Late that afternoon I fixed a poor-boy sandwich of oysters, shrimp, lettuce, and a sauce piquante, then drove through the cooling, tree-shaded streets toward the Times-Picayune, where a night editor sometimes let me use their morgue.
But first I wanted to make amends to Annie for deserting her at the houseboat the other night. Afternoon Jim Beam always endowed me with that kind of magical power.
I bought a bottle of Cold Duck and a box of pralines wrapped in orange cellophane and yellow ribbon, kept my freshly pressed seersucker coat on, and strolled up her sidewalk in the dusky light. The air smelled of lilac and spaded flower beds and clipped lawns and water sprinklers clicking across hedges and the trunks of trees.
When she didn't answer the bell, I walked around back and found her barbecuing steaks on a portable grill on a brick patio under a chinaberry tree. She wore white shorts and Mexican straw shoes and a yellow shirt tied under her breasts. Her eyes were watering in the smoke, and she stepped away from the fire and picked up a gin gimlet from a glass tabletop that was set with plates and silverware. The gimlet glass was wrapped in a paper napkin with a rubber band around it. Her eyes lighted briefly when she saw me, then she looked away.
"Oh, hello, Dave," she said.
"I should have called. I caught you at a bad time."
"A little bit."
"I brought these pralines and some Cold Duck," I said.
"That was nice of you."
"I'm sorry I left you the other night. It's something you won't understand very well, I'm afraid."
The light came back in her blue eyes. I could see the red birthmark on the top of her breast.
"The best way to end a conversation is to tell somebody she can't understand something," she said.
"I meant there was no excuse for it."
"There was a reason. Maybe you just don't want to look at it."
"I went after liquor. I was drunk all night. I ended up in a bar on Old 90 with a bunch of sideshow performers. I called up the CIA and cussed out the duty officer."
"I guess that prevented you from finding a telephone for two days."
"I tried to find Bobby Joe Starkweather. Somebody canceled him out in a hog lot."
"I'm not interested, Dave. Did you come by to screw me?"
"You think I'm giving you a shuck?"
"No, I think you're singleminded and you're bent on revenge. I made the overture the other night and complicated things for you. Now you're feeling the gentleman's obligation. Sorry, I'm not in the absolution business. I don't have any regrets. If you do, that's your problem."
She began to poke the meat on the grill with a fork. The fire flared up and her eyes winced in the smoke. She poked at the meat all the harder.
"I'm truly sorry," I said. "But you're right about my being singleminded. There's only one girl I'm interested in."
I wanted to put my arms around her waist and take her out of the smoke, hold her against me and feel her curly hair under my hands.
"You just can't leave a woman alone in the night, Dave."
I looked away from her face.
"I woke up and you were gone and I thought maybe those defective people had come back. I drove up and down the beach looking for you until dawn," she said.
"I didn't know that."
"How could you, if you were with some sideshow people?"
"Annie, I'd like another chance with you. I can't make you many promises, except I won't deliberately hurt you again. That's probably not very adequate, but it's all I have."
She turned her face away from me, and I saw her brush her eye with the back of her wrist.
"Another night. There's someone coming over now," she said.
"All right."
"Are those people out there worth all this?"
"They'll find me if I don't find them. You can bet on it."
"My great-grandparents were part of the Underground Railway. Quantrill's Raiders tore down their sod houses and burned their cornfields. Long after Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson and Jesse James were dead, they were raising children and Russian wheat in a free state.
"But somebody canceled Quantrill and Company's action first, namely, federal cavalry."
I smiled at her, but her face suddenly looked wan in the electric light that was hung in the chinaberry tree. I didn't care about propriety or restraint or the fact that her friend would arrive any minute now; I set the Cold Duck and the pralines on the glass tabletop and put my arms around her and kissed her curly hair. But she didn't respond. Her shoulders were stiff, her eyes turned down, her arms angular and dead.
"Call me tomorrow," she whispered.
"Sure."
"I want you to."
"I will. I promise."
"Things just aren't right with me tonight. I'll be all right tomorrow."
"I'll leave the pralines. I'll call early. Maybe we'll have breakfast at the Café du Monde."
"That sounds nice," she said. But her eyes were veiled, and I couldn't read them. Under all her fascination with weirdness, she had the sensitive heart of a small-town Midwestern girl.
On my way down the front walk I passed a young man who looked like a graduate student at Tulane. He wore cream-colored slacks, a pale blue shirt, and a striped tie, and his smile was good-natured and his face very handsome. I asked him if he was having dinner with Annie Ballard.
"Why, yes," he said, and smiled again.
"Here, take this," I said, and handed him the bottle of Cold Duck. "It's on the fuzz tonight."
It was an old thing to do, and a moment later I felt foolish and rude. Then I remembered an axiom taught me in Vietnam by a line officer who used to cut through Gordian knots with a sentence: Fuck it. Who wants to be a good loser?
That night as I sat in the morgue of the Times-Picayune and turned the yellowed pages of old newspapers or flipped the strips of microfilm up on the viewing screen, I reflected upon the ambiguous importance of the past in our lives. In order to free ourselves from it, I thought, we treat it as a decaying memory. At the same time, it's the only measure of identity we have. There is no mystery to the self; we are what we do and where we have been. So we have to resurrect the past constantly, erect monuments to it, and keep it alive in order to remember who we are.
For some, even our darkest past moments are preferable somehow to those few interludes of peace and sunshine in the world. Why? God only knows. I thought about the followers of Pancho Villa who found his assassination and the end of his violent era so unacceptable that they dug up his corpse, sawed the head from the trunk, sank it in a huge glass jar of white rum, and brought it in a Model T Ford to the Van Horn Mountains outside of El Paso, where they entombed it under a pile of orange rocks. At night for years thereafter, they would remove the rocks and drink mescal and smoke marijuana in the hot wind and talk to his bloated, leering face floating against the glass.
But I was looking at another kind of dark history now. The retired two-star general had not been hard to find. His full name was Jerome Gaylan Abshire, and he lived right here in New Orleans, in the Garden District off St. Charles Avenue. He was a West Point graduate, and he'd had a distinguished combat record in World War II and Korea. A 1966 color photograph showed him eating out of a GI mess kit with his men in an LZ cut out of the elephant grass in the central highlands of Vietnam. He wore an automatic pistol in a shoulder holster over his bare, leathery chest; his face was deeply tanned, his eyebrows and hair very white, his eyes the intense blue of a butane flame. A creative journalist had called him "The Happy Warrior" in the cutline.
But I ran across another Jerome Gaylan Abshire in the newspaper files, this one a junior, a U.S. Army lieutenant, obviously his son. His name first appeared in a 1967 story when he was listed as missing in action; then I found a second clipping dated November 1, 1969, that described how two American prisoners held by the Vietcong in an area called Pinkville had been tied to posts with their heads inserted in wooden cages filled with rats. The article said one of these soldiers may have been Lieutenant Jerome Abshire of New Orleans.
The word "Pinkville" leaped off the page like a sin not confessed and deliberately forgotten. It was the name that GIs called the area around My Lai.
Then, as though the newspaper librarian had made the same associations as I, he or she had attached a crossreferenced Xerox copy of an article about some testimony at the court-martial of Lieutenant William Calley, when he was tried for ordering the My Lai massacre. One of the grunts who had taken the stand said in a parenthetical aside that some captured Vietcong had told him that two American prisoners had helped them string mines through a rice field, the same rice field in which his company had been blown apart.
I was tired. My system was beginning to crave alcohol again, and the place names, the dates, a photograph of villagers executed on a trail, filled me with a sadness and despair that made me close the file, flick off the viewing screen, walk to the window, and stare out into the darkness for a full minute, hoping that no one in the room saw my eyes.
I never saw an American atrocity, at least not a deliberate one, so I did not have those kinds of memories from the war. Instead, if there was one experience that encapsulated my year in Vietnam, it was a strange incident involving two men in my platoon and a drowning water buffalo.
They were almost all Southerners, from textile and cannery and cotton-gin towns where young people seldom expected more than Saturday nights at the drive-in movie with others like themselves who would wear their high school football jackets years after their graduation. We had walked twenty miles out of Indian country into a secured area by a tree-lined, milky brown river, and the men had dropped their packs and rifles and undressed, and were splashing around in the shallows like boys. The late-afternoon sun was warm through the trees and dappled the ground with shadow. I hadn't slept in a day and a half, and I lay down in the cool, short grass under a banyan tree, put my arm across my eyes, and in seconds I was asleep.
I awoke a half hour later to giggling and laughter and the drowsy smell of marijuana. Somebody had scored some Cambodian red, and the whole platoon was getting loaded. I got up stiffly from under the tree, walked down the bank, and realized they were all being entertained by a scene taking place in the middle of the river. A water buffalo had wandered out into the hard current, had become stuck in the silt on the bottom, and was now floundering and barely able to keep its nostrils above the surface. Its eyes were wide with terror, its horns webbed with debris from the river. The owner of the buffalo, who wore a French legionnaire's flop hat on his pointed head and who was so thin and bony that he looked like he was made of coat hangers, ran up and down the bank, waving his arms and shouting at us in Vietnamese and scraps of French.
Two cousins from Conroe, Texas, had waded in after the buffalo with a lariat they had fashioned from a rope they had taken out of the back of a Marine Corps six-by. Their brown backs were wet and ridged with muscle and vertebrae, and they were grinning and laughing and flinging out their lariat with all the stoned confidence of nineteen-year-old cowboys.
"There's dropoffs out there," I said.
"Watch this, Lieutenant," one of them called back. "We'll slide this honker out slicker than a hog's pecker."
Then suddenly out of the brown current I saw the gnarled, black roots of a floating tree break through the surface and reach into the air like an enormous claw.
It hit them broadside with such force that their faces went white. Their mouths gasped open, then spit water. They tried to push away from the roiling, yellow foam around the tree and the roots that spiked their eyes and twisted their faces into contortions. The tree spun around in the current, shining with mud, caught new momentum, and pressed them under. We waited for them to surface on the other side, to pop up in a calm place, rattling water and light from their hair, but we never saw them again.
We probed the river with poles and dragged it with a grappling hook for three hours. Instead of our own people, we dredged up belts of French machine-gun ammunition, a box of unexploded Japanese potato mashers that leaked rust and green slime on the bank, American soda-pop cans, and a cargo net filled with Vietcong dead that must have been dropped by one of our helicopters. When the hook pulled the net tautly from the water's surface, we saw arms and heads draped through the webbing like those of prisoners long since tired of their eternal sentence.
I wrote letters to the families of the two boys in Conroe, Texas. I said they had given their lives in trying to help others. Their lives had not been taken; they were given. I did not say I regretted there were no medals for innocence and the trusting courage it took to keep being a Texas country boy in a land that seemed created for jaded and transient colonials.
An hour later I was in a wonderful old bar on Magazine Street, which separated the Garden District from a huge black residential area of paintless, wooden nineteenth-century houses whose sagging galleries and dirt yards reminded me of the Negro quarters on the plantations in Iberia Parish. The bar, like many buildings along Magazine, had a wooden colonnade in front, big windows, and screen doors, and inside was a long mahogany counter with a brass rail, overhead fans, walls filled with Hadacol and Dixie 45 and Dr. Nut signs, Earl K. Long political posters, and a blackboard with the names of major-league teams and ball scores chalked all over it. The owner used to be a submarine pitcher for the Lafayette Bulls in the defunct class-C Evangeline League, and he had never been quite able to extricate himself from yesterday. He sold loose-string Virginia Extra tobacco and cigarettes out of cartons on the shelf, covered the pool tables with oilcloth on Thursday nights and served free chicken gumbo as bar owners often did back in the bayou country, never called the cops to settle a beef, kept hard-boiled eggs in big pickle jars on the bar, and made hot boudin that would break your heart. It was always cool and softly lighted inside, and the jukebox was full of zydeco and Cajun records, and workingmen shot pool in back under a red Jax sign and a tin-shaded swinging light.
Archie, the owner, picked up my empty boudin plate and wiped under it with a rag. He was a dark Cajun with a big round face and a small mouth. His arms were covered with black hair. I motioned with my shot glass for a refill.
"You know why they call them boilermakers, Dave?" he asked. "Because they put pieces of foundry plate in your head, like broken metal teeth."
"Sounds like bad stuff."
"Then one day it chews its way through your brain."
"Can I have another shot of Beam?"
"I don't like to argue against my own profits, but I hate to see you sit on the porch and listen to your liver rot."
"Would it make you feel better if I told you I'm not enjoying it?"
"Ease up tonight. You can have a shithouse of misery any day you want."
I looked away from his face. He was a friend and an honest man, and because I had no defense, I knew I was capable of insulting people, even an old friend, to save my situation.
"I got another problem, too. Your slip's showing," he said.
"What?"
"Wearing a pistol as big as a cornbread pan on your hip gives anxiety to some people."
"Here," I said, unsnapping the holster from my belt. "Stick it under the bar till I leave."
"What the hell is wrong with you, Dave? Are you trying to take a big fall? Why invite more trouble in your life?"
"It came free of charge."
"I'm talking about tonight. They took your badge. That means you can't walk around like Wyatt Earp."
"Do you know anything about a retired general named Jerome Abshire over on Prytania?"
"A little bit. His kid used to come in here."
"Is he a right-wing crazy?"
"No, I don't think so. I always heard he was kind of a classy guy. His kid was a hell of a fine boy, though. He used to come in here with his baseball team when he went to Tulane. He was a big, blond boy with a pitching arm like a whip. He was always arm-wrestling and tussling and having fun. It was a shame he disappeared over there in Vietnam."
"Does anybody know what happened to him?"
"Just a lot of stories. He was captured, he was missing, the Vietcong executed him or something. My boy was over there, but he came back home all right. I tell you the truth, Dave, if I'd lost him, I'd be afraid what I'd do."
"I've got to cruise. We'll see you around, Archie."
"I hope so. Don't crowd the plate when you don't have to, podna."
I drove into the Garden District. The neighborhood was filled with homes that had been built during the 1850s. They were pillared and scrolled, marked with widow's walks and latticework, wide porches and second-story verandas, with brick courtyards and gazebos on the lawns. The streets were lined with oaks, and the yards themselves seemed to explode with every type of Southern flower and tree: blooming myrtle, azalea, bamboo, umbrella and banana trees, elephant ears, hibiscus, tangles of red and yellow roses. I could smell barbecue fires and hear people diving in swimming pools. It was a neighborhood of historical security and endless summer parties that flowed from one thick, clipped lawn onto the next.
Jerome Gaylan Abshire's home was no exception. The brick walk was lighted by burning candles placed inside paper bags in the flower beds, and through the tall windows beyond the front porch I could see the guests crowded in a large living room lighted by chandeliers. The loud conversation reached all the way to the street. A band was playing on the lawn somewhere in back.
Why not? I thought. I had on a coat and tie. Archie was right. Why crowd the plate when it was just as easy to throw the bat at the pitcher's head?
I parked the car up the street and walked back to the party. The sidewalk was buckled and peaked by the enormous roots that grew under the concrete. I buttoned my coat so my.45 wasn't apparent, combed my hair, flattened my tie with the palm of my hand, and walked up the brick entrance with my eyes fixed steadily on the face of the man checking invitations at the door.
He probably worked for a security service and was not accustomed to handling anybody more serious than college party-crashers.
"I don't have an invitation. I'm the New Orleans heat," I said.
"May I see your identification?"
"Here's a quarter. Call the First District and tell them Lieutenant Dave Robicheaux is here."
"I think you're drunk, sir."
I brushed past him, went to the bar, and picked up a glass of champagne off a tray. The rooms were furnished with French antiques, gold and silver grandfather clocks, deep purple divans with scrolled walnut frames, oil portraits of a Southern military family that went back to the War of 1812. The blond hardwood floors were waxed to a shine that looked like clear plastic. Every tabletop, brass candelabra, ashtray, glass light chimney, and polished strip of seamed woodwork gleamed as though it had been rubbed incessantly with soft rags.
The people in the room were an older crowd, undoubtedly wealthy, confident in themselves and their friends and the world of manners and success in which they lived. The women had bluing in their hair and wore glittering evening dresses, and their throats and wrists dripped with jewelry. In their white tuxedo coats, the men gave you the impression that age was no more a physical problem in their lives than the remote struggles of the poor. It was obvious that I didn't belong there, but they were too polite to look directly at me.
But the security man at the door was talking with two others who looked like rent-a-cops, and all three of them were staring at me. I put down my empty champagne glass, picked up another, and walked out the French doors onto the back patio, where a half-dozen black cooks in white jackets were making mint juleps and barbecuing a pig impaled on a roasting spit. The wind rustled through the oaks, the banana trees, the bamboo border of the lawn, and ruffled the unlit water in the swimming pool that was as dark as burgundy wine. One of the elderly black cooks fanned the barbecue smoke away from his face with his hand.
"Where's the general gone to?" I asked.
"He having his julep in the library with the other gentlemens," he said.
"I don't want to go back through that big crowd. Is there another way I can get to the library?"
"Yes suh. Go back through the kitchen. The girl tell you where it's at." I walked across the clipped lawn, went through a huge Colonial-style kitchen with brick in the walls, where three black maids were making hors d'oeuvres, and came out in a hallway. I could see the library door partly opened and two men with highball glasses in their hands talking to somebody who sat in a chair with his legs crossed. I recognized one of the standing men immediately. I pushed the door, sipped out of my champagne glass, and smiled at the three of them.
The general had gained weight since the newspaper photograph was taken, but his skin was still deeply tanned and glowing with health, the white hair was cut GI, and his acetylene-blue eyes looked at you with the unflinching clarity of a man who was never inhibited by complexity or moral doubt.
"How are you doing, General?" I said. "It's amazing who might drop in on a cocktail party these days. I'm speaking about myself, of course. But what are you doing with a character like Whiplash Wineburger? Most people call the Orkin Company if they see this guy anywhere near their neighborhoods I'll take care of it," Wineburger said, and moved his hand to the table phone.
"It's all right," the general said.
"I don't know about that," I said. "I think some of your cadre are starting to unravel. I've got a couple of Polaroids of Bobby Joe Starkweather lying out behind his fish camp. You can have them for postcards."
"You'll be treated as a guest in my home, even though you came here uninvited. You can go back to the bar, or you can leave."
"I'm comfortable here."
"You've had too much to drink, or perhaps you're simply obsessive," he said. "But there's no point in your being here."
"You should have stuck with regular army, General. These guys working for you wouldn't even measure up to Mafia standards. Wineburger here is a jewel. One time a naive cop down at the First District asked him to defend some indigent Haitians, and he said, 'I'm full up on food stamps.' It's the amateurs that kill the IPs."
"What do you know about IPs?"
"I was in Vietnam, too, except my outfit went out of its way to protect innocent people. I don't think you can say the same."
"How dare you!" he said.
"Cut the gentlemanly rancor. You've got Sam Fitzpatrick's blood painted all over you, and I'm going to nail you for it."
"Ignore him. He's a lush," Wineburger said.
"I'll give you something else to work on, too," I said. "I visited the father of that nineteen-year-old girl that Segura's people murdered. I wonder if you'd like to confront him and explain why she had to lose her life over some elephant game you and your cretins are playing."
"Get out."
"You lost a son in Vietnam. I think if he were alive he'd consider you a disgrace."
"You leave my home. Don't you ever enter it again."
"You'll get no rest from me, General. I'm going to be the worst thing in your life."
"No, you won't, Robicheaux," Wineburger said. "You're a motormouth and you smell bad. You're just a jitterbird that everybody is bored with."
"Whiplash, how do you think you got in here? Because you're a brilliant attorney? Most of these people don't like Jews. They're paying for your ass right now, but when they don't need you anymore, you might end up like Bobby Joe or Julio. Think about it. If you were the general, would you keep a lowlife like yourself around?"
"Turn around. Some of your colleagues want to talk with you," Wineburger said.
Two uniformed street cops stood behind me. They were young, and they had their hats off and were uncomfortable at their situation. One of them tried to smile at me.
"Bad night, huh, Lieutenant?" he said.
"Don't worry about it," I said. "I'm wearing my rock-'n'-roll cassette, though. Just unbutton my coat and pull it out."
His hand brushed across my stomach, almost like a caress, and eased the.45 out of my belt holster.
"Walk this way with us. We'll go out the side door," he said. "But we'll have to cuff you in the car."
"It's all right," I said.
"Hey, Robicheaux, call that colored bondsman on Rampart. He gives credit," Wineburger said.
I glanced back at the general, whose tanned brow was webbed with wrinkles as he stared intensely into space.
They booked me into the drunk tank downtown. I woke up with the first gray light on an iron bunk whose gray paint was covered with scratched and rusted names and obscenities. I sat up slowly, holding the bunk on each side of me, and smelled the rancid odor of stale sweat, cigarette smoke, alcohol, urine, vomit, and the seatless and caked toilet in the corner. The floor and all the bunks, which were suspended from wall chains, were filled with snoring drunks, demented street people, barroom brawlers still flecked with blood, a few genuine badasses, and anxiety-ridden, middle-class DUIs who later would expect to be treated with the courtesy due good Kiwanians.
I walked in my socks to the toilet and leaned over it. Names had been burned into the yellow paint of the ceiling with cigarette lighters. My eyes watered from the reek of the toilet, and my hangover had already started to tighten the veins in my head like a hatband. Ten minutes later a guard and a trusty in white fatigues opened the barred door and wheeled in a stainless-steel food cart loaded with powdered scrambled eggs, grits, and black coffee that tasted like iodine.
"Hors d'oeuvres time, gentlemen," the guard said. "Our accommodations are humble, but our hearts are warm. If you're planning to stay for lunch today, we're having spaghetti and meatballs. Please do not ask for doggy bags. Also, even though it's a temptation, don't try to take the food home in your pockets."
"Who the fuck is this guy?" asked a soldier sitting on the floor. His tie hung loose around his neck, and the buttons were torn off his shirt.
"He's a pretty good guy," I said.
"Some place for a fucking comedian," he said, and I flipped his cigarette butt off the wall above the toilet.
I waited until the trusty had passed out the paper plates of eggs and grits and he and the guard had gone back out the door, then I went to the bars and clicked my ring against the metal to get the guard's attention. He looked at me without expression, blinking his eyes to hide either recognition or his embarrassment.
"Is arraignment at eight?" I asked.
"They'll put you on the wrist-chain then. I don't know what time they'll get to you." He almost said "Lieutenant," but he clamped his lips tightly.
"Who's on the bench this morning?"
"Judge Flowers."
"Oh boy."
"You want a lawyer with you?"
"No, not just yet. Thanks, anyway, Phil."
"You bet. Hang tough. It's going to be all right. Everybody's got a right to a hard night sometimes."
An old man with a wild, tobacco-stained beard sat down beside me on the iron bunk. He wore plastic cowboy boots, jeans that fit him like balloons, and a denim shirt cut off at the armpits.
"You ain't gonna eat your food?" he said.
"No. Go ahead."
"Thanks," he said, and began putting the dry eggs in his mouth with a plastic spoon. "The spiders starting to crawl around in your head?"
"Yep."
"Look down in my boot," he said. "The hack missed it when they shook me down. Take a snort. It'll swat them spiders right back into their nest."
I looked down at the pint bottle of whiskey inside his boot. I breathed deeply and ran my tongue over my cracked lips. My own breath was stronger than the smell of the drunk tank. It wouldn't be long before I would start sweating and shaking, maybe even going into the dry heaves. I wondered what I would look like in front of Judge Flowers, a notorious morning-court jurist who could put the fear of God into a drunk with his gavel.
"I'll pass right now, but I appreciate it, partner," I said.
"Suit yourself. Don't let them shake you up, though, son. I been up in front of this court so many times they don't even mess with me. The judge gives me thirty days and tells me to get out. That ain't nothing. We got them by the short hairs."
A half hour later, Sergeant Motley stood at the tank door with the guard. He smoked a cigar and looked on quietly while the guard turned the key in the lock. He wore his shirt lapels pressed back so the hair on his black barrel of a chest stuck out like wire.
"Come with us, Robicheaux," he said.
"Zoo visitors aren't allowed in until this afternoon," I said.
"Just come along," he said.
I walked between him and the guard to the far end of the jail corridor. A trusty was damp-mopping the floor, and our shoes left wet imprints where he had cleaned. Sunlight came through the windows high up on the corridor wall, and I could hear traffic out on the street. The guard turned the lock on an individual cell. Motley's weight made him breathe as though he had emphysema.
"I got you transferred to a holding cell," he said.
"What for?"
"You want somebody in that tank to make you?"
I stepped inside the cell, and the guard locked me in. Motley remained at the door, his cannonball head beaded with perspiration from the heat outside.
"What are you up to?" I asked.
"I've been in your shoes. I think they're putting a RotoRooter up your hole, and all you've got going for you is your own balls. That's okay, but after a while they get ground down to the size of marbles."
"I have a hard time buying this."
"Who asked you to? We never got along. But I'll tell you a story, Robicheaux. Everybody thinks I let those seven guys die in that elevator to save my own buns. I was responsible, all right, but not because I was afraid. I didn't have the key to the chain. I didn't have the fucking key. I climbed up out of the shaft to find somebody with a master. When we pried the doors open, they looked like smoked oysters in there. Whether you believe me or not, that's some hard shit to live with."
"Why don't you tell that to somebody?"
"You know why I didn't have the key? I got a freebie that morning from one of Julio Segura's broads and she rolled me. The key was in my billfold."
"You tried to get them out, Motley."
"Tell that to everybody in the courthouse and the First District. Tell it to Purcel. He's always got clever things to say to a black man."
"What's he been doing?"
"I don't like those guys in Internal Affairs any more than you do. In my opinion, Purcel is operating in their area. I don't drop the dime on other cops, not even racists, so I don't comment on Purcel."
"He's not a racist."
"Wake up, Robicheaux. You got to get hit in the face with it? The guy's got a hard-on all the time. Quit the Little Orphan Annie routine."
"You're determined to make people love you, aren't you?"
"Read it like you want. I hope you get out of this crap. I don't think you will."
"You're a breath of fresh air, buddy."
"They stiffed you on the charge. I'd get out of town if I were you. I think they're going to put you away."
I touched the side of my face to the bar and looked at him silently. I could feel the pulse working fearfully in my throat.
"They charged you with carrying a concealed firearm," he said, and looked back at me with his knowing, hard brown eyes. It was a lowball morning. I went to court on a chain with four other drunks, a street dealer, a psychotic exhibitionist, and a black kid who had murdered a filling-station attendant for sixty-five dollars. Judge Flowers was what we called at AA a white-knuckler. He had gotten off the booze on his own, but he'd stayed dry only by redirecting his intense inner misery into the lives of others, particularly those who stood before him blowing alcohol in his face. He set my bond on the concealed-firearm charge at ten thousand dollars.
I didn't even have the thousand I would need to pay the bondsman's ten-percent fee. I sat on the bunk of the holding cell and stared at the scatological words scratched all over the opposite wall. It was the lowest morning of my life, except perhaps for the day my wife left me for the Houston oilman. We had gone to an evening lawn party out by the lake, and he had been there and did not even make a pretense about the affair they were having. He touched shoulders with her at the drink table, brushed his palm across the down on top of her arm, smiled good-naturedly at me with his rugged good looks, as though we enjoyed an intelligent understanding of our situation. Then a lesion snapped open somewhere behind my eyes; I felt color rise into my vision, the way a glass might fill with red water, then a woman screamed and I felt men's arms lifting me up from the lawn, pulling me away from his stunned, terrified face.
In the morning I found her note on the table under the big umbrella where we ate breakfast while the sun rose across Lake Pontchartrain.
Dear Dave,
I don't know what it is you're looking for, but three years of marriage to you have convinced me I don't want to be there when you find it. Sorry about that. As your pitcher-bartender friend says, Keep it high and hard, podjo.
Nicole
"What are you doing with your clothes off?" the guard asked through the bars of the holding cell.
"It's hot."
"There's people that walk through here."
"Don't let them."
"Jesus Christ, Dave, get your act together."
"I got it solidly together. I'm very copacetic at the moment." I opened and closed my palms. I watched the way the veins in my forearms filled with blood.
"Unless you bond out, I got to move you. You got to go into the main population unless you want lockdown."
"Do what you need to do, Phil."
"I can't put you in lockdown if you don't request it. Dave, there's some real badasses upstairs."
I fingered the pungi-stick scar on my stomach. Somebody was shouting hysterically in a cell down the corridor, then a cop's baton rang on the bars.
"I'm going to get the doctor. You're going into lock-down whether you like it or not," he said.
I heard him walk away. My head felt as if piano wire were twisted around it. I closed my eyes and saw balloons of orange flame erupt out of a rain forest, GIs locked up to their knees in a muddy shimmering rice field while the shards of Claymores sang through the air with the edges of boiler plate, the souls of children rising like gunsmoke from the ditch where they lay, Sam Fitzpatrick's boyish face lighted in the purgatorial fire of a holy card. The sweat leaked out from under my palms and ran down my naked thighs.
At three o'clock that afternoon, another guard walked down the corridor of the isolation unit, called "Queens' Row," where I was in lockdown with the snitches, psychotics, and roaring homosexuals. The door of my small cell was made of metal grillwork, with a slit and an iron apron for the trusty to pass in the food tray. The guard was having trouble with the key in the lock, and the light behind him made his body seem to jerk and disconnect itself through the squares in the door.
"Pack it up. You're going all the way," he said.
"What happened?"
"Somebody went bail for you. Strip your sheets and throw them into the corridor. Pick up that plastic spoon off the floor and drop your soap in the toilet."
"What?"
"You still drunk or something? Clean out your cell if you want to leave here today."
We walked down the corridor to the hydraulically operated double-barred doors that gave onto the booking room, where two black women were being fingerprinted. I signed at the possessions desk for the large brown envelope tied with string that contained my wallet, car keys, pocket knife, and belt.
"Happy motoring," the trusty clerk said.
Out in the visitors' area I saw Annie sitting on a wooden bench with her hands pinched together in her lap. She wore blue tennis shoes, Clorox-faded jeans, and a print shirt covered with purple flowers. The tables in the room were filled with inmates and their families who had come to visit them, and each group tried to isolate themselves in their intimate moment by bending their heads forward, never focusing their eyes beyond their own table, holding one another's forearms tightly in their hands. Annie tried to smile at me, but I saw the nervousness in her face.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Sure."
"My car's right at the curb. We can go now."
"Sure, let's get out of here."
"Dave, what's wrong?"
"The bastards took my piece. I ought to get a receipt fork."
"Are you crazy?" she whispered.
"Forget it. Let's go."
We went through the glass doors onto the street, and the afternoon heat hit me like somebody opening a furnace door next to my skin. We got into her car and she started the engine, then looked across at me with a cloud in her face. My arm jerked when it touched the burning metal on the window.
"Dave, are you okay? Your face is white," she said.
"I'm running on some weird fluids. Just consider the source and don't take everything I say to heart today. How did you know I was in jail?"
"Your partner, what's his name, Clete, called. He said something strange, but he told me to tell it to you just like he said it-'You still own yourself, Streak. That's a big victory. Disconnect from this dogshit while there's time.' What's he talking about?"
"It means part of him is still intact. I'm not sure if the same is true of me. I think I felt all the stitches pop today. "
She steered into the traffic. The yellow haze, the heat off the concrete, the hot leather against my back, the acrid gasoline fumes around me, filled my head with a sensation that was like breathing over a tar-roofer's pot on a summer day.
"I don't know much about alcohol and drinking problems, Dave. Do you want to stop for a beer? I don't mind. Isn't it better to taper off sometimes?"
She had made it very easy, and at that moment I think I would have cut my fingers off one at a time with tin snips for a frosted quart of Jax beer.
"I'd just appreciate it right now if you'd drive me to my houseboat. Did you have to put up a thousand for the bondsman?" I said.
"Yes."
"I'll make it good tomorrow. I'm suspended from the credit union, but I'm going to take a loan out on the boat."
"I'm not thinking about that. Last night you tried to make amends, and I sent you away."
"You had someone coming for dinner."
"He was just a friend from the music school. He would have understood."
"Let me explain something. My getting thrown in jail doesn't have anything to do with you. I had four years of sobriety, and I blew it in."
"You can stop again."
I didn't answer. We were on Elysian Fields Avenue, headed out toward the lake. My seersucker suit was rumpled and stained with tobacco juice from the jail, and the skin of my face felt grimy and unshaven under my hand.
"Pull in by that eating place, will you?" I said.
She parked next to a café that had an open-air counter and tables under shade trees where people ate poor-boy sandwiches and bleeding slices of watermelon. I ordered two Dr. Peppers in paper cups packed with crushed ice and asked the waiter to add a handful of candied cherries and cut limes. I sat in the car and drank out of the cup with both hands, and the slide of ice and bruised cherries and syrupy soda ached wonderfully all the way down my throat and into my stomach.
"When I was a kid in New Iberia, we had a drink called Dr. Nut. It tasted just like this," I said. "My father always bought my brother and me a Dr. Nut when we went to town. That was a big treat back then."
"How do you think of the past, Dave?" she asked. Her curly hair blew in the wind through the window while she drove.
"What do you mean?"
"What feelings do you have when you remember your father?"
"I think of him with fondness."
"That's right, you do, even though your family was poor and sometimes your father wasn't there when you needed him. You didn't take any anger toward him into your adult life. You forgave him and you remember what was best about him. Why not do the same for yourself?"
"It's not that simple with some people's metabolisms."
"Today is Saturday, and it's Saturday all day long, and I don't care about what happened yesterday, at least not about the bad things. I like being with you and remembering good things and knowing it's going to get better all the time. Don't they teach something like that at AA?"
"That's pretty close."
"Will you take me to the horse races tonight?"
I touched the damp, curly hair on the nape of her neck and brushed the smoothness of her cheek with my fingers. She smiled at me with her eyes and patted me on the thigh, and I felt a weakness drain through my body like water and then settle and swell in my loins.
When we got to Lake Pontchartrain it was like walking out from under a layer of steam into a slap of cool, salt-smelling air. Pelicans dove for fish out of the blue sky, plummeting downward with their wings cocked behind their heads as though they had been dropped from a bomb rack, exploding in the smoky green water and rising suddenly with silvery fish flipping helplessly in their beaks. Far out on the horizon the water was capping in the sunlight, and a long, gleaming white yacht with red sails was dipping into the troughs and sending geysers of foam bursting into the air.
I showered and shaved in my tin stall and felt the smell of the jail, its physical touch that was like an obscene hand, go out of my body. I washed carefully around the stitches in my scalp, then I pulled off the old dressing on my shoulder and arm, where the chips of glass had been embedded, and let the water run warmly on the crusted skin. Annie was cooking bass fillets and spinach with hard-boiled eggs on my small stove, and for the first time that day I felt hunger. I dried off, sat on the side of the bed with the towel wrapped around my waist, and opened the plastic first-aid box in which I kept the bandages and ointment to dress my shoulder and arm. I could have done it myself. Pride and a larger measure of self-respect actually required it. I looked at the closed curtain and heard Annie turn down the pots on the stove.
"Annie, I need you to help me," I said.
She slid back the curtain on the door.
"I have a little trouble getting these bandages into place," I said.
She sat beside me, wiped ointment on my cuts with a piece of cotton, snipped adhesive tape into strips with the scissors, and taped down two big, folded squares of gauze on top of the ointment. Then she rubbed her hands over my skin, down my shoulders and back, across my chest, her eyes looking over my body without embarrassment, as though she were discovering me for the first time. I leaned her back on the bed and kissed her mouth, her neck, unbuttoned her flower-print blouse and placed my head against the red birthmark on her breast. I felt her body stretch out against mine, felt the confidence, the surrender that a woman gives in that moment when she no longer hides her hunger and instead blesses you with a caress that is always unexpected and heart-rushing and humbling in its generosity.
This time I wanted to give her more than she gave me, but I wasn't able. In seconds I was lost inside her, her hands tight against my back, her legs in mine in almost a maternal way, and when I tried to tense and stop because it was too soon, she held my face close to hers, kissed my cheek, ran her fingers through the back of my hair, saying, "It's all right, Dave. Go ahead. It's all right." Then I felt all the anger, the fear, and the heat of the last two days rise inside me like a dark bubble from a well, pause in its own gathered energy and momentum, and burst away into light, into the joy of her thighs, the squeeze of her arms, the blue tenderness of her eyes.
That night at the track, while heat lightning danced in the western sky, we strolled among the flower gardens by the paddock, watched the hot-walkers cool out the thoroughbreds that had already run, smelled the wonderful odors of freshly raked and dampened sod and horse sweat and manure and oats in the stables, and looked with genuine wonder and admiration at the rippling sheen of the roans and black three-year-olds walking onto the track under a halo of electric arc lights.
We cashed the daily double, a perfecta, two win, and three place tickets. The palm trees were purple against the flickering sky; the lake in the centerground caught the stars and the moon, and when the surface shuddered in a gust of wind off the Gulf, the water was streaked with quicksilver; I could smell oak trees and moss and night-blooming flowers. Gamblers and lovers pay big dues and enjoy limited consolations. But sometimes they are enough.