"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 thought 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 bed time 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 sou
th, 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."
"Clete-"
"I didn't drag you down here just to fire in the well. Take it easy."
We watched the Chrysler speed down the wet boulevard along the lakefront, then slow and turn through the iron gates of the yacht club. The taillights disappeared down a palm-lined drive that led to an enormous white glass-domed building by a golf course. Clete pulled to the curb and stared glumly through the windshield. The waves out on the lake were dark green and blowing with strips of froth. He breathed loudly through his nose.
"It's all right," I said.
"The hell it is. I'm going to take that cocksucker down."
"We don't need him to talk to the girl."
"I don't know where she is. He meets her in different bars, then they go to a motel."
"We'll give it a little while. Maybe he'll head over to Algiers later."
"YeA, maybe," he said. His eyes moved over the rolling fairways and oak trees, the parking lot in front of the main building, the sailboats rising and falling in their slips.
"There's two or three exits to this place. We'd better park inside. I'm going to have a talk with Nig later about credibility. That's the problem with this PI stuff, you've got about the same clout as the lowlifes. I always feel like I'm picking up table scraps."
We drove through the gate and parked at the back of the lot, where we could see the Chrysler two rows away, under a sodium lamp. Clete reached into the back seat for his Styrofoam cooler, pulled out two fried-oyster poor-boy sandwiches, a can of Jax for himself, and a Dr. Pepper for me. He kept brushing crumbs off his shirtfront while he ate.
When he finished a beer he crushed the can in his huge hand, threw it out onto the parking lot, and snapped open another one. He squinted one eye at me.
"Dave, have you got something else on the agenda?" he said.
"Not really."
"You're not going to see Joey Meatballs again and forget to invite your old partner to the party, are you?"
"Gouza doesn't rattle. We're going to have to take down somebody around him."
"It's been tried before. They're usually a lot more afraid of Joey than they are of us. I heard he busted out a snitch's teeth in Angola with a ballpeen hammer. Every punk and addict and pervert in New Orleans knows that story, too."
"How heavy do you figure he's into the crack trade?"
"He's not. It's pieced off too many times before it gets to the projects. Gouza's on the other end. Big shipments, pure stuff, out of Florida or South America. I hear his people distribute to maybe four or five guys in Orleans Parish, they make their profit on quantity, then they're out of the chain with minimum risk. Even the greaseballs won't go into the welfare projects. I had to go after a jumper for Nig at the St. Thomas. Two kids on the roof filled up a thirty-gallon garbage can with water and dropped it on me, bottom end down. It missed me by a foot and flattened a kid's tricycle like a half-dollar... But you didn't really answer my question, noble mon. I think you've got something else on the dance card and you're not cutting ole Cletus in on it."
"This case has been all dead ends, Clete. When I learn something, I'll tell you. My big problem is the Sonniers. I feel like locking them all up as material witnesses."
"Maybe it's not a bad idea. Taking showers with child molesters and mainline bone smokers helps get your perspective clear sometimes."
"I couldn't make it stick. They weren't actually witness to anything."
"Then let them live with their own shit."
"I'm still left with a dead cop."
We sat for a long time in the rain. The band of cobalt light on the horizon gradually faded under the rim of storm clouds, and the take grew dark and then glazed with the yellow reflection of ballroom lights in the club. I could taste salt in the wind. I pulled my rainhat down over my eyes and fell asleep.
I see Bootsie when she's nineteen, her hair as bright as copper on the pillow, her nude body as pink and soft as a newly opened rose. I put my head between her young breasts.
When I awoke the rain had stopped completely, the moon had broken through a rip in the clouds over the lake, and Clete was not in the car. I could hear orchestra music from the ballroom. Then I saw him, in silhouette, his wide back framed in the opened driver's door of Bobby Earl's Chrysler, his elbows cocked, both his arms pointed down toward his loins. He rotated his head on his neck as though he were standing indifferently at a public urinal. Even at that distance I could see the spray splashing on the dashboard, the steering wheel, the leather seats. Clete shook himself, flexed his knees, and zipped his fly. He cupped his Zippo in his hands, lit a cigarette, and puffed it in the corner of his mouth as he walked back toward the car and squinted up approvingly at the clearing sky overhead, "I don't believe it."
"You got to let a guy like Bobby know you're around," he said, slamming the door behind him. "Ali, lookie there, our man scored after all. I think he's one of these guys who plans on marrying up and screwing down."
Bobby Earl walked across the parking lot in a white suit charcoal shirt, and white-and-black striped tie. A red-headed woman in a sequined evening gown held on to his arm and tried to step across the puddles in her high heels. Both she and Bobby Earl balanced champagne glasses gingerly in their hands. The woman was laughing uncontrollably at something Bobby Earl was telling her.
Earl opened the passenger door for her, then got behind the wheel. The light from the sodium lamp shone through his front window, and I saw his silhouette freeze, then his shoulders stiffen, as though he had just become aware that a geological fissure had opened up below his automobile.
Then he got out of the car, staring incredulously at his upturned palms, the wet streaks in his suit, the damp imprints of his shoes.
Clete started the e
ngine, and the rusted-out muffler thundered off the asphalt and reverberated between the rows of cars. He turned out into the aisle and drove slowly past the Chrysler, the engine and frame clanking like broken glass.
"What's happenin', Bob?" he asked, then flipped his cigarette in a high, sparking arc, punched in a rock tape, and gave Bobby Earl the thumbs-up sign.
Bobby Earl's face slipped by the window like an outraged balloon. The woman in the sequined evening gown walked hurriedly back toward the clubhouse, her spiked heels clicking across the puddles.