That night it rained again, the way it always does with the advent of winter in Louisiana, clogging the rain gutters on the house with leaves, washing the dust and black lint from the sugar mills out of the trees, sometimes filling the air with a smell that has the bright clarity of rubbing alcohol. These things are natural and good, I would tell myself, but sometimes the ticking of the rain on a windowsill or in an aluminum pet bowl can take on a senseless, metronomic beat like a windup clock that has no hands and that serves no purpose except to tell you your time is running out.
I have never liked sleep. It has always been my enemy. Long before I went to Vietnam, I had nightmares about a man named Mack. He was a professional bourre and blackjack dealer in the gambling clubs and brothels of St. Landry Parish. He seduced my mother when she was drunk and blackmailed her and made her his mistress while my father was working on a drill rig offshore or fur-trapping on Marsh Island. Mack drowned my cats and held his fingers to my nose after he was with my mother. I hated him more than any man I had ever met, and in Vietnam I sometimes saw his face superimposed on those of the Asian men I killed.
Mack lived in my head for many years and dissipated in importance only after I began to assemble a new collection of specters and demons-the shadowy figures who came out of the trees and used our 105 duds to booby-trap a night trail, the suspended corpse of a suicide dancing with maggots that Clete and I cut down from a rafter, the discovery of a child inside a refrigerator that had been abandoned in a field not far from a playground, a black man strapped in a heavy oak chair, his face and nappy hair bejeweled with sweat just before the hood was dropped over his face.
It’s my belief that images like these cannot be exorcised from one’s memory. They travel with you wherever you go and wait for their moment to come aborning again. If you are rested and the day is sunny and cool and filled with the fragrances of spring, the images will probably remain dormant and seem to have little application in your life. If you are fatigued or irritable or depressed or down with the flu, you’ll probably be presented with a ticket to your unconscious, and the journey will not be a pleasant one. One thing you can count on: Sleep is a flip of the coin, and you are powerless inside its clutches unless you’re willing to drink or drug yourself into oblivion.
It was 11:07 P.M., and I was reading under the lamp in the living room. The kitchen was dark and I could see the message light on the machine blinking on and off, like a hot drop of blood that glowed and died and then glowed again. Molly and Alafair were awake, and I could have gotten up and retrieved the message without disturbing anyone, but I didn’t want to, in the same way you sometimes hesitate to answer the door when the knock is more forceful than it should be, the face of your visitor obscured by shadows.
“Did you drop your pills in the bathroom sink?” Molly said behind my chair.
“Maybe. I don’t remember,” I replied.
“Over half of them are gone. They have morphine in them, Dave.”
“I know that. That’s why I try not to use them.”
“But you’ve been taking them?”
“I was taking them two or three times a week. Maybe not even that much. I haven’t felt a need for them in the last few days.”
She sat down across from me, the capped plastic bottle in her hand. She held her eyes on mine. “Can you go without them altogether?”
“Yeah, toss them out. I should have done that already.” But my words sounded both hollow and foolish, like those of a man standing in a breadline and pretending he doesn’t need to be there.
“It’s late. Let’s go to sleep,” she said.
I closed my book and looked at the title. It was a novel about British soldiers in the Great War, written by an eloquent man who had been gassed and wounded and had seen his best friends mowed down by Maxim guns, but I could remember hardly anything in it, as though my eyes had moved across fifty pages and registered almost nothing. “Maybe you and Alafair should visit your aunt in Galveston,” I said. “Just for a few days.”
“We’re not going anywhere.”
I stood up and pulled the tiny chain on the reading lamp. Through the doorway, I could see the reflection of the red light in the window glass above the sink. The driveway was completely black, and in the window glass, the red light was like a beacon on a dark sea. “Tee Jolie is out there somewhere,” I said.
“She’s dead, Dave.”
“I don’t believe that. She brought me the iPod in the recovery unit in New Orleans. I talked to her on the phone. She’s alive.”
“I can’t have this kind of conversation with you anymore,” Molly said.
She went back in the bedroom and closed the door. I sat for a long time in the dark, the message machine blinking in sync with my heart, daring me to push the play button. Maybe with a touch of the finger, I could be back on the full-tilt boogie, free of worry and moral complications, delighting in the violence I could visit upon my enemies, getting back on the grog at the same time, surrendering myself each day to the incremental alcoholic death that preempted my fear of the grave.
The rain seemed to rekindle its energies, thudding as hard as hail on the roof. I walked into the kitchen and stood at the counter and pressed the play button with my thumb.
“Hi, Mr. Dave,” the voice said. “I hope you don’t mind me bothering you again, but I’m real scared. There ain’t nobody here except a nurse and a doctor that comes sometimes ’cause of a problem I got. I need to get off this island, but I ain’t sure where it is. The people that owns it has got a big boat. One of the men here said we was sout’east of the chandelier. That don’t make no sense. Mr. Dave, the man I’m wit’ is a good man, but I ain’t sure about nothing no more. I don’t know where Blue is at. They say she’s all right, that she went out to Hollywood ’cause her voice is good as mine is and she’s gonna do fine out there. The medicine they been giving me makes me kind of crazy. I ain’t sure what to believe.”
On the machine I heard a door slam in the background and another voice speaking, one I didn’t recognize. Then the recording ended.
The Chandeleur Islands, I thought. The barrier islands that formed the most eastern extreme of Louisiana’s landmass. That had to be it. I woke Molly and asked her to come into the kitchen. She was half asleep, her cheek printed by the pillow. “I thought I heard a woman’s voice,” she said.
“You did. Listen to this.”
I replayed Tee Jolie’s message. When it was over, Molly sat down by the breakfast table and stared at me. She was wearing a pink nightgown and fluffy slippers. She seemed dazed, as though she couldn’t extract herself from a dream.
“You’re not going to say anything?” I asked.
“Don’t get anywhere near this.”
“She’s asking for help.”
“It’s a setup.”
“You’re wrong. Tee Jolie would never do anything like that.”
“When will you stop?”
“Stop what?”
“Believing people who know your weakness and use it against you.”
“Mind telling me what this great weakness is?”
“You’re willing to love people who are corrupt to the core. You turn them into something they’re not, and we pay the price for it.”
I took a carton of milk out of the icebox and walked down to the picnic table in the backyard and sat down with my back to the house and drank the carton half empty. I could hear Tripod’s chain tinkling as he dragged it down the wire stretched between two live oaks. I reached down and picked him up and set him on my lap. He rubbed his head against my chest and flipped over on his back, waiting for me to scratch his stomach, his thick tail swishing back and forth. A tug passed on the bayou, its green and red running lights on, its wake slapping against the cypress roots. I longed to pour a half pint of whiskey into the milk carton and chugalug it in one long swallow, until I pushed all light out of my eyes and sound from my ears and thoughts from my mind. At that moment I would have swallowed broken glass for a drink. I knew I would not fall asleep before dawn.
At 6:13 A.M., just as I finally nodded off, the phone rang. It was Clete Purcel. “Gretchen’s back from Miami,” he said.
“So what?” I said.
“She says she found her mother.”
“Keep her away from Molly and Alafair and me.”
I hung up the phone, missing the cradle and dropping the receiver on the floor, waking my wife.
Jesse Leboeuf had never thought of himself as a prejudiced man. In his mind, he was a realist who looked upon people for what they were and what they were not, and he did not understand why that was considered bad in the eyes of others. People of color did not respect a white man who lowered himself to their level. Nor did they wish to live with whites or be on an equal plane with them. Any white person who had grown up with them knew that and honored the separations inherent in southern culture. Saturday-night nigger-knocking was a rite of passage. If anyone was to blame for it, it was the United States Supreme Court and the decision to integrate the schools. Shooting Negroes with BB guns and slingshots and throwing firecrackers on the galleries and roofs of their homes didn’t cause long-term damage to anyone. They had to pay some dues, like every immigrant group, if they wanted to live in a country like this. How many people in those homes had been born in Charity Hospital and raised on welfare? Answer: all of them. How would they like living in straw villages back in Africa, with lions prowling around the neighborhood?
But when Jesse reviewed his life, he stumbled across an inalterable fact about himself that he didn’t like to brood upon. In one way or another, he had always needed to be around people of color. He not only went to bed with Negro girls and women as a teenager, he found himself coming back for more well into his forties. They feared him and shrank under his weight and cigarette odor and the density of his breath, while their men slunk away into the shadows, the whites of their eyes yellow and shiny with shame. After each excursion into the black district, Jesse felt a sense of power and control that no other experience provided him. Sometimes he made a point of drinking in a mulatto bar near Hopkins just after visiting a crib, drinking out of a bottle of Jax in the corner, looking nakedly into the faces of the patrons. His sun-browned skin was almost as dark as theirs, but he always wore khaki clothes and half-top boots and a fedora and a Lima watch fob, like a foreman or a plantation overseer would wear. The discomfort Jesse caused in others was testimony that the power in his genitals and the manly odor in his clothes were not cosmetic.
It ended with affirmative action and the hiring of black sheriff’s deputies and city police officers. It had taken Jesse thirteen years and three state examinations and four semesters of night classes at a community college to make plainclothes. In one day, a black man was given the same pay grade as he and assigned as his investigative partner. The black man lasted two months with Jesse before he resigned and went to work for the state police.
Jesse became a lone wolf and was nicknamed “Loup” by his colleagues. If an arrest might get messy or require undue paperwork, the Loup was sent in. If the suspect had shot a cop or raped a child or repeatedly terrorized a neighborhood and barricaded himself in a house, there was only one man for the job; the Loup went in carrying a cut-down twelve-gauge pump loaded with pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks. The paramedics would have the body bag already unzipped and spread open on the gurney, ready for business.
Jesse knew a trade-off had been made without his consent. He was a useful tool, a garbage collector in a cheap suit, a lightning bolt that stayed in the sheriff’s quiver until a dirty job came along that no one wanted to touch. In the meantime, black law officers, some of them female, had replaced him as a symbol of authority in the black neighborhoods, and Jesse Leboeuf had become one more uneducated aging white man, one who no longer had sexual access to the women whose availability he had always taken for granted.
At 5:46 A.M. Saturday, he drove his pickup truck down East Main through the historical district. The street was empty, the lawns blue-green in the poor light, the caladiums and hydrangeas beaded with dew, the bayou smoking just beyond the oaks and cypress trees that grew along the bank. Up ahead he could see the Shadows, and across the street from it, the plantation overseer’s house that had been converted into a restaurant. Jesse had never been impressed by historical relics. The rich were the rich, and he wished a pox on every one of them, both the living and the dead.
He peered through his windshield at a modest shotgun home with a small screened gallery and ceiling-high windows and ventilated green storm shutters. No lights were on in the house. A rolled newspaper lay on the front steps. Two compact cars and a pickup truck were parked in the driveway and under the porte cochere, their windows running with moisture. He went around the block and this time pulled to the curb, under the overhang of a giant live oak, two houses up from the home of the homicide detective who Jesse believed had besmirched his reputation and humiliated him in front of his peers.
He cut the engine and lit an unfiltered cigarette and sipped from a pint bottle of orange-flavored vodka. The cigarette smoke went down into his lungs like an old friend, blooming in his chest, reassuring him that his heart problems had nothing to do with nicotine. He’d acquired several drops over the years, but nobody had seen the one he had on him now. It was a five-chamber. 22 revolver he had taken off a New Orleans prostitute. He had burned the serial numbers with acid and reverse-wrapped the wood grips with electrician’s tape and coated the steel surfaces with a viscous layer of oil. The possibilities of lifting a print from it were between remote and nonexistent. The challenge was to arrange the situation. It couldn’t be in the home; it would have to be someplace else, where there would be no adult witness.
He took another drink from the bottle and another deep puff off his cigarette, letting the exhaled smoke drift through his fingers. He saw himself squeezing the trigger of his. 38 snub, the flash leaping from the muzzle and either side of the chamber, the bullet catching the target unaware, pocking a single hole in the middle of the forehead, the facial muscles collapsing as the brain turned to mush. Then he would wrap the drop in his victim’s hand and fire a round into a wall. It was that easy. In his lifetime, he had never seen a cop go down for an execution if there were no witnesses and it was done right.
The street was completely silent, the lawns empty, the Victorian and antebellum homes overhung by trees dripping with Spanish moss. The setting was like a replication of everything that he secretly hated. Was he being silently mocked for the fact and circumstances of his birth? He had picked cotton and broken corn and mucked out cow stalls before ever seeing the inside of a school. He wondered if anyone in those houses had seen the tips of a child’s fingers bleed on a cotton boll.
He looked at the shotgun house again. Wrong time, wrong place, he thought. Down the bayou in Jeanerette, there was another person he might visit, someone who deserved an experience he hadn’t given a woman in a long time. He wet his lips at the prospect. As he pulled away from the curb, he thought he heard the deep-throated rumble of dual exhausts echoing off a row of buildings, the kind of sound he associated with hot rods and Hollywood mufflers. Then the sound thinned and disappeared over on St. Peter Street, and he gave it no more thought.
Jesse took the back road into Jeanerette and crossed the drawbridge by a massive white-pillared home surrounded by live oaks whose leaves trembled simultaneously when the wind gusted. The eastern sky was black with rain clouds, the moon still up, the surface of the bayou coated with fog as white and thick as cotton. Catin Segura’s home was not hard to find. It was the last one on the block, down by the water, in a neighborhood of small wood-frame houses. Her cruiser was parked in the gravel driveway, and she had put new screens on her gallery and planted flowers in all the beds and window boxes and nailed a big birdhouse painted like the American flag in a pecan tree. A tricycle rested on its side in the yard. A plastic-bladed whirligig fastened to a rain gutter was spinning and clicking in the breeze. Other than the whirligig, there was no movement or sound anywhere on the short block where Catin lived with her two children.
Jesse had one more drink and capped his bottle and rolled down his windows. He lit another cigarette and draped one arm over the steering wheel and thought about his alternatives. There were two or three ways to go. He could get rough with her in a major way and teach her a lesson in the bedroom that she would never forget and probably would be afraid to report. Or he could park one in her ear with his. 38 snub and put the drop in her hand and tack a small holster for it under the breakfast table. He could take a flesh wound if he had to. He drew in on his cigarette and heard the paper crisp and burn. He took the cigarette from his mouth, holding it with his thumb and three fingers, exhaling through his nostrils, his thoughts coming together, an image forming before his eyes. He dropped the cigarette out the window and heard it hiss in a puddle of water. He reached into his glove box and removed a pair of handcuffs and the clip-on holster that contained his. 38 snub. Then he got out of the truck and put on his coat and took his old fedora from behind the seat and put it on his head and threaded the handcuffs through the back of his belt. He worked a crick out of his neck and flexed his shoulders and opened and closed his hands. “Tell me how your life is going one hour from now, you black bitch,” he said under his breath.
The screen door on the gallery was latched. He slipped a match cover between the jamb and the door and lifted the latch hook free of the eyelet and stepped inside. As he tapped on the inside door, he heard the same rumble of twin exhausts that he had heard in New Iberia. He looked down the street and caught a glimpse of a pickup painted with gray primer, its windows no more than one foot high. The vehicle went through the intersection, the driver easing off the accelerator and depressing the clutch to prevent the dual exhausts from waking up the neighborhood.
Catin opened the door on the night chain. Through the crack, he could see her slip showing where she had belted her bathrobe. He could also see the black sheen and the thickness of her hair and the way it curled on her cheeks, like a young girl might wear it. Her skin had the color and tone of melted chocolate; it didn’t have the pink scars that black women often got from shucking oysters or fighting over their men in the juke. “What are you doing on my gallery?” she said.
“I came to apologize,” he replied.
Her eyes went away from his face and focused on the latch hook that he had worked loose with his match cover. “I already forgave you. There’s no reason for you to be here.”
“I want to make it right, maybe do something for your kids.”
“Don’t you talk about my children.”
“I can get them into a private school. My daughter’s church has got a scholarship fund for minority children.”
“I think you’ve been drinking.”
“Getting to the end of the road isn’t much fun. People deal with it in different ways.”
“Go home, Mr. Jesse.”
“I’m talking about death, Miss Catin.”
“It’s Deputy Segura.”
“You know why each morning is a victory for an old person? It’s ’cause most old people die at night. Can I have a cup of coffee? It’s not a lot to ask.”
He noticed the pause in her eyes and knew he’d found the weak spot. He could see into the house’s interior now, a bedroom door that opened on two small beds, the covers tucked tightly in, the pillows fat and unmarked by the weight of anyone’s head. The children were not home. He could feel a tingling in his hands and a stiffening in his loins.
“I can call a cab for you or have a cruiser drive you home,” she said.
“You said you was a Christian woman.”
“I am.”
“But you’ll turn me from your door?”
Her eyes were lidless, her face absolutely still.
“What do you think I’m gonna do? I’m an old man with congestive heart failure,” he said.
She slid the night chain off the door and pulled it wide. “Sit at the dining room table. I’ll start the coffee. There’s a sweet roll on the plate.”
He removed his hat and set it crown-down on the table and sat in a straight-back chair. “You have two, don’t you?”
“Two what?”
“Children. That’s what I always heard. You’re a single mother. That’s what they’re calling it, aren’t they?”
She was at the stove. She looked sideways at him. “What was that?”
“They use the term ‘single mother’ these days. That’s not how we used to put it.”
“I changed my mind. I want you to leave.”
“Your robe isn’t tied tight. You got a piece of string wrapped around your waist so it hikes up your slip and don’t let it show below your hem. My mother learned that trick from a nigra woman we picked cotton with. Where’s your children at?”
“I told you to leave.”
He didn’t move.
“Don’t smoke in here,” she said.
He blew out the paper match he had used to light his cigarette and dropped it in the flower vase on the table. “You came out to my house with Dave Robicheaux and treated me like I was dirt. Now I’m in your house.”
“You stay back.”
“You ever have a white man in your house?”
“Don’t you dare put your hand on me.”
“’Fraid my color is gonna rub off on you?”
“You’re a sick man. And I pity you.”
“Not as sick as you’re fixing to be.”
He hit her across the face with the flat of his hand. His hand was large and square and as rough-edged as an asbestos shingle, and the blow knocked the light out of her eyes and the shape out of her face. He grabbed her around the neck with his left arm and turned off the burner on the stove with his right hand. Then he pinched her chin and forced her to look into his face. “Where’s your piece?”
Her left eye was red and watering where he had struck her. “You’re going to prison.”
“I doubt it. When I get finished with you, you’ll think twice about the story you tell.”
She spat in his face. He picked her up in the air, locking his hands behind her back, crushing her ribs, and slung her across the table. Then he wiped her saliva off his skin with a paper towel and lifted her to her feet and slammed her down in the chair where he had been sitting. “Want to answer my question? Where’s your piece?”
She was bleeding from one nostril, her face trembling with shock. “You’re a man and twice my size. But you’re afraid of me.”
He wrapped his fingers in the back of her hair and slowly raised her up from the chair, twisting her hair to get better purchase, making tears run from her eyes. He pulled his handcuffs from the back of his belt and bent one arm behind her and fitted a cuff on her wrist and pushed the steel tongue into the lock, then crimped the second cuff on her other wrist and squeezed the mechanisms so tight that the veins on the undersides of both wrists were bunched like blue string.
“You gonna yell?” he asked.
“No.”
“That’s what you say now.” He wadded up three paper towels and pushed them into her mouth. “See, that takes away all temptation.”
He walked her into her bedroom and opened a pocketknife and cut her robe down the back and her slip down the front and peeled both of them off her. Her eyes were bulging, sweat beading on her forehead, her breath starting to strangle on the paper towels that had become so soaked with saliva, they were slipping down her throat. He fitted his hand on her face and shoved her on the bed.
“Think this is tough?” he said. “Wait till we get to the main event.”
Then he began to hurt her in ways she probably did not know existed. But Jesse Leboeuf had a problem he was not aware of. He’d always considered himself a cautious man. As a lawman, he had taken risks only when necessary and had never felt the need to prove himself to his colleagues. In fact, he looked upon most displays of bravery as theatrical, as confessions of fear. When the Loup went after a barricaded suspect with a cut-down Remington pump, he had no doubt about the outcome: Only one man would walk out of the building. Most perps, particularly the black ones, would drop their weapons and beg right before he pulled the trigger. The equation had always been simple: He was better than they were and they knew it, and as a result, he lived and they died. People could call it bravery if they wished; Jesse called it a fact of life.
He had shut the bedroom door and made sure the windows were down and the shades pulled all the way to the sills. He had turned on a floor fan to keep the room cool. He was environmentally safe and comfortable and sealed off from the outside world and could do whatever he wanted and take all the time in the world doing it. All these were unconscious conclusions that he considered a done deal.
Until he heard the doorknob twist behind him and the door scrape across the throw rug that had knotted under his boot when he shoved Catin Segura into the room. He rose naked from the bed, his body hair glistening with sweat, his mouth and throat choked with phlegm. “Who are you?” he said.
The figure was wearing a hooded jacket and a face mask made of digital camouflage and was pointing a Sig Sauer P226 at him, a sound suppressor screwed onto the barrel. His eyes drifted to Catin’s dresser, where he had placed his. 38 snub in its clip-on holster. The. 38 was under five feet from where he stood, but the distance could have been five miles. There was salt in his eyes, and he tried to wipe them clean with his fingers. His erection had died, and a vinegary stench was rising from his armpits. He heard the roof creak in the wind.
“The woman invited me here. Ask her,” he said. “Me and her go back. We got us an arrangement.”
He realized he had started to raise his hands without being told and that a kettledrum was pounding in his head. What were the right words to say? What argument could he make to save his life? What verbal deceit could he perpetrate on the person aiming the silenced P226 at his sternum? “That’s military-issue. I was a serviceman myself. United States Air Force,” he said.
The figure moved toward the bed and, with a gloved hand, removed the wadded-up paper towels from Catin Segura’s mouth.
“I know who you are,” Jesse Leboeuf said. “You’re the one that was out at the Point. You got no reason to kill me, girl.”
He tried to hold his eyes on the masked figure, but they were burning so badly that he had to press his palms into the sockets. Red rings receded into his brain, and sweat ran down his chest and stomach and pubic hair and phallus onto the floor. Reach out and take death into your arms and pull it inside your chest, he heard a voice say. It cain’t be as bad as they say. A flash, a moment of pain, and then blackness. Don’t be afraid.
“Kill him,” Catin Segura said.
“She tole me to do all this. The handcuffs, all of it,” he said. “We need to talk this out. I’m gonna put on my pants, and we’ll sit down and talk. You got to let me give my side of it.”
“He’s lying,” the woman said from the bed.
“It’s her that’s lying. It’s their nature. It’s the way they was raised. I’m not being unfair. I’m not afraid. I know you’re probably a good person. I just want to talk.”
But he was terrified and acted it. He ran for the bathroom, where he had not locked the window, slipping on the rug, slamming into the doorframe, trying to right himself with one hand and reach a spot that was beyond the shooter’s angle of fire. His flab and his genitalia jiggled on his frame; his breath heaved in his chest; his heart felt like it was wrapped with wire. He heard a sound that was like a sudden puncture and the brief escape of air from a tire, just as a round cored through his left buttock and exited his thigh, slinging a horsetail of blood across the wall. He tried to grab the windowsill with one hand and mount the toilet seat so he could knock the screen out of the window with his head and leap to the ground. Then he heard the phitt of the suppressor again. The round hit him with the bone-deep dullness of a ball-peen hammer thudding between his shoulder blades, the bullet punching an exit hole above his right nipple. He fell sideways and tumbled over the edge of the bathtub, bringing the shower curtain down on top of him, his legs spread over the tub’s rim as though they had been fitted into stirrups.
The figure stood above him, aiming with both hands, arms outstretched. The suppressor was pointed directly at his mouth. Jesse tried to look through the slits in the mask at the shooter’s eyes. Were they lavender? If he could only explain, he thought. If someone could reach back in time and find the moment when everything went wrong, if someone could understand that he didn’t plan this, that this was the hand he was dealt and it was not of his choosing. If others could understand that, they could all agree to go away and let the past be the past and forget about the injuries he had done to his fellow man and let him start all over. If he could just find the right words.
“None of y’all know what it was like,” he said. “I broke corn when I was five. My daddy worked nights eleven years to buy ten acres.”
He tried to make himself stare into the suppressor, but he couldn’t do it. He saw a soapy pink bubble rise from the hole in his chest. The tears in his eyes distorted the room as though he were looking at the world from the bottom of a goldfish bowl. “Tell Varina-”
His lung was collapsing, and he couldn’t force the words out of his mouth. The figure stepped closer, then squatted next to the tub, gripping the rim with one hand, holding the P226 with the other.
Jesse waited for the round that would rip through his brain and end the bubbling sound in his throat, but it didn’t happen. He shut his eyes and whispered hoarsely at the masked face. It was a phrase he had learned from his French-speaking father when the father talked about Jesse’s baby sister. Then the words seemed to die on his lips. For just a moment, Jesse Leboeuf thought he heard black people laughing. Oddly, they were not black people in a juke joint, nor were they laughing at him behind his back, as they did when he first wore a policeman’s uniform. They were in a cotton field in North Louisiana at sunset, and the sky and the earth were red and the plants were a deep green and he could smell rain and see it blowing like spun glass in the distance. It was Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, and all the darkies in the parish would be headed into town soon, and he wondered why he hadn’t chosen to celebrate the occasion with them. They had always been kind to him and let him ride on the back of the flatbed when they drove to town, all of them rocking back and forth with the sway of the truck, their bodies warm with the heat of the day, smelling slightly in a good way of the sweat from their work, their legs hanging down in the dust, the children breaking up a watermelon in big meaty chunks. Why hadn’t he gone with them? It would have been fun. He opened his eyes one more time and realized a terrible transformation was taking place in him. He was no longer Jesse Leboeuf. He was dissolving into seawater, his tissue and veins melting and running down his fingertips and pooling around his buttocks. He heard a loud sucking sound and felt himself swirling through the chrome-ringed drain hole at the bottom of the tub. Then he was gone, just like that, twisting in a silvery coil down a pipe to a place where no one would ever celebrate Juneteenth.