“Take a ride with me,” he said.
“What’s up?”
“I need to talk, that’s all.”
“Turn the radio down,” I said.
“Hey, you listen to Dr. Boogie and the Bon Ton Soul Train?”
“No.”
He started the engine again and kept feeding it the gas while the Caddy’s gutted muffler vibrated and rattled against the frame.
“Okay!” I said, above the noise, and got in beside him. A few minutes later we were approaching the drawbridge. “Do you realize you always end up driving the same kind of cars grease balls do?” I said.
“That’s because I buy them off grease balls I’m lucky I can afford grease ball hand-me-downs.”
I waited for him to get to it. We turned into New Iberia, then headed out toward Spanish Lake. He bit down softly on his thumbnail, his face reflective and cool in the wind.
“I heard about Sonny. The guy didn’t deserve to die like that,” he said. We were on the old two-lane road now. The azaleas and purple wisteria along the roadside were still in bloom and you could see the lake through the trees. Clete’s voice was hoarse, down in his throat. “Something else bothers me, too.” He turned and looked at me. “I told you, when I hit Sonny, I got a red bruise on my knuckles, it looked like strawberry juice under the skin, it wouldn’t go away?”
He shook his head, without waiting for me to answer.
“I was always pissed off at Sonny, I can’t even tell you why. When I heard he got clipped, I felt really bad the way I treated him. I was in the can at Tujague’s last night, washing my hands, and that strawberry bruise was gone.”
He held up the back of his hand in the sun’s red glow off the dashboard.
“This stuff’s in your mind, Clete.”
“Give me some credit, mon. My hand throbbed all the time. Now it doesn’t. I think Johnny Carp used both of us to set up the whack.”
He turned left off the two-lane, drove past a collapsed three-story house that had been a gambling club in the sixties, then followed a dirt road to a woods where people had dumped raw garbage and mattresses and stuffed chairs in the weeds. Clete backed the Caddy into the gloom of the trees. The sun was below the horizon now, the air thick with birds.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Helen Soileau got the warrant on Sweet Pea’s house. Guess what? He’d ripped the carpet out of his Caddy.”
The radio was off now, and when he cut the engine I heard movement in the trunk, a shift of weight, the scrape of shoe leather against metal.
“This is a mistake,” I said.
“Watch the show. He’s a geek. Geeks get off on being the center of attention.”
Clete took a can of beer from the Styrofoam cooler in the backseat and popped the trunk. Sweet Pea Chaisson’s long body was curled between the tire wells, his webbed eyes glistening in the enclosed heat, his tin-colored silk shirt swampy with sweat. He climbed out over the bumper, his small mouth compressed as though he were sucking a mint.
“Hey, Dave. What’s the word, babe?” he said.
Clete shoved him backward across a log, onto the ground.
“Streak lost his shield, Sweet Pea. We’re operating on different rules now. Bad time to be a wiseass, know what I’m saying?” Clete said.
Sweet Pea inserted his little finger into an empty space in his teeth, then looked at the blood on the tip of it and spit in the weeds. He grinned up at Clete.
“I got to go to the bat’room he said.
“Do it in your clothes,” Clete said. Then to me, “I found our man behind a colored juke joint. He was beating the shit out of one of his chippies with a rolled newspaper.”
“That was my wife,” Sweet Pea said.
Clete pitched the can of beer into his lap.
“Rinse your mouth out. Your breath’s bad,” he said.
“T’anks, Purcel,” Sweet Pea said, ripped the tab, and drank deeply from the can. His face was covered with pinpoints of sweat and dirt. “Where we at?” He looked off into the purple haze above the cane fields. “Oh yeah, my mother’s grave was right across them railway tracks.”
“Who put the whack on Sonny?” Clete said.
“I live in Breaux Bridge now. A crawfish getting run over on the highway is big news there. How do I know?”
Sweet Pea tipped the beer can to his mouth. Clete kicked it into his face. Sweet Pea’s lips were suddenly bright red, his eyebrows dripping with beer foam, his face quivering with the force of the blow. But not one sound came from his throat. I pushed Clete away from him.
“No more,” I said.
“Take a walk down the road. Enjoy the evening. Stroll back in ten minutes,” he said. His blue-black .38 one-inch hung from his right hand.
“We take him back to wherever you got him. That’s the way it is, Cletus.”
“You’re screwing it up, Streak.”
Behind me, I heard Sweet Pea stirring in the weeds, getting to his feet.
“Stay where you are, Sweet Pea,” I said.
He sat on a log with his head between his legs and let the blood and saliva drain out of his mouth. When he looked up at me again, his face was changed.
“You’re a pair of white clowns playing big shit out in the wood,” he said. His sharp, tiny teeth looked like they were stained with Mercurochrome.
Clete stepped toward him. I put my hand on his chest.
“What the fuck y’all know?” Sweet Pea said. “Y’all ever hear there’s a glow hanging over the ground at night on the Bertrand place? Where all them convicts was killed and buried in their chains. You t’ink you shit vanilla ice cream?”
“You’re not making much sense, Sweet Pea,” I said.
“The juke where I bring my broads, how’s it stay open? It’s Bertrand’s.”
“That’s not true, partner. I’ve seen the deeds on all the land around here.”
“It’s part of a con... a cons or... something... what do you call it?” he said.
“Consortium.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Hey, Purcel, you look like you need an enema. Why don’t you shove that gun up your ass?”
Clete took a Lucky Strike out of his pocket and lit it. Then he pulled a strand of tobacco off his lip and dropped it in the air. The lighted windows of the Amtrak streamed by on the train tracks across the cane field. Sweet Pea sat on the log and looked at the train and scratched his cheek as though we were no longer there.
“You got a lot of luck, Sweet Pea,” I said.
“Yeah? Tell your wife I got an opening. For an older broad like that, I’ll make an exception, too. Just straight dates, no sixty-nines,” he said.
I dream that night of people who live in caves under the sea. Their arms and shoulders are sheathed in silver feathers; their abalone skins dance with fiery sparks.
I once knew a helicopter pilot from Morgan City whose Jolly Green took an RPG right through the door. He had been loaded with ammunition and wounded civilians, and when they crashed in the middle of a river, most of the civilians burned to death or drowned. He became psychotic after the war and used to weigh and sink plastic statues of Jesus all over the waterways of southern Louisiana. He maintained that the earth was wrapped with water, that a bayou in the Atchafalaya Basin was an artery that led to a flooded rice plain in the Mekong Delta, that somehow the presence of a plastic statue could console those whose drowned voices still spoke to him from the silt-encrusted wreckage of his helicopter.
When he hung himself, the wire service story made much of his psychiatric history. But in my own life I had come to believe in water people and voices that can speak through the rain. I wondered if Sonny would speak to me.