He put his hand on his chin and watched the children throwing the baseball.
"What does your bartender friend know about Romero now?" he said.
"Nothing."
"What's this guy's name? We'd like to chat with him."
"So would Bubba Rocque. That means that Jerry-that's his name, and he works at Smiling Jack's on Bourbon-is probably looking for a summer home in Afghanistan."
"You never disappoint me. So you've managed to help scare an informant out of town. Just out of curiosity, how is it that people tell you these things they don't care to share with us?"
"I stuck a cocked.45 up his nose."
"That's right, I forgot. You learned a lot of constitutional procedure from the New Orleans police department."
"I'm correct, though, aren't I? Somehow Immigration got these two characters into the underground railway, or whatever the sanctuary people call it."
"That's what they call it. And no matter what you might have figured out, it's still not your business. Of course, that doesn't make any difference to you. So I'll put it another way. We're nice guys at the DEA. We try to lodge as many lowlifes as we can in our gray-bar hotel chain. And we respect guys like you who are well intended but who have their brains encased in cement. But my advice to you is not to fuck with Immigration, particularly when you have an illegal in your home."
"You don't like them."
"I don't think about them. But you should. I once met a regional INS commissioner, an important man wired right into the White House. He said, 'If you catch 'em, you ought to clean 'em yourself.' I wouldn't want somebody like that on my case."
"It sounds like folksy bullshit to me," I said.
"You're a delight, Robicheaux."
"I don't want to mess up your lunch, but aren't you bothered by the fact that maybe a bomb sent that plane down at Southwest Pass, that somebody murdered a Catholic priest and two women who were fleeing a butcher shop we helped create in El Salvador?"
"Are you an expert on Central American politics?"
"No."
"Have you been down there?"
"No."
"But you give me that impression just the same. Like you've got the franchise on empathy."
"I think you need a whiff of a ville that's been worked over with Zippo-tracks."
"Don't give me that righteous dogshit. I was there, too, podna." The bread in the side of his mouth made an angry lump along his jaw.
"Then don't let those farts at Immigration jerk you around."
He put his sandwich in his plate, drank from his iced tea, and looked away reflectively at the children playing under the trees.
"Have you ever thought that maybe you'd be better off drunk than sober?" he said. "I'm sorry. I really didn't mean that. What I meant to say is I just remembered that I have a check in my shirt pocket. I'll pay for my own lunch today. No, don't argue. It's just been a real pleasure being out with you."
The inside of the church was cool and dark and smelled of stone, burning candles, water, and incense. Through the side door I could see the enclosed garden where, as a child, I used to line up with the other children before we made the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. It was sunny in the garden, and the St. Augustine grass was green and clipped, and the flower beds were full of yellow and purple roses. At the head of the garden, shaded by a rain tree with bloodred blooms on it, was a rock grotto with a waterfall at the bottom and a stone statue of the crucified Christ set back in the recess.
I walked into the confessional and waited for the priest to slide back the small wooden door in the partition. I had known him for twenty-five years, and I trusted his working-class instincts and forgave him his excess of charity and lack of admonition, just as he forgave me my sins. He slid back the door, and I looked through the wire screen at the round head, the bull neck, the big shoulders in silhouette. He had a small, rubber-bladed fan in the box with him, and his crewcut gray hair moved slightly in the breeze.
I told him about Eddie Keats. Everything. The beating I took, the humiliation, the pool cue shattered across his face, the blood stringing from the fingers cupped over his nose.
The priest was quiet a moment.
"Did you want to kill this man?" he said.
"No."
"Are you sure of that?"
"Yes."
"Do you plan to hurt him again?"
"Not if he leaves me alone."
"Then put it behind you."
I didn't reply. We were both quiet in the gloom of the box.
"Are you still bothered?" he said.
"Yes."
"Dave, you've made your confession. Don't try to judge the right and wrong of what you did. Let it go. Perhaps what you did was wrong, but you acted with provocation. This man threatened your wife. Don't you think the Lord can understand your feelings in a situation like that?"
"That's not why I did it."
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."
"I did it because I want to drink. I burn inside to drink. I want to drink all the time."
"I don't know what to say."
I walked out the side door of the church into the garden. I could hear the waterfall in the grotto, and the odor of the yellow and purple roses and the red flowers on the rain tree was heavy and sweet in the warm, enclosed air. I sat on the stone bench by the grotto and stared at the tops of my shoes.
Later I found Annie weeding the vegetable garden behind our old smokehouse. She was barefoot and wore blue jeans and a denim shirt with no sleeves. She was on her hands and knees in the row, and she pulled the weeds from between the tomato plants and dropped them into a bucket. Her face was hot with her work. I had told her that morning in bed about Eddie Keats. She had said nothing in reply, but had merely gone into the kitchen and started breakfast.
"I think maybe you should go visit your family in Kansas and take Alafair along," I said. I had a glass of iced tea in my hand.
"Why?" She didn't look up.
"That guy Keats."
"You think he's going to come around?"
"I don't know. Sometimes when you bash his kind hard enough, they stay away from you. But then sometimes you can't tell. There's no point in taking chances."
She dropped a handful of weeds into the bucket and stood up from her work. There was a smear of dirt and perspiration on her forehead. I could smell the hot, dusky odor of the tomato plants in the sunlight.
"Why didn't you think of that earlier?" she said. She looked straight ahead.
"Maybe I made a mistake. I still want you and Alafair to go to Kansas."
"I don't want to sound melodramatic, Dave. But I don't make decisions in my life or my family's because of people like this."
"Annie, this is serious."
"Of course it is. You're trying to be a rogue cop of some kind, and at the same time you have a family. So you'd like to get one part of the problem out of Louisiana."
"At least give it some thought."
"I already did. This morning, for about five seconds. Forget it," she said, and walked to the coulee with the weed-filled bucket and shook the weeds down the bank.
When she came back she continued to look at me seriously, then suddenly she laughed.
"Dave, you're just too much," she said. "At least you could offer us Biloxi or Galveston. You remember what you said about Kansas when you visited there? 'This is probably the only place in the United States that would be improved by nuclear war.' And now you'd like to ship me back there?"
"All right, Biloxi."
"No deal, baby love." She walked toward the shade of the backyard, the bucket brushing back and forth against her pants leg.
That evening we went to a fais dodo in St. Martinville. The main street was blocked off for the dancers, and an Acadian string band and a rock 'n' roll group took turns playing on a wooden platform set back against Bayou Teche. The tops of the trees were green against the lavender and pink light in the sky, and the evening breeze blew through the oaks in the churchyard where Evangeline and her lover were buried. For some reason the rock 'n' roll music in southern Louisiana has never changed since the 1950s. It still sounds like Jimmie Reed, Fats Domino, Clifton Chenier, and Albert Amnions. I sat at a wooden table not far from the bandstand, with a paper plate of rice and red beans and fried sac-a-lait, and watched the dancers and listened to the music while Annie took Alafair down the street to find a rest room.