I GOT THE PHONE call from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department at 11:46 P.M. Clete had been barreling down the two-lane toward the Iberia Parish line when he hit the roadblock. Rather than think it through and let the situation decompress and play out of its own accord, he swung the Caddy onto a dirt road and tried to escape through a sugarcane field. The upshot was a blown tire, forty feet of barbed-wire fence tangled under his car frame, and a half-dozen Brahmas headed for Texas. The deputy who had called me was a fellow member of A.A. whom I saw occasionally at different meetings in the area. Her name was Emma Poche, and, like me, she had once been with the NOPD and had left the department under the same circumstances, ninety proof and trailing clouds of odium. Even today I had trepidation about Emma and believed she was perhaps one of those driven creatures who, regardless of 12-step membership, lived one drink and one click away from the Big Exit.
She lowered her voice and told me she was subbing as a night screw and that her call was unauthorized.
“I can’t understand you. Clete’s drunk?” I said.
“Who knows?” she replied.
“Say again?”
“He doesn’t act drunk.”
“What’s all that noise in the background?”
“Four deputies trying to move him from the tank into an isolation cell.”
The kitchen was dark, the moon high over the park on the far side of the bayou, the trees in the backyard full of light and shadows. I was tired and didn’t want to be pulled into another one of Clete’s escapades. “Tell those guys to leave him alone. He’ll settle down. He has cycles, kind of like an elephant in must.”
“That pimp from New Iberia, what’s his name?”
“Herman Stanga?”
“Purcel tore him up at a bar in the black district. And I mean tore him up proper. The pimp’s lawyer is down here now. He wants your friend charged with felony assault.”
“Stanga must have done something. Clete wouldn’t attack someone without provocation, particularly a lowlife like Stanga.”
“He just poleaxed a deputy. You’d better get your ass up here, Dave.”
I dressed and drove up the bayou ten miles to the lockup in the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Annex, next to the white-columned courthouse that had been built on the town square in the 1850s. Emma Poche met me at the door and walked me down to the holding cell where Clete had been forcibly transferred. Emma was around thirty-five and had gold hair and was slightly overweight, her cheeks always pooled with color, like a North European’s rather than a Cajun’s. A softcover book was stuffed in her back pocket. Before we got to the cell, she glanced behind her and touched my wrist with her fingers. “Does Purcel have flashbacks?” she said.
“Sometimes.”
“Get him moved to a hospital.”
“You think he’s psychotic?”
“Your friend isn’t the problem. A couple of my colleagues have a real hard-on for him. You don’t want him in their custody.”
“Thanks, Emma.”
“You can dial my phone anytime you want, hon.” She winked, her face deadpan. Then waited. “That was a joke.”
I wouldn’t have sworn to that. She stuck me in the ribs with her finger and walked back down the corridor, her holstered pistol canting on her hip. But I didn’t have time to worry about Emma Poche’s lack of discretion. Clete looked terrible. He was alone in the cell, sitting on a wood bench, his big arms propped on his kneecaps, staring straight ahead at the wall. He didn’t speak or acknowledge my presence.
Clete was a handsome man, his hair still sandy and cut like a little boy’s, his eyes a bright green, his skin free of tattoos and blemishes except for a pink scar through one eyebrow, where another kid had bashed him with a pipe during a rumble in the Irish Channel. He was overweight but could not be called fat, perhaps because of the barbells he lifted daily and the way he carried himself. When Clete’s boiler system kicked into high register, the kind that should have put his adversaries on red alert, his brow remained as smooth as ice cream, his eyes showing no trace of intent or anger, his physical movements like those of a man caught inside a photograph.
What usually followed was a level of mayhem and chaos that had made him the ogre of the legal system throughout southern Louisiana.
He turned his head sideways, his eyes meeting mine through the bars. The knuckles on his left hand were barked. “Just passing by?”
“Why’d you bust up Herman Stanga?”
“He spat on me.”
“So you had provocation. Why’d you run from the St. Martin guys?”
“I didn’t feel like putting up with their doodah.” He paused a moment. “I’d been smoking some weed earlier. I didn’t want them tearing my Caddy apart. They ripped out my paneling once before.”
So you wrecked your convertible for them, I thought.
“What?” Clete said.
“Did you knock down a screw?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe he slipped. I told those guys to keep their hands off me.”
“Clete-”
“Stanga was playing to an audience. I blew it. I stepped into his trap. He claims to be a member of a street-people outreach program called the St. Jude Project. You ever hear of it?”
“That’s not the issue now. I’ll have a lawyer down here in the morning to get you out. In the meantime-”
“Don’t shine me on, Dave. What do you know about this St. Jude stuff?”
“Either I stay here tonight to protect you from yourself, or you give me your word you’re finished pissing off everybody on the planet.”
“You don’t get it, Streak. Just like always, you’ve got your head wrapped in concrete.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re yesterday’s bubble gum. We’re the freaks, not Herman Stanga. That guy has wrecked hundreds, maybe thousands, of people’s lives. Guys like us follow around behind him with a push broom and a dustpan.”
“What happened at the Gate Mouth?”
“I saw villagers in the Central Highlands. We’d lit up the ville. I heard AK rounds popping under the hooches. All the old people and children and women were crying. The VC had already blown Dodge, but we torched the place with the Zippo track anyway. It was a resupply depot. Their wells were full of rice. We had to do it, right?”
I leaned my forehead lightly against one of the bars. When I looked up, Clete was staring at the back of the cell as though the answer to a mystery lay inside the shadows cast by the lights in the corridor.
On the way out of the annex, I saw Emma Poche in a small side office, reading her book. “Your friend quiet down?” she said.
“I’m not sure. Call me again if there’s any more trouble.”
“Will do.”
“What are you reading?”
She held up the cover so I could see it. “The Green Cage by Robert Weingart,” she said. “He’s an ex-con who supposedly works with some kind of self-help group around here. What do they call it? He’s hooked up with a rich guy in St. Mary Parish.”
“The local rich guy is Kermit Abelard.”
“Good book,” Emma said.
“Yeah, if you like to get into lockstep with the herd, it’ll do the trick,” I replied.
“You’re a joy, Streak,” she said, and resumed reading.
BY NOON THE next day Clete had been charged with destroying private property, resisting arrest, and felony assault. I went his bond for twenty-five thousand dollars and drove him back to the motor court on East Main in New Iberia, where he lived in a tan stucco cottage, under spreading oaks, no more than thirty yards from Bayou Teche. He showered and shaved and put on fresh slacks and a crisp shirt, and I drove him to Victor’s cafeteria and bought him a huge lunch and a pitcher of iced tea. He ate with a fork in one hand and a piece of bread in the other, his hat tilted forward, his skin lustrous with the energies that burned inside him.
“How you feel?” I asked.
“Fine. Why shouldn’t I?” he replied. “I need to rent a car and get back to my office and talk to my insurance man.”
“Why is it I think you’re not going to do that at all? Why is it I think you’ve got Herman Stanga in your bombsights?”
The cafeteria was crowded and noisy, the sound rising up to the high nineteenth-century stamped-tin ceiling. Clete finished chewing a mouthful of fried pork chop and mashed potatoes and swallowed. He spoke without looking at me, his eyes intense with thought. “Stanga set me up and I took the bait. He’ll be filing civil suit by the end of the day,” he said. “I’m going to take Stanga down with or without you, Dave.”
I paused before I spoke again. I could leave Clete to his own devices and let him try to resolve his troubles on his own. But you don’t let your friends down when they’re in need, and you don’t abandon a man who once carried you down a fire escape with two bullets in his back.
“Robert Weingart may be hooked up with this St. Jude Project,” I said. “At least that’s the impression I got from Emma Poche.”
“Weingart works with Stanga?”
“I’m not sure of that,” I said.
Clete wiped his mouth with his napkin and drank from his iced tea, pushing his half-eaten lunch away. “Does the St. Jude Project have an office hereabouts?”
“Not exactly. Want to take a little trip back into ‘the good old days’?” I said.
ST. MARY PARISH had a long history as a fiefdom run by a small oligarchy that had possessed power and enormous fortunes, actually hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time when the great majority of people in the parish had possessed virtually nothing. The availability of the ancient cypress trees, the alluvial soil that was among the most fertile in the world, the untapped oil and natural-gas domes that had waited aeons for the penetration of the diamond-crusted Hughes drill bit, and, most important, the low cost of black and poor-white labor seemed like the ultimate fulfillment of a corporate dream that only a divine hand could have fashioned. Even the curds of white smoke rising from the mills into the hard blue Louisiana sky could easily be interpreted as a votive offering to a benevolent capitalist deity.
To my knowledge, no members of the Abelard family had held rank of consequence in the Confederate army, nor had they participated in great battles, nor had their home been burned or vandalized by Yankee marauders. Nor did they choose to participate in the grand illusion that came to be known as the Lost Cause. In fact, rumors had persisted to the present time that the Abelards, originally from Pennsylvania, had gotten along very well with their Union occupiers and their cotton and molasses had been allowed to pass unobstructed up the Mississippi to markets in the North.
The patriarch was Peter Abelard. He had been a successful haberdasher in Philadelphia and New York City during the 1840s and had brought his wife and children to the South with one objective-to buy as much land and as many slaves as possible. By the outbreak of the war, he had owned 185 slaves and was renting fifty more, the latter in a category known as “wage slaves.” After Emancipation, while others watched in quiet desperation as their fortunes went down the sinkhole or joined terrorist groups like the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia, Peter Abelard formed a partnership with the man who had converted Angola Plantation into Angola Prison and turned it into a giant surrogate for the slave-labor system that Lincoln had signed out of existence with one stroke of his pen. The two men created the convict-lease system that became a prototype throughout the South, resulting, in Louisiana alone, in the deaths of thousands of inmates, mostly black, who died of malnutrition, disease, and physical abuse.
The Abelard estate was down at the bottom of St. Mary Parish, where the land bleeds gradually into sawgrass and ill-defined marshy terrain that is being eaten away by saltwater intrusion as far as the eye can see. The Abelard house, with its Greco columns and second-story veranda, had once been a magnificent structure inside an Edenic ambience that John James Audubon had painted because of the beautiful birds that lived among the trees and flowers. But now, as Clete and I drove south on the two-lane asphalt road, the vista was quite different.
A ten-thousand-mile network of canals that had been cut for the installation of pipelines and the use of industrial workboats had poisoned the root systems of living marsh along the entirety of the coast. The consequences were not arguable, as any collage of aerial photography would demonstrate. Over the years, the rectangular grid of the canals had turned into serpentine lines that had taken on the bulbous characteristics of untreated skin tumors. In the case of the Abelard plantation, the effects were even more dramatic, due in part to the fact that the grandfather had allowed drilling in the black lagoons and hummocks of water oaks and gum and cypress trees that had surrounded his house. Now the house sat in solitary fashion on a knoll, accessible only by a plank bridge, the white paint stained by smoke from stubble fires, its backdrop one of yellowed sawgrass, dead trees protruding from the brackish water, and abandoned 1940s oil platforms whose thick wood timbers were as weightless in the hand as desiccated cork.
For whatever reason, for whatever higher cause, the collective industrial agencies of the modern era had transformed a green-gold paradisiacal wonderland into an environmental eyesore that would probably make the most optimistic humanist reconsider his point of view.
I had called ahead and had been told by Kermit Abelard that he would be genuinely happy if I would come to his home. I did not ask about his friend Robert Weingart, the convict-author, nor did I mention the reason for my visit or that I would be bringing Clete Purcel with me, although I doubted if any of these things would have been of concern to him. I did not like Kermit dating my daughter, but I could not say he was a fearful or deceptive man. My objections to him were his difference in age from Alafair’s and that he was an experienced man in the ways of the world, and a great part of that experience came from the exploitive enterprises with which the Abelards had long been associated.
We rumbled over the bridge and knocked on the front door. A storm was kicking up in the Gulf, and the wind was cool on the porch. In the south I could see a bank of black thunderheads low on the horizon and electricity forking inside the clouds the way sparks fork and leap off an emery wheel.
“What a dump,” Clete said.
“Will you be quiet?” I said.
He screwed a filter-tip cigarette into his mouth and got out his Zippo. I started to pull the cigarette out of his mouth, but what was the use? Clete was Clete.
“Who’s Abelard’s cooze?” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Alafair is going out with him.”
His face looked as though it had just undergone a five-second sunburn. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I thought maybe you’d figured it out.”
“Is there another agenda working here, Dave?”
“Not a chance,” I replied.
He lit his cigarette and puffed on it. When Kermit Abelard opened the door, Clete took one more drag and flipped the cigarette in the flower bed.
“How do you do?” Kermit said, extending his hand.
“What’s the haps?” Clete replied.
“You’re Clete Purcel, aren’t you? I’ve heard a lot about you. Come in, come in,” Kermit said, holding the great oaken door wide.
The interior of the house was dark, the furnishings out of the Gilded Age, the light fixtures glowing dimly inside their dust. The carpet was old and too thin for the hardwood floor, and I could feel the rough grain of the timber through my shoes. Clete touched his nose with the back of his wrist and cleared his throat.
“Something wrong, Mr. Purcel?” Kermit asked.
“I have allergies,” Clete replied.
“I’ve fixed some drinks for us and a cold Dr Pepper or two and a snack if you’d like to come out on the sunporch,” Kermit said.
I couldn’t hold it back. “You’re keen on Dr Pepper?” I said.
“No, I thought you might want-” he began.
“You thought I would like a Dr Pepper instead of something else?” I said.
“No, not necessarily.”
“You have water?” I said.
“Of course.”
“I’ll take a glass of water.”
“Sure, Dave, or Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Call me whatever you like.”
I saw Clete gazing out the side door onto the sunporch, trying to hide a smile.
“What is it I can help y’all with?” Kermit said.
“Is your friend Robert Weingart here?” I said.
“He’s just getting out of the shower. We were splitting wood on the lawn. Robert is marvelous at carving ducks out of wood. Both of us write through the morning, then have a light lunch and do a little physical exercise together. I’m glad you came out, Mr. Robicheaux. I think so highly of Alafair. She’s a great person. I know you’re proud of her.”
He was patronizing and presumptuous, but nevertheless I wondered if I hadn’t been too hard on him; if indeed, as Clete had suggested, I’d had my own agenda when I’d brought Clete to the Abelard home.
When Kermit was only a teenager, his parents had disappeared in a storm off Bimini. Their sail yacht had been found a week later on a sunny day, floating upright in calm water, the canvas furled, the hull and deck clean and gleaming. I suspected that regardless of his family’s wealth, life had not been easy for Kermit Abelard as a young man.
Earlier I mentioned that his ancestors had not invested themselves in the comforting legends of the Lost Cause. But as I glanced at a glassed-in mahogany bookcase, I realized that southern Shintoism does not necessarily have to clothe itself in Confederate gray and butternut brown. A Norman-Celtic coat of arms hung above the bookcase, and behind the glass doors were clusters of large keys attached to silver rings and chains, the kind a plantation mistress would wear on her waist, and a faded journal of daily life on a southern plantation written in faded blue ink by Peter Abelard’s wife. More significantly, the case contained framed photographs of Kermit’s grandfather, Timothy Abelard, standing alongside members of the Somoza family in Nicaragua, supervising a cockfight in Batista-era Cuba, receiving a civilian medal for the productivity of munitions that his defense plant had manufactured during the Vietnam War, and finally, Timothy Abelard overseeing a group of black farmworkers in a field of wind-swirling sugarcane.
In the last photograph, the cane cutters were bent to their work, their shins sheathed in aluminum guards. Only Timothy Abelard was looking at the camera, his pressed clothes powdered with lint from the cane. His expression was that of a gentleman who had made his peace with the world and did not consign his destiny or the care of either his family or his property to others.
Then I realized that I was being stared at, in a fashion that is not only invasive but fills you with a sense of moral culpability, as though somehow, through a lapse of manners, you have invited the disdain of another.
Timothy Abelard was sitting in a wheelchair no more than ten feet away, a black female nurse stationed behind him. Eight or nine years ago he had become a recluse without ever offering a public explanation of his infirmity. Some people said he’d developed an inoperable tumor in the brain; others said he had been dragged by his horse during an electric storm. His skin was luminescent from the absence of sunlight.
“Hi, Pa’pere. Did you want to join us?” Kermit said.
But Timothy Abelard’s eyes did not leave my face. They had the intensity of a hawk’s, and like a hawk’s, they did not occupy themselves with thoughts about good or evil or the distinction between the two. He was well groomed, his hair thin and combed like strands of bronze wire across his pate. His smile could be called kindly and deferential, even likable, in the way we want old people to be wise and likable. But the intrusive nature of his gaze was unrelenting.
“How are you, sir?” I said.
“I know you. Or I think I do. What’s your name?” he said.
“Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Sheriff’s Department,” I said.
“You investigating a crime, suh?” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
“I had some questions about the St. Jude Project.”
“That’s a new one on me. What is it?” he said.
“I guess that makes two of us,” I said. “Do you remember my father? His name was Aldous Robicheaux, but everyone called him Big Aldous.”
“He was in the oil business?”
“He was a derrick man. He died in an offshore blowout.”
“I’m forgetful sometimes. Yes, I do remember him. He was an extraordinary man in a fistfight. He took on the whole bar at Provost’s one night.”
“That was my father,” I replied.
“You say he was killed on a rig?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, as though the event were yesterday.
I waited for Kermit to introduce Clete, but he didn’t. “Miss Jewel, would you get Pa’pere ready to go to Lafayette? He’s having dinner with friends this evening. I’ll have the car brought around.”
“Yes, suh,” the nurse said.
“Come on, Dave, let’s go out here on the porch,” Kermit said, jiggling his fingers at me, using my first name now, showing some of the imperious manner that I associated with his background. I was beginning to wonder if my earlier sympathies with him had been misplaced.
Entering the sunporch was like stepping into another environment, one that was as different from the interior of the house as a sick ward is from a brightly lit fairground on a summer evening. The windows on the porch were paneled with stained-glass designs of bluebirds and parrots, kneeling saints, chains of camellias and roses and orchids, unicorns and satyrs at play, a knight in red armor impaling a dragon with a spear. The western sunlight shining through the panels created a stunning effect, like shards of brilliant color splintering apart and re-forming themselves inside a kaleidoscope.
“Sorry to be late for our little repast,” Robert Weingart said behind me.
He was wearing sandals and a terry-cloth robe that was cinched tightly around his waist, his hair wet and freshly combed, his small mouth pursed in an expression that I suspected was meant to indicate sophistication and long experience with upscale social situations. Kermit introduced Clete to him, but Clete did not shake hands. Nor did I.
A confession is needed here. Most cops do not like ex-felons. They don’t trust them, and they think they got what they deserved, no matter how bad a joint they did their time in. In the best of cases, cops may wish an ex-felon well, even help him out with a job or a bad PO, but they do not break bread with him or ever pretend that his criminal inclinations evaporated at the completion of his sentence.
By no stretch of the imagination could Robert Weingart be put in a best-case category.
The glass-topped table was set with place mats and tiny forks and spoons and demitasse cups and bowls of crawfish salad, hot sauce, veined shrimp, dirty rice, and soft-crusted fried eggplant. Two dark green bottles of wine were shoved deep in a silver ice bucket, alongside two cans of Dr Pepper. Neither Clete nor I sat down.
“Well, time waits on no man,” Robert Weingart said, sitting down by himself. He dipped a shrimp in red sauce and bit into it, then began reading a folded newspaper that had been in the pocket of his robe as though the rest of us were not there.
“You know Herman Stanga?” I asked Weingart.
“Can’t say I’ve heard of him,” he replied, not looking up from his paper.
“That’s funny. Herman says he’s working for the St. Jude Project,” I said. “That’s your group, isn’t it?”
Weingart looked up. “No, not my group. It’s a group I support.”
“I’m familiar with Herman Stanga, Dave,” Kermit said. “He doesn’t work for St. Jude, but I’ve had conversations with him and tried to earn his trust and show him there’s a better way to do things. We’ve gotten two or three of his girls out of the life and into treatment programs. You see a problem in that?”
“Down on Ann Street, I met this sawed-off black kid named Buford. He was slinging dope on the corner. He was probably twelve years old at the outside. He’s Herman Stanga’s cousin,” Clete said. “I guess Herman’s outreach efforts don’t extend to children or his relatives.”
“Does Herman know this boy is dealing drugs?” Kermit asked.
“It’s hard to say. I broke Herman’s sticks at the Gate Mouth club in St. Martinville. He’s in the hospital right now. You could drop by Iberia General and chat him up.”
“Your sarcasm isn’t well taken, Mr. Purcel,” Kermit said. “You attacked Herman?”
“Your man spat in my face.”
“He’s not my man, sir.”
“Is he your man?” Clete said to Robert Weingart.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, my friend,” Weingart replied.
“There’s something wrong with the words I use? You can’t quite translate them? How about taking the corn bread out of your mouth before you say anything else?”
Weingart put away his paper and unfolded a thick linen napkin and spread it on his lap. His robe had fallen open, exposing the thong he was wearing. “Have you ever tried writing detective stories, Clete? I bet you’d be good at it. I could introduce you to a couple of guys in the Screenwriters Guild. Your dialogue is tinged with little bits of glass that would make Raymond Chandler envious. Really.”
Clete looked at me, his face opaque, his hands as big as hams by his sides, his facial skin suddenly clear of wrinkles. Don’t do it, Cletus, don’t do it, don’t do it, I could hear myself thinking.
Clete sniffed again, as though he were coming down with a cold. He looked back at the doorway into the interior of the house. “You have rats?”
“No, not to my knowledge,” Kermit said. “Mr. Purcel, no one meant to offend you. But what we’re hearing is a bit of a shock. The St. Jude Project isn’t connected with Herman Stanga, no matter what he’s told you.”
“We’re glad to hear that, Kermit,” I said. “But why would you be talking with a man like Stanga to begin with? You think he’s going to help you take his prostitutes off the street?”
“I’ve spoken with Alafair regarding some of these things. I thought maybe she had talked with you. She’s expressed a willingness to help out.”
“You’re trying to involve my daughter with pimps and hookers? You’re telling me this to my face?”
Kermit shook his head, nonplussed, swallowing. “I’m at a loss. I respect you, Mr. Robicheaux. I respect your family. I’m very fond of Alafair.”
I could feel my moorings starting to pull loose from the dock. “You’re almost ten years older than she is. Older men don’t have ‘fond’ in mind when they home in on younger women.”
“Why don’t I walk outside with Mr. Weingart and let y’all talk?” Clete said. “How about it, Bob? Can you hitch up your robe and tear yourself loose from that fried eggplant? What do you say, Bob?”
Inside my head I saw an image of hurricane warning flags flapping in a high wind.
Weingart rested his fingertips on the tabletop, his lips pursed, his cheeks slightly sunken, every hair on his head neatly in place. He seemed to be thinking of a private joke, his eyes lighting, a smile flickering at the corner of his mouth. “What would you like to do on our little stroll?”
“Robbie, don’t do this,” Kermit said.
“I just wondered what the big fellow had in mind. He looks like a gelatinous handful.”
I saw the crinkles around Clete’s eyes flatten, the blood draining from the skin around his mouth. But he surprised me. “Time to dee-dee, Streak,” he said.
Weingart repositioned his newspaper and began reading again, detached, wrapped in his narcissism and contempt for the world, indifferent to the embarrassment flaming in Kermit’s face.
“Thank your grandfather for his hospitality,” I said to Kermit.
“Mr. Robicheaux, I want to apologize for anything inappropriate that may have occurred here.”
“Forget the apology. Don’t take Alafair anywhere near Herman Stanga or his crowd. If you do, I’d better not hear about it.”
Kermit blanched. “Absolutely. I wouldn’t-”
“Mr. Weingart?” Clete interrupted.
“Yes?” Weingart said, reading his paper.
“Don’t ever call me by my first name again.”
“How about ‘Mr.’ Clete? Do come back, Mr. Clete. It’s been such a pleasure,” Weingart said. “Absolutely it has.” He lifted his gaze to Clete, his eyes iniquitous.
I fitted my hand on Clete’s upper arm. It was as tight as a fire hydrant. We walked back through the living room, past the photos of Timothy Abelard with members of the Somoza family, past a copy of a Gauguin painting, out the door and across the porch and onto the lawn. I could taste the salt in the wind and feel the first drops of rain on my face. Clete cleared his throat and turned to one side and spat. “Did you smell it in there?”
“Smell what?”
“That odor, like something dead. I think it’s on the old man. You didn’t smell it?”
“No, I think you’re imagining things.”
“He sends chills through me. He makes me think of a turkey buzzard perched on a tombstone.”
“He’s just an old man. He’s neurologically impaired.”
“I’ve been wrong about you for many years, Dave. You know the truth? I think you want to believe people like the Abelards are part of a Greek tragedy. Here’s the flash: They’re not. They should have been naped off the planet a long time ago.”
“Get in the truck.”
“Did you know Kermit Abelard was gay?”
“No. And I don’t know that now.”
“Weingart is a cell-house bitch. Those two guys are getting it on. Don’t pretend they’re not.”
“Stay away from Weingart, Clete. A guy like that is looking for a bullet. Anything short of it will have no effect.”
“You want Weingart around Alafair? You want his fop of a boyfriend around her? What’s wrong with you?”
“Just shut up.”
“The hell I will.”
I ate two aspirin from a box I kept on the dashboard of my truck, started the engine, and hoped that a great hard gray rain would sweep across the wetlands. I hoped that window-breaking hail would pound down on my truck, clattering like tack hammers on the roof, filling the cab with such a din that I could not hear Clete talking all the way back to New Iberia. I wished somehow the sulfurous smell of the storm and the swirling clouds of rain and the bolts of lightning spiking into the horizon would cleanse me of the angst I felt about my daughter and her exposure to a tangle of vipers thriving on the watery southern rim of St. Mary Parish.