I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Alf. I did.”
“You already said that.”
“Listen. When you kill another human being, no matter how necessary it might seem at the time, something goes out of your life forever. I never want that to happen to you. I still have dreams about the war, I have them about men I ran up against as a police officer. Their faces don’t go underground with them.”
Her eyes blinked and went away from mine.
I saw the sheet ruffle and hump at the foot of the bed. It should have been a humorous moment, but it wasn’t. “Let’s get this guy out of here so we can talk,” I said, and lifted Tripod from under the sheet. He hung heavily from my hands and churned his paws in the air as I walked to the window.
“He’ll run down to the dock again,” she said, as if she could open a door out of our conversation.
“Batist can handle it,” I said, and dropped Tripod into the yard. I sat back down.
It was sunny and blue outside. In a short while we would be driving to Mass at St. Peter’s in New Iberia, then we’d have lunch at Victor’s on Main. I didn’t want to address the question in her eyes. Her hands were pinched together on top of her knees. She looked at a poster of two calico kittens on the far wall.
“How many people, Dave, how many did you—”
“You never let yourself see a number in your mind, Alf. The day you do, the day it comes out of your mouth, that’s the day you start being someone else,” I said.
Sonny Boy called the bait shop at three o’clock that afternoon.
“You’ve got a serious hearing problem,” I said. “I want you out of my life. Don’t come around my house anymore, you understand? You want to be a guardian angel, go to New York, put on a red beret, and buy a lot of subway tokens.”
“What do you mean come around your house?” he said. I could hear waves breaking against rocks or a jetty, then the sound of a door on a telephone booth closing.
“Friday night,” I said.
“I was in New Orleans,” he said.
“Don’t give me that, Sonny.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“My daughter saw a guy in the trees. It wasn’t Emile Pogue, it wasn’t Patsy Dap, Patsy wants to do business and screw Johnny Carp, that leaves you.” But my words sounded hollow even to myself.
“They got lots of guys working for them, Streak, a lot of them in Florida. They get gooned-up like over-the-hill jarheads on a skivvy run, blow into town, give a guy a fatal accident, and catch the redeye back to Tampa the same night.”
I could hear myself breathing against the receiver. Outside the screen window, the sunlight’s reflection on the bayou was like a sliver of glass in the eye.
“Why’d you call?” I said.
“A rag-nose used to work for Johnny Carp told me Johnny’s in on a deal to get some land by a train track. He said he heard Johnny tell a guy on the phone the land’s got to be by a train track. That’s the key.”
“To what?” I said.
“I don’t know. You ought to see the rag-nose. He’s got nostrils that look like tunnels going straight into his brain. The real reason I called, if my string runs out, like I bounce back treys and boxcars, know what I’m saying, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry for the trouble I caused other people.”
“Come on, Sonny, you got your ticket punched a long time ago. You’ll be standing on Canal with a glass of champagne when they drive Johnny’s hearse by... Sonny?”
I heard the phone booth door rachet back violently on its hinges, the receiver clattering back and forth on its cord, then, almost lost in the crash of waves against rocks or a jetty, a sound like a string of firecrackers popping.
Chapter 21
Early Monday morning the sheriff called and asked me to come to the department. I thought it was about Sonny. It wasn’t.
He was scraping out the bowl of his pipe over the wastebasket with a penknife when I walked into his office.
“Sit down,” he said. He wiped the blade of the penknife on a piece of paper and folded it against the heel of his hand. “This is a bad day, my friend... I wish I could tell you it’s just a matter of IAD finding against you.”
I waited.
“You know the route,” he said. “It’s the kind of deal usually gets a guy a letter of reprimand in his jacket or a suspension.” He wadded up the piece of paper and tried to wipe the pipe’s ashes out of his palm. “This one’s different.”
“Too many times across the line?”
“The problem is you’re a police officer who doesn’t like rules. You kept yourself on the job while you were officially suspended, didn’t you?”
In my mind’s eye I saw Rufus Arceneaux’s face leaning across the seat inside Julia’s automobile, the green eyes lighted with ambition and long-held grievance.
“There’s something you’re not saying, Sheriff.”
“I couldn’t cover for you anymore, Dave. I told them about you and Purcel salting Sweet Pea’s Caddy and queering the warrant.”
“I’m fired?”
“You can submit your resignation. It needs to be on my desk by five.”
I bounced my palms on my thighs.
“About queering the warrant,” I said. “I made the connection between the scrap iron on the floater’s body and a junk pile next to Sweet Pea’s house. How’d that play out?”
“I’m afraid it’s not your concern any longer.”
It was a windy day outside, and I could see the flag snapping and popping on the steel pole without making any sound.
“I’ll box up my stuff,” I said.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said.
I nodded and opened the door to leave.
“Are you going to have that letter on my desk?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
On the way down the hall I picked up my mail and messages, found an empty cardboard box in a custodian’s closet, unlocked my office door, and went inside.
It was all that quick, as though a loud train had gone past me, slamming across switches, baking the track with its own heat, creating a tunnel of sound and energy so intense that the rails seem to reshape like bronze licorice under the wheels; then silence that’s like hands clapped across the eardrums, a field of weeds that smell of dust and creosote, a lighted club car disappearing across the prairie.
Or simply a man walking through glass doors into a sun-drenched parking lot, a box on his shoulder, and no one taking particular notice.
An electrical storm struck New Iberia that afternoon, and I sent Batist home and shut down the dock and watched a twenty-four-hour news station on the television set that I kept on top of the soda and lunch meat cooler. A lorry carrying three white men had gone into the black homelands of South Africa and had been shot up by black militia of some kind. The footage was stunning. One white man was already dead, crumpled over the steering wheel, his face pushed into a lopsided expression by the horn button; the two other men lay wounded on the pavement. One had propped his back against the tire and had his hands up, but he never spoke. The other man was on his stomach and having trouble raising his head so he could speak to the soldiers whose legs surrounded him. He was a large man, with a wild red beard, a broad nose, and coarse-grained skin, and he could hardly contain the rage in his throat.
“Will you call a fucking ambulance?” he said in a British accent. “My friend’s hurt. Did you hear me? We need the fucking ambulance. How do I say it to you? Call the fucking hospital for an ambulance... Oh you have, have you? Well, thank you very much. Thank you fucking bloody very much.”
The militia shot him and his friend. Later, the replay of the tape did not show the bearded man getting in the face of his executioners. Instead, the newscaster said the victims had begged for their lives. That last line was repeated over and over throughout the afternoon. I kept waiting for it to be corrected. It never was, not to my knowledge. A brave man’s death was revised downward to a shameful and humiliating one, either for categorical or dramatic purposes. The truth had become an early casualty.