"I don't give a goddamn where it came from. I won't put up with it. Particularly from some guy I never saw before," he said.
"Then don't listen to it."
"It's called libel."
"It's called filing a police report," I said.
"Who the fuck are you?" the other man said.
"My name's Dave Robicheaux."
"You're an ex-cop or some kind of local bird dog?" he said.
"I'm going to ask you guys to disengage," I said.
"You're asking us! You're unbelievable, man," the tall man said.
I started to get in my truck. He put his hand around the window jamb and held it.
"You're not running out of this," he said. The accent was East Texas, all right, piney woods, red hills, and sawmills.
"Pugh's a pathetic man. He melted his brains a long time ago. The company gave him a break when nobody else would. Obviously it didn't work out. He gets souped up with whiskey and dope and has delusions." He took his hand from the window jamb and pointed his finger an inch from my chest.
"Now, if you want to spend your time talking to somebody like that, that's your damn business. But if you spread rumors about me and I hear about it, I'm going to look you up."
I got in my truck and closed the door. I breathed through my nose, looked out at the shadows on the church, the stone statue of Evangeline under the spreading oak. Then I clicked my key ring on the steering wheel. The faces of the two men were framed through my truck window.
Then I yielded to the temptations of anger and pride, two serpentine heads of the Hydra of character defects that made up my alcoholism.
"It was the Coleman fuel for the stove, wasn't it?" I said.
"You spread it around the inside of the cabin, then strung it down the steps and up the levee. As an added feature maybe you opened the drain on the gas drum, too. You didn't expect the explosion to blow Dixie Lee out into the water, though, did you?"
It was a guess, but the mouth of the short man parted in disbelief. I started the engine, turned out into the traffic, and drove past the old storefronts and wood colonnades toward the edge of town and the back road to New Iberia.
In my dreams is a watery place where my wife and some of my friends live. I think it's below the Mekong River or perhaps deep under the Gulf. The people who live there undulate in the tidal currents and are covered with a green-gold light. I can't visit them there, but sometimes they call me up. In my mind's eye I can see them clearly. The men from my platoon still wear their pots and their rent and salt-caked fatigues. Smoke rises in bubbles from their wounds.
Annie hasn't changed much. Her eyes are electric blue, her hair gold and curly. Her shoulders are still covered with sun freckles. She wears red flowers on the front of her nightgown where they shot her with deer slugs. On the top of her left breast is a strawberry birthmark that always turned crimson with blood when we made love.
How you doing, baby lovel she asks.
Hello, sweetheart.
Your father's here.
How is he?
He says to tell you not to get sucked in. What's he mean? You're not in trouble again, are you, baby love? We talked a long time about that before.
It's just the way I am, I guess.
It's still rah-rah for the penis, huh? I've got to go, Dave. There's a big line. Are you coming to see me?
Sure.
You promise?
You bet. I won't let you down, kiddo.
"You really want me to tell you what it means?" the psychologist in Lafayette said.
"Dreams are your province."
"You're an intelligent man. You tell me."
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do."
"Sometimes alcoholics go on dry drunks. Sometimes we have drunk dreams."
"It's a death wish. I'd get a lot of distance between myself and those kinds of thoughts."
I stared silently at the whorls of purple and red in his carpet.
The day after I visited the St. Martin Parish courthouse I talked with the sheriff there on the phone. I had met him several times when I was a detective with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, and I had always gotten along well with him. He said there was nothing in the coroner's report that would indicate the girl had been struck with a tire iron or a jack handle before the fish camp burned.
"So they did an autopsy?" I said.
"Dave, there wasn't hardly anything left of that poor girl to autopsy. From what Pugh says and what we found, she was right over the gas drum."
"What are you going to do with those two clowns you had in your office yesterday?"
"Nothing. What can I do?"
"Pugh says they killed some people up in Montana."
"I made some calls up there," the sheriff said.
"Nobody has anything on these guys. Not even a traffic citation. Their office in Lafayette says they're good men. Look, it's Pugh that's got the record, that's been in trouble since they ran him out of that shithole he comes from."
"I had an encounter with those two guys after I left your department yesterday. I think Pugh's telling the truth. I think they did it."
"Then you ought to get a badge again, Dave. Is it about lunch-time over there?"
"What?"
"Because that's what time it is here. Come on by and have coffee sometime. We'll see you, podna."
I drove into New Iberia to buy some chickens and sausage links from my wholesaler. It was raining when I got back home. I put " La Jolie Blonde " by Iry Lejeune on the record player, changed into my gym shorts, and pumped iron in the kitchen for a half hour. The wind was cool through the window and smelled of rain and damp earth and flowers and trees. My chest and arms were swollen with blood and exertion, and when the rain slacked off and the sun cracked through the mauve-colored sky, I ran three miles along the bayou, jumping across puddles, boxing with raindrops that dripped from the oak limbs overhead.
Back at the house I showered, changed into a fresh denim shirt and khakis, and called Dan Nygurski collect, in Great Falls, Montana. He couldn't accept the collect call, but he took the number and called me back on his line.
"You know about Dixie Lee?" I said.
"Yep."
"Do you know about the waitress who died in the fire?"
"Yes."
"Did y'all have a tail on him that night?"
"Yeah, we did but he got off it. It's too bad. Our people might have saved the girl's life."
"He lost them?"
"I don't think it was deliberate. He took the girl to a colored place in Breaux Bridge, I guess it was, a zydeco place or something like that. What is that, anyway?"
"It's Negro-Cajun music. It means 'vegetables," all mixed up."
"Anyway, our people had some trouble with a big buck who thought it was all right for Pugh to come in the club but not other white folks. In the meantime Pugh, who was thoroughly juiced, wandered out the side door with the girl and took off."
"Have you heard his story?"
"Yeah."
"Do you believe it?"
"What difference does it make? It's between him and the locals now. I'll be square with you, Robicheaux. I don't give a damn about Pugh. I want that lunatic Sally Dio in a cage. I don't care how I get him there, either. You can tell Dixie Lee for me I'll always listen when he's on the subject of Sally Dee. Otherwise, he's not in a seller's market."
"Why would he be buying and leasing land for this character Dio? Is it related to the oil business?"
"Hey, that's good, Robicheaux. The mob hooking up with the oil business." He was laughing out loud now.
"That's like Frankenstein making it with the wife of Dracula. I'm not kidding you, that's great. The guys in the office'll love this. You got any other theories?"
Then he started laughing again.
I quietly replaced the telephone receiver in the cradle, then walked down to the dock in the wet afternoon sunlight to help Batist close up the bait shop.
That evening Alafair and I drove down to Cypremort Point for boiled crabs at the pavilion. We sat at one of the checker-cloth tables on the screened porch by the bay, a big bib with a red crawfish on it tied around Alafair's neck, and looked out at the sun setting across the miles of dead cypress, saw grass, the sandy inlets, the wetlands that stretched all the way to Texas. The tide was out, and the jetties were black and stark against the flat gray expanse of the bay and the strips of purple and crimson cloud that had flattened on the western horizon. Seagulls dipped and wheeled over the water's edge, and a solitary blue heron stood among the saw grass in an inlet pool, his long body and slender legs like a painting on the air.