"That's because I woke up just before some guy with a tire iron or a jack handle came down on my head. He was going to bust me right across the lamps, but I twisted away from him just before he swung. The next thing I knew I was in the water. You ever wake up drowning and on fire at the same time? That's what it was like. There was a gas tank for the outboards under the cabin, and it must have blown and dumped the whole thing in the bayou. Burning boards was hanging off the stilts, the water was full of hot ash, steam hissing all over the fucking place. I thought I'd gone to hell, man."
He stopped talking and his lips made a tight line. I saw water well up in his green eyes.
"Then I seen something awful. It was the girl, you remember, that redheaded waitress from the cafe in West Baton Rouge. She was on fire, like a big candle burning all over, hung in all them boards and burning against the sky.
"I can't clean it out of my head, not even when they hit me with the joy juice. Maybe they hit her in the head like they done me. Maybe she was already dead. God, I hope so. I can't stand thinking about it, man. She didn't do nothing to anybody."
I wiped my palms on my slacks and blew out my breath. I wanted to walk back out into the sunshine, into the windy morning, into the oak trees that were hung with moss.
"Who was the guy with the tire iron?" I said.
"One of those fuckers I work with."
"You saw his face?"
"I didn't have to. They knew I was going to drop the dime on them. For all the damn good it would do."
"You told them that?"
"Sure. I got fed up with both of them. No, wait a minute. I got fed up being afraid. I was a little swacked when I stuck it in their face, but I done it just the same. Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes. One's a coon ass and the other's a stump-jumper from East Texas."
"I'm having one problem with all this. There's some people who think you're mixed up in dope. Up in Montana."
His green eyes closed and opened like a bird's.
"They're wrong," he said.
"-that maybe you're mixed up with a trafficker named Dio."
His mouth smiled slightly.
"You been talking to the DEA," he said.
"But they're sniffing up the wrong guy's leg."
"You didn't lease land for him in Montana?"
"I leased and bought a bunch of land for him. But it don't have anything to do with dope. Sally Dee was my cell partner. Some guys were going to cut me up in the shower. Till Sally Dee told them they treat me just like they treat him. Which means they light my cigarettes, they pick in my sack when we get in thin cotton. The cat's half crazy, man, but he saved my butt."
"What was the land deal about, Dixie?"
"I didn't ask. He's not the kind of guy you ask those things to. He's got a lot of holdings. He hires people to act as his agents. He likes me for some reason. He paid me a lot of bread. What's the big deal?"
"As an old friend, Dixie, I'm going to ask you to save the Little Orphan Annie routine for the DEA."
"You believe what you want."
"What's your bond?"
"Fifteen thou."
"That's not too bad."
"They know I ain't going anywhere. Except maybe to Angola. Dave, I ain't giving you a shuck. I can't take another fall, and I don't see no way out of it."
I looked out the window at the treetops, the way their leaves ruffled in the breeze, the whiteness of the clouds against the dome of blue sky.
"I'll come back and visit you later," I said.
"I think maybe you have too much faith in one guy."
"I'll tell you a story I heard Minnie Pearl tell about Hank. This was right after he brought the whole auditorium down singing 'I Saw the Light' at the Opry. Backstage he turned to her and said, "But, Minnie, they ain't no light. They just ain't no light." That's when your soul is hanging on a spider's web right over the fire, son. That's right where I'm at now."
That afternoon I stood on the levee and looked down at the collapsed and blackened remains of the fish camp that, according to Dixie Lee, had belonged to Star Drilling Company. Mattress springs, charred boards, a metal table, a scorched toilet seat, half the shingle roof lay in the shallows at the bottom of the stilt supports. A paste of gray ash floated among the cattails and lily pads.
I walked down to the water's edge. I found what was left of a Coleman stove and a pump twelve-gauge shotgun whose shells had exploded in the magazine. The gasoline drum that had been used to fuel outboard engines was ripped outward and twisted like a beer can.
The fire had made a large black circle from the water to halfway up the levee. Extending out from the circle were trails of ash through the buttercups and new grass like the legs of a spider. One of them led up to the road at the top of the levee.
I dug the soil loose from around the trail with my pocketknife and smelled it. It smelled like burnt grass and dirt.
I knew little about arson investigation, but I saw nothing on the levee that would help Dixie Lee's case.
I drove to St. Martinville and parked across from the old church where Evangeline and her lover are buried under an enormous spreading oak. The wind blew the moss in the trees along Bayou Teche, and the four-o'clocks were opening in the shade along the banks. I was told by the dispatcher in the sheriff's department that the sheriff was out for a few minutes but that a detective would talk to me.
The detective was penciling in a form of some kind and smoking a cigarette when I walked into his office. He affected politeness but his eyes kept going to the clock on the wall while I talked. A side door opened onto the sheriff's office, and I could see his desk and empty chair inside. I told the detective the story that Dixie had told me. I told him about the lea semen Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes.
"We know all about that," he said.
"That's why the sheriff been talking to them. But I tell you right now, podna, he don't believe that fella."
"What do you mean he's been talking with them?"
He smiled at me.
"They in his office right now. He went down to the bat' room he said. Then he got up and closed the door to the sheriff's office.
I looked at him, stunned.
"They're sitting in there now?" My voice was incredulous.
"He called them up and ax them to come in and make a statement."
I stood up, took a piece of paper off his desk, and wrote my name and telephone number on it.
"Ask the sheriff to call me," I said.
"What's your name again?"
"Benoit."
"Get into another line of work."
I walked back outside to my pickup truck. The shadows were purple on the bayou and the church lawn. An elderly Negro was taking down the flag from the pole in front of the courthouse and a white man was closing and locking the side doors. Then two men came out the front entrance and walked hurriedly across the grass toward me, one slightly ahead of the other.
The first was a tall, angular man, dressed in brown slacks, shined loafers, a yellow sport shirt with a purple fleur-delis on the pocket, a thin western belt with a silver buckle and tongue. I could hear the change in his pocket when he walked. On his bottom lip was a triangular scar that looked like wet plastic.
The man behind him was shorter, dark, thick across the middle, the kind of man who wore his slacks below the navel to affect size and strength and disguise his advancing years. His eyebrows dipped down and met over his nose. Even though it was warm, he wore a long-sleeved white shirt, the pocket filled with a notebook and clip-on ballpoint pens.
Both men had the agitated look of people who might have seen their bus pass them by at their stop.
"Just a minute there, buddy," the tall man said.
I turned and looked at him with my hand on the open truck door.
"You were using our names in there. Where the hell do you get off making those remarks?" he said. His eyes narrowed and he ran his tongue over the triangular scar on his lip.
"I was just passing on some information. It didn't originate with me, partner."