldn't describe the guy. They said they just saw some fellow take off through the bushes."
We walked out onto his dock and into the boathouse.
Oars and life preservers were hung from hooks on the rafters, and the whole interior rippled with the sunlight that reflected off the water at the bottom of the walls.
"Are you sure he didn't say anything?" I said.
"Nothing."
"Did you see a ring or a watch?"
"I just saw that wire loop flick down past my nose. But I know it was one of Joey Gouza's people."
"Why?"
"Because I've got some stuff Joey wants. Joey's been behind all this from the beginning. The guy with the wire was probably Jewel Fluck or Jack Gates. Or any number of mechanics Joey can hire out of Miami or Houston."
"So you are hooked up with them?"
"Sure, I am. But I've had it. I don't care if I take a fall or not. I can't keep endangering or fucking up other people anymore. Give me a minute and we'll go to the movies."
"What?"
"You'll see," he said, moving a pirogue that was upended on sawhorses. Then he knelt on one knee and lifted up a plank in the floor of the boathouse. A videocassette tightly wrapped in a clear plastic bag was stapled to the bottom of the plank. He sliced the cassette out of the bag with his pocketknife. "Come on up to the house and I'll give you a private screening from Greaseball Productions."
"What's this about, Weldon?"
"Everything you want is on this tape. I'm going to give it to YOU."
"Maybe you should think about calling your lawyer."
"There's time for that later. Come on."
I followed him up to his house and into his living room.
He turned on his television set and VCR; he plugged in the cassette and paused with the remote control in his palm.
"This is what it amounts to, Dave," he said. "I hit two dusters in a row, I was broke, and I was about to lose my business. I borrowed everything I could at the bank, but it wasn't enough to stay afloat. So I started talking with a couple of shylocks in New Orleans. Before I knew it I was dealing with Jack Gates and he made me an offer to do a big arms drop in Colombia."
"Colombia?"
"That's where it's happening. Bush is sending a lot of arms down there to fight the druglords, but the Colombian government has a way of whacking out some of the peasants with it at the same time. So there are antigovernment people down there who pay big money for weapons, and I figured I could make a couple of runs, twenty thou a drop, and not worry about the political complexities involved. Why not? I dropped everything in Laos from pigs to napalm homemade from gasoline and soap detergent.
"Then Jack Gates offered me the big score, eighty thou for one run. The plan was for me to fly an old C-47 into Honduras, pick up a load of arms, land at this jungle strip in Colombia, where these guys process large amounts of coke, load about eight million dollars worth of flake on board, then do the arms drop up in the mountains and head for the sea.
"But I told Gates I wanted the payoff when I loaded the coke. He said I'd get paid on this end, and I told him it was no deal, then, because I didn't exactly trust the kind of people he represented. So he made a couple of phone calls and finally said all right, since eighty thou is used Kleenex to these guys. Also, Gates and Joey Gouza thought we'd be in business together for a long time. Except I took them over the hurdles. Sit down. You'll enjoy this."
He pressed the remote button, and for fifteen minutes the screen showed a series of scenes and images that could have been snipped from color footage filmed in Southeast Asia two decades earlier: wind whipping the canvas cargo straps and webbing in the empty bay of a plane; the shadow of the C-47 racing across yellow pasture-land, hummocks, earthen dikes, and brown reservoirs, the dark green of coffee plantations, a village of shacks built from discarded lumber and sheets of tin that looked as bright and hot as shards of broken mirror in the sun; then the approach over the crest of a purple mountain and the descent into a long valley that contained a landing strip bulldozed out of the jungle so recently that the broken roots in the soil were still white and pink with life.
The next images looked like they had been taken at an oblique angle from the pilot's compartment: sweat-streaked Indians in cutoff GI fatigues dragging crates of grenades, ammunition, and Belgian automatic rifles into the bay, a man who looked like an American watching in the background, a straw hat shadowing his face; then suddenly an abrupt shift in the location and cast of characters. The second cargo was loaded at twilight, and the bags were pillowsize, wrapped in black vinyl, the ends tucked, folded, and taped, carried on board as lovingly as Christmas packages.
"The next thing you should see is a lot of parachutes popping open in the dark and those crates floating down toward a circle of burning truck flares in the middle of some mountains," Weldon said. "That's where I made a change in the script. Watch this."
The screen showed a moonlit seacoast, the waves sliding up on the beach in a long line of foam, humps of coral reef protruding from the surf like the rose-colored backs of whales. Then the kickers began shoving the cargo out of the C-47.
"I call this part 'Weldon pickles the load and says get fucked to the greaseballs,' " Weldon said.
The wind ripped apart the bags of cocaine and covered the black surface of the water with a floating white paste.
The crates of arms tumbled out into the darkness like a flying junkyard. Some of the crates sent geysers of foam out of the groundswell; others burst apart on the exposed reef, bejeweling the coral with belts of.50 caliber shells.
The screen went white.
"That's it?" I said.
"Yeah. What do you think of it?"
"This is what Gouza's been after?"
"Yeah, I told both of them I had their whole operation on tape. I told them to get out of my life. I figured they owed me the eighty thou for the earlier runs, anyway. I took thirty-seven holes in the fuselage on one of them. What do you think of it?"
"Not much."
"What?"
"What else have you got besides this tape?" I asked.
"This is the whole show."
"Have you got something connecting Gouza to arms and dope trafficking?"
"I've just got this tape."
"Will you make a sworn statement that you were flying for Joey Gouza?"
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"I made all the arrangements with Jack Gates. Gouza stayed out of it."
I looked out the ceiling-high window at the live oaks in Weldon's side yard.
"What's Bobby Earl's part in this?" I said.
"He's got no part."
"Don't tell me that, Weldon."
"Bobby doesn't have anything to do with it."
"Now's not the time to cover for this guy, podna."
"Bobby's mind is on the U.S. Senate and his putz. Use your head, Dave. Why would he want to get mixed up with dope and guns?"
"Money."
"He gets all he wants from right-wing simpletons and north Louisiana rednecks. Besides, that's not what he's after. You liberals have never figured him out. Bobby doesn't care about black people one way or another. He's never known any. How could he be upset by them? It's educated and intelligent white people he doesn't like. In his mind you're all just like his parents. I don't think a day went by in his life that they didn't let him know he was a piece of shit. He's got two loves in this world, porking the ladies and provoking the press and people like yourself."
"That might all be true, but he's hooked up with Joey Gouza and that means he's in this bullshit right up to his kneecaps."
"You're wrong."
"I'm weary of you holding out on me, Weldon."
"I'm not. I've told you everything. What else do you want out of me? A guy tried to take my head off with a piano wire. I can't think about it without shuddering all over. It really got to me, man. I can even smell the guy."
"What do you mean?"
He stopped, and his eyes looked into space.
"I didn't think about it before," he said. "The guy had a smell. It was like embalming fluid or something."
"Say it again."
"Embalming fluid. Or chemicals. Hell, I don't know. It was there just a second, then my light switch clicked off."
"It wasn't one of Gouza's people, Weldon."
His brow furrowed, and he fingered the red line around his neck.
"I think your brother, Lyle, was right all along," I said. "I think your father has made a spectacular reappearance in your life. Take this tape to the DEA or the U.S. Customs office, if you want. It doesn't fall under my jurisdiction."
"You're not interested in it?"
"We already have a murder warrant out on Jack Gates. You haven't shown or told me anything that will help put any of the other players in jail."
"You mean I've been holding this evidence and taking all this heat for nothing? And all you can tell me is that my poor demented brother has been right all along, that my own father wants to put my head on a pike?"
"I'm afraid that's about it."
"No, that's not it, Dave," he said. "I think this time I finally read you. You're not interested in Joey Gouza or Jack Gates or any of these Aryan Brotherhood clowns. You want to staple my brother-in-law's butt to the furniture. In fact, if you had your way, you'd blow up his shit big time, wouldn't you? Just like a Gatling gun locking down on Charlie in the middle of a rice field."
We stared at each other in the silence like a pair of bookends.
I drove to the Salvation Army transient shelter in Lafayette to try and find Vic Benson. A portly, red-cheeked, kindly man with big sideburns who ran the shelter said that Benson had had a fistfight with another man two days ago and had been asked to leave. He had responded by packing his duffel bag quietly and walking out the door without a word; then he had stopped, snapped his fingers as though he had forgotten something, and returned to the dormitory long enough to stuff his bed sheets in the toilet bowl.
"Where do you think he went?" I asked.
"Anywhere there's Southern Pacific tracks," the Salvation Army officer said.
"Can I talk to the other men?"
"I doubt if they know anything. You can try, though.
They were a little afraid of Vic. He wasn't like the rest.
Most of our men are harmless. Vic always made you feel he was working on a dark thought, like he was grinding sand between his back teeth. One time he was watching television…" He stopped, smiled, and shook the memory out of his face.
"Go on," I said.
"He and some of the other men were watching this minister, then Vic said, 'I'd pour lye down that one's throat if his brother didn't deserve it worse."
"Which minister?"
"That fellow in Baton Rouge, what's-his-name."
"Lyle Sonnier?"
"Yeah, that's the one. I tried to make a joke out of it, and I said, "Vic, what could you possibly have against that man up there?' He said, 'The same thing the rooster's got against the baby chick that thinks the brooder house is his.' Talking with Vic could be a little bit like walking through cobwebs. Or accidentally raking your hand across a yellow-jacket nest."
We talked to a half-dozen men in the dormitory, and they all had the same vacant response and benign, vacuous expressions that they wore and used as habitually as the identities and personal histories that they had created for themselves in hundreds of drunk tanks and trackside jungle camps. They reminded me of figures in a van Gogh or Munch painting. Palm fronds and the sunlit leaves of banana trees rustled against the screen windows, but in contrast the men inside looked wind-dried, the color of cardboard, weightless in their emaciation, their hollow chests devoid of heartbeat, the skin of their arms wrapped as tight as fish scales around their bones. Their squared-away bunks, which cast no shadows because of the sun's position, looked in their exactitude like a line of coffins.
Why the morbidness over a bunch of drunks? Because they brought back the ever-present knowledge in my life that I was one drink away from their fate-despair, murder of the soul, insanity, or death-and that realization was like someone working my heart muscle with an angry thumb.
The Salvation Army officer and I walked out of the dormitory into the sunlight, into the clean sweep of wind through oak and myrtle trees and a twirling water sprinkler on the grass.
"How would you describe that odor they have?" I asked.
"I beg your pardon?"
"That smell. They all have it. How would you describe it?"
"Oh. It's those short-dogs they drink. It's one step above paint-thinner."
"It's like they have liquefied mothballs in their blood, isn't it?" I said.
"Yeah, yeah, something like that."
"Would you say it smelled like embalming fluid?"
He scratched one sideburn with a fingernail.
"I was never a mortician," he said, "but, yeah, that seems to come pretty close. Yeah, some of those ole boys are mite near dead and don't know it yet. Poor fellows."
He didn't understand the direction of my questions, and I didn't explain it to him. I simply gave him my business card and said, "If Vic comes back here, call me. Don't mess with him. I think your intuitions about him are correct. He's probably a deranged and dangerous man."
"What's he done?"
"I think only Vic Benson and God could tell you that. I don't think the rest of us would even want to know. He's one of those who make you want to believe that all of us didn't fall out of the same tree."
"It's got something to do with children, doesn't it?"
"How did you know?"
"One of the old-timers told me Vic flipped a hot cigarette in the face of a little colored boy who was pestering him. I kind of put it out of my mind because I didn't want to believe it."
His face looked momentarily sad, then he shook hands with me and walked back across the wet, shining lawn into the gloom of the dormitory.
I went back to the office, planning to call Lyle Sonnier in Baton Rouge to ask if he had any idea where his father might have gone. Just as I picked up the phone, I looked through the window and saw Clete Purcell park his automobile in a yellow zone, step out on the street, and stretch his arms like a bear coming out of hibernation. Two fishing rods were sticking out of a back window. I didn't wait for him to come into the office. At best, my colleagues thought of Clete as a happy zoo animal; others had a way of disappearing from a room as soon as he entered it.
I met him outside on the walk.
"What's happening, Dave?" he said. "Did you eat lunch yet?"
"Nope."
"Let's eat some red beans and rice, then drown some worms after you get off work."
He wore a sleeveless tropical shirt, Budweiser shorts that hung off his navel, and his powder-blue porkpie hat slanted over one eye. His huge biceps were glowing with sunburn.
"We're going down to Cypremort Point for crabs tonight. You're welcomed to go with us," I said.
He looked disappointed.
"That's all right," he said. "I thought I'd fish a little bit more today, that's all. Anyway, let's get something to eat and I'll fill you in on some stuff I found out about Joey Gouza and the white man's hope."
We drove down the street to a small caM run by a black man. Crushed beer cans littered the floor of Clete's car, and I could smell beer on his breath.
"Are things slow at your office?" I asked.
"I just felt like taking off, that's all. Hey, let's eat."
We took paper plates loaded with red beans, rice, and links of sausage to a plank table under a live-oak tree. The cafe owner didn't have a beer license, and Clete went to the trunk of his car and came back with a sweating six-pack of Jax. It was warm in the shade of the trees, and smoke from a barbecue fire floated in a blue haze through the overhead limbs.
"I did some checking on Joey's business connections around town," Clete said. "I'm talking about his legitimate businesses-a linen service, a movie house up on Prytania, a bunch of dago restaurants, places where he launders his drug money for the IRS. Anyway, the word is Joey and his people are putting up big gelt for Bobby Earl's U.S. Senate campaign. In other words, the greaseballs are into PACs now."
I nodded. "Yeah?"
"That's it."
"So what's new in that? It's what we thought all along."
You're reading it wrong, noble mon."
"How's that?"
"If Joey Meatballs was piecing off his drug action to Bobby Earl, he wouldn't have to give him money through a bunch of PACs. He'd already own the guy."
"Maybe that's the way he launders Earl's cut."
"They don't do it that way, Streak. They give the guy something he can't resist, they bring him in on one of their deals, their shylocks lend him money, they set him up with some hot-ass broad on video tape. But they don't go into the drug business with the guy, then create a lot of public records to show everybody they got the guy's tallywacker tied around their neighborhood fireplug."
"You drove all the way to New Iberia to tell me Bobby Earl is clean?"
"Oh, they know all the same people, and Joey would like to put a U.S. senator in his pocket, but there's no law against that, mon."
"Bobby Earl's dirty."
"Maybe so. I'm just telling you what I found out and what I think. The guy's a sonofabitch but so are half the politicians in Louisiana."
"I get the feeling something else is bothering you, Clete."
He ripped open another beer and lit a cigarette, his food unfinished.
"It comes with the territory. It's nothing new," he said.
"What is it?"
"I might get my PI ticket pulled."
"What for?"
He bit one of his fingernails and shrugged.
"I've had two or three beefs since I opened my office. It's my own fault," he said.
"You're always in a beef, Clete. Why is somebody giving you trouble about your ticket now?"
"That's what I asked this bozo who called me up from Baton Rouge."
"Which bozo?"
"With the state regulatory agency." His eyes moved around on my face.
"It's Bobby Earl, isn't it?" I said.
"Maybe."
"There's no 'maybe' about it."
"Anyway, they got these complaints and they're talking about a hearing before their board."
"What complaints?"
"Well, there was this button man, a real bag of shit out of Miami, a guy who whacked out two Cuban girls who were going to send this greaseball dealer up to Raiford. He jumped a two-hundred-thou bond, and word had it he was hiding out in Ascension or St. James Parish. So the bondsman in Miami calls me and tells me he'll pay me a five grand finder's fee if I can bring in this guy before the bondsman has to come up with the two hundred thou. But the only lead he can give me on the shit bag is that he's somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, he loves pink Cadillacs, smoking dope, and being a big man around lowlife broads.
"So I spend two weeks cruising these dumps along Airline Highway. Just when I'm about to give up, I see this beautiful, flamingo-pink Cadillac convertible, with Georgia plates, parked in front of this club that's got both white and mulatto broads on stage. I go inside, and the place is filled with smoke and about two hundred geeks that look like somebody beat up on them with an ugly stick. But I don't see my man. So I go back out to the parking lot and pop the door lock on the Caddy with a slim jim. The inside smells like somebody rubbed hash oil into the upholstery. In the glove compartment I find a box of rubbers, a match cover from a Fort Lauderdale bar, an ice pick, and a dozen loose.38 shells. What does that tell me? This has got to be the shit bag's car.
"Except I look all over the bar and I can't find the guy, which means he's probably wearing a disguise. Then it's three in the morning, still no shit bag, and I'm bone-tired.
So I kind of hurried things along by setting fire to the pink Caddy."
"You did what?"
"What was I supposed to do, spend the rest of the week there? I was working on spec. Anyway, the Caddy was burning beautifully in the parking lot, and the geeks came pouring out of the building to watch it, happy as pigs rolling in slop, except of course for the guy who owned the Caddy. Guess what?"
"He wasn't your guy."
"Right. He was a traveling sporting-goods salesman from Waycross. But guess what again? There, standing in the crowd, is my shit bag. In two minutes I had him in cuffs and locked to a D-ring in the back of my car. So it all worked out all right, except somebody saw me messing around the Caddy and told the cops and the firemen, and I had to come back the next day and answer some questions that made me a little bit uncomfortable. Then Nig got me into a scrape-"
"Nig?" I had finished eating and was glancing at my watch.
"Yeah, Nig Rosewater, the bondsman. I'm sorry to bore you with this stuff, Dave, but I don't get a regular paycheck. I depend upon guys like Nig to keep me afloat."
I took a breath and let him continue.
"Nig decides to go into the saloon business," Clete said.
"So he opens a bar on Magazine right next to a black neighborhood. What kind of sign does he put in his window? HAPPY HOUR 5 to 7-HAVE A SWIG WITH NIG." So the first night somebody Rings a burning trash can through the plate glass. Then they did it two more nights, even after Nig got rid of the sign. Who did it, you ask. The fucking Crips, not because they're big on civil rights but because it impresses the other punks in the neighborhood. Have you dealt with any of these guys? They knocked off a kid on Calliope, then, to make sure everybody got the message, they walked into the mortuary, in front of his family, and blew his coffin full of holes. They're a real special bunch.
"So I found out the kid who had been remodeling Nig's bar was named Ice Box. They call him that because he pushed a refrigerator on top of his grandmother. I'm not making this up. This kid could blow out your light like he was turning a page in a comic book. Anyway, I had a talk with Ice Box while I held him by his ankles off a fire escape, five stories up from the pavement. I think he's back in California these days. But his grandmother, can you dig it, with dents still in her head, filed charges against me.
"Anyway, somebody in Baton Rouge wants to cut a piece out of my butt. Like I say, I brought it on myself. I learned in the corps you don't mess with the pencil pushers. You stay invisible. You piss off some corporal in personnel and two weeks later you're humping it with an ambush patrol outside Chu Lai."
"Give me the name of the guy in Baton Rouge who's after you."
"Leave it alone. It'll probably go away."
"Bobby Earl won't."
"That's the point, mon. Earl's got no handles on him. We sent the shit bags up the road because they were born to take a fall. Earl's part of the system. There're people who love him. You think I'm giving you a shuck? Did you see him on The Geraldo Rivera Show? Some of those broads were ready to throw their panties at him. It's me and you who've got the problem. We're the geeks, Dave, not this guy. He's a fucking hero."
His breath was heavy with the smell of beer and cigarettes.
He crushed a beer can in his palm and dropped it on the table, then studied the tops of his big, coarse, red hands. He had tried to comb his sandy hair back over the divots where his stitches had been, but I could still see crusted lesions like thin black worms on his scalp.
"Oh, hell, what do I know?" he said, and looked down the street at the traffic in the hot sunlight, as though it somehow held the answer to his question.
Back in my office, I got hold of Lyle Sonnier at his church.
"Hey, Loot, I'm glad you called," he said. "I've been thinking about throwing a big dinner here at the church, actually more like a family reunion, and I wanted to ask you and Bootsie."
"Thanks, Lyle, but right now I'm looking for Vic Benson, the fellow you think might be your father."
"What do you want him for?"
"He's part of an investigation."
"You don't have to look far, then. He's right here."
"What?"
"We had lunch together just a little while ago. He's out back painting some furniture for our secondhand store right now."
How long has he been there?"
"He came in this morning."
"I think he tried to take your brother's head off last night with a piece of piano wire."
"Get real, Dave. He's a wino, a bundle of sticks. He has to wear lead shoes on a windy day."
"Tell that to Weldon."
"I already talked to Weldon. He says it was a Joey Gouza hit."
"Believe me, Lyle, Joey has no desire for more trouble in Iberia Parish."
"So if it wasn't Gouza, it was probably one of the walking brain-dead who follow Bobby Earl around. But no matter how you cut it, it wasn't the old man. Good God, Dave, what's the matter with you? Weldon could beat that poor old drunk to death with his shoe."
"Why do you think Bobby Earl might be involved in it?"
"He's bad news, that's why. He stirs up grief and hatred among the very people that's sitting out there in my flockpoor white and black folk. I'm tired of that character. Somebody should have stuffed his butt in a garbage can a long time ago."
"That may be true, Lyle, but that doesn't mean he's trying to whack out your brother."
I waited for him to say something, to offer me the linkage to Bobby Earl.
"Lyle?"
"Well, anyway, in my opinion the old man's harmless. You gonna arrest him?"
"No, I don't have enough for a warrant."
"Then what's the big deal?"
"I'll be over there later today or at least by Monday to talk to him. Tell him that for me, too. In the meantime you might ask yourself why he's shown up after all these years? Does he seem like a man of goodwill to you?"
"Maybe he wants to atone but he hasn't learned the words yet. It takes a while sometimes."
"Like we used to say out in Indian country, don't let them get behind you."
"That's what somebody said at My Lai, too. Give all that Vietnam stuff to the American Legion, Dave. It's a drag."
"Whatever you say, Lyle. Hang loose."
"Hey, I'll get back to you with a date for that dinner. I want your butt there, with no excuses. I'm proud to be your friend, Dave. I look up to you, I always did."
What do you say to someone who talks to you like that?
In order to get a jump-start on the day I used to go on dry drunks that were the equivalent of inserting my head in a microwave for ten minutes. I had come to learn that a conversation with any one of the Sonniers worked just as well.
It was Friday afternoon, and it was too late and I was too tired for a round-trip to Baton Rouge to interview Vic Benson, who was probably Verise Sonnier, particularly in view of the fact that I had no tangible evidence against him and talking to him was like conversing with a vacant lot, anyway.
The heat broke temporarily with a thirty-minute rain shower that evening, then the wind came up cool out of the south, scattering dead pecan leaves up on my gallery, and the late sun broke through the layered clouds as red and molten as if it had been poured flaming from a foundry cup.
We had a short-lived crisis at the bait shop. I was filling up the bowls in the rabbit hutches by the side of the house when I heard a loud yell in the shop, then saw Tripod racing out the door, his loose chain slithering across the planks, with Alafair right behind him. Then Batist came through the door with a broom raised over his head.
Alafair caught Tripod up in her arms at the end of the dock, then turned to face down Batist, whose black, thick neck was pulsing with nests of veins.
"I gonna flatten that coon like a bicycle patch, me," he said. "I gonna wipe up that bait shop wit' him."
"You leave him alone!" Alafair shouted back.
"I cain't be runnin' a sto', no, with that nasty coon wreckin' my shelves. You set him down on that dock and I gonna golf him right over them trees."
"He ain't did anything! Clean up your own mess! Clean up your own nasty cigars!"
In the meantime, Tripod was trying to climb over her shoulder and down her back to get as much geography between him and Batist as possible.
Oh Lord, I thought, and walked down to the dock.
"It's too late, Dave," Batist said. "That coon headed for coon heaven."
"Let's calm down a minute," I said. "How'd Tripod get into the bait shop again, Alf?"
"Batist left the screen open," she said.
"I left the screen open?" he said incredulously.
"You were fishing out back, too, or he wouldn't have gotten up on the shelf," she said. Her face was flushed and heated, her eyes as bright as brown glass.
"Look his face, look his mouth," Batist said. "He eat all the sugar in the can and two boxes them Milky Ways."
Tripod, whose fur was almost black except for his silver ringed tail and silver mask, didn't make a good witness for the defense. His muzzle and whiskers were slick with chocolate and coated with grains of sugar. I picked up the end of his chain. The clip that we used to fasten him to the clothesline was broken.
"I'm afraid we've got Tripod on a breaking-and-entering rap, Alf," I said.
"What?" she said.
"It looks like he's going to have to go into lockdown," I said.
"What?"
"That means let's put him in the rabbit hutch until tomorrow when I can fix his chain. In the meantime, Batist, let's close down the shop and think about going to the drive-in movie."
"It ain't my sto', it ain't my Milky Way. I just work here all day so I can clean up after some fat no-good coon."
Alafair was about to fire off another shot when I turned her gently by the shoulder and walked her back through the pecan trees in front of the house.
"He was mean, Dave,' she said. "He was gonna pod."
"No, he's not mean, little guy," I said. "To Batist, running the bait shop is an important job. He just doesn't want anything to go wrong while he's in charge."
"You didn't see what he looked like." Her eyes were moist in the deep shade of the trees.
"Alafair, Batist grew up poor and uneducated and never learned to read and write. But today he runs a business for a white man. He wants to do everything right, but he has to make an X when he signs for a delivery and he can't count the receipts at the end of the day. So he concentrates on things that he can do well, like barbecuing the chickens, repairing the boat engines, and keeping all the inventory squared away. Then Tripod gets loose and makes a big mess of the shelves. So in Batist's mind he's let us down."
I saw her eyes blinking with thought.
"It's kind of like the teachers at school giving you a job to do, then someone else comes along and messes it up and makes you look bad. Does that make sense?"
She shifted Tripod in her arms, so that he lay on his back with his three paws in the air, his stomach swollen with food.
"I guess so. We going to the show?"
"You bet."
"Batist is going, too?"
"I don't know, you think he should go?"
She thought about it.
"Yeah, he should go with us," she said, as though she had just reached a profound metaphysical conclusion.
"You're the best, little guy."
"You are, too, big guy."
We popped Tripod into the hutch, then I swung Alafair up on my back and we walked beneath the sparking of fireflies onto the gallery and into the lighted house, where Bootsie was deep-frying sac-a-lait and listening to a Cajun song that was playing on the radio propped in the kitchen window.
The western sky looked like a blood-streaked ink wash, and I could hear the cicadas in a distant woods, all the way across the waving field of green sugarcane at the back of my property.
The next morning Alafair helped Batist and me open the bait shop. She earned her weekly allowance of five dollars by seining the dead shiners out of the bait tailks, seasoning the chickens that we barbecued on a split oil drum for our midday customers, draining the coolers, and pouring fresh ice over the beer and soda pop. But her favorite Saturday morning job was sitting on a tall stool behind the cash register, her Astros baseball cap low on her head, ringing up worm and shiner sales with a loud bang on the keys.
It was a wonderful morning to fish. The air was still cool and windless, the early pink light muted in the cypress trees, the moon still visible in one soft blue corner of the sky. After we had rented most of our boats, I started the barbecue fire in the oil drum, then fixed coffee and hot milk and bowls of Grape-Nuts for the three of us, and we ate breakfast on one of the telephone-spool tables under an umbrella out on the dock. I had managed to push the Sonnier case completely out of my mind when the phone rang inside the shop and Alafair got up and answered it.
I could see only the side of her face through the screen window as she held the receiver to her ear, but I had no doubt that she was listening to something that she had never expected to come through our telephone. Her eyes were blinking rapidly and her tan cheeks were filled with white discolorations, and I saw her look at me with her mouth parted as though a childish bad dream had become real in the middle of her day.
I went quickly inside the shop and behind the counter and took the receiver from her hand.
"Dave, he called you real bad names," Alafair said. She was breathing hard through her mouth.
"Who is this?" I said into the receiver.
"You know who it is. Don't act stupid," a high, metallic voice, like that of a midget, said. "You cut a deal with Joey Meatballs, didn't you?"
"You're not shy about frightening a little girl. How about giving me your name?"
"You don't know my name?"
I picked up a pencil and scribbled across the top of a lined notepad: "Boots, call office, tell them to trace call in shop." Then I put the pad in Alafair's hands and pushed her toward the door.
"What's the matter, you got nothing wise to say?" the voice asked.
"What do you want, Fluck?"
"I want to know what you're giving Joey Gee so that he puts a whack out on me."
"There's no deal with Joey."
"You lying sonofabitch. He's out of the bag one day and everybody in New Orleans hears there's a five-grand open contract on me. You telling me you don't have anything to do with it?"
"That's right."
"What is it, you guys want to wipe your books clean with my ass? Or is it a personal beef because I almost cooled you out in Sonnier's house?"
"You're going down because you killed a police officer and Eddy Raintree."
"I'm shaking."
"To tell you the truth, Fluck, I'm busy right now and you're a boring man to talk to."
"The only reason somebody from the AB didn't take you out is you're not worth the trouble. But I'm going to give you a deal, one that'll make you big shit in your little town. I get immunity on that dead cop in the Sonnier house, I don't know anything about Eddy Raintree's problems next to a train track, and I give you everything you want on Joey Meatballs. I'm talking about guys he's whacked, the marshmallow Jack Gates shoved into the plane propeller, the crack they're selling to the niggers in the projects, gun deals with spics, you name it, I'll give it to you… Are you listening to me, man?"
"I hear you just fine."
"Then you set it up. I want protective custody, too. Maybe in another state."
"I think you're overestimating your importance, Fluck. You're not the kind of witness that prosecutors get excited about."
"Look, I can take you to two graves down by Terrebonne Bay. Two guys that Joey made kneel down on the edge of a trench and suck on a barrel of a.22 mag before he dumped a big one down their throats."
"It's not a sellers' market these days."
"What's with you, man? You want to see Joey Gee go down or not?"
"Where are you?"
"Are you kidding?"
"What I mean is, you're probably not too far from a police station of some kind. Turn yourself in. It's the only deal you're going to get from me or probably anybody else. You executed a police officer. You get caught by the wrong guys and you'll never make the jail, Fluck."
"You're getting off on this, aren't you?"
Through the screen window I saw Bootsie wave at me from the gallery of the house.
"Nope, I'm tired of talking to you," I said.
"I'm messing up your morning, huh?"
"No, you just made a big mistake today."
"What mistake, what are you talking-"
"You phoned me at my house. You frightened my little girl. You did it because inside you're a small, scared man, Fluck. That's why you wanted Garrett to see it coming. For just a second you felt you were as big a man as he was."
"You're talking yourself into something real bad."
"Call the DEA. They cut deals with snitches all the time."
I could hear him breathing into the receiver.
"Where you from, outer space? You're fucking with the AB. We're everywhere, man. There ain't anybody we can't clip. Even if I go down, even if I'm in a max unit somewhere, I can have your whole family taken out."
"For five grand your AB buddies will have you in a soap dish."
I could almost hear a wet, gastric click in his throat. Then he hesitated a moment, as though he were squeezing his anger back into a small box down in his chest.
"I want you to remember everything you said to me," he said. "Keep running the words over and over in your head. I'm gonna think up something for you, something special, something that you didn't think could ever happen in your life. I was in Parchman, man. You don't know how much pain a wise-ass fuck like you can go through before he dies."
Then the line went dead. I looked at my watch. I didn't know if there had been enough time for the dispatcher at the office to get a successful trace on the call or not. I dipped a wad of paper towels into the floating ice in the beer cooler and rubbed my face with it, then wiped my skin dry and flung the towels into the trash basket, as though I could somehow rinse and clean the voice of Jewel Fluck out of my day.
I waited ten more minutes, then called the dispatcher.
"They traced it to a pay phone on Decatur in New Orleans," he said. "We called First District headquarters, but the guy was gone when they got there. Sorry, Dave. Who was it?"
"The guy who killed Garrett."
"Fluck? Oh man, if we'd just been a little bit faster-"
"Don't worry about it."
I walked up through the shade of the pecan trees to the gallery. Bootsie was sitting in the swing with Alafair beside her. Alafair looked up at me from under the brim of her ball cap, her face filled with a pinched light.
"It was just a drunk man, little guy," I said. "He thought I was somebody else."
"His voice, it was-" she began. "It made me feel bad inside." She swallowed and looked out into the deep shadows of the trees.
"That's the way drunk people sound sometimes. We just don't pay any attention to them," I said. "Anyway, Bootsie had the call traced to New Orleans, and the cops went to pick this guy up. Hey, let's don't waste any more time worrying about this character. I need you to help me get ready for our lunch customers."
I felt Bootsie's eyes searching my face.
I went inside the house, took my.45 out of the dresser, slipped it down into my khakis, and pulled my shirt over it.
At the dock I put Alafair in charge of turning the sausage links and split chickens on the barbecue grill. Her shoulders barely came above the top of the pit, and when the grease and sauce piquant dripped onto the coals her head and cap were haloed in smoke.
I put the.45 on a top shelf behind a stand-up display of Mepps spinners. I wouldn't need it, I told myself, not here, anyway. Fluck had too many problems of his own to worry about me. His kind took revenge only when they had nothing at risk, when it came to them as a luxury they could savor. I was sure of that, I told myself.