“Can you hand me my orange juice, please?” he said.
I lifted the glass straw to his lips, watched him draw the juice and melting ice into his mouth.
“I dreamed about roses under the snow. But then I saw they weren’t roses. They were drops of blood where we marched out of the Chosin. It’s funny how your dreams mix up things,” he said.
“It’s better to let old wars go, skipper.”
“New Iberia is a good place.”
“It sure is.”
“We need to get these bastards out of here, Dave,” he said.
“We will.”
“Your daughter ID-ed Marsallus from his mug shot?”
“I shouldn’t have told you that story,” I said.
“They couldn’t pull him across the Styx. That’s a good story to hear... Dave?”
“Yes?”
“I never told this to anyone except a marine chaplain. I sent three North Korean POW’s to the rear once with a BAR man who escorted them as far as one hill. In my heart I knew better, because the BAR man was one of those rare guys who enjoyed what he did...”
I tried to interrupt, but he raised two fingers off the sheet to silence me.
“That’s why I always sit on you, always try to keep the net over all of us... so we don’t take people off behind a hill.”
“That’s a good way to be,” I said.
“You don’t understand. It’s the rules get us killed sometimes. You got too many bad people circling you.”
His voice became weaker, and I saw the light in his eyes change, his chest swell, as he breathed more deeply.
“I’d better go now. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“Don’t leave yet.” His hand moved across my wrist. “I don’t want to fall asleep. During the day I dream about trench rats. It was twenty below and they’d eat their way inside the dead. That’s how they live, Dave... By eating their way inside us.”
I went home for lunch, then walked down to the dock to talk to Alafair, who had just gotten out of school for the summer. Sitting under an umbrella at one of the spool tables was Terry Serrett, Clete’s secretary. She wore pale blue shorts and a halter and her skin looked as white as a fish’s belly. She read a magazine behind a pair of dark glasses while she idly rubbed suntan lotion on her thighs. When she heard my footsteps, she looked up at me and smiled. Her cheeks were roughed with orange circles like makeup on a circus clown.
“You’re not working today?” I said.
“There’s not much to do, I’m afraid. It looks like Clete is going to move back to New Orleans in a couple of weeks.”
“Can I bring you something?”
“Well, no, but... Can you sit down a moment?”
“Sure.”
The wind was warm off the water, and I was sweating inside my shirt even in the umbrella’s shade.
“Clete’s told me a little bit about this man Sonny Marsallus,” she said. “Is it true he knows something about POW’s in Southeast Asia?”
“It’s hard to say, Ms. Serrett.”
“It’s Terry... We think my brother got left behind in Cambodia. But the government denies he was even there.”
“Sonny was never in the service. Anything he... knew was conjecture, probably.”
“Oh... I got the impression he had evidence of some kind.”
Her sunglasses were tinted almost black, and the rest of her face was like an orange and white mask.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said.
“Well, I hope I haven’t bothered you,” she said, and touched my elbow softly.
“No, not at all.”
“I guess I’d better go before I burn up in this sun.”
“It’s a hot one,” I said.
I watched her walk up the dock on her flats toward her car, a drawstring beach bag hanging from her wrist. The line of soft fat that protruded from her waistband was already pink with sunburn.
I went inside the bait shop. Alafair was stocking lunch meat and cold drinks in the wall cooler.
“Hi, Dave,” she said. “Who was that lady?”
“Clete s secretary.”
She made a face.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
She looked out the window screen. “Where’s Batist?” she said.
“Out on the ramp.”
“She was sitting inside a half hour ago, smoking one cigarette after another, smelling the whole place up. Batist gave me his Pepsi because he had to go put some man’s boat in. After he went out, she said, “Better bring that over here, honey.”
“I didn’t know what she meant. I walked over to her table and she took the can out of my hand and got a bunch of napkins out of the holder and started wiping the top. She said, “You shouldn’t drink after other people.” Then she put it back in my hand and said, “There... Maybe now you won’t have to scrub your gums with disinfectant. But I’d still pour it down the drain if I were you.”
“What’s she doing here, Dave?”
Rufus Arceneaux lived in a wood frame house on Bayou Teche just outside St. Martinville. He had a gas light in his front yard, a new aluminum boat shed under his oak trees, an electric bug killer that snapped and hissed on his gallery. He did not resent his black neighbors because he considered himself superior to them and simply did not recognize their existence. Nor did he envy the rich, as he believed them the recipients of luck passed out by a society that was meant to be inequitable and often blessed the bumbling and the effete. His wary eye, instead, was directed at his peers and those among them who succeeded, he was sure, through stealth and design, and always at his expense.
He brought back a Japanese wife from Okinawa, a small, shy woman with bad teeth who worked briefly in a bakery and who lowered her eyes and covered her mouth when she grinned. One night the neighbors made a 911 call on Rufus’s house, but the wife told the responding sheriff’s deputies her television set had been tuned too loud, there was certainly no problem in the home.
One morning she did not report to work at the bakery. Rufus called the owner later and said she had mumps. When people saw her in town, her face was heavily made up, marbled with discolorations.
She left town on a Greyhound bus the following year. A Catholic priest who worked with Vietnamese refugees drove her to the depot in Lafayette and refused to tell anyone her destination.
For a while Rufus lived with a topless dancer from Morgan City, then a woman who had been fired from her position as a juvenile probation officer in Lake Charles. There were others, too, who came and went, all out of that seemingly endless supply of impaired or abused women who find temporary solace in the approval of a man who will eventually degrade and reject them. As an ex-NCO, Rufus was not one to argue with long-established systems. The only constants in Rufus’s life were his two hunting dogs and his squared-away, freshly painted frame house.
It was twilight when I drove up his dirt drive and parked my truck in the trees and walked behind his house. He was drinking bottled beer in his undershirt on the cement pad that served as a back porch, his knees crossed, a pork roast hissing on a rotisserie barbecue pit. Rufus’s shoulders were as smooth as stone, olive with tan, a gold and red Marine Corps emblem tattooed on his right arm. At the foot of his sloping yard a half-flooded pirogue lay in the shadows, its sides soft with green mold.
As was his way, he was neither friendly nor unfriendly. My presence in his life, off the clock, had no more significance than the whir of cars out on the state highway. A brunette woman with unbrushed hair, in cutoff blue jeans, came outside, set a small table with wood salad bowls and plates, and never looked at me. Nor did he attempt to introduce her.