“See that dude with the caved-in face?” Clete said, panting with the effort.
“What about him?” Alafair said.
“He’s bad news. Cut across the grass.”
Alafair followed Clete as he angled back toward the bayou, running through shade trees again, down into depressions sprinkled with leaves, tannic with the smell of gas. Then she made a mistake. She looked back over her shoulder at the man with an elongated head and a face that seemed to have melted and been remolded to resemble the back of a thumb.
A moment later she heard a man’s feet pounding the sod behind her, his breath coming hard in his throat.
“Thought that was you,” the man said to Clete. “Who’s your young friend?”
Clete slowed, working hard to catch his wind. “We’re on our run, here,” he said.
“Watch this,” the man said. He sprang onto a picnic bench and caught a limb with both hands, grinning from ear to ear, his exposed stomach fish-belly white, splayed with black hair. He dropped to the ground with a thump. He wiped his hands on the front of his windbreaker, his smile still in place. His eyes were green and recessed, playful as marbles. “I’m ronald,” he said to Alafair.
“How do you do?” she said.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.
“She didn’t give it. We need to finish our regimen, here, Mr. Bledsoe. I’ll chat you up some other time,” Clete said.
“You’re all out of breath, there. I’ve got cold drinks in my cooler. I have some po’boy sandwiches as well.” his eyes shifted to Alafair, lighting with curiosity or perhaps a proprietary sense that he knew and had claim on her. “Are you Mr. Purcel’s daughter?”
“No, I’m not.”
Clete placed both of his hands against a tree trunk, breathing through his nose, his heart rate starting to drop, his head spinning. “I don’t know how else to say this to you, podjo, but you seriously need to dee-dee. That means beat feet down the road. No insult intended.”
“You from South Ca’lina?” Bledsoe asked, ignoring Clete, stiffening an index finger playfully at Alafair.
She looked at her watch and rubbed the glass clean with her wrist. She tapped on it with a fingernail, as though the second hand were stuck. In the silence the man named Bledsoe shifted his weight, his shoe crunching a pecan husk.
“I knew a girl ’Cross the line in Savannah, looked just like you,” he said. “She was part Indian and had the same kind of coloring. She had long legs and wore an ankle bracelet, the kind with little charms all over it. You could hear her jingling when she walked. I always got a kick out of her.”
“Go on without me for a minute,” Clete said to Alafair.
“Dave and Molly are expecting us, Clete,” she replied, squeezing his upper arm. “Let’s go.”
He put his car keys in her hand. “Bring the Caddy around. I blew my circuits. I’ll be all right in a minute.” He winked. “Believe me, I’m copacetic here.”
The keys felt heavy and hard inside her palm, foreign and reductive somehow, as though their presentation to her had relegated her to the level of an object, one that required protection. The sun came out and she saw motes of desiccated leaves swimming in the shafts of light that fell through the tree overhead. The air was damp and stained with the septic odor of a public restroom a few feet away. She wiped a cloud of mosquitoes out of her face and felt a surge of anger like a bubble rising in her chest. A fox squirrel clattered across a limb above her head and involuntarily she looked up at it. When she lowered her gaze, the man named Ronald Bledsoe was staring at her, intrigued, his eyes roving over her features and the broken lines of sweat trickling into her sports bra.
“I’m going to get my friend’s car and come back for him,” she said. “If you bother my friend or me in this park again, I’ll have you arrested.”
“I wouldn’t offend you for the world,” Bledsoe said, placing his hand on his heart. “But you still haven’t told me your name, little darlin’.”
She walked back to the parking area by the concrete boat ramp and started up Clete’s Caddy, the exhaust pipe coughing a cloud of oil smoke into the air. As she drove back toward the clump of oak trees, she saw Clete talking heatedly to Bledsoe, like a third-base coach angry at an umpire, his arms pumped. All the while, Bledsoe continued to look back at Clete without speaking, nodding occasionally, his mouth forming a smile that made her think of earthworms constricting on a hand-rolled piece of pie dough. She drove out onto the grass and stopped the car a few feet from them. The top of the Caddy was down and leaves drifted out of the trees onto the leather seats. “Time to boogie, Cletus,” she said.
“You got it,” he said, pulling open the passenger door, looking back over his shoulder, his face as hot as a slap.
Alafair turned the convertible around and headed out of the park. She looked in the rearview mirror. “What’d that guy say?” she said.
“Nothing. He’s just one of those guys who’s a couple of quarts down.”
But wheels were turning in Clete’s head all the way back to the house, his sweat drying in a glaze on his skin. She pulled the Caddy to the curb in front of the house and got out. “Tell me what he said, Clete.”
“The guy’s a meltdown. Just stay away from him.” He slid behind the wheel and rubbed his palms along its surface and clicked the radio on and off.
“Stop acting like a dope and tell me what he said.”
Clete blew out his breath and lifted his eyes up to hers. “How about I take y’all to dinner tonight?” he replied.
DOWN THE STREET, Clete got stuck behind a tourist bus in front of an antebellum home called the Shadows. He turned out of the traffic at the red light and headed down St. Peter’s Street toward his motor court, punching in my number on his cell.
“Dave?”
“Hey, Clete.”
“We ran into this character Ronald Bledsoe in the park,” he said. “He was coming on wise to Alafair.”
“In what way?” I asked.
“Innuendos mostly. But…”
“But what?
“The guy gives me the chills. His eyes were all over Alafair’s body. The guy’s a sadist. You can smell it on him. Can Alafair hear you now?”
“She’s not here.”
“What do you mean? I just dropped her off.”
I put down the phone and looked out the front door and through the side window. “She’s not here, Clete. What did this guy say?”
“I sent her to get the car. He watched her walk away, then he said, ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher. That’s what country people say back in South Ca’lina.’”
“I’ll call you back,” I said.
I knocked the garbage can into an oak tree getting out of the driveway.
ALAFAIR HAD JOGGED back down East Main and crossed the drawbridge at Burke Street, taking long strides, breathing evenly, the bottoms of her running shoes ringing on the bridge’s steel grid. The sun was well above the trees now, the bayou’s surface bladed with mirrorlike reflections that made her eyes water. Up ahead, inside the park, she saw the man who called himself Ronald Bledsoe standing under a picnic shelter, gazing across the bayou in the direction of her house.
She jogged down the asphalt path, then slowed to a walk, studying the ground as she did, Bledsoe’s silhouetted image hovering on the edge of her vision. Dave would have told her not to confront a defective man, not to empower those whose destructive energies always turned against them if you left them alone. But Clete had treated her as he would a child and then had tried to conceal information from her, as though she were incapable of dealing with the world. And Bledsoe had violated her with his eyes and his language and the lascivious curl of his mouth, and had gotten away with it.
She walked down to the bayou’s edge, perhaps thirty feet from the picnic shelter. She tossed a stick into the current. The wind wrinkled the water’s surface and carried with it the smell of charcoal starter flaring on a grill.
“I knew you??
?d be back,” Bledsoe said from the edge of her vision.
“Is that right?” she replied.
He was sitting on the picnic table now, one foot resting on a bench, his smile like a slit upturned at the corners. “Know how I knew that?”
“No, but why don’t you tell me?” she said.
“’Cause you don’t let people push you around.”
“Really?”
“You have sharp edges. That means people cain’t get over on you. That means you don’t let an older man boss you around.”
The stick she had tossed into the water spun on the edge of the current, a green horsefly resting on top of it. “I didn’t want you to have a wrong impression back there,” she said.
“I know that. I know what you gonna think before you think it, darlin’.”
“You see, I am Indian. I was born in a village in El Salvador. A Catholic priest tried to fly my mother and me into the United States, but we crashed off Southwest Pass. My mother drowned in the plane. I think she was a brave woman.”
“You have quite a history. It seems you’re educated, too. But you got something else on your mind, too, don’t you, little sweetheart? You weren’t gonna let Mr. Purcel treat you like you don’t know your own mind about things.”
He reached into a cooler and removed a dark bottle of beer with a silver and gold label on it. He made a ring with his thumb and forefinger and wiped the crushed ice from the surface, then cracked off the cap. He stepped out into the sunlight and approached her, his hand cupped around the bottle’s coldness. “Here,” he said. “Put this in your mouth and tell me how you like it.”
“I told you about my mother because I wanted you to understand I couldn’t care less about the racist and sexist remarks of a peckerwood degenerate. Because of your impoverished background and your cultural ignorance, we’re going to let you slide with a C minus as a human being and hope you go away someplace where the standards are minimal. But that’s a one-time-only exception. You shouldn’t presume you’ll be treated as generously in the future. Are you able to follow what you have just heard?”
“Darlin’, I’ve cut it all over the country—black and white girls, Indians, Hispanics, an Eskimo girl once. I think of them all with respect. But it’s not the saddle that counts. It’s the man who climbs in it.” He stepped between her and the sun, his face dropping into shadow. She could smell his deodorant and the peppermint mouth-wash on his breath. His hand was moist when he fitted it on her bicep. His fingers began to massage her muscle. “Want to take a ride? In my car, I mean. Down to the bay?”
“Let go of me.”
He leaned forward and began to whisper. She felt his spittle touch her skin and his breath probe her ear. The next moment was one she remembered only in terms of images and sensations rather than in a linear fashion. She stepped backward, spinning and pulling loose from his grasp simultaneously. Her left leg came up so quickly from the ground, he never saw it coming. His feet must have been set solidly because he took the blow full on the mouth, his nose and lips bursting under the sole of her shoe.
The beer bottle rolled down the embankment into the water. Bledsoe cupped both his hands to his face and walked half crouched to the picnic shelter, sitting down like a man who was holding his brains inside his head. I braked my truck by the shelter and got out, unsure of what I was seeing. Bledsoe picked a broken tooth off the heel of his right hand and stared at it. Then he grinned at me, his lips bright red. “Bet I know who you are. You’re her daddy, Mr. Purcel’s friend. My name is ronald. What’s yours?”
THAT AFTERNOON, the sky was glistening with humidity when I parked my pickup truck in front of Sidney Kovick’s flower shop in Algiers. Across the river, New Orleans was sweltering in mold and receding pools of sewage, and from a distance looked deserted of automobiles and people. Clete stared at the City of his birth for a long time, then he and I went inside the shop. Sidney came out of the back, a full-length clean apron hung from his neck and tied around his waist. As always, his face showed no expression. Behind him, his wife Eunice said hello by jiggling the fingers of one hand at us.
“I’ll make it quick, Sidney,” Clete said. “I found some money that was probably washed out of a garage up the street from your house. I took it to Tommy the Whale for his opinion on it. He told me it was queer, so I put it in an envelope, marked it ‘FBI,’ and dumped it in a mailbox. I don’t know if it was your queer or not, but I would have dumped it in a mailbox just the same. That doesn’t give you the right to sic this Bledsoe fuck on me.”
“Watch your language,” Sidney said.
“What Clete is saying to you, Sidney, is you’ve probably placed a dangerous man in our midst,” I said. “This morning he made some nasty remarks to my daughter. She kicked his teeth in, but I suspect he’ll be back around. If that happens, I’m going to punch his ticket. But I’m going to punch yours first.”
Sidney drew in his cheeks, as though he were gathering the spittle in his mouth, his nostrils swelling slightly as he breathed in and out. He closed the door to the back of the shop and faced us again. “The pukes started this, not me. Two of them got what they deserved. The other two give me back what’s mine, all these other problems go away. You guys are screwing with something that’s way over your heads.”
“Oh yeah? Check this out, Sidney. I was in Saigon when pogey bait such as yourself were funneling PX goods to the VC, so clean the mashed potatoes out of your mouth.”
Below the level of the counter, I touched Clete’s upper thigh to shut him up.
“You’ve always had two problems, Purcel. You’re ninety-proof most of the time and you never learned how to keep that fat dick in your pants. It cost you your career and your marriage, and everybody in New Orleans knows it except you, so they tolerate you the same way they do a child. But don’t never come around here acting disrespectfully in front of my wife again.”
“We’re losing the thread here, Sidney,” I said.
“No, let him talk,” Clete said.
I kept my eyes focused on Sidney’s, trying to keep an invisible wall between me and Clete and the obvious injury Sidney had done to him. “My daughter is not a player in this. This man Bledsoe insulted her without provocation. You want respect for your own family, but you’re not giving it to mine. What do you think we should do about that?”
“Who says this guy Bledsoe works for me?”
“We’re talking as family men, Sidney. If you want to blow smoke at us, we’re through here. I thought more of you.”
His face was opaque, impossible to read. “I got no say in what happens over in New Iberia.”
“I’m sorry to hear you take that attitude,” I said.
“The pair of you walk in here like your shit don’t stink and threaten me in my own store, and it’s me who’s got the problem? I know what loss is, Dave. You say you’re gonna punch my ticket? I got news for you. I paid my dues a long time ago.”
Our visit was pointless. Sidney was now using the accidental death of his son as a shield against his own criminality. I cannot say if this was because of his narcissism or a genuine belief that the gods had wronged him and had thereby made him unaccountable for the damage he did to others. But either way, Sidney knew how to wrap himself inside the role of victim.
I hit Clete on the shoulder. “Let’s go, podna,” I said.
“This isn’t over, Sidney. I kicked your ass all over Magazine when we were kids. I can do it again,” Clete said.
I opened the door for Clete, the bell ringing over my head. But he remained stationary in front of the counter, the blood in the back of his neck climbing into his hairline, his fists balled, the accusation of drunk and womanizer and disgraced cop embedded in him like a rusty fishhook. Sidney began pulling dead flowers from a vase, shaking the water off the stems before he dropped them in a wastebasket. He glanced up at Clete. “You still here?” he said.
I waited for Clete in the truck. When he came out of the flower shop, his expression was somber, hi
s tropical shirt damp on his skin, his porkpie hat tilted at an angle on his forehead. He made me think of a haystack. Even in the Marine Corps his fellow jarheads had called him “the Heap,” out of sync, consumed by his own appetites, instantly recognized as a troublemaker by authority figures. But his greatest vulnerability always lay in the power he gave away to others, in this case to Sidney Kovick.
He got into the truck and eased the door shut, restraining his energies so as not to show his anger and sense of defeat.
“Blow it off, Clete. You’ve cut Kovick slack when he deserved a bullet in the mouth,” I said.
“I let him wipe his feet on me.”
“No, you didn’t. Sidney Kovick is a pimp. Anyone who has a conversation with him wants to take a shower afterward.”
But Clete wasn’t buying it. I started up the truck and drove to the end of the block, then turned up the street that led past the alley behind Sidney’s shop. I glanced down the alley as we passed. Amid the trash cans and the clusters of banana trees between the garages, I could see a floral delivery van parked at the back door of Sidney’s shop. Sidney’s wife was helping a Hispanic man load flowers in the side of the van. I stepped on the brake and shoved the transmission into reverse.
“What’s going on?” Clete said.
“The guy in the alley with the Gothic-letter tats. He looks just like Chula Ramos,” I said.
“Who?”
“The MS-13 dude, Natalia Ramos’s brother. He was released from the Iberia stockade by mistake.”
“The brother of the hooker who was shacked up with the priest?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“You really want to mess with this, Dave?”
“Yeah, I do.”