"You guys are pretty good. You know anything about the girl? Her first name is Kim."
"No. What about her?"
"She seems too smart for the company she keeps."
"If she's with Tony C.'s crowd, she's somebody's punch."
"I don't read her like that."
"A broad's a broad to those guys. They don't keep them around because they have Phi Beta Kappa keys."
"She said Lionel and the Latin guy who made the delivery killed somebody with a piece of piano wire."
"I haven't heard that one. But Lionel's got the potential. He was on the boxing team in Angola. They say he did some real damage to a couple of guys."
"Thanks for telling me, Minos."
"An agent'll pick up the coke about eight-thirty in the morning. He'll look like a geek, but he's one of ours."
"I don't want to make this a permanent job. Let's up the ante now."
"It went well tonight. Be patient. Let things take their own course."
"Those guys are dipshits and addicts. The mule talked like a pimp. We're not going to get anywhere dealing with them. Let me take a deal straight to Cardo, something that'll make him hungry."
"Like what?"
"Can you shake loose five hundred thou?"
"Maybe. But you may still end up dealing with the dipshits."
"No, I'm going to offer him something he doesn't have. But you've got to give me some more help. Get Purcel in on the sting."
"No."
"He's a good man."
"It's out of the question."
"Minos, I'm by myself in this thing. I want somebody covering my back."
"What are you going to offer Cardo besides the buy?"
"Deal Purcel in and we'll talk about it."
"We don't negotiate at this phase of the operation, Dave."
"We do."
"I think you're beat," he said. "I think you need to get some sleep. We'll talk in the morning."
"It's not going to change. Clete backs my play or it's up the spout."
"Good night," he said. His voice was tired. I didn't answer, and he hung up.
Sleep. It was the most natural and inevitable condition of the human metabolism, I thought as I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark that night. We can abstain from sex and thrive on the thorns of our desire, deny ourselves water in the desert, keep silent on the torturer's rack, and fast unto the death; but eventually sleep has its way with us.
But if you are a drunk, or a recovering drunk, or what some people innocently called a recovered drunk, that most natural of human states seldom comes to you on your terms. And you cannot explain why one night you will sleep until morning without dreaming while the next you will sit alone in a square of moonlight, your palms damp on your thighs, your breath loud in your chest. No more than you can explain why one day you're anointed with magic. You get high on the weather, you have a lock on the perfecta in the ninth race; then the next morning you're on a dry drunk that fills the day with monstrous shapes prized out of memory with a dung fork.
I could hear revelers out in the street, glass breaking, a beer can rolling across the cement. What was my real fear, or theirs? I suspected mortality more than anything else. You do not wish to go gently into that good night. You rage against it, leave your shining bits of anger for a street sweeper to find in the early morning light, kneel by your bed in the moon glow, the scarlet beads of your rosary twisted around your fist.
But as always, just before dawn, the tiger goes back in his cage and sleeps, and something hot and awful rises from your body and blows away like ash in the wind. And maybe the next day is not so bad after all.
CHAPTER 6
The next morning was Saturday. I got up early and, after the DEA agent picked up the coke, invited Bootsie for breakfast at a restaurant on St. Charles. When I picked her up at her house on Camp, she had on dark slacks, gray pumps, a white silk blouse that hung over her waist, and a pearl necklace. Her face was fresh and cheerful with the morning, and the dark and light swirls and streaks of gray in her thick hair, which she'd had cut since I had visited her, gave her an elegance that you seldom see in maturing Acadian women.
I opened the door of the pickup and helped her in. The air was balmy, the street full of blowing leaves, the trees in the yards filled with the sounds of blue jays and mockingbirds.
"I hope you don't mind riding down St. Charles in a pickup," I said.
"Darlin', I don't mind riding anywhere with you," she said, with the innocent flirtatious gaiety that's characteristic of New Orleans, and that allows you to never feel awkward or embarrassed with a woman.
"Bootsie, you look absolutely great."
"Thank you," she said, moving her lips without sound, a smile in her eyes.
The restaurant had a domed, glassed-in porch, but it was warm enough to eat at the tables outside. The sunlight looked like bright smoke in the oak trees overhead; the air smelled of green bamboo, gardenias, the camellias that bloomed in yards all along the street, the occasional hot scorch of the old green streetcar that rattled down the esplanade, or what the people in New Orleans call the neutral ground. We ate hot, fresh-baked bread with honey and marmalade, and the Negro waiter poured the coffee and milk from two long-spouted copper pots.
I touched Bootsie on the top of the hand.
"I'm going back to New Iberia for the weekend," I said. "I have an adopted daughter there."
"Yes?"
"Do you ever go home?"
"Not really. My parents are passed away. Sometimes I feel strange back there. New Iberia never changes. But I have, and it hasn't all been for the good."
"Hey, no beating up on ourselves today, Boots."
"It's funny looking back at the past, isn't it? That night you asked me to dance under the trees on Spanish Lake, I remember it like a photograph. My back was on fire with sunburn. You brought me a vodka Collins, then a handful of aspirin. I thought how kind you were, but then you wouldn't go away."
"I see. I was the one who put everything in motion."
"What are you talking about?" Her eyes were smiling again.
"You remember what you did with that vodka Collins? You took the cherry out and bit it between your teeth and kept chewing it while you looked into my eyes. You knew I wasn't going to leave you alone after that."
"I did that? It must have been your imagination."
"Come back with me today. I still live in my father's old house," I said. Then I added, "We have a guest room."
"What are you trying to start, hon?"
"I'm in the one-day-at-a-time club. Tomorrow takes care of itself. I've got three tickets to the LSU-Ole Miss game tonight. We'll take Alafair with us and have crawfish at Mulate's, then go on up to Baton Rouge."
She didn't answer for a moment; then she said, "I'm flattered you want me to meet your daughter, but do you think maybe you're trying to fix yesterday's mistakes?"
"No," I said, and felt my throat color.
"Because if your conscience bothers you, or if you feel that somehow you need to make amends to me, I want you to stop now."
"It's not that way."
"Which way is it, then?"
"It's a beautiful day. It's going to be a fine weekend. Why not take a chance on it?"
"You made a choice for both of us thirty years ago, Dave. I didn't have a chance to participate in it. Since then, most of my choices have turned out to be bad ones."
"Boots, I'll never intentionally hurt you again."
"We get hurt worse by the people whom we care about. And they seldom mean to do it. That's what makes it so painful, kiddo."
"At any point you wish, you just say, 'Let's go home, Dave. Let's not try to be kids again.' It'll end right there."
"People make lots of promises in the daylight."
This time I simply looked back across the table at her. Her hair was so thick and lovely I wanted to reach over and touch it.
"Are you sure this is what you want?" she said finally.
"I can't think of anything better in the whole world," I said.