“How did you know?”
“You want absolution for what you did to this guy?”
“Yes.”
“Dave, when we say the Serenity Prayer about acceptance, we have to mean it. I can absolve sins but I can’t set either one of us free from the nature of time.”
“It has nothing to do with time. It’s what we’ve allowed them to do — all of them, the dope traffickers, the industrialists, the politicians. We gave it up without even a fight.”
“I’m all out of words,” he says, and lays his hand on my shoulder. It has the weightlessness of an old man’s. He looks at the empty diamond with a private thought in his eyes, one that he knows his listener is not ready to hear.
“Come on down to the office and talk to somebody for me, will you?” Clete said when I answered the phone early the next morning. Then he told me who.
“I don’t want to talk to him,” I said.
“You’re going to enjoy this. I guarantee it.”
Twenty minutes later I parked my truck in front of the office. Through the window I could see Patsy Dapolito sitting in a wood chair next to my desk, his brow furrowed as he stared down at the BB game that he tilted back and forth in his hands. His face looked like stitched pink rubber molded against bone.
I walked inside and sat behind my desk. The new secretary looked up and smiled, then went back to typing a letter.
“Tell Dave what’s on your mind, get his thoughts on it,” Clete said to the back of Patsy’s head.
“You guys hire operatives. Maybe we can work something out,” Patsy said.
“Like work for us, you mean?” I asked.
“Nobody catches any flies on you. I can see that,” he answered, and tilted more BB’s into the tiny holes of his game.
Clete widened his eyes and puffed air in his cheeks to suppress the humor in his face.
“We’re not hiring right now, Patsy. Thanks, anyway,” I said.
“Who tried to peel your box?” he said.
Clete and I looked at each other.
“You didn’t know your place got creeped?” He laughed, then pointed with his thumb to the safe. “You can punch ‘em, peel ‘em, or burn ‘em. The guy tried to do this one was a fish. He should have gone through the dial.”
Clete got up from his desk and rubbed his fingers along the prised edge of the safe, then went to the front and back doors. “How’d the guy get in?” he said to me, his face blank.
“It’s called a lock pick, Purcel,” Patsy said.
“There’re no scratches,” Clete said to me.
“Maybe the safe was already damaged when you got it from Nig,” I said. But Clete was already shaking his head.
Patsy lit a cigarette, held it upward in the cone of his fingers, blew smoke around it as though he were creating an artwork in the air.
“There’s a hit on me. I got a proposition,” he said.
“Tell me who Charlie is,” I said.
“Charlie? What the fuck you talking about?”
“Would you watch your language, please,” I said.
“Language? That’s what’s you guys got on your mind, I use bad language?” he said.
“You’re a beaut, Patsy,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, fuck you. The hit’s coming from Johnny Carp. You stomped the shit out of him, Robicheaux; Purcel bounced money off his face. That gives all of us a mutual interest, you get my drift?”
“Thanks for coming by,” I said.
He stood up, ground his cigarette out in an ashtray, stabbing it into the ceramic as though he were working an angry thought out of his mind. “Marsallus ever wash up on the shore?” he said.
“No, why?” I said.
“No reason. I wish I’d been there for it. It was time somebody broke that mutt’s legs.”
“Get out,” I said.
When he walked past the secretary, he drew his finger, like a line of ice water, across the back of her neck.
When I closed the bait shop that night and walked up the dock toward the house, I saw Luke Fontenot waiting for me in the shadows of the oaks that overhung the road. He wore a pair of pink slacks, a braided cloth belt, a black shirt with the collar turned up on the neck. He flipped a toothpick out onto the road.
“What’s up, partner?” I said.
“Come out to the plantation wit’ me.”
“Nope.”
“Ruthie Jean and me want to bring all this to an end.”
“What are you saying?”
“Moleen Bertrand gonna fix it so it come out right for everybody.”
“I’m afraid I’m not one of his fans, Luke.”
“Talk to my Aint Bertie. If it come from you, she gonna listen.” I could hear the strain, like twisted wire, in his throat.
“To what? No, don’t tell me. Somebody’s going to give y’all a lot of money. Sounds great. Except Bertie’s one of those rare people who’s not for sale and just wants her little house and garden and the strip Moleen’s grandfather gave y’all’s family.”
“You ain’t got to the part that counts most.”
He rubbed a mosquito bite on his neck, looked hotly into my face.
“Moleen and Ruthie Jean?” I said.
“That’s what it always been about, Mr. Dave. But if it don’t go right, if Aint Bertie gonna act old and stubborn... There’s some bad white people gonna be out there. I’m between Ruthie Jean and that old woman. What I’m gonna do?”
I followed him in my truck out to the Bertrand plantation. The sky was freckled with birds, the air heavy with smoke from a trash fire, full of dust blowing out of the fields. The grove of gum trees at the end of the road thrashed in black-green silhouette against the dying sun. While he told me a story of reconciliation and promise I sat with Luke on the tiny gallery of the house from which he and Ruthie Jean had been evicted, and I wondered if our most redeeming quality, our willingness to forgive, was not also the instrument most often used to lay bare and destroy the heart.
Moleen had found Luke first, then Ruthie Jean, the latter in a motel in a peculiar area of north Lafayette where Creoles and blacks and white people seemed to traverse one another’s worlds without ever identifying with any one of them. He spent the first night with her in the motel, a low-rent 19405 cluster of stucco boxes that had once been called the Truman Courts. While he made love to her, she lay with her head propped up on pillows, her hands lightly touching his shoulders, her gaze pointed at the wall, neither encouraging nor dissuading his passion, which seemed as insatiable as it was unrequited.
Then in the middle of the night he sat naked on the side of the bed, his skin so white it almost glowed, his forearms on his thighs, his confession of betrayal and hypocrisy so spontaneous and devoid of ulterior motive that she knew she would have to forgive whatever injury he had done her or otherwise his sin would become her own.
She rose to her knees, pressed him back on the pillow, then mounted him and kissed his face and throat, made love to him almost as though he were a child.
When the light broke against the window curtains in the morning and she heard the sound of diesel trucks outside, car doors slamming, people talking loudly because they didn’t care if others slept or not, all the hot, busy noise of another day in the wrong part of town, she could feel the nocturnal intimacy of their time together slipping away from her, and she knew he would shower soon, drink coffee with her, be fond, even affectionate, while the attention in his eyes wandered, then begin to refocus on the world that awaited him with all the guarantees of his race and position as soon as he left the motel.
But instead he drove them to Galveston, where they ate lunch at a hotel restaurant on the beach, rented a boat and fished for speckled trout in the deep drop-off beyond the third sandbar, walked barefoot along the edge of the surf by the old World War I fort at sunset, and on a whim flew to Monterrey to watch a bullfight the next afternoon.