CHAPTER 5
Once out of jail I felt like the soldier who returns to the war and discovers that the battlefield is empty, that everyone else has tired of the war except him and has gone home.
Dixie Lee had left a note at the house the day before:
Dave, What I done to you grieves me. That's the honest to God truth, son. I got no excuse except everything I touch turns to shit. I'm leaving a box of milky ways for the little girl that lives with you. Big deal. Me and Clete and his lady friend are headed for the big sky today. Maybe later I might get a gig at one of Sals casinos. Like my daddy used to say, it don't matter if we're colored or not, we all got to pick the white mans cotton. You might as well pick it in the shade next to the water barrel. Dave, don't do time.
Dixie Lee And what about Harry Mapes, the man whose testimony could send me to Angola? (I could still smell his odor from the motel room a mixture of rut, perfume from the whores, chlorine, bourbon and tobacco and breath mints.) I called Star Drilling Company in Lafayette.
"Mr. Mapes is in Montana," the receptionist said.
"Where in Montana?"
"Who is this, please?"
"An acquaintance who would like to talk with him."
"You'll have to speak to Mr. Hollister. Just a moment, please."
Before I could stop her he was on the line.
"I need to know where Mapes is. Deposition time and all that," I said.
"What?"
"You heard me."
There was a pause.
"Is this Robicheaux?" he asked.
"If we don't get it from you, we'll get it from the prosecutor's office."
"The only thing I'll tell you is that I think you're a sick and dangerous man. I don't know how they let you out of jail, but you stay away from my people."
"You have Academy Award potential, Hollister," I said. But he hung up.
I worked in the bait shop, shoed Alafair's horse, weeded the vegetable garden, cleaned the leaves out of the rain gutters and the coulee, tore down the old windmill and hauled it to the scrap yard I tried to concentrate on getting through the day in an orderly fashion and not think about the sick feeling that hung like a vapor around my heart. But my trial was six weeks away and the clock was ticking.
Then one bright morning I was stacking cartons of red wigglers on a shelf in the bait shop and one spilled out of my hand and burst open on the countertop. The worms were thin and bright red in the dark mixture of loam and coffee grounds, and I was picking them up individually with my fingertips and dropping them back in the carton when I felt that sickness around my heart again and heard the words in my head: They're going to do it. In five and a half weeks.
I had no defense except my own word, that of an alcoholic ex-cop with a history of violence who was currently undergoing psychotherapy. My trial wouldn't last more than three days, then I would be locked on a wrist chain in the back of a prison van and on my way to Angola.
"What's wrong your face, Dave?" Batist said.
I swallowed and looked at my palms. They were bright with a thin sheen of sweat.
I went up to the house, packed two suitcases, took my.45 automatic out of the dresser drawer, folded a towel around it, snapped it inside a suitcase pouch with two loaded clips and a box of hollow-points, and called the bondsman in Lafayette. I had known him for twenty-five years. His name was Butter Bean Verret; he wasn't much taller than a fire hydrant, wore tropical suits, neckties with palm trees painted on them, rings all over his fingers, and ate butter beans and ham hocks with a spoon in the same cafe every day of his life.
"What's happening, Butter Bean? I need to get off the leash," I said.
"Where you going?"
" Montana."
"What they got up there we ain't got here?"
"How about it, partner?"
He was quiet a moment.
"You're not going to let me get lonely down here, are you? You're gonna call me, right? Every four, five days you gone, maybe."
"You got it."
"Dave?"
"What?"
"You done got yourself in a mess here in Lou'sana. Don't make no mo' mess up there, no."
I told Batist that I was leaving him and Clarise in charge of the dock, my house and animals, that I would call him every few days.
"What you gonna do Alafair?" he said.
"My cousin will keep her in New Iberia."
He made a pretense of wiping off the counter with a rag. His blue cotton work shirt was unbuttoned, and his stomach muscles ridged above his belt buckle. He put a gumdrop in the side of his mouth and looked out the window at the bayou as though I were not there.
"All right, what's wrong?" I said.
"You got to ask me that?"
"I have to do it, Batist. They're going to send me to prison. I'm looking at ten and a half years. That's with good time."
"That don't make it right."
"What am I supposed to do?"
"Her whole life people been leaving her, Dave. Her mama, Miz Annie, you in the jail. She don't need no mo' of it, no."
I filled up the truck at the dock and waited on the gallery for the school bus. At four o'clock it stopped in the leafy shade by the mailbox, and Alafair walked through the pecan trees toward me, her tin lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her tan skin was dark in the shadows. As always, she could read a disturbed thought in my face no matter how well I concealed it.
I explained to her that I had to leave, that it wouldn't be for long, that sometimes we simply had to do things that we didn't like.
"Cousin Tutta is always nice to you, isn't she?" I said.
"Yes."
"She takes you to the show and out to the park, just like I do, doesn't she?"
"Yes."
"Batist will come get you to ride Tex, too. That'll be all right, won't it?"
This time she didn't answer. Instead she sat quietly beside me on the step and looked woodenly at the rabbit hutches and Tripod eating out of his bowl under the pecan tree. Then pale spots formed in her cheeks, and the skin around her bottom lip and chin began to pucker. I put my arm around her shoulders and looked away from her face.
"Little guy, we just have to be brave about some things," I said.
"I've got some big problems to take care of. That's just the way it is."
Then I felt incredibly presumptuous, vain, and stupid in talking to her about bravery and acceptance. She had experienced a degree of loss and violence in her short life that most people can only appreciate in their nightmares.
I stared across the road at a blue heron rising from the bayou into the sunlight.
"Have you ever seen snow?" I said.
"No."
"I bet there's still snow on the ground in Montana. In the ponderosa and the spruce, high up on the mountain. I went out there once with a friend from the army. I think you and I had better go check that out, little guy."
"See snow?"
"You better believe it."
Her teeth were white and her eyes were squinted almost shut with her smile.
By that evening we were high balling through the red-clay piney woods of East Texas, the warm wind blowing through the open truck windows, the engine humming under the hood, the inside of the cab aglow with the purple twilight.
We rode into the black, rain-swept night until the sky began to clear out in the Panhandle and the moon broke through the clouds in a spoked wheel of silver over the high plains. The next day, outside of Raton, New Mexico, I bought a bucket of fried chicken and we ate in a grove of cottonwoods by a stream and slept four hours on a blanket in the grass. Then we climbed out of the mesa country into Trinidad, Colorado, and the tumbling blue-green roll of the Rocky Mountains, through Pueblo, Denver, and finally southern Wyoming, where the evening air turned cold and smelled of sage, and the arroyo-cut land and buttes were etched with fire in the sunset. That night we stayed in a motel run by Indians; in the morning it rained and you could smell bacon curing in a smokehouse.