She came before I did, both of her hands pushing hard into the small of my back, her knees gathered around my thighs, then she came a second time, with me, her stomach rolling under me, her voice muted and moist in my ear.
She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running. She walked toward me out of the light, touching her face with a towel, then lay on top of the sheet and put her head on my chest. The ends of her hair were wet and the spinning blades of the window fan made shadows on her skin.
"What's worrying you?" she asked.
"Nothing."
She kicked me in the calf.
"Clete Purcel. I think he's going to be hurt," I said.
"Advice about love and money. Give it to anyone except friends."
"You're right. You were about Megan, too. I'd thought better of her."
She ran her fingernails through my hair and rested one ankle across mine.
SUNDAY MORNING I WOKE at dawn and went down to the bait shop to help Batist open up. I was never sure of his age, but he had been a teenager during World War II when he had worked for Mr. Antoine, one of Louisiana's last surviving Confederate veterans, at Mr. Antoine's blacksmith shop in a big red barn out on West Main. Mr. Antoine had willed Batist a plot of land and a small cypress home on the bayou, and over the years Batist had truck farmed there, augmented his income by trapping and fishing with my father, buried two wives, and raised five children, all of whom graduated from high school. He was illiterate and sometimes contentious, and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans in one direction and Lake Charles in the other, but I never knew a more loyal or decent person.
We started the fire in the barbecue pit, which was fashioned from a split oil drum with handles and hinges welded on it, laid out our chickens and sausage links on the grill for our midday customers, and closed down the lid to let the meat smoke for at least three hours.
Batist wore a pair of bell-bottomed dungarees and a white T-shirt with the sleeves razored off. His upper arms bunched like cantaloupes when he moved a spool table to hose down the dock under it.
"I forgot to tell you. That fella Cool Breeze was by here last night," he said.
"What did he want?"
"I ain't ax him."
I expected him to say more but he didn't. He didn't like people of color who had jail records, primarily because he believed they were used by whites as an excuse to treat all black people unfairly.
"Does he want me to call him?" I asked.
"I know that story about his wife, Dave. Maybe it wasn't all his fault, but he sat by while them white men ruined that po' girl. I feel sorry for him, me, but when a man got a grief like that against hisself, there ain't nothing you can do for him."
I looked up Mout's name in the telephone book and dialed the number. While the phone rang Batist lit a cigar and opened the screen on the window and flicked the match into the water.
"No one home," I said after I hung up.
"I ain't gonna say no more."
He drew in on his cigar, his face turned into the breeze that blew through the screen.
BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR AND I went to Mass, then I dropped them off at home and drove to Cisco Flynn's house on the Loreauville road. He answered the door in a terry-cloth bathrobe that he wore over a pair of scarlet gym shorts.
"Too early?" I said.
"No, I was about to do a workout. Come in," he said, opening the door wide. "Look, if you're here to apologize about that stuff on the set—"
"I'm not."
"Oh."
"The sheriff wants to know why the city of New Iberia is hosting a mainline con like your friend Boxleiter."
We were in the living room now, by the collection of photographs that had made Megan famous.
"You were never in a state home, Dave. How would you like to be seven years old and forced to get up out of bed in the middle of the night and suck somebody's cock? Think you could handle that?"
"I think your friend is a depraved and violent man."
"He's violent? Y'all put him in the hospital over a drop of sweat."
Through the French doors I could see two dark-skinned people sitting at a glass table under a tree in the back yard. The man was big, slightly overweight, with a space between his front teeth and a ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades. The woman wore shorts and a tank top and had brownish-red hair that reminded me of tumbleweed. They were pouring orange juice into glasses from a clear pitcher. A yellow candle stub was melted to the table.
"Something bothered me the last time I was here. These photos that were in Life magazine? Y'all caught the kill from inside the drainpipe, just as the bullet hit the black guy in the neck?"
"That's right."
"What were you doing in the pipe? How'd you know the guy was coming out at that particular place?"
"We made an arrangement to meet him, that's all."
"How'd the cops know he was going to be there?"
"I told you. He raped a high school girl. They had an all-points out on him."
"Somehow that doesn't hang together for me," I said.
"You think we set it up? We were inside the pipe. Bullets were ricocheting and sparking all around us. What's the use? I've got some guests. Is there anything else?"
"Guests?"
"Billy Holtzner's daughter and her boyfriend."
I looked out the French doors again. I saw a glassy reflection between the fingers of the man's right hand.
"Introduce me."
"It's Sunday. They're just getting up."
"Yeah, I can see."
"Hey, wait a minute."
But I opened the French doors and stepped outside. The man with the ponytail, who looked Malaysian or Indonesian, cupped the candle stub melted to the table, popping the waxy base loose, and held it behind his thigh. Holtzner's daughter had eyes that didn't fit her fried hair. They were a soapy blue, mindless, as devoid of reason as a drowsy cat's when small creatures run across its vision.
A flat, partially zippered leather case rested on a metal chair between her and her boyfriend.
"How y'all doing?" I asked.
Their smiles were self-indulgent rather than warm, their faces suffused by a chemical pleasure that was working in their skin like flame inside tallow. The woman lowered her wrist into her lap and the sunlight fell like a spray of yellow coins on the small red swelling inside her forearm.
"The officer from the set," the man said.
"It is," the woman said, leaning sideways in her chair to see behind me. "Is that blond lady here? The one with the blackjack. I mean that guy's head. Yuck."
"We're not in trouble, are we?" the man said. He smiled. The gap in his front teeth was large enough to insert a kitchen match in.
"You from the U.K.?" I said.
"Just the accent. I travel on a French passport," he said, smiling. He removed a pair of dark glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on.
"Y'all need any medical attention here?"
"No, not today, I don't think," the man said.
"Sure? Because I can run y'all down to Iberia General. It's no trouble."
"That's very kind of you, but we'll pass," the man said.
"What's he talking about?" the woman said.
"Being helpful, that sort of thing, welcoming us to the neighborhood," the man said.
"Hospital?" She scratched her back by rubbing it against her chair. "Did anybody ever tell you you look like Johnny Wadd?"
"Not really."
"He died of AIDS. He was very underrated as an artist. Because he did porno, if that's what you want to call it." Then her face went out of focus, as though her own words had presented a question inside herself.
"Dave, can I see you?" Cisco said softly behind me.
I left Billy Holtzner's daughter and the man with the ponytail without saying goodbye. But they never noticed, their heads bent toward each other as they laughed over a private joke.
Cisco walked with me through the shade trees to my tru
ck. He had slipped on a golf shirt with his gym shorts, and he kept pulling the cloth away from the dampness of his skin.
"I don't have choices about what people around me do sometimes," he said.
"Choose not to have them here, Cisco."
"I work in a bowl of piranhas. You think Billy Holtzner is off the wall? He twists noses. I can introduce you to people who blow heads."
"I didn't have probable cause on your friends. But they shouldn't take too much for granted."
"How many cops on a pad have you covered for? How many times have you seen a guy popped and a throw-down put on his body?"
"See you, Cisco."
"What am I supposed to feel, Dave? Like I just got visited by St. Francis of Assisi? In your ear."
I walked to my truck and didn't look back at him. I heard the woman braying loudly in the back yard.
WHEN I WENT DOWN to the bait shop to open up Monday morning, Cool Breeze Broussard was waiting for me at a spool table, the Cinzano umbrella ruffling over his head. The early sun was dark red through the trunks of the cypresses.
"It gonna be another hot one," he said.
"What's the haps, Breeze?"
"I got to talk… No, out here. I like to talk in the open space… How much of what I tell you other people got to learn about?"
"That depends."
He made a pained face and looked at the redness of the sun through the trees.
"I went to New Orleans Saturday. A guy up Magazine, Jimmy Fig, Tommy Figorelli's brother, the guy the Giacanos sawed up and hung in pieces from a ceiling fan? I figured Jimmy didn't have no love for the Giacanos 'cause of his brother, and, besides, me and Jimmy was in the Block together at Angola, see. So I t'ought he was the right man to sell me a cold piece," Cool Breeze said.
"You're buying unregistered guns?" I said.
"You want to hear me or not?… So he go, 'Willie, in your line of work, you don't need no cold piece.'
"I go, 'This ain't for work. I got in bad wit' some local guys, maybe you heard. But I ain't got no money right now, so I need you to front me the piece.'
"He say, 'You feeling some heat from somewhere, Breeze?' And he say it wit' this smart-ass grin on his face.
"I say, 'Yeah, wit' the same dudes who freeze-wrapped your brother's parts in his own butcher shop. I hear they drank eggnog while he was spinning round over their heads.'
"He say, 'Well, my brother had some sexual problems that got him into trouble. But it ain't Italians you got to worry about. The word is some peckerwoods got a contract to do a black blabbermouth in New Iberia. I just didn't know who it was.'
"I say, 'Blabbermouth, huh?'
"He go, 'You was ripping off the Giacanos and selling their own VCRs back to them? Then you snitch them off and come to New Orleans figuring somebody's gonna front you a piece? Breeze, nothing racial meant, but you people ought to stick to pimping and dealing rock'."
"Who are these peckerwoods?" I asked.
"When I tole you the story about me and Ida, about how she wrapped that chain round her t'roat and drowned herself, I left somet'ing out."
"Oh?"
"A year after Ida died, I was working at the Terrebonne cannery, putting up sweet potatoes. Harpo Delahoussey run the security there for Mr. Terrebonne. We come to the end of the season and the cannery shut down, just like it do every winter, and everybody got laid off. So we went on down to the unemployment office and filed for unemployment insurance. Shouldn't have been no problem.
"Except three weeks go by and the state sends us a notice we ain't qualified for no checks 'cause we cannery workers, and 'cause the cannery ain't open, we ain't available to work.
"I went on down to see Mr. Terrebonne, but I never got past Harpo Delahoussey. He's sitting there at a big desk wit' his foot in the wastebasket, sticking a po'boy sandwich in his mout'. He go, 'It's been explained to you, Willie. Now, you don't want wait round here till next season, you go on down to New Orleans, get you a job, try to stay out of trouble for a while. But don't you come round here bothering Mr. Terrebonne. He been good to y'all.'
"'Bout a week later they was a big fire at the cannery. You could smell sweet potatoes burning all the way down to Morgan City. Harpo Delahoussey jumped out a second-story window wit' his clothes on fire. He'da died if he hadn't landed in a mud puddle."
"You set it?"
"Harpo Delahoussey had a nephew wit' his name. He use to be a city po-liceman in Franklin. Everybody called him Li'l Harpo."
"You think this is one of the peckerwoods?"
"Why else I'm telling you all this? Look, I ain't running no more."
"I think you're living inside your head too much, Breeze. The Giacanos use mechanics out of Miami or Houston."
"Jimmy Fig tole me I was a dumb nigger ought to be pimping and selling crack. What you saying ain't no different. I feel bad I come here."
He got up and walked down the dock toward his truck. He passed two white fishermen who were just arriving, their rods and tackle boxes gripped solidly in their hands. They walked around him, then glanced over their shoulders at his back.
"That boy looks like his old lady just cut him off," one of them said to me, grinning.
"We're not open yet," I said, and went inside the bait shop and latched the screen behind me.
* * *
EIGHT
YOU READ THE JACKET ON a man like Swede Boxleiter and dismiss him as one of those genetically defective creatures for whom psychologists don't have explanations and let it go at that.
Then he does or says something that doesn't fit the pattern, and you go home from work with boards in your head.
Early Monday morning I called Cisco Flynn's home number and got his answering service. An hour later he returned my call.
"Why do you want Swede's address? Leave him alone," he said.
"He's blackmailing you, isn't he?"
"I remember now. You fought Golden Gloves. Too many shots to the head, Dave."
"Maybe Helen Soileau and I should drop by the set again and talk to him there."
BOXLEITER LIVED IN A triplex built of green cinder blocks outside St. Martinville. When I turned into his drive he was throwing a golf ball against the cement steps on the side of the building, ricocheting it off two surfaces before he retrieved it out of the air again, his hand as fast as a snake's head, click-click, click-click, click-click. He wore blue Everlast boxing trunks and a gauzy see-through black shirt and white high-top gym shoes and leather gloves without fingers and a white bill cap that covered his shaved and stitched head like an inverted cook pan. He glanced at me over his shoulder, then began throwing the ball again.
"The Man," he said. The back yard had no grass and lay in deep shade, and beyond the tree trunks the bayou shimmered in the sunlight.
"I thought we'd hear from you," I said.
"How's that?"
"Civil suit, brutality charges, that kind of stuff."
"Can't ever tell."
"Give the golf game a break a minute, will you?"
His eyes smiled at nothing, then he flipped the ball out into the yard and waited, his sunken cheeks and small mouth like those of a curious fish.
"I couldn't figure the hold you had on Cisco," I said. "But it's that photo that began Megan's career, the one of the black man getting nailed in the storm drain, isn't it? You told the cops where he was coming out. Her big break was based on a fraud that cost a guy his life."
He cleaned an ear with his little finger, his eyes as empty of thought as glass.
"Cisco is my friend. I wouldn't hurt him for any reason in the world. Somebody try to hurt him, I'll cut them into steaks."
"Is that right?"
"You want to play some handball?"
"Handball?"
"Yeah, against the garage."
"No, I—"
"Tell the dyke I got no beef. I just didn't like the roust in front of all them people."
"Tell the dyke? You're an unusual man, Swede."
"I heard abou
t you. You were in Vietnam. Anything on my sheet you probably did in spades."
Then, as though I were no longer there, he did a handstand in the yard and walked on stiffened arms through the shade, the bottoms of his gym shoes extended out like the shoulders of a man with no head.
CLETE PURCEL SAT IN the bow of the outboard and drained the foam out of a long-necked bottle of beer. He cast his Rapala between two willow trees and retrieved it back toward him, the sides of the lure flashing just below the surface. The sun was low on the western horizon and the canopy overhead was lit with fire, the water motionless, the mosquitoes starting to form in clouds over the islands of algae that extended out from the flooded cypress trunks.
A bass rose from the silt, thick-backed, the black-green dorsal fin glistening when it broke the water, and knocked the Rapala into the air without taking the treble hook. Clete set his rod on the bow and slapped the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm.
"So this guy Cool Breeze is telling you a couple of crackers got the whack on him? One of them is maybe the guy who did these two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?" he said.
"Yeah, that's about it."
"But you don't buy it?"
"When did the Giacanos start using over-the-hill peckerwoods for button men?"
"I wouldn't mark it off, mon. This greaseball in Igor's was complaining to me about how the Giacano family is falling apart, how they've lost their self-respect and they're running low-rent action like porno joints and dope in the projects. I say, 'Yeah, it's a shame. The world's really going to hell,' and he says, 'You telling me, Purcel? It's so bad we got a serious problem with somebody, we got to outsource.'