“She’s back in New Orleans?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“So where is she?”
“Can I order you an ice cream soda or a malt?”
“Did you take her to your uncle’s house?” I said.
“Ask Uncle Mark.”
“I don’t get along with him. So I’m asking you.”
Three teenage girls came in, the bell ringing above their heads. They began giggling as soon as they saw Johnny. He folded his hands tightly and put them between his legs. “There’s lots of secrets in my family, Mr. Dave. Maybe our ways are strange to others, but that’s the way it is.”
“Whoever taught you that is an idiot, Johnny. Where’s Isolde?”
“I’m staying at the house alone. My uncle Mark is gone. That’s all I can tell you.” Half his face remained in shadow.
“You’ll have to do better than that. Look at me.”
“No.”
“Who hit you?”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Your uncle struck your face? For what? You sassed him?”
“A little more serious than that.”
“It doesn’t matter. No adult of conscience would strike a young person in the face.”
“A guy gave me some purple acid. I’d never done it before. I took some and gave the rest to Isolde.”
“You gave her LSD?”
His face reddened, causing the welt on his cheek to stand out like a piece of white bone. “I didn’t think.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Mr. Dave.”
“You want me to ask your uncle?”
“I ran away with her. I wanted her for myself. She wanted me, too. It was like that for five days, in a motel on the beach in Biloxi. But not because of the acid. It was like she was my sister and my girlfriend and my lover and my wife and the person I never wanted to let go of.”
“It’s called falling in love.”
“It was wrong. I owe my uncle.”
“Get this in your head,” I said. “You and Isolde aren’t the problem. The problem is your uncle and the fact that nobody has shoved a gun in his mouth and put his brains on the wall.”
The three teenage girls were in a corner booth. One of them caught my tone or saw my face and looked away, the blood draining from around her mouth.
“Uncle Mark agreed to be her guardian and godfather,” Johnny said. “It’s a tradition that goes way back in our families.”
“White slavery isn’t a tradition,” I said. “You heard about the two guys who got stuffed in a barrel piece by piece?”
“Down by Vermilion Bay?”
“They worked for your uncle.”
“A lot of people do.”
“Wake up,” I said.
“I’m leaving my uncle’s house. I’m leaving Louisiana.”
“Where you headed?”
“Florida.”
“Fort Lauderdale?”
“How’d you know?”
“That’s where Eddy Firpo has his studio. He’s a bucket of shit, Johnny. He’ll ruin your career, then your life.”
“I don’t care about my career anymore. I lost Isolde. I’ll never get her back. I want to do something awful.”
He was nineteen. I remembered the degree of judgment I had at that age and shuddered.
It was time to up the ante. Marcel LaForchette, the button man I visited in Huntsville, had been getting a free pass, largely because he was one of those undefined and marginal creatures who lived in the murk at the bottom of the aquarium, then one day you discovered he’d eaten everything in the tank.
Marcel hung in places that weren’t good for me. I wasn’t simply an alcoholic; I was a drunkard. What’s the difference? An alcoholic has a deep-seated, armor-plated neurosis buried in the unconscious that keeps him constantly at war with himself. The drunkard cuts to the chase. A chemical form of sackcloth and ashes becomes his coat of arms. He drinks until he passes out, gets up and pours down another fifth, chases it with a case of Tuborg or a half-gallon of dago red and repeats the process until he enters what is called alcoholic psychosis and slides the muzzle of a double-barrel twelve-gauge over his teeth, the way Ernest Hemingway did it, and lets his family clean up the room.
My wife Annie was murdered and my wife Bootsie died of lupus, and my daughter, Alafair, was a student on an academic scholarship at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. I didn’t handle solitude or mortality well. I don’t guess anyone does. Here’s the strange thing about death. At a certain age it’s always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn’t get your real attention until you find yourself alone at home and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about. That’s why most drunks become believers, no matter how long they’ve been atheists or agnostics, and often preface the Lord’s Prayer with the rhetorical question “Who made the stars and keeps us out of bars?”
But on that particular night I went to a low-rent pickup dive on the edge of the black district nine miles up the bayou in St. Martinville. The walls were bright red, the pool table unbalanced, the felt faded and patched with tape, the race of the customers hardly definable, most of the women unhinged and often dangerous. Marcel was by himself at a table in back, playing solitaire, a Coca-Cola bottle by his elbow. The restrooms were ten feet away, hung with red-bead curtains, the light golden behind them, the ammonia smell of urinated beer blowing in the breeze from the electric fans.
He had obviously seen me when I came in, but he kept his gaze on his cards. When my shadow broke across his face, he said, “Doing research on the other half?”
“Just you,” I said, sitting down without being asked. “Your PO doesn’t mind you coming here?”
“Long as I drink Coca-Cola.”
The bottle was half empty. The liquid at the top was diluted, brownish. “I got a beef with you, podna.”
His pupils were as small as match heads. “What’d I ever do to you, Dave?”
“Waltz me around, jerk my chain, try to fuck me over?”
He looked at the bar. Several women, their arms heavy with fat, were drinking there, standing up, talking to each other. “You use that kind of language because of the environment you’re in? Like it’s something to wipe yourself with?”
“I agreed to help you with your parole transfer. But you cut a deal with Mark Shondell.”
“He gave me an apartment over his carriage house. He gave me a good salary. You were gonna do that?”
“Stop lying. You gave him information about the Balangie family.”
“What, that the Balangies are gangsters?”
“You said you were the driver on a whack that would interest some people in New Iberia.”
“Yeah, I guess I was a little too forthcoming on that.”
“Who was the whack?”
“Long time ago, Dave.”
“You said he was a child molester.”
“ ‘Pitiful’ is a better word.”
“About fifteen years ago a member of the Shondell family disappeared,” I said. “He was a sidewalk painter in Jackson Square.”
“Here’s what I remember. The guy was a serial offender. He was on the floor of the backseat. He was crying and begging and shit.” He glanced at the bar. “Pardon my language, ladies.”
I leaned forward. “Cut the act. Who was the hit?”
“It came down from Pietro Balangie, the old man. He didn’t allow jackrollers in the Quarter, he didn’t allow child molesters anywhere.”
“You’re testing my patience, Marcel.”
“That’s your problem,” he replied. “I thought they were gonna knock him around and run him out of town. That’s not what happened. After we got back from the lake, I shot up in my apartment. China white with a half teaspoon of Jack. I couldn’t get the screams out of my head.”