Two hours later it was dark. I used the switch inside the house to turn on the string of lights over the dock. Patsy Dapolito still sat at his table, the Cinzano umbrella furled above his head. His hard, white body seem to glow with electrified humidity.
Later, Bootsie and Alafair pulled into the drive, the car loaded with bags of groceries they had bought in Lafayette.
“Dave, there’s a man sitting on the dock,” Bootsie said.
“It’s Patsy Dap,” I said.
“The man you—” she began.
“That’s the one.”
“I can’t believe it. He’s on our dock?”
“He’s not going to do anything,” I said.
“He’s not going to have a chance to. Not if I have anything to do with it,” she said.
“I think Johnny Giacano’s cut him loose. That’s why he’s here, not because of me. He couldn’t think his way out of a wet paper bag, much less rejection by the only form of authority he’s ever respected.”
But she wasn’t buying it.
“I’ll get rid of him,” I said.
“How?”
“Sometimes you’ve got to make their souls wince.”
“Dave?”
I carried a sack of groceries inside, then wrapped both my .45 and nine-millimeter Beretta inside a towel, took a tube of first-aid cream from the medicine cabinet, and walked down to the dock. Patsy’s elbows were splayed on the table, his face pale and luminous with heat and perspiration. The tide was out and the current was dead in the bayou.
Patsy worked a thumbnail between his teeth and stared at me.
“Put some of this stuff on those mosquito bites,” I said.
He surprised me. He filled both palms with white cream and rubbed it into his forearms and on his face and neck, his round chin pointed up in the air.
I unfolded the towel on the table. His eyes dropped to the pistols, then looked up at me.
“What, you got cold pieces for sale?” he said.
I released the magazine from the butt of each automatic so he could see the top round, inserted it again, chambered the round, set the safety, and placed both weapons butt to butt in the center of the table. Then I sat down across from him, my eyes stinging with salt. Up the slope, I could see Bootsie under the light on the gallery.
“If you want to square what I did to you, now’s the time,” I said. “Otherwise, I’m going to mop up the dock with you.”
He smiled and screwed a fresh cigarette in his mouth, crumpled up the empty pack. “I always heard you were a drunk. That ain’t your problem. You’re fucking stupid, man,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I want to make somebody dead, I don’t even have to get out of bed. Don’t try to shine me off, worm man. Tell Johnny and those military as swipes they piece me off or I leave hair on the walls.”
He walked on the balls of his feet toward his automobile, lifting his arm to smell himself again.
Sometimes they don’t wince.
Chapter 20
Even inside the dream I know I’m experiencing what a psychologist once told me is a world destruction fantasy. But my knowledge that it is only a dream does no good; I cannot extricate myself from it.
As a child I saw the sun turn black against a cobalt sky and sink forever beyond the earth’s rim. Years later the images would change and I’d revisit my brief time as a new colonial, see Victor Charles, in black pajamas, sliding on his stomach through a rice paddy, a French bolt-action rifle strapped across his back; two GI’s eating C-rations in the shade of banyan trees after machine-gunning a farmer’s water buffalo just for meanness’ sake; three of our wounded after they’d been skinned and hung in trees like sides of meat by NVA.
In my dream tonight I can see the Louisiana coastline from a great height, as alluvial and new as it must have been after Jehovah hung the archer’s bow in the sky and drew the waters back over the earth’s edges, the rivers and bayous and wetlands shimmering like foil under the moon. But it’s a view that will not hold at the center, because now I realize the cold light of the moon is actually the fire from chemical plants and oil refineries along the Mississippi, the shook foil of a dead Jesuit poet nothing more than industrial mercury systemically injected into the earth’s veins. The roadways and ditches are blown with litter, the canals a depository for rubber tires, beer cans, vinyl sacks of raw garbage thrown from pickup trucks. A fish’s gills are orange with fungus.
I wake from the dream and sit alone in the kitchen. I can hear thunder out of the Gulf and Tripod pulling his chain along the clothesline. Through the window my neighbor’s freshly cut lawn smells like corn silk and milk. I sit on the back steps until the trees turn gray with the false dawn, then I go back inside and fall asleep just as the first raindrops ping against the blades of the window fan.
At noon Bootsie and I were eating lunch in the kitchen when Ruthie Jean Fontenot called.
“Moleen’s at Dot’s in St. Martinville. You know where that’s at, I’m talking about in the black section?” she said.
“I’m not his keeper, Ruthie Jean.”
“You can get him out.”
“Get him out yourself.”
“Some secrets suppose to stay secret. You know the rules about certain things that go on between white and black people.”
“Wrong man to call,” I said.
“The man owns the place is a friend of Luke’s. He said Moleen’s got a li’l pistol stuck down inside his coat. The man doesn’t want to call the police unless he has to.”
“Forget Moleen and take care of yourself, Ruthie Jean. He’s not worth—”
She hung up. I sat down at the table and started eating again. Bootsie watched my face.
“Moleen’s a grown man,” I said. “He’s also a hypocritical sonofabitch.”
“He got her out of jail,” Bootsie said.
“He paid somebody else to do it. Which is Moleen’s style. Three cushion shots.”
“Too harsh, Streak,” she said.
I drank out of my iced tea, sucked on a sprig of mint, finally squeezed my temples between my fingers.
“See you before five,” I said.
“Watch your ass, kiddo,” she said.
I took the old road into St. Martinville, along Bayou Teche and through cane fields and pastureland where egrets stood like spectators on the backs of grazing cows. Dot’s was a ramshackle bar toward the end of the main artery that traversed the black district and eventually bled into the square where Evangeline was buried with her lover behind the old French church. Ironically, the bar’s geographical location, set like a way station between two worlds, was similar to the peculiar mix of blood and genes in the clientele — octoroons and quadroons, red bones and people who were coal black but whose children sometimes had straw-colored curly hair.
Moleen sat in the gloom, at the far end of the bar, on a patched, fingernail-polish-red vinyl stool, his seersucker coat tight across his hunched shoulders, one oxblood loafer twisted indifferently inside an aluminum rung on the stool. I could smell his unwashed odor three feet away.
“She’s worried about you,” I said, and sat down next to him.
He drank from a glass of bourbon and melted ice, pushed two one-dollar bills out of his change toward the bartender.
“You want a drink?” he said.
I didn’t answer. I peeled back the edge of his coat with one finger.
He glared at me.
“A .25 caliber derringer. That’s dumb, Moleen,” I said. “One of those is like bird shit hitting a brick.”
He pointed at his empty glass for the bartender. A deformed mulatto man with a shoe-shine box came through the front door in a burst of hot sunlight, let the door slam hard behind him, vibrating the glass and Venetian blinds. His face was moronic, his mouth a wet drool, his arms like gnarled oak roots that were half the length they should have been. I looked away from him.