HE WAS WRONG. I had already quit trying to figure out how to pull it off. Instead, I had spent the entire day brooding on an essential mistake I had made in the investigation, a failure to act upon a foregone conclusion about how Bubba and his wife operated-namely, that they used people. They used them in a cynical and ruthless fashion and then threw them away like soiled Kleenex. Johnny Dartez muled for Bubba and drowned in the plane at Southwest Pass; Eddie Keats kept Bubba's whores in line and Toot trimmed ears for him, and now one had been dumped in a swamp and the other had been cooked in his own bathtub; and finally in my pride and single-mindedness I had stumbled into the role of Victor Romero's executioner.
The board was swept clean. I had always thought of myself as a fairly smart cop, an outsider within the department, a one-eyed existentialist in the country of the blind, but I could not help comparing my situation with the way cops everywhere treat major crimes. We unconsciously target the most available and inept in that myriad army of metropolitan low-lifes: addicts, street dealers, petty thieves, hookers and a few of their Johns, storefront fences, and the obviously deranged and violent. With the exception of the hookers, most of these people are stupid and ugly and easy to convict. Check out the residents in any city or county jail. In the meantime the people who would market the Grand Canyon as a gravel pit or sell the Constitution at an Arab rug bazaar remain as socially sound as a silver dollar dropped into a church basket.
But you don't surrender the ballpark to the other team, even when your best pitch is a letter-high floater that they drill into your breastbone. Also, there are certain advantages in situations in which you have nothing to lose: you become justified in throwing a bucketful of monkey shit through the ventilator fan. It might not alter the outcome of things, but it certainly gives the other side pause.
I found Bubba the next morning at his fish-packing house south of Avery Island, a marsh and salt-dome area that eventually bleeds into Vermilion Bay and the Gulf. The packing house was made of tin and built up on pilings over the bayou, and the docks were painted silver so that the whole structure looked as bright and glittering as tinfoil in a sea of sawgrass, dead cypress, and meandering canals. His oyster and shrimp boats were out, but a waxed yellow cigarette boat floated in the gasoline-stained water by the dock.
I parked my truck in the oyster-shell lot and walked up a ramp onto the dock. The sun was hot, reflecting off the water, and the air smelled of dead shrimp, oil, tar, and the salt breeze off the Gulf. Bubba was filling an ice chest with bottles of Dixie beer. He was bare-chested and sweating, and his denims hung low on his narrow hips so that the elastic of his undershorts showed. There wasn't a half-inch of fat on his hips or flat stomach. His shoulders were covered with fine brown hair, and across his deeply tanned back were chains of tiny scars.
Behind him, two pale men with oiled dark hair, who wore print shirts, slacks, tassel loafers, and sunglasses, were leaning over the dock rail and shooting pigeons and egrets with a pellet rifle. The dead egrets looked like melting snow below the water's surface. I thought I recognised one of the men as an ex-driver for a notorious, now-deceased New Orleans gangster by the name of Didoni Giacano.
Bubba smiled up at me from where he squatted by the ice chest. There were drops of sweat in his eyebrows and his spiked hair.
"Take a ride with us," he said. "That baby there can eat a trench all the way across the lake."
"What are you doing with the spaghetti-and-meatball crowd?"
One of the pale-skinned, dark-haired men looked over his shoulder at me. The sun clicked on his dark glasses.
"Friends from New Orleans," Bubba said. "You want a beer?"
"They're shooting protected birds."
"I'm tired of pigeons shitting on my shrimp. But I don't argue. Tell them." He smiled at me again.
The other man at the rail looked at me now, too. Then he leaned the pellet rifle against the rail, unwrapped a candy bar, and dropped the paper into the water.
"How big is the mob into you, Bubba?"
"Come on, man. That's movie stuff."
"You pay big dues with that crowd."
"No, you got it wrong. People pay me dues. I win, they lose. That's why I got these businesses. That's why I'm offering you a beer. That's why I'm inviting you out on my boat. I don't bear grudges. I don't have to."
"You remember Jimmy Hoffa? There was none tougher. Then he thought he could make deals with the Mob. I bet they licked their teeth when they saw him coming."
"Listen to this guy," he said, and laughed. He opened a bottle on the side of the ice chest, and the foam boiled over the top and dripped flatly on the dock.
"Here," he said, and offered me the bottle, the beer glistening on the back of his brown hand.
"No, thanks," I said.
"Suit yourself," he said, and raised the bottle to his mouth and drank. Then he blew air out through his nose and looked at his cigarette boat. The scars on his back were like broken necklaces spread across his skin. He shifted his weight on his feet.
"Well, it's a beautiful day, and I'm about to go," he said. "You got something you want to tell me, 'cause I want to get out before it rains."
"I just had a couple of speculations. About who's making decisions for you these days."
"Oh yeah?" he said. He drank from the beer with one hand on his hip and looked away at the marsh, where some blue herons were lifting into the sky.
"Maybe I'm all wet."
"Maybe you got a brain disease, too."
"Don't misunderstand me. I'm not taking away from your accomplishment. I just have a feeling that Claudette has turned out to be an ambitious girl. She's been hard to keep in the kitchen, hasn't she?"
"You're starting to piss me off, Dave. I don't like that. I got guests here, I got a morning planned. You want to come along, that's cool. Don't be messing with me no more, podna."
"That is the way I figure it. Tell me if I'm wrong. Johnny Dartez wasn't a stand-up guy, was he? He was a dumb lowlife, a street dip not to be trusted. You knew that one day he'd trade your butt to the feds, so either you or Claudette told Victor Romero to take him out. Except he killed everybody in the plane, including a priest.
"Then I stumble into the middle of things and complicated matters even more. You should have left me alone, Bubba. I wasn't any threat to you. I'd already disengaged when your monkeys started coming around my house."
"What's all this about?" one of the Italians said.
"Stay out of it," Bubba said. Then he looked back at me. His thick hand was tight around the beer bottle. "I'll tell you something, and I'll tell you only once, and you can accept it or stick it sideways up your ass. I'm one guy. I'm not a crime wave. You're supposed to be a smart college guy, but you always talk like you don't understand anything. When you mess with the action out of New Orleans, you fuck with hundreds of people. You wouldn't leave it alone, they slammed the door on your nose. Stop laying your shit off on me."
"Claudette was in Romero's apartment."
"What are you talking about?"
"You heard me."
"She don't go anyplace I don't know about."
"She had her thermos of gin rickeys with her. She left wet prints all over his kitchen table."
His gray-blue eyes stared at me as though they had no lids. His face was frozen, his jaw hooked sideways like a barracuda's.
"You really didn't know, did you?" I said.
"Say all that again."
"No, it's your problem. You work it out, Bubba. I'd watch my ass, though. If she doesn't eat up your operation, these guys will. I don't think you're in control of things anymore."
"You want to find out how much I'm in control? You want that nose busted all over your face right here? Come on, is that what you want?"
"Grow up."
"No, you grow up. You come out to my home, you come out to my business, you talk trash about my family in front of my friends, but you don't do nothing about it. It's like you're always leaking gas under people's noses."
"You should have seen a psychiatrist a long time ago. You're fucking pathetic, Bubba."
He swirled the beer in his bottle.
"That's your best shot?" he said.
"You couldn't understand. You don't have the tools to."
"All right, you had your say. How about getting out of here now?"
"You don't have your father around anymore to slap your face in front of other people or beat you with a dog chain, so you married a woman like Claudette. You're pussy-whipped by a dyke. She's pulling apart your whole operation, and you don't even know it."
The skin around his eyes stretched tight. His eyes looked like marbles.
"I'll see you around," I said. "Rat-hole some money in Grand Cayman, I think you'll need it when Claudette and these guys get finished with you."
I started down the wooden ramp toward the parking lot and my truck. His beer bottle clattered to the dock and rolled across the boards, twisting a spiral of foam out of the neck.
"Hey! You don't walk off! You hear me? You don't walk off!" he said, jabbing his finger at my face.
I continued toward the truck. The oyster-shell parking lot was white and hot in the sunlight. He was walking along beside me now, his face as tight as the skin of an overinflated balloon. He pushed at my arm with his stiffened hand.
"Hey, you got wax?" he said. "You don't talk to me like this! You don't get in my face in front of my friends and walk away!"
I opened my truck door. He grabbed my shoulder and turned me back toward him. His sweating chest was crisscrossed with veins.
"Swing on me and you're busted. No more high school bullshit," I said.
I slammed the truck door and drove slowly out of the lot over the oyster shells. His dilated face, slipping past the window, wore the expression of a man whose furious energies had suddenly been transformed into a set of knives turning inside him.
That afternoon I left work early and enrolled Alafair in kindergarten at the Catholic school in New Iberia for the fall semester, then I took her with Batist and me to seine for shrimp in the jug boat out on the salt. But I had another reason to be out on the Gulf that day: it was the twenty-first anniversary of my father's death. He had been a derrick man on a drilling rig, working high up on the monkey board, when the crew hit an oil sand earlier than they had expected. There was no blowout preventer on the wellhead, and as soon as the drill bit tapped into that gas dome far below the Gulf's floor, the rig began to tremble and suddenly salt water, sand, and oil exploded from the hole under thousands of pounds of pressure, and then the casing jettisoned, too. Metal spars, tongs, coils of chain, huge sections of pipe clattered and rang through the rigging, a spark jumped off a steel surface, and the wellhead ignited. The survivors said the roar of flame looked like someone had kicked open hell's front door.
My father clipped his safety belt onto the wire that ran from the monkey board to the roof of the quarter-boat and jumped. But the rig caved with him, crashed across the top of the quarter-boat, and took my father and nineteen other roughnecks down to the bottom of the Gulf with it.
His body was never found, and sometimes in my dreams I would see him far below the waves, still wearing his hardhat and overalls and steel-toed boots, grinning at me, his big hand raised to tell me that everything was all right.
That was my old man. Sheriff's deputies could jail him, saloon bouncers could bust chair across his back, a bourée dealer could steal his wife, but the next morning he would pretend to be full of fun and brush yesterday's bad fortune aside as something not even worth mentioning.
I let Alafair sit behind the wheel in the pilot's cab, an Astros baseball cap sideways on her head, while Bafist and I took in the nets and filled the ice bins with shrimp. Then I made a half-mile circle, cut the engine, and let the boat drift back over the spot where my father's rig had gone down in a torrent of cascading iron and geysers of steam twenty-one years ago.
It was twilight now, and the water was black-green and covered with froth that slipped down in the troughs between the waves. The sun was already down, and the red and black clouds on the western horizon looked as though they had risen from a planet burning under the water's surface. I opened the scuba gear box, took out a bunch of yellow and purple roses I had snipped earlier, and threw them out on the flat side of a wave. The petals and clustered stems broke apart in the next wave and floated away from each other, then dimmed and sank below the surface.
"He like that, him," Batist said. "Your old man like flowers. Flowers and women. Whiskey, too. Hey, Dave, you don't be sad. Your old man wasn't never sad."
"Let's boil some shrimp and head for home," I said.
But I was troubled all the way in. The twilight died in the west and left only a green glow on the horizon, and as the moon rose, the water turned the color of lead. Was it the memory of my father's death that bothered me, or my constant propensity for depression?
No, something else had been stirring in my unconscious all day, like a rat working its whiskers through a black hole. A good cop puts people away; he doesn't kill them. So far I had made a mess of things and hadn't turned the key on anyone. To compensate, I had wrapped barbed wire around the head of a mental cripple like Bubba Rocque. I didn't feel good about it.
Minos called me at the office the next morning.
"Did you hear from the Lafayette sheriff's department about Bubba?" he said.
"No."
"I thought they kept you informed."
"What is it, Minos?"
"He beat the shit out of his wife last night. Thoroughly. In a bar out on Pinhook Road. You want to hear it?"
"Go ahead."
"Yesterday afternoon they started fighting with each other in their car outside the Winn Dixie, then three hours later she's slopping down the juice in the bar on Pinhook with a couple of New Orleans greaseballs when Mad Man Muntz skids his Caddy to a stop in the parking lot, crashes through the front door, and slaps her with the flat of his hand into next week. He knocked her down on the floor, kicked her in the ass, then picked her up and threw her through the men's room door. One of the greasers tried to stop it, and Bubba splattered his mouth all over a wall. That's no shit. The bartender said Bubba hit the guy so hard his head almost twisted off his neck."
"You're enjoying this, Minos."
"It beats watching these fuckers park their twenty-grand cars at the racetrack."
"Where is he now?"
"Back home, I guess. She had to go to Lourdes for stitches, but she and the greaseball aren't filing charges. They don't seem to like participating in the legal process, for some reason. Do you have any idea what triggered Bubba's toggle switch?"
"I went out to his fish business by Avery Island yesterday."
"So?"
"I poured some iodine on a couple of severed nerve endings."
"Ah."
"Let's get it all out here, Minos. I think Claudette Rocque was behind my wife's death. Bubba's a sonofabitch, but I'm convinced he would have come after me head-on. He's prideful, and he's wanted to put out my light since we were kids. He'd never admit to himself that he had to hire somebody to do it. I think Claudette sent Romero and the Haitian to kill me, and when they murdered Annie instead and then Romero missed me again, she came around the house with a poontang act and a hundred-thou-a-year job. When that didn't work, she got Bubba jealous and turned him loose on me. Anyway, I'm sure she was in Romero's apartment. She left stains on the table from that thermos of gin rickeys she always carries around."
"So that's what the lime-juice business was about?"
"Yes."
"And of course it's worthless as evidence."
"Yes."
"So you decided to stick a fork in Bubba's nuts about his old lady?"
"That's about it."
"You want absolution now?"
"All right on that stuff, Minos."
"Quit worrying about it. They're both human toilets. My advice to you now is to stay away from them."
"Why?"
"Let things run their course."
I was silent.
"He's psychotic. She collects cojones," he said. "You spit in the soup. Now let them drink it. It might prove interesting. Just stay the fuck away from it, though."
"No one will ever accuse you of euphemism."
"You know what your problem is? You're two people in the same envelope. You want to be a moral man in an amoral business. At the same time you want to blow up their shit just like the rest of us. Each time I talk to you, I never know who's coming out of the jack-in-the-box."
"I'll see you. Stay in touch."
"Yeah. Don't bother thanking me for the call. We do this for all rural flatfeet."
He hung up. I tried to call him back, but his line was busy. I drove home and ate lunch with Batist out on the dock under the canvas awning. It was hot and still and the sun was white in the sky.
I couldn't sleep that night. The air was breathless and dry, and the window and ceiling fans seemed unable to remove the heat that had built up in the wood of the house all day long. The stars looked hot in the sky, and out in the moonlight I could see my neighbour's horses lying down in a muddy slough. I went into the kitchen in my underwear and ate a bowl of ice cream and strawberries, and a moment later Robin stood in the doorway in her lingerie top and panties, her eyes adjusting sleepily to the light.
"It's just the heat. Go back to sleep, kiddo," I said.
She smiled and felt her way back down the hall without answering.
But it wasn't just the heat. I turned off the light and sat outside on the steps in the dark. I wanted to put Claudette and Bubba Rocque away more than anything else in the world; no, I wanted worse for them. They epitomised greed and selfishness; they injected misery and death into the lives of others so they could live in wealth and comfort. And while they had dined on blackened redfish in New Orleans or slept in a restored antebellum home that overlooked carriage house and flower garden and river and trees, their emissaries had torn my front door open and watched my wife wake terrified and alone in front of their shotgun barrels.
But I couldn't take them down by provoking a sociopath into assaulting his wife. This may sound noble; it's not. The alcoholic recovery program I practiced did not allow me to lie, manipulate, or impose design control over other people, particularly when its intention was obviously a destructive one. If I did, I would regress, I would start to screw up my own life and the lives of those closest to me, and eventually I would become the same drunk I had been years ago.
I fixed coffee and drank it out on the front porch and watched the first pale band of light touch the eastern sky. It was still hot, and the sun broke red over the earth's rim and turned the low strips of cloud on the horizon to flame; it was a sailor's warning, all right, but this morning was going to be one of the endings and beginnings for me. I would no longer flay myself daily because I couldn't extract the vengeance my anger demanded; I wouldn't try to control everything that swam into my ken; and I would humbly try to accept my Higher Power's plan for my life.
And finally I would refuse to be a factor in the squalor and violence of Bubba and Claudette Rocque's lives.
As always when I surrendered a problem or a self-serving mechanism inside myself to my Higher Power, I felt as though an albatross had been cut from my neck. I watched the sun's red glow rise higher into the pewter sky, saw the black border of trees on the far side of the bayou become gray and gradually green and distinct, heard my neighbour turn on his sprinkler hose in a hiss of water. There was no wind, and because it hadn't rained in two days there was dust from the road on the leaves of my pecan trees, and the shafts of spinning light between the branches looked like spun glass.
But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel. In my case that meant I didn't want any more damage to Claudette Rocque on my conscience; it meant no more rat-fucking, no more insertion of fishhooks in Bubba's head; the game was simply going into extra innings. It meant telling both of them all that.
I shaved and showered, put on my loafers and seersucker slacks, clipped on my badge and belt hoster, drank another cup of coffee in the kitchen, then drove down the dirt road toward New Iberia and the old highway to Lafayette. The weather had started to change abruptly. A long, heavy bank of gray clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon was moving out of the south, and as the first shadows passed across the sun, a breeze lifted above the marsh, stirred the moss on the cypresses, and flickered the dusty leaves of the oaks along the road.
I could feel the barometric pressure dropping. The bream and goggle-eye had already started hitting along the edge of the lily pads, as they always did before a change in the weather, and the sparrow hawks and cranes that had been gliding on the hot updrafts from the marsh were now circling lower and lower out of the darkening sky. Main Street in New Iberia was full of dust, the green bamboo along the banks of Bayou Teche bending in the wind. At the city limits the Negro owner of a fruit stand, which had been there since I was a boy, was carrying his lugs of strawberries from the shade tree by the highway back inside the stand.
Twenty minutes later I was approaching the Vermilion River and the antebellum home of Bubba and Claudette Rocque. The air was cool now, the clouds overhead blue-black, the sugarcane green and rippling in the fields. I could smell rain in the south, smell the wet earth on the wind. Up ahead I could see the pea-gravel entrance to Bubba's home, the white fences entwined with yellow roses, the water sprinklers twirling among the oak, mimosa, lime, and orange trees on his lawn. Then I saw his maroon Cadillac convertible, the immaculate white top buttoned down on the tinted windows, turn out of the drive in a scorch of gravel and roar down the highway toward me. Its weight and speed actually buffeted my truck as it sucked past me like an arrow off an archer's bow. I watched it grow smaller in the rearview mirror, then saw its brake lights come on by a filling station and restaurant. I turned into his drive.
Even though it was cool, the curtains were drawn on the windows and the fans for the central air-conditioning hummed on the side of the house and a couple of window units upstairs were turned on full blast and dripping with moisture. I walked up on the wide marble porch and twisted the brass bell handle, waited and twisted again, then knocked loudly with my fist. I could hear no sound inside the house. I walked around the side, past a flower bed of wilted geraniums that was sopping from a soak hose, and tapped on the glass of the kitchen door. There was still no answer, but the MG and the Oldsmobile were parked in the carriage house and I thought I could smell fried bacon. The light in the sky had changed, and the air was moist and looked green through the trees, and dead oak leaves clicked and tumbled across the grass like bits of dried parchment.
I put my hands on my hips and looked in a circle at Bubba's clay tennis court and gazebos and myrtle hedges on the river and stone wells hung with ornamental chains and brass buckets and was about to give it up and mark it off when I saw the wind blow smoke and powdered ash and red embers from behind an aluminum lawn shed in back.
I walked across the grass and around the shed and looked down upon an old ash and garbage heap, on top of which were the collapsed and blackened remains of a mattress. The cover had almost all burned away, and the stuffing was smoldering and rising in the wind in black threads. But one side of the mattress had not burned entirely, and on it was a dirty red stain that was steaming from the heat. I opened my Puma knife, knelt, and cut the stained material away. It felt stiff and warm between my fingers as I folded it and placed it in my pocket. Then I found a garden hose in the shed, connected it to a spigot by a flower bed, and sprinkled the mattress until all the embers were dead. A rancid odor rose in the steam.
I walked back across the lawn, pried a brick up from the border of the geranium bed, and knocked out a pane in the back door. I turned the inside handle and stepped into a Colonial-style kitchen of brass pots and pans hung on hooks above a brick hearth. The smell of bacon came from a skillet on the stove and from a single grease-streaked plate on the breakfast table. The air-conditioning was turned so high that my skin felt instantly cold and dead, as though the house had been refrigerated with dry ice. I walked through a pine-paneled television den with empty bookshelves and two black bearskins nailed at angles on the wall, into a chandeliered dining room whose walnut cabinets were filled with shining crystal ware, and finally into the -marble-floored entrance area by the spiral staircase.
I walked slowly upstairs with my hand on the bannister. The furnishings and colors and woodwork of the second story had the same peculiar, mismatched quality as the downstairs, like an impaired camera lens that wouldn't focus properly. The bathroom door gaped open at the top of the stairs, exposing a pink shag rug, gold fixtures on the washbasin and bathtub, and pink wallpaper with a silver erotic design on it. The plastic rings on the shower bar hung empty, except for one of them that still held a torn eyelet and a small piece of vinyl from the curtain.
I found the master bedroom farther down the hall. Through the French doors that gave onto the gallery I could see the tops of the oak trees beating in the wind. I turned on the light and looked at the canopied bed that was centered against one wall. The sheets, bedspread, pillows, and mattress were gone. Only the box spring remained in the wooden frame. I walked in a circle around the bed and felt the rug. It was still damp in two places and smelled of dry-cleaning fluid or spot remover.
I knew it was time to call the Lafayette Parish sheriff's office. I was overextended legally, in the home on questionable grounds, and perhaps even in danger of tainting evidence in a homicide. But legality is often a matter that is decided after the fact, and I believed sincerely that someone owed me ten more minutes.
I went out a side door onto the flagstone patio, past the screened-in pool and the breezeway where Bubba kept his dumbbells, universal gym, and punching bags, and found a garden rake leaned against the carriage house. The wind was blowing stronger now, the first raindrops clicking against the upstairs windows.
Even though the flower bed by the side of the house was flooded from the soak hose, the leaves of the geraniums still looked like wilted green paper. I began to rake the dirt and the plants out of the bed. The soil was rich and black and had been built up with compost, and as I scooped it out on the gravel, milky puddles formed in the hollows. A foot down the rake's head struck something solid. I worked the dirt and torn plants and root systems back over the brick border and created a long, shallow depression through the center of the garden, the rake's teeth again touching something thick and resistant. Then I saw the edge of a vinyl shower curtain rise on one of the teeth and a pajama-clad knee protrude through the soil. I scraped around the edges of the body, watched the feet and shoulders and brow take shape, as though I were its creator and sculpting it from the earth.
I set the rake on the gravel and cut the soak hose in half with my knife to release a strong jet of water. Then I washed the soft dirt, which looked like black coffee grounds, from Bubba's face. He rested on top of the shower curtain, his gray-blue eyes open, his face and hands and feet absolutely bloodless. The handle and the metal back of the cane knife she had used stuck out of the dirt by his head. The cut across the side of his neck went all the way to the bone.
I turned off the soak hose and went back through the kitchen door and called the Lafayette Parish sheriff's office and Minos Dautrieve, then I started toward my truck. Dead leaves swirled all over the yard in the wind, the sky was black, and the few raindrops that struck my face were as hard as BBs.
Behind me I heard the phone ring. I went back inside and picked up the receiver.
"Hello," I said.
"Bubba? This is Kelly. What's the deal on this dago linen service?" a man's voice said over the hum of long-distance wires. "Claudette says I'm supposed to hire these guys. What the fuck's going on over there?"
"Bubba's dead, partner."
"What? Who is this?"
"I'm a police officer. What's your name?"
He hung up the phone.
I drove back down the gravel lane toward the highway while the thick limbs of the oak trees beat against one another overhead. The black thunderheads on the southern horizon were veined with lightning. The air was almost cold now, and the young sugarcane was bent to the ground in the wind. I rolled up my windows, turned on the windshield wipers, and felt the steering wheel shake in my hand. Pieces of newspaper and cardboard were flying in the air across the highway, and the telephone wires flopped and bounced like rubber bands between the poles.
I passed a cement plant and a sidetracked Southern Pacific freight, and then I saw the maroon convertible parked in front of a truck stop that had a small lounge attached to it. It began raining hard just as I walked inside.
Because the Negro janitor was mopping the floor and wiping down the tables, the curtains were open and the overhead lights were turned on. In the light you could see the cigarette burns on the floor, the mending tape on the booths, and the stacked beer cases in a back corner. An overweight barmaid was drinking coffee and talking with two oilfield roughnecks at the bar. The roughnecks wore tin hats and steel-toed boots and had drilling mud splattered on their clothes. One of them rolled a matchstick in his mouth and said something to me about the weather. When I didn't answer, he and his friend and the woman continued to look at me and the pistol and badge on my belt.
Claudette Rocque was at a table by the back door. The door was open and mist was blowing through the screen. Out on the railway tracks I could see the rust-colored SP freight cars shining in the rain. She sipped her gin rickey and looked at me across the top of the glass. Her face was bruised and fatigued, and her brown eyes, which had that strange red cast to them, were glazed and sleepy with alcohol. There was an outline of adhesive tape around the stitches on her chin, and the skin was puckered on the tip of the bone. But her yellow sundress and the orange bandana in her hair were fresh and clean and even looked attractive on her, and I guessed that she had showered and changed after she had dragged Bubba downstairs on the shower curtain, dug up the garden, buried him, replanted the geraniums, and burned the mattress and pillows and sheets. She inhaled from her filtertipped cigarette and blew smoke out toward me.
"You had a hard night," I said.
"I've had worse."
"You should have taken him somewhere else. You might have gotten away with it."
"What are you talking about?"
"I dug him up. The cane knife, too."
She drank from her glass and puffed on the cigarette again. Her eyes looked vaguely amused.
"Drink it up, Claudette. You're going on a big dry."
"Oh, I wouldn't count on that, pumpkin. You ought to watch more television. Battered wives are in fashion these days."
I slipped the handcuffs off the back of my belt, took the cigarette out of her mouth and dropped it on the floor, and cuffed her wrists through the back of the chair.
"Oh, our law officer is so uncorruptible, so noble in his AA sobriety. I bet you might like a slightly bruised fuck, though. It's your last chance, sugarplum, because I'll be out on bond tomorrow morning. You should give it some thought."
I turned a chair around backwards and sat across from her.
"You did three years and you think you're conwise, but you're still a fish," I said. "Let me give you the script. You won't do time because you cut Bubba's throat. Nobody cares when somebody like Bubba gets killed, except maybe the people he owes money to. Instead, a jury of unemployed roughnecks, fundamentalist morons, and welfare blacks who don't like rich people will send you up the road because you're an ex-con and a lesbian.
"Of course, you'll think that's unfair. And you'll be right, it is. But the greatest irony is that the people who'll send you back to St. Gabriel will never hear the name of the innocent girl you had murdered. Some people might call it comedy. It'll make a good story in the zoo."
Her reddish-brown eyes were narrow and mean. The bruise over the lid of one eye looked like a small blue mouse. I walked to the pay phone on the wall by the bar and called the sheriff's office. Just as I was about to hang up, I heard Claudette scrape the chair across the floor and smash it with her weight against the wall. She snapped the back loose from the seat, and then with the broken wood supports hanging from her manacled wrists, she went out the screen door into the rain.
I followed her across a field toward the railroad tracks. The bottom of her yellow dress was flecked with mud, and her bandanna fell off her head and her hair stuck wetly to her face. The rain was driving harder now, and the drops were big and flat and cold as hail. I grabbed her by the arm and tried to turn her back toward the truck stop, but she sat down in a puddle of gray water. Her arms, twisted behind her by the handcuffs, were rigid with muscle.
I leaned over and tried to lift her to her feet. She sat in the water with her legs apart, her shoulders stooped, her head down. I pulled her by the arms, her dead weight and wet skin slipping out of my hands. She fell sideways in the water, then she got to her knees and I thought she was going to stand up. I bent down beside her and lifted under one arm. She looked up at me in the rain, as though she were seeing me for the first time, and spit in my face.
I stepped back from her, used my handkerchief, and threw it away. She stared fixedly across the fields at the green line of trees on the horizon. Water ran in rivulets out of her soaked hair and down over her face. I walked to an empty freight car on the siding and pulled an old piece of canvas off the floor. It was stiff and crusted with dirt but it was dry. I spread it over her so that she looked like she was staring out of a small, peaked house.
"It's the Mennonite way of doing things," I said.
But she wasn't interested in vague nuances. She was looking at the sheriff's deputies and Minos Dautrieve stepping out of their cars in the truck-stop parking lot. I stood beside her and watched them make their way across the drenched field toward us. Through the open doors of the freight car I could see chaff spinning in the wind, and in the distance the gray buildings of the cement plant looked like grain elevators in the rain. Minos was calling to me in the echo of thunder across the land, and I thought of drowned voices out on the salt and wheat fields in the rain. I thought of white-capping troughs out on the Gulf and sunflowers and wheat fields in the rain.