“You’re looking good.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
“I’m not here to give you a bad time, Moleen.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you hear about a guy named Sweet Pea Chaisson getting whacked out by Cade?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“A black woman died with him.”
He nodded, the sandwich in his mouth. His eyes were flat. Against the far wall was a mahogany-and-glass case full of shotguns and bolt-action rifles.
“Call it off,” I said.
“What?”
“I think you have influence with certain people.”
“I have influence over no one, my friend.”
“Where’s Ruthie Jean?”
“You’re abusing my hospitality, sir.”
“Give it up, Moleen. Change your life. Get away from these guys while there’s time.”
His eyes dropped to his plate; the ball of one finger worked at the corner of his mouth. When he looked at me again, I could see a nakedness in his face, a thought translating into words, a swelling in the voice box, the lips parting as though he were about to step across a line and clasp someone’s extended hand.
Then it disappeared.
“Thanks for dropping by,” he said.
“Yeah, you bet, Moleen. I don’t think you picked up on my purpose, though.”
“I didn’t?” he said, wiping his chin with a linen napkin, his white shirt as crinkly and fresh as if he had just put it on.
“I have a feeling me and Clete Purcel might be on somebody’s list. Don’t let me be right.”
He looked at something outside, a butterfly hovering in a warm air current against the glass.
“Read Faust, Moleen. Pride’s a pile of shit,” I said.
“I was never theologically inclined.”
“See you,” I said, and walked out into the humidity and the acrid reek of the chemical fertilizer Julia was feverishly working into her rosebushes.
But my conversation with him was not over. Two hours later he called me at the bait shop.
“I don’t want to see you or your friend harmed. That’s God’s honest truth,” he said.
“Then tell me what you’re into.”
“Dave, take the scales off your eyes. We don’t serve flags or nations anymore. It’s all business today. The ethos of Robert E. Lee is as dead as the world we grew up in.”
“Speak for yourself.”
He slammed the receiver down.
It was hot and dry that night, and through the bedroom I could see veins of heat lightning crawl and flicker through the clouds high above the swamp. Bootsie woke and turned toward me. The window fan made revolving shadows on her face and shoulders.
“Can’t you sleep?” she said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Are you worried about our finances?”
“Not really. We’re doing okay.”
She placed one arm across my side.
“The department did you wrong, Dave. Accept it and let it go. We don’t need them. What do you call that in AA?”
“Working the Third Step. But that’s not it, Boots. I think Johnny
Giacano or these military guys are starting to take people off the board.”
“They’d better not try it around here,” she said.
I looked into her face. It was calm, without anger or any display of self-manufactured feeling. Then she said, “If one of those sons of-bitches tries to harm anyone in this family, he’s going to think the wrath of God walked into his life.”
I started to smile, then looked at the expression in her eyes and thought better of it.
“I believe you, kiddo,” I said.
“Kiddo, yourself,” she answered.
She tilted her head slightly on the pillow and moved her fingers on my hip. I kissed her mouth, then her eyes and hair and ran my hands down her back.
Bootsie never did anything in half measures. She closed the door that gave onto the hallway — in case Alafair got up from bed and went into the kitchen for a drink of water — then pulled off her nightgown and stepped out of her panties in front of the window. She had the smoothest complexion of any woman I’d ever known, and in the spinning shadows of the window fan’s blades the curves and surfaces of her body looked like those of a perfectly formed statue coming to life against a shattering of primordial light.
I moved on top of her and she hooked her legs inside mine and pressed her palms into the small of my back, buried her mouth in my neck, ran her fingers up my spine into my hair, rolled her rump in a slow circle as her breath grew louder in my ear and her words became a single, heart-twisting syllable: “Dave... Dave... Dave... oh Dave...”
It started to rain outside, unexpectedly, the water sluicing hard off the roof, splaying in front of the window fan. The wind-stiffened branches of the oak tree seemed to drip with a wet light, and I felt Bootsie lock her arms around my rib cage and draw me deeper inside her, into coral caves beneath the sea where there was neither thought nor fear, only an encompassing undulating current that rose and fell as warmly as her breast.
I had wired my house with a burglar alarm system that I couldn’t afford and had taught my thirteen-year-old daughter how to use a weapon that could turn an intruder into potted meat product.
I also had dragged “my insomnia and worry into the nocturnal world of my wife.
Who was becoming the prisoner of fear? Or, better put, who was allowing himself to become a spectator while others wrote his script?
Early Saturday morning Clete took one of my outboards down the bayou, with his spinning rod and a carton of red wigglers, and came back with a stringer of bream and sun perch that he lifted out of his cooler like a heavy, gold-green ice-slick chain. He knelt on the planks in the lee of the bait shop and began cleaning them in a pan of bloody water, neatly half-mooning the heads off at the gills.
“You should have gone out with me,” he said.
“That’s like inviting the postman for a long walk on his day off,” I said.
He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and smiled. The fish blood on his fingers made tiny prints on the cigarette paper.
“You look sharp, big mon. How about I take y’all to Possum’s for lunch?” he said.
“Not today... I’m going to New Orleans in a few minutes. I told Bootsie you might hang around a little bit.”
He got to his feet and washed his hands under a faucet by the rail.
“What are you up to, Streak?”
“I’m tired of living in a bull’s-eye.”
“Who’s going to cover your back, mon?” he said, drying his hands on a rag.
“Thanks for watching the house,” I said, and walked back up the dock to my truck. When I looked in the rearview mirror, he was leaning against the dock rail, his face shadowed by his hat, one hand propped on his hip. The wind was hot blowing across the swamp and smelled of beached gars and humus drying in the sunlight. Just as I started my truck, the shadows of large birds streaked across the surface of the bayou. I looked into the sky and saw a circle of buzzards descending out of their pattern into the cypress, their wings clattering for balance just before they lighted on their prey.
There are a lot of ways to see New Orleans. At the right time of day the Quarter is wonderful. A streetcar ride up St. Charles Avenue through the Garden District, past Audubon Park and Tulane, is wonderful anytime. Or you can try it another way, which I don’t recommend.
Those who feed at the bottom of the food chain — the hookers, pimps, credit card double-billers, Murphy artists, stalls and street dips — usually work out of bars and strip joints and do a relatively minor amount of damage. They’re given to the classical hustle and con and purloined purse rather than to physical injury.
One rung up are the street dealers. Not all of them, but most, are black, young, dumb, and carry a Jones themselves. The rock they deal in the projects almost guarantees drug-induced psychosis; anything else they sell has been stepped on so many times you might as well try to get high huffing baby laxative or fixing with powdered milk.