“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said.
“I ought to brought him a paper bag.”
“What d’ you mean?”
“To put over his head. He looks like somebody took a sharp spoon and stuck it real deep all over his face.”
“Stay in the bait shop, Batist. You understand me? Don’t go near this man.”
I hung up, without waiting for him to reply, called the department for a cruiser, took my .45 out of the dresser drawer, stuck it through the back of my belt, and hung my shirt over it. As I walked down the slope through the broken light under the pecan and oak trees, I could see a strange drama being played out among the spool tables on the dock. Fishermen who had just come in were drinking beer and eating smoked sausage and boudin under the umbrellas, their faces focused among themselves and on their conversations about big-mouth bass and goggle-eye perch, but in their midst, by himself, smoking a cigarette with the concentrated intensity of an angry man hitting on a reefer, was Patsy Dapolito, his mouth hooked downward at the corners, his face like a clay sculpture someone had mutilated with a string knife.
I remembered a scene an old-time gun bull had once pointed out to me on the yard, inside the Block, at Angola Penitentiary. Inmates stripped to the waist, their apelike torsos wrapped with tattoos, were clanking iron, throwing the shot put and ripping into heavy bags with blows that could eviscerate an elephant. In the center of the lawn was a tiny, balding, middle-aged man in steel-rimmed spectacles, squatting on his haunches, chewing gum furiously, his jaws freezing momentarily, the eyes lighting, then the jaws moving again with a renewed snapping energy. When a football bounced close to the squatting man, a huge black inmate asked permission before he approached to pick it up. The squatting man said nothing and the football remained where it was.
“Forget about them big ‘uns,” the gun bull told me. “That little fart yonder killed another convict while he had waist and leg chains on. I won’t tell you how he done it, since you ain’t eat lunch yet.”
I looked down at Patsy Dapolito’s ruined face. His pale eyes, which were round like an outraged doll’s, clicked upward into mine.
“You made a mistake coming here,” I said.
“Sit down. You want a beer?” he said. He picked up a bottle cap from the tabletop and threw it against the screen of the bait shop. “Hey, you! Colored guy! Bring us a couple more beers out here!”
I stared at him with my mouth open. Batist’s head appeared at the screen, then went away.
“You’ve pulled some wiring loose, partner,” I said.
“What, I don’t got a right to drink a beer in a public place?”
“I want you out of here.”
“Let’s take a ride in a boat. I ain’t never seen a swamp. You got swamp tours?” he said.
“Adios, Patsy.”
“Hey, I don’t like that. I’m talking here.”
I had already turned to walk away. His hand clenched on my forearm, bit into the tendons, pulled me off balance into the table.
“Show some courtesy, act decent for a change,” he said.
“You need some help, Dave?” a heavyset man with tobacco in his jaw said at the next table.
“It’s all right,” I said. People were staring now. My .45 protruded from under my shirt. I sat down on a chair, my arms on top of the spool table. “Listen to me, Patsy. A sheriff’s cruiser is on its way. Right now, you got no beef with the locals. As far as I see it, you and I are slick, too. Walk away from this.”
His teeth were charcoal colored and thin on the ends, almost as though they had been filed. His short, light brown hair looked like a wig on a mannequin.
His eyes held on mine. “I got business to do,” he said.
“Not with me.”
“With you.”
The fishermen at the other tables began to drift off toward their cars and pickup trucks and boat trailers.
“I want part of the action,” he said.
“What action?”
“The deal at the plantation. I don’t care what it is, I want in on it. You’re on a pad for Johnny Carp. That means you’re getting pieced off on this deal.”
“A pad for—”
“Or you’d be dead. I know Johnny. He don’t let nobody skate unless it’s for money.”
“You’re a confused man, Patsy.”
He pinched his nose, blew air through the nostrils, looked about at the sky, the overhang of the trees, a cloud of dust drifting from a passing pickup through a cane brake. “Look, there’s guys ain’t even from the city in on this deal, military guys think they’re big shit because they cooled out a few gooks and tomato pickers. I did a grown man with a shank when I was eleven years old. You say I’m lying, check my jacket.”
“It’s Johnny you want to bring down, isn’t it?” I said.
He kept huffing puffs of air through his nostrils, then he pulled a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose in it.
“Johnny don’t show it, but he’s a drunk,” Dapolito said. “A drunk don’t look after anybody but himself. Otherwise you’d be fish bait, motherfucker.”
I walked out to meet the cruiser sent by the dispatcher. The deputy was a big red bone named Cecil Aguillard whose face contained a muddy light people chose not to dwell upon.
“You t’ink he’s carrying?” Cecil said.
“Not unless he has an ankle holster.”
“What he’s done?”
“Nothing so far,” I said.
He walked down the dock ahead of me, his gunbelt, holster, and baton creaking on his hips like saddle leather. The umbrella over Patsy’s head tilted and swelled in the wind. Cecil pushed it at an angle so he could look down into his face.
“Time to go,” Cecil said.
Patsy was hunkered down over the tabletop, scowling into a state fish and game magazine. He made me think of a recalcitrant child in a school desk who was not going to let a nun’s authority overwhelm him.
“Dave don’t want you here,” Cecil said.
“I ain’t done nothing.” His shoulders were hunched, his hands clenched into fists on the edges of the magazine, his eyes flicking about the dock.
Cecil looked at me and nodded his head toward the bait shop. I followed him. “Clear everybody out of here, Dave, I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“It won’t work on this guy.”
“It’ll work.”
“No, he’ll be back. Thanks for coming out, Cecil. I’ll call you later if I have to.”
“It ain’t smart, Dave. You turn your back on his kind, he’ll have your liver flopping on the flo’.”
I watched Cecil drive down the road in the deepening shadows, then I helped Batist seine the dead shiners out of our bait tanks and hose down the boats we had rented that day. Patsy Dapolito still sat at his table, smoking cigarettes, popping the pages in his magazine, wiping bugs and mosquitoes from in front of his face.
The sun had dipped behind my house, and the tops of the cypress in the swamp had turned a grayish pink in the afterglow.
“We’re closing up, Patsy,” I said.
“Then close it up,” he said.
“We’ve got a joke out here. This fellow woke up on his houseboat and heard two mosquitoes talking about him. One said, “Let’s take him outside and eat him.” The other one said, “We’d better not. The big ones will carry him off for themselves.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“Have a good one,” I said, and walked up the slope to the house.