THE RAIN WAS falling out of a blue-black sky when I parked the pickup truck in front of the travel agency in New Orleans. I knew the owner, and he let me use his WATS line to call a friend in Key West. Then I bought a one-way ticket there for seventy-nine dollars.
Robin lived in a decrepit Creole-style apartment building off South Rampart. The cracked brick and mortar had been painted purple; the red tiles in the roof were broken; the scrolled iron grillwork on the balconies had burst loose from its fastenings and was tilted at odd angles. The banana and palm trees in the courtyard looked as though they had never been pruned, and the dead leaves and fronds clicked loudly in the rain and wind. Dark-skinned children rode tricycles up and down the second-floor balcony, and all the apartment doors were open and even in the rain you could hear an incredible mixed din of daytime television, Latin music, and people shouting at each other.
I walked up to Robin's apartment, but as I approached her door a middle-aged, overweight man in a rain spotted gray business suit with an American-flag pin in his lapel came toward me, squinting at a small piece of damp paper in his hand. I wanted to think he was a bill collector, a social worker, a process server, but his eyes were too furtive, his face too nervous, his need too obvious. He realised that the apartment number he was looking for was the one I was standing in front of. His face went blank, the way a man's does when he suddenly knows that he's made a commitment for which he has no preparation. I didn't want to be unkind to him.
"She's out of the business, partner," I said.
"Sir?"
"Robin's not available anymore."
"I don't know what you're talking about." His face had grown rounder and more frightened.
"That's her apartment number on that piece of paper, isn't it? You're not a regular, so I suspect somebody sent you here. Who was it?"
He started to walk past me. I put my hand gently on his arm.
"I'm not a policeman. I'm not her husband. I'm just a friend. Who was it, partner?" I said.
"A bartender."
"At Smiling Jack's, on Bourbon?"
"Yes, I think that was it."
"Did you give him money?"
"Yes."
"Don't go back there for it. He won't give it back to you, anyway. Do you understand that?"
"Yes."
I took my hand away from his arm, and he walked quickly down the stairs and out into the rain-swept courtyard.
I looked through the screen door into the gloom of Robin's apartment. A toilet flushed in back, and she walked into the living room in a pair of white shorts and a green Tulane T-shirt and saw me framed against the wet light. The index finger of her left hand was wrapped in a splint. She smiled sleepily at me, and I stepped inside. The thick, drowsy odor of marijuana struck at my face. Smoke curled from a roach clip in an ashtray on the coffee table.
"What's happening, Streak?" she said lazily.
"I just ran off a client, I'm afraid."
"What d'you mean?"
"Jerry sent a John over. I told him you were out of the business. Permanently, Robin. We're moving you to Key West, kiddo."
"This is all too weird. Look, Dave, I'm down to seeds and stems, if you know what I mean. I'm going out to buy some beer. Mommy has to get a little mellow before she bounces her stuff for the cantaloupe lovers. You want to come along?"
"No beer, no more hooking, no Smiling Jack's tonight. I've got you a ticket on a nine o'clock flight to Key West."
"Stop talking crazy, will you? What am I going to do in Key West? It's full of faggots."
"You're going to work in a restaurant owned by a friend of mine. It's a nice place, out on the pier at the end of Duval Street. Famous people eat in there. Tennessee Williams used to come there."
"You mean that country singer? Wow, what a gig."
"I'm going to square what those guys did to you and me," I said. "When I do, you won't be able to stay in New Orleans."
"That's what's wrong with your mouth?"
"They told me what they did to your finger. I'm sorry. It's my fault."
"Forget it. It comes with my stage career." She sat down on the stuffed couch and picked up the roach clip, which now held only smoldering ash. She toyed with it, studied it, then dropped it on top of the glass ashtray. "Don't make them come back. The white guy, the one with the cowboy boots, he had some Polaroid pictures. God, I don't want to remember them."
"Do you know who these guys are?"
"No."
"Did you ever see them before?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes." She squeezed one hand around the fingers of the other. "In the pictures, some colored people were tied up in a basement or something. They had blood all over them. Dave, some of them were still alive. I can't forget what their faces looked like."
I sat down beside her and picked up her hands. Her eyes were wet, and I could smell the marijuana on her breath.
"If you catch that plane tonight, you can start a new life. I'll check on you and my friend will help you, and you'll put all this stuff behind you. How much money do you have?"
"A couple of hundred dollars maybe."
"I'll give you two hundred more. That'll get you to your first paycheck. But no snorting, no dropping, no shooting. You understand that?"
"Hey, is this guy out there one of your AA pals? Because I told you I don't dig that scene."
"Who's asking you to?"
"I got enough troubles without getting my head shrunk by a bunch of ex-drunks."
"Make your own choice. It's your life, kiddo."
"Yeah, but you're always up to something on the side. You should have been a priest. You still go to Mass?"
"Sure."
"You remember the time you took me to midnight Mass at St. Louis Cathedral? Then we walked across the square and had beignets at the Café du Monde. You know, I thought maybe you were serious about me that night."
"I have to ask you a couple of questions before I go."
"Sure, why not? Most men are interested in my jugs. You come around like a census taker."
"I'm serious, Robin. Do you remember a guy named Victor Romero?"
"Yeah, I guess so. He used to hang around with Johnny Dartez."
"Where's he from?"
"Here."
"What do you know about him?"
"He's a little dark-skinned guy with black curls hanging off his head, and he wears a French beret like he's an artist or something. Except he's bad news. He sold some tainted skag down on Magazine, and I heard a couple of kids were dead before they got the spike out of their arms."
"Was he muling for Bubba Rocque, too?"
"I don't know. I don't care. I haven't seen the guy in months. Why do you care about those dipshits? I thought you were the family man now. Maybe things aren't too good at home."
"Maybe."
"And you're the guy that's going to clean up mommy's act so she can wipe off tables for the tourists. Wow."
"Here's the airline ticket and the two hundred dollars. My friend's name is written on the envelope. Do whatever you want."
I started to get up, but she pressed her hands down on my arms. Her breasts were large and heavy against her T-shirt, and I knew secretly that I had the same weakness as the men who watched her every night at Smiling Jack's.
"Dave?"
"What?"
"Do you think about me a little bit sometimes?"
"Yes."
"Do you like me?"
"You know I do."
"I mean the way you'd like an ordinary woman, somebody who didn't have a pharmacy floating around in her bloodstream."
"I like you a lot, Robin."
"Stay just a minute, then. I'll take the plane tonight. I promise."
Then she put her arm across my chest, tucked her head under my chin like a small girl, and pressed herself against me. Her short-cropped, dark hair was soft and smelled of shampoo, and I could feel her breasts swell against me as she breathed. Outside it was raining hard on the courtyard. I brushed her cheek with my fingers and held her hand, then a moment later I felt her shudder as though some terrible tension and fear had left her body with sleep. In the silence I looked out at the rain dancing on the iron grillwork.
The neon lights on Bourbon looked like green and purple smoke in the rain. The Negro street dancers, with their heavy metal clip-on taps that clattered like horseshoes on the sidewalk, were not out tonight, and the few tourists were mostly family people who walked close against the buildings, from one souvenir shop to the next, and did not stop at the open doors of the strip joints where spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests were having a hard time bringing in the trade.
I stood against a building on the opposite corner from Smiling Jack's and watched Jerry through the door for a half hour. He wore his fedora and an apron over an open-necked sports shirt that was covered with small whiskey bottles. Against the glow of stage lights on the burlesque stage behind him, the angular profile of his face looked as though it were snipped out of tin.
The weight of the.45 was heavy in my raincoat pocket. I had a permit to carry it, but I never had occasion to, and actually I had fired it only once since leaving the department, and that was at an alligator who attacked a child on the bayou. But I had used it as a police officer when the bodyguard of New Orleans's number-one pimp and drug dealer threw down on my partner and me. It had kicked in my hand like a jackhammer, as though it had a life of its own; when I had stopped shooting into the back of the Cadillac, my ears were roaring with a sound like the sea, my face was stiff with the smell of the cordite, and later my dreams would be peopled by two men whose bodies danced disjointedly in a red haze.
This district had been my turf for fourteen years, first as a patrolman, then as a sergeant in robbery investigation, and finally as a lieutenant in homicide. In that time I got to see them all: male and female prostitutes, Murphy artists, psychotic snipers, check writers, pete men, car boosters, street dealers, and child molesters. I was punched out, shot at, cut with an ice pick, stuffed unconscious behind the wheel of a car and shoved off the third level of a parking garage. I witnessed an electrocution in Angola penitentiary, helped take the remains of a bookie out of a garbage compactor, drew chalk outlines on an alley floor where a woman had jumped with her child from the roof of a welfare hotel.
I turned the key on hundreds of people. A lot of them did hard time in Angola; four of them went to the electric chair. But I don't think my participation in what politicians call "the war on crime" ever made much difference. New Orleans is no safer a town now than it was then. Why? Narcotics is one answer. Maybe another is the fact that in fourteen years I never turned the key on a slumlord or on a zoning board member who owned interests in pornographic theaters and massage parlors.
I saw Jerry take off his apron and walk toward the back of the bar. I crossed the street in the slanting rain and entered the bar just as Jerry disappeared through a curtained doorway in back. On the lighted stage in front of a full-wall mirror, two topless girls in sequined G-strings with gold chains around their ankles danced barefoot to a 1950s rock 'n' roll record. I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the turning strobe light that danced across the walls and floor and the bodies of the men staring up at the girls from the bar, then I headed toward the curtained doorway in back.
"Can I help you, sir?" the other bartender said. He was blond and wore a black string tie on a white sports shirt.
"I have an appointment with Jerry."
"Jerry Falgout?"
"The other bartender."
"Yeah. Have a seat. I'll tell him you're here."
"Don't bother."
"Hey, you can't go back there."
"It's a private conversation, podna. Don't mess in it."
I went through the curtain into a storage area that was filled with cases of beer and liquor bottles. The room was lit by a solitary bulb in a tin shade, and a huge ventilator fan set in the far window sucked the air out into a brick alley. The door to a small office was partly ajar, and inside the office Jerry was bent on one knee in front of a desk, almost as if he were genuflecting, while he snorted a line of white powder off a mirror with a rolled five-dollar bill. Then he rose to his feet, closed each nostril with a finger, and sniffed, blinked, and widened his eyes, then licked his finger and wiped the residue off on a small square of white paper and rubbed it on his gums.
He didn't see me until he was out the door. I caught both of his arms behind him, put one hand behind his head and ran him straight into the window fan. His fedora clattered in the tin blades, and then I heard them thunk and whang against his scalp and I pulled his head up the way you would a drowning man's and shoved him back inside the small office and shut the door behind us. His face was white with shock, and blood ran out of his hairline like pieces of string. His eyes were wild with fright. I pushed him down in a chair.
"Goddamn, goddamn, man, you're out of your fucking mind," he said, his voice almost hiccupping.
"How much did you get for dropping the dime on Robin?"
"What? I didn't get nothing. What are you talking about?"
"You listen to me, Jerry. It's just you and me. No Miranda, no lawyer, no bondsman, no safe cell to be a tough guy in. It all gets taken care of right here. Do you understand that?"
He pressed his palm against the blood in his hair and then looked at his palm stupidly.
"Say you understand."
"What?"
"Last chance, Jerry."
"I don't understand nothing. What the fuck's with you? You come on like a crazy person."
I took the.45 out of my coat pocket, pulled back the receiver so he could see the loaded magazine, and slid a round into the chamber. I sighted between his eyes.
His face twitched with fear, his mouth trembled, his hair glistened with sweat. His hands were gripped on both his thighs as though there were a terrible pain in his bowels.
"Come on, man, put it away," he said. "I told you I ain't no swinging dick. I'm just a guy getting by. I tend bar, I live off tips, I mop up bathrooms. I'm no heavy dude you got to come down on like King Kong. No shit, man. Put away the piece."
"What did they pay you?"
"A hunnerd bucks. I didn't know they were going to hurt her. That's the truth. I thought they'd just tell her not to be talking to no ex-cops. They don't beat up whores. It costs them money. I don't know why they broke her finger. They didn't have to do it. She don't know anything anyway. Come on, man, put it away."
"Did you call Eddie Keats?"
"Are you kidding? He's a fucking hit man. Is that who they sent?"
"Who did you call?"
His eyes went away from the gun and looked down in his lap. He held his hands between his legs.
"Does my voice sound funny to you?" I said.
"Yeah, I guess so."
"It's because I have stitches in my mouth. I also have some in my head. A black guy named Toot put them there. Do you know who he is?"
"No."
"He broke Robin's finger, then he came to New Iberia."
"I didn't know that, man. Honest to God."
"You're starting to genuinely piss me off, Jerry. Who did you call?"
"Look, everybody does. it. You hear something about Bubba Rocque or somebody talking about him or maybe his people getting out of line, you call up his club about it and you get a hunnerd bucks. It don't even have to be important. They say he just likes to know everything that's going on."
"Hey, you all right in there, Jerry?" the voice of the other bartender said outside the door.
"He's fine," I said.
The doorknob started to turn.
"Don't open that door, podna," I said. "If you want to call the Man, do it, but don't come in here. While you're at it, tell the heat Jerry's been poking things up his nose again."
I looked steadily into Jerry's eyes. His eyelashes were beaded with sweat. He swallowed and wiped the dryness of his lips with his fingers.
"It's all right, Morris," he said. "I'm coming out in a minute."
I heard the bartender's feet walk away from the door. Jerry took a deep breath and looked at the gun again.
"I told you what you want. So cut me some slack, okay?" he said.
"Where's Victor Romero?"
"What the fuck I know about him?"
"You knew Johnny Dartez, didn't you?"
"Sure. He was in all these skin joints. He's dead now, right?"
"So you must have known Victor Romero, too."
"You don't get it. I'm a bartender. I don't know anything that anybody on the street don't know. The guy's a fucking geek. He was peddling some bad Mexican brown around town, it had insecticide in it or something. So he had to get out of town. Then I heard him and Johnny Dartez got busted by Immigration for trying to bring in a couple of big-time greasers from Colombia. But that must be bullshit because Johnny was still flying around when he went down in the drink, right?"
"They were busted by Immigration?"
"I don't know that, man. You stand behind that bar and you'll hear a hunnerd fucking stories a night. It's a soap opera. How about it, man? Do I get some slack?"
I eased the hammer down carefully and let the.45 hang from my arm. He expelled a long breath from his chest, his shoulders sagged, and he wiped his damp palms on his pants.
"There's one other thing," I said. "You're out of Robin's life. You don't even have thoughts about her."
"What am I supposed to do? Pretend I don't see her? She works here, man."
"Not anymore. In fact, if I were you, I'd think about finding a job. outside the country."
His face looked confused, then I could see a fearful comprehension start to work in his eyes.
"You got it, Jerry. I'm going to have a talk with Bubba Rocque. When I do, I'll tell him who sent me. You might think about Iran."
I dropped the.45 in the pocket of my raincoat and walked back out of the bar into the rain that had now thinned and was blowing in rivulets off the iron-scrolled balconies along the street. The air was clean and cool and sweet-smelling with the rain, and I walked in the lee of the buildings toward Jackson Square and Decatur, where my truck was parked, and I could see the lighted peaks of St. Louis Cathedral against the black sky. The river was covered with mist as thick as clouds. The waiters had stacked the chairs in the Café du Monde, and the wind blew the mist over the tabletops in a wet sheen. In the distance I could hear a ship's horn blowing across the water.
It was eleven o'clock when I got back home, and the storm had stopped and the house was dark. The pecan trees were wet and black in the yard, and the slight breeze off the bayou rustled their leaves and shook water onto the tin roof of the gallery. I checked on Alafair, then went into our bedroom, where Annie was sleeping on her stomach in her panties and a pajama top. The attic fan was on, and it drew the cool air from outside and moved the curly hair on the back of her neck. I put the.45 back in the drawer, undressed, and lay down beside her. I could feel the fatigue of the day rush through me like a drug. She stirred slightly, then turned her head away from me on the pillow. I placed my hand on her back. She rolled over with her face pointing at the ceiling and her arm over her eyes.
"You got back all right?" she said.
"Sure."
She was quiet a moment, and I could hear the dryness of her mouth when she spoke again: "Who was she, Dave?"
"A dancer in a joint on Bourbon."
"Did you take care of everything?"
"Yes."
"You owed her, I guess."
"Not really. I just had to get her off the hook."
"I don't understand why she's your obligation."
"Because she's a drunk and an addict and she can't do anything for herself. They broke her finger, Annie. If they catch her again, it'll be much worse."
I heard her take a breath, then she put her hands on her stomach and looked up into the dark.
"It's not over, though, is it?" she said.
"It is for her. And the guy who was partly responsible for me getting my face kicked in is going to be blowing New Orleans in a hurry. I admit that makes me feel good."
"I wish I could share your feeling."
It was quiet in the room, and the moon came out and made shadows in the trees. I felt I was about to lose something, maybe forever. I put my foot over hers and took one of her hands in mine. Her hand was pliant and dry.
"I didn't seek it out," I said. "The trouble came to us. You have to confront problems, Annie. When you don't, they follow you around like pariah dogs."
"You always tell me that one of the main axioms in AA is 'Easy does it.'"
"It doesn't mean you should avoid your responsibilities. It doesn't mean you should accept the role of victim."
"Maybe we should talk about the price we should all be willing to pay for your pride."
"I don't know what to say anymore. You don't understand, and I don't think you're going to."
"What should I feel, Dave? You lie down next to me and tell me you've been with a stripper, that you've run somebody out of New Orleans, that it makes you feel good. I don't know anything about a world like that. I don't think anybody should have to."
"It exists because people pretend it's not there."
"Let other people live in it, then."
She sat up on the side of the bed with her back to me.
"Don't go away from me," I said.
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Lie down and talk."
"It's no good to talk about it anymore."
"We can talk about other things. This is just a temporary thing. I've had a lot worse trouble in my life than this," I said.
She remained seated on the side of the bed, her panties low on her bottom. I put my hand on her shoulder and eased her back down on the pillow.
"Come on, kiddo. Don't lock your old man out," I said.
I kissed her cheeks and her eyes and stroked her hair. I could feel myself grow against her side. But her eyes looked straight ahead, and her hands rested loosely on my shoulders, as though that were the place that obligation required them to be.
I could see the water dripping out of the pecan trees in the moonlight. I didn't care about pride or the feelings that I would have later. I needed her, and I slipped off her panties and pulled off my underwear and held her against me. Her arms rested on my back and she kissed me once lightly on the jaw, but she was dry went I entered her, and her eyes stayed open and unseeing as though she were focused on a thought inside herself.
Out on the bayou I heard the peculiar cry of a bull 'gator calling to its mate. I was sweating now, even in the cool wind drawn by the attic fan through the window, and in the mire of thoughts that can occur in such a heart-rushing and self-defeating moment, I tried to justify both my lustful dependency and my willingness to force her to be my accomplice.
I stopped and raised myself off her, my body trembling with its own denial, and worked my underwear back over my thighs. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at me as a patient might from a hospital bed.
"It's been a long day," she said quietly.
"Not for me. I think I'd like to go out and blow the shit out of some tin cans and bottles right now."
I stood up from the bed and put on my shirt and pants.
"Where are you going?" she said.
"I don't know."
"Come back to bed, Dave."
"I'll lock the front door on the way out. I'll try not to wake you when I come back."
I slipped on my loafers and went outside to my truck. The few black clouds in the sky were rimmed with moonlight, and shadows fell through the oaks on the dirt road that led back into New Iberia. The bayou was high from the rain, and I could see the solitary V-shaped ripple of a nutria swimming from the cattails to the opposite shore. I banged and splashed through the muddy pools in the road, and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that my fists were ridged with bone. When I went across the drawbridge, the spare tire in the bed of the pickup bounced three feet in the air.
Main Street in New Iberia was quiet and empty when I parked in front of the poolroom. The oaks along the street stirred in the breeze, and out on the bayou the green and red running lights of a tug moved silently through the opened drawbridge. I could see the bridge tender in his little lighted office. Down the block a man in shirt sleeves, smoking a pipe, was walking his dog past the old brick Episcopalian church that had been used as a hospital by federal soldiers during the War Between the States.
The inside of the poolroom was like a partial return into the New Iberia of my youth, when people spoke French more often than English, when there were slot and race-horse machines in every bar, and the cribs on Railroad Avenue stayed open twenty-four hours a day and the rest of the world was as foreign to us as the Texans who arrived after World War II with their oil rigs and pipeline companies. A mahogany bar with a brass rail and spittoons ran the length of the room; there were four green-felt pool tables in back that the owner sometimes covered with oilcloth and served free gumbo on, and old men played bourée and dominoes under the wood-bladed fans that hung from the ceiling. The American and National League scores were written on a big chalkboard against one wall, and the television above the bar always seemed to have a baseball game on it. The room smelled of draft beer and gumbo and talcum, of whiskey and boiled crawfish and Virginia Extra tobacco, of pickled pig's feet and wine and Red Man.
The owner was named Tee Neg. He was an old-time pipe-liner and oil-field roughneck who looked like a mulatto and who had had three fingers pinched off by a drilling chain. I watched him draw a beer in a frosted schooner, rake the foam off with a ladle, and serve it with a jigger of neat whiskey to a man in denim clothes and a straw hat who stood at the bar and smoked a cigar.
"I hope you're here to play pool, Dave," Tee Neg said.
"Give me a bowl of gumbo."
"The kitchen's closed. You know that."
"Give me some boudin."
"They didn't bring me none today. You want a Dr. Pepper?"
"I don't want anything."
"Suit yourself."
"Give me a cup of coffee."
"You look tired, you. Go home and sleep."
"Just bring me a cup of coffee, Tee Neg. Bring me a cigar, too."
"You don't smoke, Dave. What you mad at, you?"
"Nothing. I didn't eat tonight. I thought your kitchen was open. You got today's paper?"
"Sure."
"I'm just going to read the paper."
"Anyt'ing you want."
He reached under the bar and handed me a folded copy of the Daily Iberian. There were beer rings on the front page.
"Give those old gentlemen in back a round on me," I said.
"You don't have to do that."
"I want to."
"You don't have to do that, Dave." He looked me steadily in the face.
"So I'm flush tonight."
"Okay, podna. But they buy you one, you go behind the bar and get it yourself. You don't use Tee Neg, no."
I shook open the paper and tried to read the sports page, but my eyes wouldn't focus on the words. My skin itched, my face burned, my loins felt as though they were filled with concrete. I folded the paper, dropped it on the bar, and walked back outside into the late-spring night.
I drove down to the bay at Cypremort Point and sat on a jetty that extended out into the salt water and watched the tide go out. When the sun came up in the morning the sky was empty and looked as white as bone. Seagulls flew low over the wet, gray sand flats and pecked at the exposed shellfish, and I could smell the odor of dead fish on the wind. My clothes felt stiff and gritty with salt as I walked back to my truck. All the way back to town my visit to the poolroom remained as real and as unrelenting in its detail as a daylong hangover.
Later, Batist and I opened up the bait shop and dock, then I went up to the house and slept until early afternoon. When I woke, it was bright and warm, and the mockingbirds and blue jays were loud in the trees. Annie had left me two waxpaper-wrapped ham and onion sandwiches and a note on the kitchen table.
Didn't want to wake you but when I get back from town can you help me find a horny middle-aged guy with a white streak in his head who knows how to put a Kansas girl on rock 'n' roll?
Love,
A.
PS. Let's picnic in the park this evening and take Alafair to the baseball game. I'm sorry about last night. You'll always be my special guy, Dave.
It was a generous and kind note. I should have been content with it. But it disturbed me as much as it reassured me, because I wondered if Annie, like most people who live with alcoholics, was not partly motivated by fear that my unpredictable mood might lead all of us back into the nightmarish world that AA had saved me from.
Regardless, I knew that the problems that had been caused us by the plane crash at Southwest Pass would not go away. And having grown up in a rural Cajun world that was virtually devoid of books, I had learned most of my lessons for dealing with problems from hunting and fishing and competitive sports. No book could have taught me what I had learned from my father in the marsh, and as a boxer in high school I had discovered that it was as important to swallow your blood and hide your injury as it was to hurt your opponent.
But maybe the most important lesson I had learned about addressing complexity was from an elderly Negro janitor who had once pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs in the old Negro leagues. He used to watch our games in the afternoon, and one day when I'd been shotgunned off the mound and was walking off the field toward the shower, he walked along beside me and said, "Sliders and screwballs is cute, and spitters shows 'em you can be nasty. But if you want to make that batter's pecker shrivel up, you throw a forkball at his head."
Maybe it was time to float one by the batter's head, I thought.
Bubba Rocque had bought a ruined antebellum home on the Vermilion River outside of Lafayette and had spent a quarter-million dollars rebuilding it. It was a massive plantation house, white and gleaming in the sun, the three-story Doric columns so thick that two men could not place their arms around them and touch hands. The front gallery was made of Italian marble; the second-story veranda ran completely around the building and was railed with ironwork from Seville and hung with boxes of petunias and geraniums. The brick carriage house had been expanded to a three-car garage; the stone wells were decorated with ornamental brass pulleys and buckets and planted with trumpet and passion vine; the desiccated wood outbuildings had been replaced with a clay tennis court.
The lawn was blue-green and glistening in the water sprinklers, dotted with oak, mimosa, and lime and orange trees, and the long gravel lane that led to the front door was bordered by a white fence entwined with yellow roses. A Cadillac convertible and a new cream-colored Oldsmobile were parked in front, and a fire-engine red collector's MG stuck out of the carriage house. Through the willows on the riverbank I could see a cigarette boat moored bow and stern to the dock, a tarp pulled down snugly on the cockpit.
It was hard to believe that this scene clipped out of Southern Living belonged to Bubba Rocque, the kid who used to train for a fight by soaking his hands in diluted muriatic acid and running five miles each morning with army boots on. An elderly Negro servant opened the door but didn't invite me in. Instead, he closed the door partly in my face and walked into the back of the house. Almost five minutes later I heard Bubba lean over the veranda and call down to me, "Go on in, Dave. I'll be right down. Sorry for our crummy manners. I was in the shower."
I let myself in and stood in the middle of the front hall under a huge chandelier and waited for him to come down the winding staircase that curled back into the second floor. The interior of the house was strange. The floors were blond oak, the mantelpiece carved mahogany, the furnishings French antiques. Obviously an expensive interior decorator had tried to recreate the Creole antebellum period. But somebody else had been at work, too. The cedar baseboards and ceiling boards had been painted with ivy vines; garish oil paintings of swampy sunsets, the kind you buy from sidewalk artists in New Orleans's Pirates Alley, hung over the couch and mantel; an aquarium filled with paddle wheels and plastic castles, even a rubber octopus stoppered to one side, sat in one window, green air bubbles popping from a clown's mouth.
Bubba came down the stairs on the balls of his feet. He wore white slacks and a canary-yellow golf shirt, sandals without socks and a gold neck chain, a gold wristwatch with a diamond-and-ruby face, and his spiked butch hair was bleached on the tips by the sun and his skin was tanned almost olive. He was still built like a fighter-his hips narrow, his stomach as flat as a boiler plate, the shoulders an ax-handle wide, the arms longer than they should be, the knuckles as pronounced as ball bearings. But it was the wide-set, gray-blue eyes above the gap-toothed mouth that leaped at you more than anything else. They didn't focus, adjust, stray, or blink; they locked on your face and they stayed there. He smiled readily, in fact constantly, but you could only guess at whatever emotion the eyes contained.
"What's happening, Dave?" he said. "I'm glad you caught me when you did. I got to go down to New Orleans this afternoon. Come on out on the patio and have a drink. What do you think of my place?"
"It's impressive."
"It's more place than I need. I got a small house on Lake Pontchartrain and a winter house in Bimini. That's more my style. But the wife likes it here, and you're right, it impresses the hell out of people. You remember when you and me and your brother used to set pins in the bowling alley and the colored kids tried to run us off because we were taking their jobs?"
"My brother and I got fired. But I don't think they could have run you off with a shotgun, Bubba."
"Hey, those were hard times, podna. Come out here, I got to show you something."
He led me through some French doors onto a flagstone patio by a screen-enclosed pool. Overhead the sun shone through the spreading branches of an oak and glinted on the turquoise water. On the far side of the pool was a screened breezeway, with a peaked, shingled roof, that contained a universal gym, dumbbells, and a body and timing bag.
He grinned, went into a prizefighter's crouch, and feinted at me.
"You want to slip on the sixteen-ounce pillows and waltz around a little bit?" he said.
"You almost put out my lights the last time I went up against you."
"The hell I did. I got you in the corner and was knocking the sweat out of your hair all over the timekeeper and I still couldn't put you down. You want a highball? Clarence, bring us some shrimp and boudin. Sit down."
"I've got a problem you might be able to help me with."
"Sure. What are you drinking?" He took a pitcher of martinis out of a small icebox behind the wet bar.
"Nothing."
"That's right, I heard you were fighting the hooch for a while. Here, I got some tea. Clarence, bring those goddamn shrimp." He shook his head and poured himself a drink in a chilled martini glass. "He's half senile. Believe it or not, he used to work on the oyster boat with my old man. You remember my old man? He got killed two years ago on the SP tracks. I ain't kidding you. They say he took a nap right on the tracks with a wine bottle on his chest. Well, he always told me he wanted to be a travelling man, poor old bastard."
"A Haitian named Toot and maybe a guy by the name of Eddie Keats came to see me. They left a few stitches in my mouth and head. A bartender in Smiling Jack's on Bourbon told me he sicked them on me by calling one of your clubs."
Bubba sat down across the glass-topped table from me with his drink in his hand. His eyes were looking directly into mine.
"You better explain to me what you're saying."
"I think these guys job out for you. They also hurt a friend of mine," I said. "I'm going to square it, Bubba."
"Is that why you think you're sitting in my house?"
"You tell me."
"No, I'll tell you something else instead. I know Eddie Keats. He's from some toilet up North. He doesn't work for me. From what I hear, he doesn't put stitches in people's heads, he smokes them. The Haitian I never heard of. I'm telling you this because we went to school together. Now we eat some shrimps and boudin and we don't talk about this kind of stuff."
He ate a cold shrimp off a toothpick from the tray the Negro had placed on the table, then sipped from his martini and looked directly into my face while he chewed.
"A federal cop told me Eddie Keats jobs out for you," I said.
"Then he ought to do something about it."
"The feds are funny guys. I never figured them out. One day they're bored to death with a guy, the next day run him through a sausage grinder."
"You're talking about Minos Dautrieve at the DEA, right? You know what his problem is? He's a coonass just like you and me, except he went to college and learned to talk like he didn't grown up down here. I don't like that. I don't like these things you're saying to me, either, Dave."
"You dealt the play, Bubba, when those two guys came out to my house."
He looked away at a sound in the front of the house, then tapped his fingertips on the glass tabletop. His nails were chewed back to the quick, and the fingertips were flat and grained.
"I'm going to explain it to you once because we're friends," he said. "I own a lot of business. I got a dozen oyster boats, I got a fish-packing house in New Iberia and one in Morgan City. I own seafood restaurants in Lafayette and Lake Charles, I own three clubs and an escort agency in New Orleans. I don't need guys like Eddie Keats. But I got to deal with all kinds of people in my business-Jews, dagos, broads with their brains between their legs, you name it. There's a labor lawyer in New Orleans I wouldn't spit on, but I pay him a five-thousand-dollar-a-year retainer so I don't get a picket in front of my clubs. So maybe I don't like everybody on my payroll, and maybe I don't always know what they do. That's business. But if you want me to, I'll make some calls and find out if somebody sent Keats and this colored guy after you. What's the name of this motormouth at Smiling Jack's?"
"Forget him. I already had a serious talk with him."
"Yeah?" He looked at me curiously. "Sounds mean."
"He thought so."
"Who's the friend that got hurt?"
"The friend is out of it."
"I think we got a problem with trust here."
"I don't read it that way. We're just establishing an understanding."
"No. I don't have to establish anything. You're my guest. I look at you and it's like yesterday I was watching you leaning over the spit bucket, your back trembling, blood all over your mouth, and all the time I was hoping you wouldn't come out for the third round. You didn't know it, but in the second you hit me so hard in the kidney I thought I was going to wet my jock."
"Did you know I found Johnny Dartez's body in that plane crash out at Southwest Pass, except his body disappeared?"
He laughed, cut a piece of boudin, and handed it to me on a cracker.
"I just ate," I said.
"Take it."
"I'm not hungry."
"Take it or you'll offend me. Christ, have you got a one-track mind. Listen, forget all these clowns you seem to be dragging around the countryside. I told you I have a lot of businesses and I hire people to run them I don't even like. You're educated, you're smart, you know how to make money. Manage one of my clubs in New Orleans, and I'll give you sixty thou a year, plus a percentage that can kick it up to seventy-five. You get a car, you cater trips to the Islands, you got your pick of broads."
"Did Immigration ever talk to you?"
"What?"
"After they busted Dartez and Victor Romero. They tried to smuggle in some high-roller Colombians. You must know that. I heard it in the street."
"You're talking about wetbacks or something now?"
"Oh, come on, Bubba."
"You want to talk about the spicks, find somebody else. I can't take them. New Orleans is crawling with them now. The government ought to send massive shipments of rubbers down to wherever they come from."
"The weird thing about this bust is that both these guys were mules. But they didn't go up the road, and they didn't have to finger anybody in front of a grand jury. What's that lead you to believe?"
"Nothing, because I don't care about these guys."
"I believe they went to work for the feds. If they'd been muling for me, I'd be nervous."
"You think I give a fuck about some greasers say they got something on me? You think I got this house, all these businesses because I run scared, because the DEA or Immigration or Minos Dautrieve with his thumb up his pink ass say a lot of bullshit they never prove, that they make up, that they tell to the newspapers or people that's dumb enough to listen to it?"
His eyes were bright, and the skin around his mouth was tight and gray.
"I don't know. I don't know what goes on inside you, Bubba," I said.
"Maybe if a person wants to find out, he's just got to keep fucking in the same direction."
"That's a two-way street, podna."
"Is that right?"
"Put it in the bank. I'll see you around. Thanks for the boudin."
I stood up to leave, and he rose from the table with me. His face was flat, heated, as unknowable as a shark's. Then suddenly he grinned, ducked into a boxer's crouch again, bobbed, and feinted a left at my face.
"Hey, got you!" he said. "No shit, you flinched. Don't deny it."
I stared at him.
"What are you looking at?" he said. "All right, so I was hot. You come on pretty strong. I'm not used to that."
"I've got to go, Bubba."
"Hell, no. Let's slip on the pillows. We'll take it easy on each other. Hey, get this. I went to this full-contact karate club in Lafayette, you know, where they box with their feet like kangaroos or something. I'm in the ring with this guy, and he's grunting and swinging his dirty foot around in the air, and all these guys are yelling because they know he's going to cut my head off, and I stepped inside him real fast and busted him three times before he hit the deck. They had to lead him back to the dressing room like somebody took his brains out with an ice cream scoop."
"I'm over the hill for it, and I still have to work this afternoon, anyway."
"Bullshit. I can see it in your eyes. You'd still like to take me. It's that long reach. It's always a big temptation, isn't it?"
"Maybe."
I was almost disengaged from Bubba and his mercurial personality when his wife walked through the French doors onto the patio. She was at least ten years younger than he. Her black hair was tied with ribbon behind her head; her skin was dark, and she wore a two-piece red and yellow flower-print bathing suit with a matching sarong fastened on one hip. In her hand she carried an open shoe box filled with bottles and emery boards for her nails. She was pretty in the soft, undefined way that Cajun girls often are before they gain weight in the middle years. She smiled at me, sat at the patio table, crossed her legs, arching one sandal off her foot, and put a piece of boudin in her mouth.
"Dave, you remember Claudette, from New Iberia?" Bubba said.
"I'm sorry, I'm a little vague on people from home sometimes," I said. "I lived in New Orleans for fourteen years or so."
"I bet you remember her mother, Hattie Fontenot."
"Oh yes, I think I do," I said, my eyes flat.
"I bet you lost your cherry in one of her cribs on Railroad Avenue," Bubba said.
"I'm not always big on boyhood memories," I said.
"You and your brother had a paper route on Railroad Avenue. Are you going to tell me y'all never got paid in rade?"
"I guess I just don't remember."
"She had two colored joints on the corner," he said. "We used to go nigger-knocking down there, then get laid for two dollars."
"Bubba just likes to talk rough sometimes. It doesn't bother me. You don't have to be embarrassed," she said.
"I'm not."
"I'm not ashamed of my mother. She had a lot of good qualities. She didn't use profane language in polite company, unlike some people I know." She had a heavy Cajun accent, and her brown eyes had a strange red cast in them. They were as round as a doll's.
"Bubba, will you make me a gin rickey?" she said.
"Your thermos is in the icebox."
"So? I'd like one in a glass, please."
"She can drink gin rickeys all day and not get loaded." Bubba said. "I think she's got hollow buns."
"I don't think Dave is used to our kind of talk," she said.
"He's married too, isn't he?"
"Bubba…"
"What?"
"Would you please get me a drink?"
"All right," he said, taking the thermos and a chilled glass out of the icebox. "I wonder what I pay Clarence for. I damn near have to show him a diagram just to get him to dust."
He poured from the thermos into his wife's glass, then put it in front of her. He continued to look at her with an exasperated expression on his face.
"Look, I don't want to get on your case all the time, but how about not filing your nails at the table?" he said. "I can do without nail filings in my food."
She wiped the powdered filings off the glass top with a Kleenex, then continued filing her nails over the shoe box.
"Well, I have to go. It was nice meeting you," I said.
"Yeah, I got to pack and get on the road, too. Walk him out to his truck, Claudette. I'm going to make some calls when I get to New Orleans. I find out somebody's been causing you problems, I'll cancel their act. That's a promise. By the way, that bartender better be out of town."
He looked at me a moment, balancing on the balls of his feet, then cocked his fists and jerked his shoulders at an angle as quickly as a rubber band snapping.
"Hey!" he said, grinned and winked, then walked back out the patio toward the circular staircase. His back was triangular, his butt flat, his thighs as thick as telephone posts.
His wife walked with me out to my pickup truck. The wind blew across the lawn and flattened the spray from the sprinklers into a rainbow mist among the trees. Gray clouds were building in the south, and the air was close and hot. Upstairs, Bubba had turned on a 1950s Little Richard record full blast.
"You really don't remember me?" she said.
"No, I'm sorry."
"I dated your brother, Jimmie, in New Orleans about ten years ago. One night we went out to visit you at your fish camp. You were really plastered and you kept saying that the freight train wouldn't let you sleep. So when it went by, you ran outside and shot it with a flare pistol."
I suddenly realised that Bubba's wife wasn't so uncomplicated after all.
"I'm afraid I was ninety-proof-a lot of the time back then," I said.
"I thought it was funny."
I tried to be polite, but like most dry alcoholics I didn't want to talk about my drinking days with people who saw humor in them.
"Well, so long. I hope to see you again," I said.
"Do you think Bubba's crazy?"
"I don't know."
"His second wife left him two years ago. He burned all her clothes in the incinerator out back. He's not crazy, though. He just wants people to think he is because it scares them."
"That could be."
"He's not a bad man. I know all the stuff they say about him, but not many people know the hard time he had growing up."
"A lot of us had a hard time, Mrs. Rocque."
"You don't like him, do you?"
"I guess I just don't know your husband well, and I'd better go."
"You get embarrassed too easy."
"Mrs. Rocque, I wish you good luck because I think you're going to need it."
"I heard him offer you a job. You should take it. The people that work for him make a lot of money."
"Yes, they do, and there's a big cost to lots of other people."
"He doesn't make them do anything they don't already want to."
"Your mother ran brothels, but she wasn't a white-slaver and she didn't sell dope. The most polite thing I can say about Bubba is that he's a genuine sonofabitch. I don't even think he'd mind."
"I like you. Come have dinner with us sometime," she said. "I'm home a lot."
I drove back down the pea-gravel lane and headed toward New Iberia and the picnic in the park with Annie and Alafair. The sun was bright on the tin roofs of the barns set back in the sugarcane fields. The few moss-hung oaks along the road made deep pools of shadow on the road's surface. I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.
I had gotten to him when I mentioned Immigration busting two of his mules. Which made me wonder even more what role Immigration played in all of this. They had obviously stonewalled Minos Dautrieve at the DEA, and I believed they were behind the disappearance of Johnny Dartez's body after it was recovered from the plane crash by the Coast Guard. So if I was any kind of cop at all, why hadn't I dealt with Immigration head-on? They probably would have thrown me out of their office, but I also knew how to annoy bureaucrats, call their supervisors in Washington collect, and file freedom-of-information forms on them until their paint started to crack. So why hadn't I done it, I asked myself. And in answering my own question, I began to have a realisation about presumption and denial in myself.