“Dry lightning probably hit a tree during the night,” I said. “It’ll burn itself out.”
“Can we go buy some strawberries for dessert?”
“I have to go by the office a few minutes. Maybe we’ll go to town for some ice cream after supper. How’s that?”
“Dave, did the doctor say something bad about Bootsie?”
“No, she’s going to be fine. Why do you think that?”
“Why did she do that with those, what d’you call them, those things the doctor gives her?”
“Her prescriptions?”
“Yeah. I saw her dump her purse all over her bed. Then she wadded up all those ’scriptions. When she saw me she put them all back in her purse and went into the bathroom. She kept running the water a long time. I had to go to the bathroom and she wouldn’t let me in.”
“Bootsie’s sick, little guy. But she’ll get better. You just got to do it a day at a time. Hey, hop on my back and let’s check up on Batist, then I have to go.”
She walked up on the steps and then climbed like a frog onto my shoulders, and we galloped like horse and rider down to the dock. But it was hard to feign joy or confidence in the moment or the day.
The wind changed, and I could smell the scorched, hot reek of burnt cypress in the marsh.
I DROVE TO the office, talked briefly with the sheriff about my visit to New Orleans, my search through biker bars for Eddy Raintree, and my conversation with Joey Gouza.
“You think he’s pulling the strings on this one?” the sheriff said.
“He’s involved one way or another. I’m just not sure how. He controls all the action in that part of Orleans Parish. The guys who beat up Clete wouldn’t have done it without Gouza’s orders or permission.”
“Dave, I don’t want you putting a stick in Gouza’s cage again. If we nail him, we’ll do it with a warrant and we’ll work through New Orleans P.D. He’s a dangerous and unpredictable man.”
“The New Orleans families don’t go after cops, sheriff. It’s an old tradition.”
“Tell that to Garrett.”
“Garrett stumbled into it. In 1890 the Black Hand murdered the New Orleans police chief. A mob broke eleven of them out of the parish prison, hanged two from street lamps, and clubbed and shot the other nine to death. So cops like me get bribe offers and guys like Clete get brass knuckles.”
“Don’t start a new precedent.”
I went to check my mailbox next to the dispatcher’s office. It was five-fifteen. All I had to do was glance at my mail and thumb through my telephone messages and make one phone call, and I was sure that when Drew picked up the phone she would be calm, perhaps even apologetic for her distraught behavior of yesterday, and I would be on my way home to dinner.
Wrong.
The dispatcher had written Drew’s message in blue ink across the first pink slip on the stack: Dave, don’t you give a damn?
Her house was only two blocks from the drawbridge that I would cross on my way home, I told myself. I would give myself fifteen minutes there. Friendship and the past required a certain degree of obligation, even if it was only a ritualistic act of assurance or kindness, and it had nothing to do with marital fidelity. Nothing, I told myself.
She was barbecuing in the backyard. She was barefoot, and she wore white tennis shorts and a striped blue cotton shirt. Her face looked hot in the smoke, and the back of her tan neck was beaded with perspiration. The picnic table was covered with a flowered tablecloth, and in the middle of it was a washtub filled with crushed ice and long-neck bottles of Jax. The oaks and myrtle trees in the yard were full of fireflies, and through the gray trunks of the cypresses along the bank I could see some kids water-skiing behind a motorboat on Bayou Teche.
“Maybe I dropped by at the wrong time,” I said.
“No, no, it’s fine. I’m glad you’re here,” she said, waving the smoke away from her face. “Weldon and Bama are coming over at eight. Stay for supper if you like.”
“Thanks. I have to be getting on in a minute. I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you, but I had to go to New Orleans. Did a uniformed deputy come out yesterday?”
“Yes, he read magazines in my living room for three hours.”
She picked up an opened bottle of beer from the table and drank out of it. The bottle was beaded with moisture, and I watched the foam run down inside the neck into her mouth.
“There’s some soda in the refrigerator,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
She put the bottle in her mouth again and looked at me. I glanced away from her, then picked up a fork and flipped one of the chickens on the grill. The sauce piquante flared in the fire and steamed off in the breeze.
“Why didn’t you report the break-in, Drew?”
“I don’t know who it was. What good would it do?”
“Was it your father?”
“If he’s alive, he’d have no interest in me.”
“Do you think it was one of Joey Gouza’s people?”
“That gangster in New Orleans?”
“That’s right. I have a feeling he and Weldon are on a first-name basis.”
“If I knew who it was, I’d tell you.”
“Cut it out, Drew. You can’t get strung out one day, then the next day go back to the deaf-and-dumb routine.”
“I don’t like you talking to me like that, Dave.”
“You made a point of relaying your feelings through the dispatcher. It’s a small department, Drew. It’s a small town.”
“I don’t have those kinds of concerns, thank God. I’m sorry if you do.”
She took a bandana from her pocket and wiped the perspiration off the back of her neck. Her face suddenly looked soft and cool in the mauve-colored light off the bayou.
“I wasn’t doing very well yesterday,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called you. I shouldn’t have made it so personal, either.”
“Look, when somebody creeps your house, it’s for one of two reasons: either to steal from you or do you bodily harm, or perhaps both. When it happens, it frightens you. You feel violated. You want to take everything out of your closets and dresser drawers and wash them.”
She unsnapped the cap on another bottle of Jax and sat down on the picnic bench. But she didn’t drink from the bottle. She just kept drawing a line down through the moisture with her finger.
“I was in northern Nicaragua,” she said. “When the contras ‘violated’ someone, they cut the person up in pieces.”
“I was just trying to say that your reaction was understandable, Drew.”
“I bought a pistol this morning. The next time someone breaks into my house, I’m going to kill the sonofabitch.”
“That’s not going to make the bigger problem go away. You’re protecting Weldon from something, and at the same time you know if he doesn’t get help, he’s going to take a fall. I think you’ve got another problem, too. Weldon’s done something that goes against your conscience, and somehow he’s pulled you into it.”
“I wish I could be omniscient. It must be wonderful to have that gift.”
“Has he been mixed up with the contras?”
“No.”
I looked her steadily in the eyes.
“I said no,” she repeated.
“I’m going to say something you probably won’t like. Weldon worked for the CIA. Air America flew in and out of the Golden Triangle. Sometimes they ferried around warlords, who were in reality transporting narcotics. The station chiefs knew it, the pilots knew it. Weldon’s been involved in some nasty stuff. Maybe it’s time he took his own fall. I think he’s a chickenshit for hiding behind his sister.”
“Why’d you let everything go between us?”
“Excuse me?”
“You were talking about chickenshit. I thought you were the sun coming up in the morning. That’s what I thought you were.”
I felt the skin of my face tighten in the humid air.
“I went to Vietnam. Do you remember what you though
t about people who went to Vietnam?” I said.
“That wasn’t it at all, and you know it. You blew it with Bootsie, and I was ‘just passing through.’ That’s what chickenshit means.”
“You’re wrong.”
She took a drink from the bottle and looked away toward the bayou so I couldn’t see her face.
“I always respected you,” I said. “You got upset yesterday because under it all you have a tender heart, Drew. Nobody is expected to be a soldier every day of his life. I start every other day with a nervous breakdown.”
Her face was still turned away from me, but I could see her back shaking under her shirt.
I put my hand lightly on her shoulder. Her fingers came up and covered mine, rested there a moment, then she lifted my hand up and released it.
“It’s time for you to go, Dave,” she said.
I didn’t reply. I walked across the thick Saint Augustine grass, through the shadows and the tracings of fireflies in the trees. When I turned and looked back at her, I didn’t see a barefoot woman pushing at her eyes in the smoke but a little Cajun girl of years ago whose bare legs danced in the air while a switch whipped across them.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I sent two uniformed deputies to check the missions and the shelters in Iberia and Lafayette parishes for a man who had been disfigured in a fire. I also told them to check the old hobo jungles along the S.P tracks.
“What do we do when we find him?” one deputy said.
“Ask him to ride down with you.”
“What if he don’t want to come?”
“Call me and I’ll come out.”
“Half the guys in that hobo camp look like their mothers beat on them with a baseball bat.”
“This guy’s face looks like red rubber.”
“Can we take him out to lunch?” He was grinning.
“How about getting on it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then I called Clete’s hospital room in New Orleans, but was told by a nurse that he was in X-ray. I asked her to have him call me collect when he got back to his room. Fifteen minutes later I was drinking coffee, eating a doughnut, and looking out the window at a black man who was selling rattlesnake watermelons and strawberries off the back of his pickup truck, when my phone extension rang. It was Weldon Sonnier.
“What’s the idea of leaning on my sister?” he said.
“I think you’ve got it turned around.”
“What did you say to her?”
I set my doughnut down on a napkin.
“I think that’s none of your business,” I said.
“You’d damn well better believe it is.”
“Then why don’t you stop dumping your garbage in her life?”
“Listen, Dave—”
“I got a bribe offer from an anonymous letter writer. This guy mentioned your name. He also said you’re a prick and a welsher.”
He was silent.
“Then I talked with Joey Gouza. He also called you a welsher.”
“Consider the source.”
“The interesting question is why I keep seeing or hearing the word ‘welsher’ when your name is mentioned.”
“When did you see Gouza?”
“None of your business.”
“He’s a candidate for a lobotomy. I wouldn’t mash on his oysters.”
“Why are you mixed up with Gouza?”
“Who says I know him? The guy’s notorious. Gouza is to New Orleans what monkey flop is to a zoo.”
“Weldon, the real problem is you’ve tracked through your own shit and you’re laying it off on other people. I think you’ve put your sister in jeopardy. In my opinion that’s a lousy thing to do.”
“Yeah? Is that right? Maybe if you ever get your nose out of the air long enough, I’ll clue you in on the facts of life down in the tropics.”
“I think you’ve sought out the trouble in your life. Nobody forced you to fly for Air America. You were dirty in Indo-China, I think you’re dirty now.”
“I wish I had the patent on righteousness. I guess you never called in any 105s on a ville. Stay the fuck away from my sister if you can’t handle it any better than you did yesterday.”
He hung up. This time I was the one whose words and anger were caught in my throat like a tangle of fish hooks. Unconsciously I wadded up a sheet of paper on top of my desk and threw it toward the wastebasket, then realized it was my time log for my paycheck.
IT WAS JUST AFTER one o’clock and it had started to rain again when Clete returned my call. I had opened my windows, and the wind blew a fine spray through the screens.
“Can you come to New Orleans this evening?” he asked.
“I was coming tomorrow.”
“How about today?”
“What’s up?”
“I got some information on Bobby Earl that might lead us to those farts who worked me over.”
“Wait a minute, where are you?”
“At home.”
“The hospital cut you loose?”
“I cut myself loose. Somehow the smell of bedpans just doesn’t go together with mashed potatoes and boiled carrots. Forget about the hospital. Look, you remember Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater?”
“The bondsmen?”
“That’s right. I chase down jumpers for them sometimes. So I called them this morning to see if they might have some work for me, since I don’t have any medical insurance and my hospital bill is a nightmare. But these guys are also a gold mine of information on the lowlifes of New Orleans. So when I had Nig on the phone I asked him what he knew about the buttwipes who put stitches all over my head. No help there, though. In fact, he said he thought Raintree and Fluck weren’t around the city anymore, because when they’re in town you hear about it. Fluck in particular. Evidently he likes beating the shit out of people.
“So I asked Nig what kind of action Bobby Earl might be involved in, and he told me this interesting story. Nig went a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond for this broad over in Algiers. The broad got nailed with four kees of pure Colombian nose candy. But Nig’s not worried about her. She’s got a high-priced lawyer, it’s her first bust, and she knows she can cut a deal and not do any time, so Nig’s money is safe. It’s her two brothers who are the problem. Nig put up big bucks to get them out on a robbery beef, and they both skipped on him.
“Smart businessman that he is, Nig tells the broad that she either delivers up her brothers or he yanks her bond and she waits for her trial in the parish jail. Which is not what she envisioned for herself, because this broad is one beautiful hot-assed piece of equipment who the bull dykes will cannibalize. So Nig thinks he’s got her and she’ll have both her brothers in his office in twenty-four hours. But the broad pulls one on Nig that he doesn’t expect.
“She says if he messes with her bond, threatens her again, or gets in her face about anything, she’ll have a bedtime chat with Bobby Earl, and Willie and Nig’s state license is going to be hanging out in the breeze. Nig checked it out. She’s Bobby Earl’s regular punch across the river. Once a week he’s at her pad like clockwork. She brags it around among the lowlifes that she fucks him cross-eyed on the ceiling.”
“I’m not following you, Clete. Who cares? This doesn’t get us any closer to Fluck, Gates, or Raintree. Tell Nig to give his story to the Picayune about election time.”
“Here’s the rest of it. Nig says the broad’s brothers are bikers and they were both in the AB in Angola and Huntsville.”
“I don’t know if that’s a big lead.”
“You got anything else? It’s Thursday. Nig says Thursday is poontang night for Bobby in Algiers. We tail him over there and see what happens. Come on, Bobby Earl’s an amateur. We’ll make drops of blood pop on his forehead.”
I looked out at the rain denting the trees and thought for a moment. The rain was blowing across the truck awning of the black man selling strawberries and watermelons, and in the south, against a black sky, lightning was striking against the Gulf.
>
“All right,” I said.
“Why all the thought?”
“No reason. I’ll be at your apartment in about three hours.”
Clete had enough problems of his own and didn’t need to know everything about a police investigation, I told myself. I called Bootsie and told her that I had to go to New Orleans, but I promised to be back that night, no matter how late it was. I meant it, too.
WE USED CLETE’S battered Plymouth for the tail. It was 7:30, and we were parked a block down the street from Bobby Earl’s driveway; the sky was still black with clouds and rainwater ran high and dark in the gutters. Out on Lake Pontchartrain I could see the lighted cabins of a yacht rocking in the swell. Clete smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke out his window into the rain-flecked air. He wore his porkpie hat over the scalped divots and stitches in his head, and a purple-and-white-striped shirt and seersucker trousers that rode up high on his ankles. He kept rubbing the back of his thick neck and craning his head.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Yeah, there is. I hurt from head to foot. Man, I must be getting old to let punks like that take me down.”
“Sometimes you lose.”
“You’re always quoting Hemingway to me. Do you know what he told his kid when his kid asked something about the importance of being a good loser? He said, ‘Son, being a good loser requires one thing—practice.’ ”
“Clete, we do it by the numbers tonight.”
“Who said different? But you got to make ’em sweat, mon. When they see you coming, something inside them should try to crawl away and hide.”
“There he goes. Try to stay a block behind him,” I said.
Clete started up the Plymouth’s engine. The rusted-out muffler, which was wired to the frame with coat hangers, sounded like a garbage truck’s. The white Chrysler headed up the street with its lights on and turned at the corner toward Lakeshore Drive.
“Don’t worry, he’s not going to make us,” Clete said. “Our man’s got his mind on getting his Johnson serviced. I’ve got to scope out this broad. Nig says she looks like a movie star. When I was in Vice—”
“He’s not going to Algiers. He’s turning the wrong way.”
“He’s probably picking up some rubbers.”