After he was gone, I sat by myself in the yard awhile and tried to put my thoughts into separate envelopes. Then I gave it up and went inside to eat supper with Alafair at the kitchen table.
So the days went by and I watched the leaves fall and my neighbor harvest his sugarcane, which was now thick and gold and purple in the fields. Each evening I jogged three miles down the dirt road to the drawbridge on the bayou, the air like a cool burn on my skin, and as the sun set over the bare field behind my house I did sit-ups and stomach crunches in my backyard, curled a fifty-pound dumb-bell with my right arm, a ten-pound bar with my left, and sat down weary and glazed with sweat in the damp grass. I could feel my body mending, the muscles tightening and responding in my upper chest and neck the way they had before a bullet had torn through the linkage and collapsed it like a broken spiderweb.
But to be honest, the real purpose in my physical regimen was to induce as much fatigue in my body as possible. Morpheus' gifts used to come to me in bottles, Beam and black Jack Daniel's, straight up with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, while I watched the rain pour down in the neon glow outside the window of an all-night bar not far from the Huey Long Bridge. In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry.
Now I tried to contend with my own unconscious, and the dreams it brought, with a weight set, a pair of Adidas shoes, and running shorts.
Then one evening, a week after Minos had appeared again, a pickup truck with two cracked front windows, crumpled fenders, and a bumper that hung down like a broken mouth bounced through the depressions in my drive, the tailgate slamming on the chain, the rust-gutted muffler roaring like a stock-car racer. Tante Lemon's head barely extended above the steering wheel; her chin was pointed upward, her small hands pinched on the wheel, her frosted eyes pinpoints of concern as she tried to maneuver through the trunks of the pecan trees. Dorothea sat next to her, one hand propped against the dashboard.
"She wanta tell you something," Tante Lemon said.
"Come in," I said, and I opened the truck door for her.
"We ain't got to do that," she said.
"Yeah, you do," I said.
They both followed me up onto the gallery. I opened the screen door. I wondered how many times Tante Lemon had walked through a white person's front door. Once inside, neither of them would sit until I told them to.
"What is it?" I said.
"Ax her," Tante Lemon said.
I looked at Dorothea. She wore an orange polyester dress and a straw purse on a strap, but her black pumps were scuffed and dusty.
"Tee Beau say maybe he can find out where that man's at," she said.
"You talked to him?"
She looked at her hands in her lap.
"You got to promise somet'ing, Mr. Dave," she said. "Tee Beau say you a good man. Tante Lemon say your daddy good to her, too. It ain't right if you try to trick Tee Beau, no."
"What do you mean?"
"You tole me Tee Beau can call you collect. From a pay phone. But you can find out where he's at that way, cain't you?"
"You mean trace the call?"
"That's right. I seen them do that on TV. You gonna do that to Tee Beau, suh?" she said, and looked down at her lap again.
"If he'll call me, I'll promise not to do that, Dorothea. Look, I can't tell Tee Beau what to do, but isn't it better that he talk to somebody like me, who knows something about his case, who owes him a debt, than let some other cops hunt him down as an escaped killer?"
"Tee Beau say that man mean all the way through. He tell Tee Beau anybody stop them and Tee Beau open his mouth, he shoot everybody there and he shoot Tee Beau first."
"Where does he think Boggs is?"
"He say he keep talking about the Italians, how they owe him a lot of money, how they gonna take care of him, how if Tee Beau smart he stay in New Orleans and sell dope. All the time Tee Beau sitting in back, scared that man gonna find out he ain't killed you in the coulee."
"Tell him to call me at home. I'll write down my number."
"He gonna find out where that man at first."
"No, he shouldn't do that."
"That little boy got courage," Tante Lemon said. "People ain't never see that in him. All they see is a little throwaway baby in a shoe box, him. Like when he took Mr. Dore car. He ain't stole it. Our track was broke and I didn't have no way to go to the Charity in New Orleans. Me going blind, couldn't see to light my stove in the morning. He come flying round the corner in Mr. Dore car, couldn't even drive, smash right over the church mailbox. Po-licemens come out and put handcuffs on him, shove him in their car with their stick like he's a raccoon. Ain't nobody ever ax why he done it."
"You tell him I said to stay away from Boggs. That's not his job."
"That ain't what you said before," Tante Lemon said.
"I didn't tell him to go looking for Boggs."
"No suh, you say Tee Beau he'p you find that man, you he'p Tee Beau," Dorothea said. "That's what you tell me at the juke, out there in your car, out there in the rain. When I tell that to Tee Beau I say I don't knows what to think. He say Mr. Dave a white man, but he don't never lie."
Then both of them looked at me silently in the half-light of my living room. Tante Lemon's frosted turquoise eyes were fixed on me with the lidless glare of a bird's.
A therapist once told me that everyone has a dream box in his head. He said that sometimes an event provides us with a rusty key to it that we can well do without. Jimmie Lee Boggs had turned all the tumblers in the lock, and I discovered that, like a perverse nocturnal demiurge, he had taken my ten months in Vietnam from me, reactivated every fearful moment I had lived through, and written himself into the script as a player.
The sun is hot in the sky but I cannot see it through the thick canopy of trees overhead. The light is diffused a yellow-green through the sweating vegetation, as though I am looking at it through water. The trunks of the banyan trees are striped with moisture; the blades of elephant grass, which can leave your skin covered with paper-thin cuts, are beaded with wet pinpoints of light. I lie flat on my chest in the grass, and the air is so humid and superheated I cannot keep the sweat out of my eyes-my forearm only rubs more sweat and dirt into them. I can feel ants crawling inside my shirt and belt, and ahead of me, where the elephant grass slopes down to a coulee, a gray cloud of mosquitoes hovers over a dead log, and a red centipede, as thick as a pencil and six inches long, is wending his way across the humus.
I can smell the sour odor of mud, stagnant water in the coulee, the foul reek of fear from my own armpits. An eighteen-year-old kid nicknamed Doo-Doo, from West Memphis, Arkansas, lies next to me, his bare chest strung with bandoliers, a green sweat-soaked towel draped from under the back of his pot.
His ankle is broken, and he keeps looking back at it and the boot that he has worked halfway off his foot. His sock looks like rotted cheesecloth. The whites of his eyes are filled with ruptured blood veins.
"They got Martinez 's blooker. Don't go out there, Lieutenant. They waiting for you in the tree line," he says.
"They'll hang him up in a tree."
"He at the bottom of the ditch. You cain't get him out. They waiting for you, Lieutenant. I seen them."
The rivulets of sweat leaking out of his pot and running down his face and shoulders look like lines of clear plastic against his black skin.
I crawl on my stomach through the grass with the barrel of the.45 lifted just above the mud. The underside of my body is slick with green-black ooze; my elbows, knees, and boots make sucking sounds with each movement forward. My face is alive with cuts and mosquitoes. Behind me I hear Doo-Doo easing a clip into his rifle.