As I got into my truck three of Johnny Carp’s hoods were standing by the back of his Lincoln. They wore slacks with knife creases, tasseled loafers, short-sleeve tropical shirts, gold chains on their necks, and lightly oiled boxed haircuts. But steroids had become fashionable with the mob, too, and their torsos and arms were thick with muscle like gnarled oak about to split the skin.
They were taking turns firing a .22 revolver at tin cans and the birds feeding along the dirt road that led between the trash heaps. They glanced at me briefly, then continued shooting.
“I’d like to drive out of here without getting shot,” I said.
There was no response. One man broke open the revolver, shucked out the hulls, and began reloading. He looked at me meaningfully.
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said.
I drove down the road, tapping my horn as cattle egrets on each side of me lifted into the air. In my rearview mirror I saw Johnny Carp walk out of his office and join his men, all of them looking at me now, I was sure, with the quiet and patient energies of creatures whose thoughts you never truly wish to know.
Friday night I went to the parish library and began to read about Jean Lafitte. Most of the material repeated in one form or another the traditional stories about the pirate who joined forces with Andrew Jackson to defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans, the ships he robbed on the high seas, the gangs of cutthroats he lived with in Barataria and Galveston, his death somewhere in the Yucatan.
He had been considered a romantic and intriguing figure by New Orleans society, probably because none of them had been his victims. But also in the library was an article written by a local historian at the turn of the century that did not treat Lafitte as kindly. His crimes did not stop with piracy and murder. He had been a blackbirder and was transporting African slaves into the country after the prohibition of 1809. He sold his stolen goods as well as human cargo on the banks of the Teche.
Milton and Shakespeare both said lucidity and power lay in the world of dreams. For me, that has always meant that sleep and the unconscious can define what daylight and rationality cannot. That night, as a wind smelling of salt and wet sand and humus blew across the swamp, I dreamed of what Bayou Teche must have been like when the country was new, when the most severe tool or weapon was shaped from a stone, the forest floor covered with palmettos, the moss-hung canopy so thick and tall that in the suffused sunlight the trunks looked like towering gray columns in a Gothic cathedral.
In the dream the air was breathless, like steam caught under a glass bell, an autumnal yellow moon dissected with a single strip of black cloud overhead, and then I saw a long wood ship with furled masts being pulled up the bayou on ropes by Negroes who stumbled along the banks through the reeds and mud, their bodies rippling with sweat in the firelight. On the deck of the ship were their women and children, their cloth bundles gathered among them, their eyes peering ahead into the bayou’s darkness, as though an explanation for their fear and misery were somehow at hand.
The auction was held under the oaks at the foot of the old Voorhies property. The Negroes did not speak English, French, or Spanish, so indigenous histories were created for them. The other property did not offer as great a problem. The gold and silver plate, the trunks filled with European fashions, the bejeweled necklaces and swords and scrolled flintlocks, all had belonged to people whose final histories were written in water somewhere in the Caribbean.
In a generation or two the banks of Spanish Lake and Bayou Teche would be lined with plantations, and people would eat off gold plate whose origins were only an interesting curiosity. The slaves who worked the sawmills, cane fields, and the salt domes out in the wetlands would speak the language and use the names of their owners, and the day when a large sailing ship appeared innocuously on a river in western Africa, amidst a green world of birds and hummocks, would become the stuff of oral legend, confused with biblical history and allegory, and finally forgotten.
I believed the dream. I remembered the oak trees at the foot of the Voorhies property, when lengths of mooring chain, driven with huge spikes into the trunks, grew in and out of the bark like calcified rust-sheathed serpents. Over the years, the chains had been drawn deeper into the heart of the tree, like orange-encrusted iron cysts in the midst of living tissue or perhaps unacknowledged and unforgiven sins.
At breakfast Saturday morning Bootsie said, “Oh, I forgot, Dave, Julia Bertrand called last night. She invited us out to their camp at Pecan Island next Saturday.”
The kitchen window was open, and the sky was full of white clouds.
“What’d you tell her?” I said. “I thought it was a nice idea. We don’t see them often.”
“You told her we’d come?”
“No, I didn’t. I said I’d check to see if you had anything planned.”
“How about we let this one slide?”
“They’re nice people, Dave.”
“There’s something off-center out at Moleen’s plantation.”
“All right, I’ll call her back.” She tried to keep the disappointment out of her face. “Maybe it’s just me, Bootsie. I never got along well in that world.”
“That world?”
“They think they’re not accountable. Moleen always gives me the impression he lives in rarefied air.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Call Julia up and tell her we’ll be out there.”
“Dave” she said, the exasperation climbing in her voice.
“Believe me, it’s part of a game. So we’ll check it out.”
“I think this is a good morning to work in the garden,” she said.
It rained hard that night, and when I fell asleep I thought I heard a motorboat pass by the dock. After the rain stopped, the air was damp and close and a layer of mist floated on the bayou as thick as cotton. Just after midnight the phone rang. I closed the bedroom door behind me and answered it in the living room. The house was dark and cool and water was dripping off the tin roof of the gallery.
“Mr. Robicheaux?” a man’s voice said.
“Yeah. Who is this?”
“Jack.”
“Jack?”
“You found a dog tag. We tried to get your friend out. You want to hear about it?” There was no accent, no emotional tone in the voice.
“What do you want, partner?”
“To explain some things you probably don’t understand.”
“Come to the office Monday. Don’t call my house again, either.”
“Look out your front window.”
I pulled aside the curtain and stared out into the darkness. I could see nothing except the mist floating on the bayou and a smudged red glow from a gas flare on an oil rig out in the swamp. Then, out on the dock, a tall, angular man in raincoat and hat flicked on a flashlight and shined it upward into his face. He held a cellular phone to his ear and the skin of his face was white and deeply lined, like papier-mâché that has started to crack. Then the light clicked off again. I picked the phone back up.
“You’re trespassing on my property. I want you off of it,” I said.
“Walk down to the dock.”
Don’t fall into it, I thought.
“Put the light back on your face and keep your hands away from your sides,” I said.
“That’s acceptable.”
“I’m going to hang up now. Then I’ll be down in about two minutes.”
“No. You don’t break the connection.”
I let the receiver clatter on the table and went back into the bedroom. I slipped on my khakis and loafers, and removed my holstered .45 automatic from the dresser drawer. Bootsie was sleeping with the pillow partially over her head. I closed the door quietly behind me, pulled back the slide on the .45 and chambered a round, eased the hammer back down, set the safety, then stuck the barrel inside the back of my belt.