"What is it?" I said.
He didn't answer. He wiped his hands on his apron and put on a pair of sunglasses. We walked around the corner to the Pearl and sat at the bar. A white man farther down the bar was shucking oysters with a fierce energy on a sideboard. Tee Beau ordered a Falstaff and kept looking at me out of the side of his eye.
"You know, Tee Beau, I don't think sunglasses in the evening are the best kind of disguise."
"Why you want to see me, Mr. Dave?"
"I heard Jimmie Lee Boggs has been in New Iberia. I'd like to find out why. Can you talk to Dorothea?"
"I ain't got to. Talked to her last night. She didn't say nothing about seeing Jimmie Lee. But she tole me what Gros Mama Goula say about you, Mr. Dave."
"Oh?"
"You got the gris-gris. She say you been messin' where you ain't suppose to be messin'. You ain't listen to nobody."
"Listen, Tee Beau, Gros Mama is a big black gasbag. She jerks your people around with a lot of superstition that goes back to the islands, back to the slave days."
But my words meant nothing to him.
"I made you this, Mr. Dave. I was gonna come find you."
"I appreciate it but-"
"You put it on your ankle, you."
I made no offer to take the perforated dime and the piece of red string looped through it from his hand. He dropped them in my shirt pocket.
"You white, you been to colletch, you don't believe," he said. "But I seen things. A man that had snakes crawl all over his grave. They was fat as my wrist. Couldn't keep them off the grave with poison or a shotgun. You stick a hayfork in them, shake them off in a fire, they be back the next morning, smelling like they been lying in hot ash.
"A woman name Miz Gold, 'cause her skin was gold, she taken a man away from Gros Mama, then come in Gros Mama's juke with him, wearing a pink silk dress, carrying a pink umbrella, laughing about Gros Mama's tattoos saying she ain't nothing but a nigger putain that does what white mens tells her. The next day Miz Gold woke up with hair all over her face. Just like a monkey. She do everything to get rid of it, Mr. Dave, pull it out of her skin with pliers till blood run down her neck. But it didn't do no good. That woman so ugly nobody go near her, no white peoples hire her. She use to go up and down the alley, picking rags out of my gran 'ma-man's trash can."
"Okay, Tee Beau, I'll keep it all in mind."
"No, you ain't. In one way you like most white folks, Mr. Dave. You don't hear what a black man saying to you."
He upended his bottle of Falstaff and looked at me over the top of his glasses.
The evening air was cool and moist, purple with shadow, when I walked back to my truck. I saw a car parked overtime at a meter. I broke the red string off the perforated dime that Tee Beau had given me, slipped the dime into the meter, and twisted the handle. In front of the liquor store two Negro men in bright print shirts and lacquered porkpie hats were snapping their fingers to the music on a boom box. One of them smiled at me for no reason, his teeth a brilliant flash of gold.
I didn't go back to Tony's right away. Instead, I parked by Jackson Square and sat on a stone bench in front of St. Louis Cathedral and watched people leaving Saturday evening Mass. My head was filled with confused thoughts, like a clatter of birds' wings inside a cage. I used a pay phone on the corner to call Bootsie, but she wasn't home. The square was dark now, the myrtle and banana trees etched in the light from the du Monde, and there was a chill in the wind off the river. After the cathedral had emptied, I went inside and knelt in a back pew. A tiny red light, like a drop of electrified blood, glowed at the top of a confessional box, which meant that a priest was inside.
Many people are currently enamored with Cajun culture, but they know little of its darker side: organized dogfights and cockfights, the casual attitude toward the sexual exploitation of Negro women, the environmental ignorance that has allowed the draining and industrial poisoning of the wetlands. Also, few outsiders understand the violent feelings that Cajun people have about the nature of fidelity and human possession.
When I was twenty I worked as a welder's helper with my father on a pipeline outside of a little town north of the Atchafalaya Basin. Someone discovered that a married woman in the town was having an affair with the priest. A mob came for her at night, in a caravan of cars, and took her from her home and drove her to an empty field next to the church. They formed a circle around her, and while she cried and begged they beat her black and blue with hairbrushes. Simultaneously someone phoned her husband at his job in Baton Rouge and told him of his wife's infidelity. He was killed driving home that night in a rainstorm.
Some might simply explain it as redneck bigotry, but I think it is much more complex than that. In the minds of rural Acadian people the priest is the representative of God, and they will not share him or Him.
Their violence seldom has to do with money. Instead, it can reach a murderous intensity within minutes over a betrayed trust, a lie, a wrong against a family member. Their sense of loyalty is atavistic and irrational, their sense of loss at its compromise as painful and unexpected, no matter how many times it happens, as a lesion across the heart.
I went inside the confessional. The priest slid back the small wooden door behind the screen, and I could see the gray outline of his head. His voice was that of an elderly man, and I also discovered that he was hard of hearing. I tried to explain to him the nature of my problem, but he only became more confused.
"I'm an undercover police officer, Father. My work requires that I betray some people. These are bad people, I suppose, or what they do is bad, but I don't feel good about it."
"I don't understand."
"I'm lying to people. I pretend to be something I'm not. I feel I'm making an enormous deception out of my life."
"Because you want to arrest these people?"
"I'm a drunk. I belong to AA. Honesty is supposed to be everything in our program."
"You're drunk? Now?"
I tried again.
"I've become romantically involved with a woman. She's an old friend from my hometown. I hurt her many years ago. I think I'm going to hurt her again."
He was quiet. He had a cold and he sniffed into a handkerchief.
"I don't understand what you're telling me," he said.
"I was shot last summer, Father. I almost died. As a result I developed great fears about myself. To overcome them I became involved in an undercover sting. Now I think maybe other people might have to pay the price for my problem-the woman from my hometown, a man with a crippled child, a young woman I was with today, one I feel an attraction to when I shouldn't."
His head was bent forward. His handkerchief was crumpled in his hand.
"Can you just tell me the number of the commandments you've broken and the number of times?" he asked. "That's all we really need to do right now."
He waited, and it was obvious that his need for understanding, at least in that moment, was as great as mine.
Sunday morning Tony and I took Paul horseback riding on the farm of one of Tony's mobster friends down in Plaquemines Parish. Tony had dressed Paul in a brown corduroy coat and trousers, with a tan suede bill cap, and he balanced Paul in front of him on the saddle while we walked our horses along the edge of a barbed-wire-fenced hardpan field a hundred yards from the Gulf. The grass in the field was pale green, and white egrets picked in the dry cow flop. The few palm trees along the narrow stretch of beach were yellowed with blight, and they clattered and straightened in the wind that was blowing hard off the water. Behind us, parked by a tight grove of oak trees, were the Lincoln and the white Cadillac limousine. Jess and Tony's other bodyguards and gunmen were drinking canned beer and eating fried chicken out of paper buckets in the sunshine and entertaining themselves by popping their pistols at sea gulls out on a sandspit. Tony wore a white cashmere jacket, a safari hat, and riding breeches tucked inside his knee-high leather boots.