“Sure, Dave,” he said, and moved toward me along the bar, pointed toward his Manhattan glass for the bartender. “How you doin’? You didn’t bring that Irish ape, did you? Hey, just kidding. Purcel don’t bother me. You ever know his mother? She was a wet-brain, used to sell out of her pants when her old man run off. Ask anybody in the Channel.”
“Can we talk somewhere?” I said.
“This is good.” Two of his hoods stood behind him, eating out of paper plates, salami and salad hanging off their lips. Their steroid-pumped upper arms had the diameter and symmetry of telephone poles inside their sports coats. “Don’t be shy. What’s the problem?”
“No problem. That’s what I’m saying, Johnny. I’m no threat to you guys.”
“What am I listening to here? I ever said you were a problem?” He turned to his men, a mock incredulous look on his face.
“My daughter saw a guy hanging around our house, Johnny. You think I have information, which I don’t. They pulled my shield, I’m out of the game, I don’t care what you guys do. I’m asking you to stay away from me and my family.”
“You hear this crazy guy?” he said to his hoods. Then to me, “Eat some dinner, drink some wine, you got my word, anybody bother you with anything, you bring it to me.”
“I appreciate your attitude, Johnny,” I said.
My palms felt damp, thick, hard to fold at my sides. I was sweating inside my shirt. I swallowed and looked away from the smile on his face. “I accused you of something that was in the imagination. I’m sorry about that,” he said. His men were grinning now.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“A redheaded guy, looked like Sonny Boy Marsallus, out at my house, walking around downtown, I asked you and Purcel if you’d hired an actor, remember?” he said.
I nodded.
“There he is,” he said, and pointed to a man in a white jacket busing a table. “He’s Sonny’s cousin, a retard or something, I got him a job here. He looks just like him, except his brains probably run out his nose.”
“He looks like a stuffed head,” one of Johnny’s men said.
“He’d make a great doorstop,” the other man said.
“Why was he at your house?” I said. The skin of my face burned and my voice felt weak in my throat.
“He was looking for a job. He’d been out there with Sonny once. Now he’s making six bucks an hour and tips cleaning slops. So I done a good one for Sonny.”
One of the men behind Johnny gargled with his drink.
“Salt water’s good for the throat,” he said to me. “Take a glass-bottom boat ride, Robicheaux, ask Sonny if that ain’t true.”
Johnny stripped a folded fifty out of the fan in his hand and dropped it on my forearm.
“Get something nice for your daughter,” he said. “You done the right thing here tonight.” He reached out with one hand and adjusted the knot in my tie.
I saw the balloon of red-black color well up behind my eyes, heard a sound like wet newspaper ripping in my head, saw the startled and fearful look in his face just before I hooked him above the mouth, hard, snapping my shoulder into it, his nose flattening, his upper lip splitting against his teeth. I caught him again on the way down, behind the ear, then brought my knee into his face and knocked his head into the bar.
I kept waiting for his men to reach inside their coats, to pinion my arms, but they didn’t move. My breath was heaving in my chest, my hands were locked on the lip of the bar, like a man aboard ship during a gale, and I was doing something that seemed to have no connection with me. He fought to get up, and I saw my shoe bite into his chin, his ear, his raised forearm, his rib cage, I felt Johnny Carp cracking apart like eggshell under my feet.
“Mother of God, that’s enough, Dave!” I heard Clete shout behind me.
Then I felt his huge arm knock me backward, away from Johnny’s body, which was curled in an embryonic position next to the brass bar rail, his yellow shirt streaked with saliva and blood, his fists clenched on his head.
Then Clete laced his fingers under my arm, a paper bag crushed against the contour of his palm, and drew me back toward the door with him, a pistol-grip, sawed-down double-barrel twelve-gauge pointed at Johnny’s men. The only sound in the room was the service door to the kitchen flipping back and forth on its hinges. The faces of the diners were as expressionless as candle wax, as though any movement of their own would propel them into a terrible flame. I felt Clete push me out into the darkness and the cold odor of an impending electric storm that invaded the trees like a fog. He shoved the sawed-down twelve-gauge into the paper bag and threw it on the seat of his convertible.
“Oh Dave,” he said. “Noble mon...” He shook his head and started his car without finishing his sentence, his eyes hollow and lustrous with a dark knowledge, as though he had just seen the future.
Chapter 25
By Monday morning nothing had happened. No knock at the door from New Orleans plainclothes, no warrant cut. To my knowledge, not even an investigation in progress.
The sky was clear and blue, windless, the day warm, the sun as bright as a shattered mirror on the bayou’s surface. After the early fishermen had left the dock and I had started the fire in the barbecue pit for the lunches Batist and I would sell later, I called Clete at the office on Main.
“You need me for anything?” I said.
“Not really. It’s pretty quiet.”
“I’m going to work at the dock today.”
“He s coming, Dave.”
“I know.”
The priest sits next to me on the weathered planks of the bleachers by the baseball diamond at New Iberia High. The school building is abandoned, the windows broken by rocks, pocked with BB holes. The priest is a tall, gray, crewcut man who used to be a submarine pitcher for the Pelicans back in the days of the Evangeline League and later became an early member of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Today he belongs to the same AA group I do.
“Did you go to the restaurant with that purpose in mind?” he asks.
“No.”
“Then it wasn’t done with forethought. It was an impetuous act. That’s the nature of anger.”
It’s dusk and the owner of the pawn and gun shop on the corner rattles the glass in his door when he slams and locks it. Two black kids in ball caps gaze through the barred window at the pistols on display.
“Dave?”
“I tried to kill him.”
“That’s a bit more serious,” he says.
The black kids cross the street against the red light and pass close to the bleachers, in the shadows, oblivious to our presence. One picks up a rock, sails it clattering through a tree next to the school building.
I hear a faint tinkle of glass inside.
“Because of your friend, what was his name, Sonny Boy?” the priest says.
“I think he put the hit on Sonny. I can’t prove it, though.”
His hands are long and slender, with liver spots on the backs. His skin makes a dry sound when he rubs one hand on top of the other.
“What bothers you more than anything else in the world, Dave?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Vietnam? The death of your wife Annie? Revisiting the booze in your dreams?”
When I don’t reply, he lifts one hand, gestures at the diamond, the ruined school building that’s become softly molded inside the fading twilight. A torn kite, caught by its string on an iron fire escape, flaps impotently against a wall.
“It’s all this, isn’t it?” he says. “We’re still standing in the same space where we grew up but we don’t recognize it anymore. It’s like other people own it now.”