"I may be over to see you in Great Falls."
"Why?"
"Because I think Dio is mixed up in this. Harry Mapes has been around his place, and I don't think it's simply because he knows Dixie Lee."
"Dio is mixed up with narcotics, whores, and gambling. Let me set you straight about this guy. He's not Bugsy Siegel. Comparatively speaking, he's a small-time player in Vegas and Tahoe. Anything he owns, he's allowed to own. But he's an ambitious guy who wants to be a swinging dick. So he's come up here to Lum 'n' Abner land to make the big score. Now, that's all you get, Robicheaux. Stay away from him. You won't help your case, and in the meantime you might get hurt. If I hear anything about missing Indians, I'll let you know."
"Is it possible you feel you have the franchise on Sally Dio?"
"That could be, my friend. I grew up in West Virginia. I don't like what shitheads can do to good country. But I'm also a federal agent. I get paid for doing certain things, which doesn't include acting as an information center. I think I'm already overextended in this conversation. So long, Mr. Robicheaux."
That evening I walked Alafair downtown in the twilight, and we ate fried chicken in a restaurant by the river. Then we walked over the Higgins Street Bridge, where old men fished off the railing in the dark swirls of current far below. The mountains in the west were purple and softly outlined against the red sun, and the wind was cold blowing across the bridge. I could smell chimney smoke and wood pulp in the air, diesel and oil from a passing Burlington Northern. We walked all the way to the park, where a group of boys was trying to hurry summer with a night baseball game. But in the hard glare of the lights the wind grew colder and the dust swirled in the air and finally drops of rain clicked across the tin roof of the dugout. The sky over the valley was absolutely black when we made it home.
Firewood was stacked on the back porch of our house, and I broke up kindling from an orange crate in the fireplace, placed it and balls of newspaper under three pine logs on the andirons, and watched the bright red cone of flame rise up into the brick chimney. It was raining hard outside now, clattering against the roof and windows, and I could see a sawmill lighted across the river in the rain.
During the night lightning flickered whitely on the far wall of my bedroom. It created a window in the soft green plaster, and through it I saw Annie sitting on a rock by a stream's edge. Cylindrical stone formations rose against the cobalt sky behind her. Her hair and denim shirt were wet, and I could see her breasts through the cloth.
I'm worried, Dave, she said.
Why's that?
You haven't been going to AA meetings. You think maybe you're setting yourself up for a slip?
I haven't had time.
She pulled her wet shirtfront loose from her skin with her fingers.
Will you promise me to look in the yellow pages today and find a meeting? she said.
I promise.
Because I think you're flying on the outer edges now. Maybe looking at something worse than a slip.
I wouldn't do that.
What?
I'm Catholic.
I'm talking about something else, baby love. You blow out your doors and they put you in a place like Mandeville.
I've still got it between the ditches. I'm sober.
But you keep calling on me. I'm tired, sweetheart. I have to come a long way so we can talk.
I'm sorry.
She put a finger to her lips.
I'll come again. For a while. But you have to keep your promise.
Annie.
When I woke I was sleepwalking, and my palms were pressed against the cold green plaster of the bedroom wall.
CHAPTER 6
It was still raining and cold in the morning. The logs in the fireplace had crumbled into dead ash, and the sky outside was gray. The trees in the yard looked wet and black in the weak light. I turned on the furnace, put fresh logs in the fireplace, lit the kindling and balls of wadded newspaper, and tried to fix French toast for me and Alafair while she dressed for school. I thought I could hear the drone of mosquitoes in my brain. I had on a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and I kept wiping the perspiration out of my eyes on my forearm.
"Why you shaking, Dave?" Alafair said.
"I have malaria. It comes back sometimes. It's not bad, though."
"What?"
"I got it in the army. In the Philippines. It comes from mosquito bites. It goes away soon."
"You ain't suppose to be up when you sick. I can fix my own breakfast. I can cook yours, too."
"Don't say 'ain't."
" She took the spatula and the handle of the frying pan out of my hands and began turning the toast. She wore fresh denims with an elastic waistband, and a purple sweater over her white shirt. Her black hair was shiny under the kitchen light.
I felt weak all over. I sat down at the kitchen table and wiped my face with a dry dish towel. I had to swallow before I could speak.
"Can you put on your raincoat and walk yourself to school this morning?" I said.
"Sure."
"Then if I don't pick you up this afternoon, you go to the babysitter's. Okay?"
"Okay."
I watched her pack her lunch box and put on her yellow raincoat and hood.
"Wait a minute. I'll drive you," I said.
"I can take myself. You sick, you."
"Alafair, try not to talk like Batist. He's a good man, but he never went to school."
"You still sick, Dave."
I rubbed the top of her head and hugged her briefly around the shoulders, then put on my raincoat and hat. The wind outside was cold and smelled of the pulp mill down the river. In the wet air the smell was almost like sewage. I drove Alafair to the school and let her off by the entrance to the playground. When I got back home I was trembling all over, and the heat from the fireplace and the furnace vents wouldn't penetrate my skin. Instead, the house seemed filled with a dry cold that made static electricity jump off my hand when I touched a metal doorknob. I boiled a big pot of water on the kitchen stove to humidify the air, then sat in front of the fireplace with a blanket around my shoulders, my teeth clicking, and watched the resin boil and snap in the pine logs and the flames twist up the chimney.
As the logs softened and sank on the andirons, I felt as though I had been sent to a dark and airless space on the earth where memory became selective and flayed the skin an inch at a time. I can't tell you why. I could never explain these moments, and neither could a psychologist. It happened first when I was ten years old, after my father had been locked up a second time in the parish jail for fighting in Provost's Pool Room. I was at home by myself, looking at a religious book that contained a plate depicting the souls in hell. Suddenly I felt myself drawn into the illustration, caught forever in their lake of remorse and despair. I was filled with terror and guilt, and no amount of assurance from the parish priest would relieve me of it.
When these moments occurred in my adult life, I drank. I did it full tilt, too, the way you stand back from a smoldering fire of wet leaves and fling a glass full of gasoline onto the flames. I did it with Beam and Jack Daniel's straight up, with a frosted Jax on the side; vodka in the morning to sweep the spiders into their nest; four inches of Wild Turkey at noon to lock Frankenstein in his closet until the afternoon world of sunlight on oak and palm trees and the salt wind blowing across Lake Pontchartrain reestablished itself in a predictable fashion.
But this morning was worse than any of those other moments that I could remember. Maybe it was malaria, or maybe my childlike psychological metabolism still screamed for a drink and was writing a script that would make the old alternatives viable once again. But in truth I think it was something else. Perhaps, as Annie had said, I had found the edge.
The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are and what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.