His wife was a pale, small-boned, ash-blonde woman, whose milk-white skin was lined with blue veins. She wore a pink silk house robe, and she had brushed her hair back over her neck and had put on fresh makeup. She should have been pretty, but she always had a startled look in her blue eyes, as though she heard invisible doors slamming around her. The breakfast room was domed and glassed-in, filled with sunlight and hanging fern and philodendron plants, and the view of the bayou, the oaks and the bamboo, the trellises erupting with purple wisteria, was a magnificent one. But her face seemed to register none of it. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, the pupils shrunken to small black dots, her skin so tight that you thought perhaps someone was twisting the back of her hair in a knot. I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in the same home that had produced a man like Bobby Earl.
She had been christened Bama. Her accent was soft, pleasant to listen to, more Mississippi than Louisiana, but in it you heard a tremolo, as though a nerve ending were pulled loose and fluttering inside her.
She said she had been in bed when she heard the shot and the glass break. But she hadn’t seen anything.
“What about this prowler you reported, Mrs. Sonnier? Do you have any idea who he might have been?” I smiled at her.
“Of course not.”
“You never saw him before?”
“No. He was horrible.”
I saw Weldon raise his eyes toward the ceiling, then turn away and look out at the bayou.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“He must have been in a fire,” she said. “His ears were little stubs. His face was like red rubber, like a big red inner-tube patch.”
Weldon turned back toward me.
“You’ve got all that on file down at your office, haven’t you, Dave?” he said. “There’s not any point in covering the same old territory, is there?”
“Maybe not, Weldon,” I said, closed my small notebook, and replaced it in my pocket. “Mrs. Sonnier, here’s one of my cards. Give me a call if you remember anything else or if I can be of any other help to you.”
Weldon rubbed one hand on the back of the other and tried to hold the frown out of his face.
“I’ll take a walk down to the back of your property, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Help yourself,” he said.
The Saint Augustine grass was wet with the morning dew and thick as a sponge as I walked between the oaks down to the bayou. In a sunny patch of ground next to an old gray roofless barn, one that still had an ancient tin Hadacol sign nailed to a wall, was a garden planted with strawberries and watermelons. I walked along beside the brick retaining wall, scanning the mudflat that sloped down to the bayou’s edge. It was crisscrossed with the tracks of neutrias and raccoons and the delicate impressions of egrets and herons; then, not far from the cypress planks that led to Weldon’s dock and boathouse, I saw a clutter of footprints at the base of the brick wall.
I propped my palms on the cool bricks and studied the bank. One set of footprints led from the cypress planks to the wall, then back again, but somebody with a larger shoe size had stepped on top of the original tracks. There was also a smear of mud on top of the brick wall, and on the grass, right by my foot, was a Lucky Strike cigarette butt. I took a plastic Ziploc bag from my pocket and gingerly scooped the cigarette butt inside it.
I was about to turn back toward the house when the breeze blew the oak limbs overhead, and the pattern of sunlight and shade shifted on the ground like the squares in a net, and I saw a brassy glint in a curl of mud. I stepped over the wall, and with the tip of my pen lifted a spent .308 hull out of the mud and dropped it in the plastic bag with the cigarette butt.
I walked through the sideyard, back out to the front drive and my pickup truck. Weldon was waiting for me. I held the plastic bag up briefly for him to look at.
“Here’s the size round your rabbit hunter was using,” I said. “He’d ejected it, too, Weldon. Unless he had a semiautomatic rifle, he was probably going to take a second shot at you.”
“Look, from here on out, how about talking to me and leaving Bama out of it? She’s not up to it.”
I took a breath and looked away through the oak trees at the sunlight on the blacktop road.
“I think your wife has a serious problem. Maybe it’s time to address it,” I said.
I could see the heat in his neck. He cleared his throat.
“Maybe you’re going a little beyond the limits of your job, too,” he said.
“Maybe. But she’s a nice lady, and I think she needs help.”
He chewed on his lower lip, put his hands on his hips, looked down at his foot, and stirred a pattern in the pea gravel, like a third-base coach considering his next play.
“There are a bunch of twelve-step groups in New Iberia and St. Martinville. They’re good people,” I said.
He nodded without looking up.
“Let me ask you something else,” I said. “You flew an observation plane off a carrier in Vietnam, didn’t you? You must have been pretty good.”
“Give me a chimpanzee, three bananas, and thirty minutes of his attention, and I’ll give you a pilot.”
“I also heard you flew for Air America.”
“So?”
“Not everybody has that kind of material in his dossier. You’re not still involved in some CIA bullshit, are you?”
He tapped his jaw with his finger like a drum.
“CIA . . . yeah, that’s Catholic, Irish, and alcoholic, right? No, I’m a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I’ve never hit the juice. I don’t guess I fit the category, Dave.”
“I see. If you get tired of it, call me at the office or at home.”
“Tired of what?”
“Jerking yourself around, being clever with people who’re trying to help you. I’ll see you around, Weldon.”
I left him standing in his driveway, a faint grin on his mouth, a piece of cartilage as thick as a biscuit in his jaw, his big, square hands open and loose at his sides.
BACK AT THE OFFICE I asked the dispatcher where Garrett, the new man, was.
“He went to pick up a prisoner in St. Martinville. You want me to call him?” he said.
“Ask him to drop by my office when he has a chance. It’s nothing urgent.” I kept my face empty of meaning. “Tell me, what kind of beef did he have with Internal Affairs in Houston?”
“Actually it was his partner who had the beef. Maybe you read about it. The partner left Garrett in the car and marched a Mexican kid under the bridge on Buffalo Bayou and played Russian roulette with him. Except he miscalculated where the round was in the cylinder and blew the kid’s brains all over a concrete piling. Garrett got pissed off because he was under investigation, cussed out a captain, and quit the department. It’s too bad, because they cleared him later. So I guess he’s starting all over. Did something happen out there at the Sonniers’?”
“No, I just wanted to compare notes with him.”
“Say, you have an interesting phone message in your box.”
I raised my eyebrows and waited.
“Lyle Sonnier,” he said, and grinned broadly.
On my way back to my office cubicle I took the small pile of morning letters, memos, and messages from my mailbox, sat down at my desk, and began turning over each item in the stack one at a time on the desk blotter. I couldn’t say exactly why I didn’t want to deal with Lyle. Maybe it was a little bit of guilt, a little intellectual dishonesty. Earlier that morning I had been willing to be humorous with Garrett about Lyle, but I knew in reality that there was nothing funny about him. If you flipped through the late-night cable channels on TV and saw him in his metallic-gray silk suit and gold necktie, his wavy hair conked in the shape of a cake, his voice ranting and his arms flailing in the air before an enrapt audience of blacks and blue-collar whites, you might dismiss him as another religious huckster or fundamentalist fanatic whom the rural South produces with unerring predictability generation after generation.
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Except I remembered Lyle when he was an eighteen-year-old tunnel rat in my platoon who would crawl naked to the waist down a hole with a flashlight in one hand, a .45 automatic in the other, and a rope tied around his ankle as his lifeline. I also remembered the day he squeezed into an opening that was so narrow his pants were almost scraped off his buttocks; then, as the rope uncoiled and disappeared into the hillside with him, we heard a whoomph under the ground, and a red cloud of cordite-laced dust erupted from the hole. When we pulled him back out by his ankle, his arms were still extended straight out in front of him, his hair and face webbed with blood, and two fingers of his right hand were gone as though they had been lopped off with a barber’s razor.
People in New Iberia who knew Lyle usually spoke of him as a flimflam man who preyed on the fear and stupidity of his followers, or they thought of him as an entertaining borderline psychotic who had probably cooked his head with drugs. I didn’t know what the truth was about Lyle, but I always suspected that in that one-hundredth of a second between the time he snapped the tripwire with his outstretched flashlight or army .45 and the instant when the inside of his head roared with white light and sound and the skin of his face felt like it was painted with burning tallow, he thought he saw with a third eye into all the baseless fears, the vortex of mysteries, the mockery that all his preparation for this moment had become.
I looked at his Baton Rouge phone number on the piece of message paper, then turned the piece of paper over in my fingers. No, Lyle Sonnier wasn’t a joke, I thought. I picked up my telephone and started to dial the number, then realized that Garrett, the ex-Houston cop, was standing in the entrance to my cubicle, his eyes slightly askance when I glanced up at him.
“Oh, hi, thanks for dropping by,” I said.
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Not much.” I tapped my fingers idly on the desk blotter, then opened and closed my drawer. “Say, do you have a smoke?”
“Sure,” he said, and took his package out of his shirt pocket. He shook one loose and offered it to me.
“Lucky Strikes are too strong for me,” I said. “Thanks, anyway. How about taking a walk with me?”
“Uh, I’m not quite following this. What are we doing, Dave?”
“Come on, I’ll buy you a snowball. I just need some feedback from you.” I smiled at him.
It was bright and warm outside, and a rainbow haze drifted across the lawn from the water sprinklers. The palm trees were green and etched against the hard blue sky, and on the corner, by a huge live oak tree whose roots had cracked the curb and folded the sidewalk up in a peak, a Negro in a white coat sold snowballs out of a handcart that was topped with a beach umbrella.
I bought two spearmint snowballs, handed one to Garrett, and we sat down side by side on an iron bench in the shade. His holster and gunbelt creaked like a horse’s saddle. He put on his sunglasses, looked away from me, and constantly fiddled with the corner of his mustache.
“The dispatcher was telling me about that IA beef in Houston,” I said. “It sounds like you got a bad deal.”
“I’m not complaining. I like it over here. I like the food and the French people.”
“But maybe you took two steps back in your career,” I said.
“Like I say, I got no complaint.”
I took a bite out of my snowball and looked straight ahead.
“Let me cut straight to it, podna,” I said. “You’re a new man and you’re probably a little ambitious. That’s fine. But you tainted the crime scene out at the Sonniers’.”
He cleared his throat and started to speak, then said nothing.
“Right? You climbed over that brick retaining wall and looked around on the mudbank? You dropped a cigarette butt on the grass?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you find anything?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re sure?” I looked hard at the side of his face. There was a red balloon of color in his throat.
“I’m sure.”
“All right, forget about it. There’s no harm done. Next time out, though, you secure the scene and wait on the investigator.”
He nodded, looking straight ahead at some thought hidden inside his sunglasses, then said, “Does any of this go in my jacket?”
“No, it doesn’t. But that’s not the point, here, podna. We’re all clear on the real point, aren’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, I’ll see you inside. I have to return a phone call.”
But actually I didn’t want to talk with him anymore. I had a feeling that Deputy Garrett was not a good listener.
I called Lyle Sonnier’s number in Baton Rouge and was told by a secretary that he was out of town for the day. I gave the spent .308 casing to our fingerprint man, which was by and large a waste of time, since fingerprints seldom do any good unless you have the prints of a definite suspect already on file. Then I read the brief paperwork on the prowler reports made by Bama Sonnier, but it added nothing to my knowledge of what had happened out at the Sonnier place. I wanted to write it all off and leave Weldon to his false pride and private army of demons, whatever they were, and not spend time trying to help somebody who didn’t want any interference in his life. But if other people had had the same attitude toward me, I had to remind myself, I would be dead, in a mental institution, or putting together enough change and crumpled one-dollar bills in a sunrise bar to buy a double shot of Beam, with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, in the vain hope that somehow that shuddering rush of heat and amber light through my body would finally cook into ashes every snake and centipede writhing inside me. Then I would be sure that the red sun burning above the oaks in the parking lot would be less a threat to me, that the day would not be filled with metamorphic shapes and disembodied voices that were like slivers of wood in the mind, and that ten A.M. would not come in the form of shakes so bad that I couldn’t hold a glass of whiskey with both hands.
At noon I drove home for lunch. The dirt road along the bayou was lined with oak trees that had been planted by slaves, and the sun flashed through the moss-hung branches overhead like a heliograph. The hyacinths were thick and in full purple flower along the edges of the bayou, their leaves beaded with drops of water, like quicksilver, in the shade. Out in the sunlight, where the water was brown and hot-looking, dragonflies hung motionless in the air and the armor-plated backs of alligator gars turned in the current with the suppleness of snakes.
A dozen cars and pickup trucks were parked around the boat ramp, dock, and bait shop that I owned and that my wife, Bootsie, and an elderly black man named Batist operated when I wasn’t there. I waved at Batist, who was serving barbecue lunches on the telephone-spool tables under the canvas awning that shaded the dock. Then I turned into my dirt drive and parked under the pecan trees in front of the rambling cypress-and-oak house that my father had built by himself during the Depression. The yard was covered with dead leaves and moldy pecan husks, and the pecan trees grew so thick against the sky that my gallery stayed in shadow almost all day, and at night, even in the middle of summer, I only had to turn on the attic fan to make the house so cool that we had to sleep under sheets.
My adopted daughter, Alafair, had a three-legged pet raccoon named Tripod, and we kept him on a chain attached to a long wire that was stretched between two oaks so he could run up and down in the yard. For some reason whenever someone pulled into the drive Tripod raced back and forth on his wire, wound himself around a tree trunk, tried to clatter up the bark, and usually crashed on top of one of the rabbit hutches, almost garroting himself.
I turned off the truck engine, walked across the soft layer of leaves under my feet, picked him up in my arms, and untangled his chain. He was a beautiful coon, silver-tipped, fat and thick across the stomach and hindquarters, with a big ringed tail, a black mask, and salt-and-pepper whiskers. I opened one of the unused hutches, where I kept his bag of cornbread and dry cracklings, and filled up his food bowl, which was next
to the water bowl that he used to wash everything he ate.
When I turned around, Bootsie was watching me from the gallery, smiling. She wore white shorts, wood sandals, a faded pink peasant’s blouse, and a red handkerchief tied up in her honey-colored hair. In the shadow of the gallery her legs and arms seemed to glow with her tan. Her figure was still like a girl’s, her back firm with muscle, her hips smooth and undulating when she walked. Sometimes when she was asleep I would put my hand against her back just to feel the tone of her muscles, the swell of her lungs against my palm, as though I wanted to assure myself that all the heat, the energy, the whirl of blood and heartbeat under her tanned skin were indeed real and ongoing and not a deception, that she would not awake in the morning stiff with pain, her connective tissue once more a feast for the disease that swam in her veins.
She leaned against the gallery post with one arm, winked at me, and said, “Comment la vie, good-lookin’?”
“How you doin’ yourself, beautiful?” I said.
“I made étoufée for your lunch.”
“Wonderful.”
“Did Lyle Sonnier get hold of you at the office?”
“No. He called here?”
“Yes, he said he had something important to tell you.”
I squeezed her with one arm and kissed her neck as we went inside. Her hair was thick and brushed in swirls, tapered and stiff on her neck and lovely to touch, like the clipped mane on a pony.
“Do you know why he’s calling you?” she said.
“Somebody took a shot at Weldon Sonnier this morning.”
“Weldon? Who’d do that?”
“You got me. I think Weldon knows, but he’s not saying. The older Weldon gets, the more I’m convinced he has concrete in his head.”
“Has he been in trouble with some people?”
“You know Weldon. He always went right down the middle. I remember once he got caught stealing food out of the back of the poolroom in St. Martinville. The bartender pulled him out of the kitchen by his ear and twisted it until he squealed in front of everybody in the room. Ten minutes later Weldon came back through the door with tears in his eyes and grabbed a handful of balls off the pool table and smashed every inch of window glass in the place.”