"He come around to the window, still grinning, like he done somet'ing great, and let spit drip out of his mout' on his finger. He took Fat Daddy's sun helmet off his head and put his finger in Fat Daddy's ear and then dropped his hat back on his head again. Didn't say one word. Just rubbed spit in po' Fat Daddy's ear and walked off.
"What kind of man do t'ings like that, Dave? It makes me feel real bad. I wish I'd done somet'ing to stop that man when he come in our shop. Lawd God, I do."
Batist shook his head, his spoon forgotten by the side of his soup bowl.
A therapist once told me that dreams are not a mystery. They simply represent our hopes and fears, he said. But unfortunately I was never good at distinguishing between the two.
I see an arbor atop the grassy slope of Bayou Teche. The tree trunks look hard and white under the moon, stonelike yet filled with power, as though the coldness in the light has trapped a trembling energy inside the bark. Inside the arbor is a wicker picnic basket filled with grapes and bananas, a corked green bottle of burgundy, a bottle of black label Jack Daniel's wrapped in a soft towel, a bucket of shaved ice with two chrome cups chilling inside it.
I can taste the charcoal and the oak in the whiskey, as weightless as liquid smoke on the back of the tongue. I can feel its heat spread from my stomach into my chest and my loins. But my system is dry, as though my glands have become dust, and the real rush doesn't come until the second hit, a long deep swallow of sugar and shaved ice and mint leaves and bourbon, then it reaches every nerve in my body, just as if someone had struck a sulfurous match across the base of the brain.
But this time the dream is not just about the charcoal-filtered product of Lynchburg, Tennessee. She's on her knees inside the arbor, her bottom resting on her heels, eating a sandwich with both hands, somehow vulnerable and reminiscent of a wartime photo of a frightened and starving child. She smiles when she sees me, as she would greet an old friend, and she gathers her dress in her hands and works it over her head. Her tan body seems glazed with moonglow, her breasts swollen and hard, her face innocent of any agenda except the welcoming press of her thighs around mine. In the dream I know it's wrong, that I've reached a place where I can't turn it around, just like the whiskey that lights old fires and once again claims a landscape inside me I'd long forgotten. Her mouth is on mine, her fingers on my hips, then kneading the small of my back, and I feel something break inside me, like water bursting through the bottom of a paper bag, and when I look into her face, my body trembling with the moment, I see a tangle of platinum hair and eyes like black glass and a self-indulgent lazy smile that ends in a kiss of contempt upon the cheek.
I woke and sat on the side of the bed, my fingers clenched on my knees, my loins aching like those of an adolescent boy trapped inside the unrelieved fantasies of his masturbation.
Outside, I heard Tripod running on his chain and wind coursing through the trees and dead leaves swirling across the yard. When the wind dropped, the night was silent for only a moment, then I heard leaves again, this time breaking under someone's foot.
I looked out the window and saw Tripod sitting on top of his hutch, motionless, his face pointed toward the backyard.
I slipped on a pair of blue jeans and my tennis shoes, took my .45 out of the dresser and the flashlight from the nightstand, and checked the lock on the front door. Bootsie was asleep on the couch, her arm across her eyes, a magazine splayed on the floor by her. I turned on the flood lamp in the mimosa tree and stepped out into the yard.
The wind blew plumes of ash out of my neighbor's field and ruffled the starlight's reflection on the duck pond by my fence line. I searched the side yard, the horse lot and stable, the aluminum tool-shed where we still kept my father's old tractor, then I walked along the edge of the coulee toward the duck pond.
The batteries in my flashlight grew weaker and I turned them off and started back toward the house. I heard the shrill, hysterical-like cry of a nutria out in the swamp.
A man with the sinewy proportions of an atavistic throwback moved out quickly from behind a stand of banana trees and shoved the blunt, round end of a hard object into the center of my back.
"I could have used a telephone. I come here in trust. Don't mess it up," he said.
"What do you want, Aaron?"
"Give me your pistol. . . I'll give it back. I promise. I ain't gonna harm nobody, either."
His hand moved down my arm and slipped the .45 free from my fingers. He smelled like humus and wool clothes full of wood smoke and dried sweat.
"I got you! Sonofabitch if I didn't! Slickered you good!" he said. He squatted and roared at his own humor, slapped his thigh with one hand. "Didn't have nothing but this old corncob pipe I got out of a garbage can! How you like that!"
"Why don't you act your age?"
"Did y'all use the same kind of smarts against them Viet Cong?" He danced like an ape under the overhang of withered banana leaves.
"You going to give me my piece back?" I said.
"Cain't do that." Then his face went as blank and stark as a sheet of tin under the starlight. "I want you to set up my surrender to Buford LaRose."
When I didn't reply, he said, "You deaf? Just set it up. Out in the country somewheres. He'll go for it. It'll make him a big man."
"I don't know if I trust what you've got in mind, partner."
"They sent a little pisspot Eye-talian after me. Man I was in jail with and knowed where my camp was at. Some people is cursed by their knowledge."
"What are you saying?"
His eyes were wide, lidless, burning with certainty about the adversarial nature of the world.
"You might say I talked to his conscience. He said me and you are the shit on somebody's nose and it's suppose to get wiped off before a certain governor gets sworn in. He was at a point in his life he didn't want to keep no secrets."
"I don't like what you're telling me, Aaron."
"They treated me worsen they would a nigger rapist. You think I give a fuck about what you don't like? . . . We got a mutual interest here."
"No, we don't."
He put the .45 under my jaw. "Then you walk to the shed."
"You're starting to seriously piss me off, Aaron."
He pushed the barrel harder into my throat. "LaRose used my daughter and throwed her away. Then he sent me to the penitentiary. You side with them, then you're my enemy."
His face was bloodless, his dilated nostrils radiating gray hair. He wasn't a bizarre old man anymore, or even a pitiful and ignorant victim. For some reason, as I stared into the vacuity of his eyes, I was absolutely convinced he would have found reason to wage war against Buford LaRose's world even if Buford LaRose had never existed.
"I'm not going in that shed, Aaron. It ends here," I said.
He breathed loudly in the darkness. His tongue looked like a gray biscuit inside his mouth.
"I done cut your phone line already. I'll give you back this later. But don't come after me," he said.
"You're a foolish man, sir."
"No, I'm a dead one. That's what they call people in the Death House, the Dead Men. Wait till you feel that big nigger's hand on you. Or one of yourn up at the house. See how goddamn liberal you are then."
"What did you say?"
But he was gone, running like a crab through the trees, his prison work boots crashing in the leaves.
I sat on the floor by the couch where Bootsie slept. Her eyes opened into mine.
"What is it?" she said.
"Aaron Crown was outside . . ." I placed my hand on her arm before she could get up. "It's all right. He's gone now. But he cut the phone line."
"Crown was—"
"I'm giving it up, Boots. Aaron, the LaRose family, whatever they're into, it's somebody else's responsibility now."
She raised herself on one elbow.
"What happened out there?" she asked.
"Nothing. That's the point. Nothing I do will ever change the forces these people represent."
> Her eyes steadied on mine and seemed to look inside me.
"You want to fix something to eat?" she said.
"That'd be swell. I'll use the phone in the bait shop to call the department."
When I locked the front door behind me, I could see her in the kitchen, shredding a raw potato on a grater to make hash browns, her robe cinched around her hips, just as though we were waking to an ordinary dawn and the life we'd had before I'd allowed the fortunes of Aaron Crown and the LaRose family to grow like a tentacle into our own.
In the morning Batist found my .45 wrapped in a Kentucky Fried Chicken bag under the doormat on his gallery.
CHAPTER 27
"we've got a real prize in the holding cell," Helen said.
I followed her down the corridor to the lockup area and waited for the deputy to open the cell. The biker inside had a gold beard and head of hair like a lion's mane. His eyes reminded me of red Lifesavers, pushed deep into folds of skin that were raw from wind-burn or alcohol or blood pressure that could probably blow an automobile gasket.
His name was Jody Hatcher. A year and a half ago the court had released him to the Marine Corps, in hopes, perhaps, that the whole Hatcher family would simply disappear from Iberia Parish. His twin sister achieved a brief national notoriety when she was arrested for murdering seven men who picked her up hitchhiking on the Florida Turnpike. The mother, an obese, choleric woman with heavy facial hair, was interviewed by CBS on the porch of the shack where the Hatcher children were raised. I'll never forget her words: "It ain't my fault. She was born that way. I whipped her every day when she was little. It didn't do no good."
"They treating you all right, Jody?" I said after the deputy locked me and Helen inside.
"I don't like the echoes, man. I can't tell what's out in the hall and what's inside," he said, grinning, pointing at his head. He wore skintight black jeans and a black leather vest with no shirt. His face seemed filled with a merry, self-ironic glow, like a man who's become an amused spectator at the dissolution of his own life.
Helen and I sat down on the wood bench against the far wall. In the center of the cell was a urine-streaked drain hole.
"They say your saddlebags were full of crystal meth," I said.
"Yeah, dude I lent my Harley to probably really messed me over. Wow, I hate it when they do that to you."
I nodded, as though we were all listening to a sad truth.
"I thought you were in Haiti," I said.
"Got cut loose, man. You saw that on TV about the firelight at the police station? That was my squad. See, this native woman was cheering us up on a balcony and an attache busted her upside the head with a baton. That's why we was down at the police station. We camied-up and set up a perimeter 'cause we didn't want these guys hurting the people no more. The Corps is peace makers, not peace keepers, a lot of civilians don't understand that. We got the word these guys was gonna light us up, so this one dude comes outside and starts to turn toward us with an Uzi in his hand, and pow, man, I see the tracer come out of the lieutenant's gun, and then a shit storm is flying through the air and before I knew it I burned a whole magazine on just one guy, like chickens was pecking him to death against the wall. I wasn't up for it, man. That's some real cruel shit to watch."
He was seated on a wood bench, his wrists crossed on his knees, his fists clenched, his face staring disjointedly into space.
"Tell Detective Robicheaux about the Mexican cowboy," Helen said.
"We already covered that, ain't we? I don't like remembering stuff like that." He puckered his mouth like a fish's.
"You got to work with us, Jody, you want some slack on the meth," Helen said.
"It was right before I went in the Crotch. I met the Mexican guys in a bar in Loreauville. I was doing dust and rainbows and drinking vodka on top of it, and we all ended up out in a woods somewhere. It was a real weirded-out hot night, with fireflies crawling all over the trees and bullfrogs croaking and nutrias screaming out on the water. These guys had some beautiful meth, high-grade clean stuff that don't foul your blood. But this one cowboy tied off and slapped a vein till it was purple as a turnip, then he spikes into it and whop, he doubles over and crumples on the ground, with the rubber tourniquet flopping in his teeth like a snake with its head cut off.
"It's not like skag. You don't drop the guy in cold water or a snowbank. The guy's eyes rolled, all kind of stuff came out of his mouth, his knees started jerking against his chest. What are you gonna do, man? I was wasted. Jesus, it was like watching a guy drown when you can't do nothing about it."
"Is that all of it, Jody?" I asked.
"Tell him," Helen said.
"They dug a hole and buried him," he said.
"Who?" I asked.
"Everybody. I run off in the trees. I couldn't watch it. . . Maybe he wasn't dead . . . That's what keeps going through my head . . . They didn't get a doctor or nothing . . . They should have put a mirror in front of his nose or something . . ."
"Who was there, Jody?" I asked.
"The guy who just got elected governor."
"You're sure?" I said.
"He was strung out, crying like a little kid. There was some other Americans there had to take care of him."
"Who?" I asked.
"I don't know, man. I blacked out. I couldn't take it. I can't even tell you where I was at. I woke up behind a colored bar in St. Martinville with dogs peeing on me."
His face was swollen, glazed like the red surfaces on a lollipop, decades older than his years. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
Back in my office, Helen said, "What do you think?"
"Take his statement. Put it in the file," I answered.
"That's it?"
"Somebody snipped Jody's brain stem a long time ago."
"You don't believe him?"
"Yeah I do. But it won't stand up. Buford LaRose won't go down until he gets caught in bed with a dead underage male prostitute."
"Too much," she said, and walked out the door.
Saturday morning Clete Purcel drove in from New Orleans, fished for two hours in a light mist, then gave it up and drank beer in the bait shop while I added up my receipts and tried to figure my quarterly income tax payment. He spoke little, gazing out the window at the rain, as though he was concentrating on a conversation inside his head.
"Say it," I said.
"After I got to Vietnam, I wished I hadn't joined the Corps," he said.
"So?"
"You already rolled the dice, big mon. You can't just tell these cocksuckers you don't want to play anymore."
"Why not?"
"Because I keep seeing Jerry Joe's face in my dreams, that's why . . . That's his jukebox back there?"
"Yeah."
"What's on it?"
"Forties and fifties stuff. Every one of them is a Cadillac."
"Give me some quarters."
"I sliced the cord in half."
"That's a great way to deal with the problem, Streak."
A half hour later the phone rang. It was Buford LaRose. I walked with the phone into the back of the shop.
"Meet me at the Patio restaurant in Loreauville," he said.
"No, thanks," I said.
"Goddamn it, Dave, I want to get this mess behind us."
"Good. Resign your office."
"Crown's a killing machine," he said.
"If he is, you helped make him that way."
"You don't know, do you?"
"What?"
"About the guy who was just fished out of Henderson Swamp."
"That's St. Martin Parish. It's not my business. Good-bye, Buford." I hung up the phone.
"That was dickhead?" Clete said.
"Yep."
"What did he want?"
I told him.
"You're just going to let it slide down the bowl?"
"That about sums it up."
"Mistake. Stay in their faces, Streak. Don't let them blindside you. I'll back your play, mon."
He turned toward me on the counter stool, his scarred face as flat and round as a pie tin, his eyes a deep green under his combed, sandy hair.
"Listen to me for once," he said. "That was Mookie Zerrang you saw in the pirogue. You want the button man out of your life, you got to find his juice."