"I'm sorry you had to arrive in the middle of all this," I said.
"Dave, that officer was talking about a cult. Do you know people like that?"
"It wasn't done by cultists. He knew it, too."
"What?"
"I'm supposed to think I've got a gris-gris on me. You remember a Negro woman named Gros Mama Goula in New Iberia?"
"She ran a brothel?"
"That's the one. She'd like to shake up my cookie bag. She either sent some of her people over here to do this, or it was done by a guy named Jimmie Lee Boggs. But my guess is that the two of them are working together."
"I just don't understand."
"These are people who for one reason or another would like me to disappear. So they put on this gris-gris show. But whoever did this has probably spent some time in a southern prison. A frog with a nail through it means a guy had better jump or he's going to have a bad fate."
I saw her face becoming more and more clouded.
"Bootsie, these guys are dimwits. They're always looking for something new or clever to dress up their act. When they do some bullshit like this, it's because they're running scared."
"I've heard that name Boggs," she said. "I get the feeling he's taken very seriously."
"All right, he's got the contract on Tony C. He's also the guy who shot me last summer. But I think Jimmie Lee's scared. It's turned around on him."
"Dave, what in God's name are you doing? Why did you bring me here this morning?"
"I'm not sure, Boots."
"God, you're incredible."
"Maybe I don't think I'm doing right by you."
This time her eyes saw meaning in my face.
"I hurt you real bad a long time ago. I don't want to do it again," I said.
Her eyes kept looking up at me. I pulled up a chair and sat across from her.
"Maybe you have some regrets?" she said softly.
"I didn't say that."
"You love the past, Dave. You love Louisiana the way it used to be. It's changed. Forever. We are, too. Maybe you're discovering that." She smiled.
"I don't know. I don't learn anything very easily."
Her eyes went down in her lap, and she brushed her fingers over the fine hair on the back of her wrist.
"Dave, did you do something that bothers you?" she said.
"No."
"Are we talking about another woman?"
"I'm mixed up with a bunch of people I can't think straight about right now."
She was quiet for a moment; then she said, "Who is she?"
"I haven't been untrue to you." The words sounded hollow, marital, the banal end of something.
"Is she one of Tony's crowd?"
"I'm in a situation where I'm going to have to hurt some people. I don't feel good about it. I got mixed up in it because I was shot by Jimmie Lee Boggs. Now I'm at a place where I don't understand my own feelings."
"You're an undercover cop, aren't you?"
"I've gotten involved with people whom cops sometimes call lowlifes or geeks or greaseballs. Except I don't feel that way about all of them now, and I should. That's what it amounts to, Bootsie."
"Do you want it over between us?"
"I don't think it can ever be over between us."
"You shouldn't count on that," she said, and I felt my heart drop.
"Can you tell me why you were over at Baylor?" I said.
"Not today. No more today."
"You're going to close me out? You're not going to let me be your friend when you need one?"
"Do you love me or the past, Dave? Do you think I'm the past? Do I look like the past? Am I the summer of 'fifty-seven?"
Her eyes and her voice were kind, but I had no answer for her or myself, and the room was so quiet that I could hear the rustle of banana leaves outside the window.
Three hours later I was sitting at a redwood table by the side of Tony's tennis court while he hit balls at Jess Ornella on the opposite side of the net. Jess wore a red sweatsuit and blue boat shoes and clubbed at the balls as though he were under attack. Three dozen balls must have littered the clay court, most of them on his side.
"I tell you what, why don't you get us some iced tea?" Tony said.
"I told you I ain't any good at games," Jess said.
"You're doing good. Keep working at it. Your stroke's getting better all the time," Tony said. He sat down at the table with me, patting his neck and face with a towel, and watched Jess walk toward the house. "He looks like a hog on ice, but you ought to see him fly an airplane."
"Jess?"
"His old man was a crop duster during the Depression. Jess can thread a needle with anything that has wings on it. One time he flew us upside down under a power line."
Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my lip. They felt as tight and hard as wire.
"When are you getting them out?" he said.
"Tomorrow."
"Something on your mind, Dave?"
"I guess I was still thinking about my apartment."
"Don't go back there. Stay with me as long as you're in New Orleans. You don't need an apartment."
"I'm still trying to figure out Boggs, too."
"Why? You like trying to put yourself inside the head of a moron? Look, why do you think a guy like me is successful in this business? I'll tell you. A guy who can walk down the street and chew gum at the same time is king of the block. Take Jess there, and remember he's one of the few I trust, he thinks Peter Pan is the washbasin in a whorehouse."
"Boggs is smarter than you think."
"He's a psychopath. Look, the real badasses are in prison or the graveyard. If they're not there yet, they will be. About every two or three months I hear a rumor somebody's going to whack me out. And once in a while somebody tries. But I'm still hitting tennis balls. And a couple of other guys, guys who somebody wound up in Houston or Miami, Jess has driven down into Lafourche Parish and no telling what happened. So if you want into the life, Dave, you don't worry over it. Hey, come on, man, most people grow old and sit on the porch and listen to their livers rot."
"I've got another problem, too, Tony. My people back in Lafayette want a chance to get their money back. A half million is a lot to lose."
He picked up his racket cover and began pulling it over the head of his racket.
"They're not looking for a major buy," I said. "They just want to recover what they lost."
He zipped up the leather cover and rested the racket across his thighs.
"Clete says there's a major score about to go down in the projects. I'd like to get in on it," I said.
He nodded attentively, his eyes looking off into the trees.
"I hear you talking, Dave, but like I once said to you, I don't do business at my house." Then he glanced into my face.
"I respect that, Tony, but these guys back in Lafayette are turning some dials on me."
"Fuck 'em."
"I've got to live around there."
"Hey, give me a break. Do I take care of you or not?" His small mouth made that strange butterfly shape.
"I'm just telling you about my situation."
"All right, for God's sakes. We'll take a drive. You're worse than my wife."
A few minutes later we were in the Lincoln, driving across the twenty-four-mile causeway that spans Lake Pontchartrain, with Jess and the other bodyguards behind us in the Cadillac. The sun was high in the hard, blue sky, and the waves were green and capping in the wind. Tony drove with his arm on the window, a Marine Corps utility cap pulled down snugly to the level of his sunglasses. His gray and black ringlets whipped on his neck. He looked out at a long barge whose deck was loaded with industrial metal drums of some kind.
"We used to fish and swim in the lake when I was a kid," he said. "Now the lake's so polluted it's against the law to get in the water."
"New Orleans has changed a lot."
"All for the bad, all for the bad," he said.
"Can you tell me where we're going now?"
"A place I bet you've never seen. Maybe I'll show you my plane, too."
"Can we talk now?"