"Just get through your hangover, Streak. Mommy's been fighting her own dragons for a long time," she said.
It wasn't simply a hangover, however. This slip had blown a year of sobriety for me, and in that year of health and sunshine and lifting weights and jogging for miles in the late evening, my system had lost all its tolerance for alcohol. It was similar to pouring a five-pound bag of sugar in an automobile gas tank and opening up the engine full-bore. In a short time your rings and valves are reduced to slag.
"Can I have my wallet?" I said.
"It's under the cushion on the couch."
I found it and put it in my back pocket, then slipped on my loafers.
"You headed for a beer joint?" she said.
"It's a thought."
"You're on your own, then. I'm not going to help you mess yourself up anymore."
"That's because you're the best, Robin."
"Save the baby oil for yourself. I don't need it."
"You've got it wrong, kiddo. I'm going to buy a bathing suit and we're going down to the beach. Then I'm going to take you out to lunch."
"It sounds like a good way to ease yourself back into the bar and keep mommy along."
"No bars. I promise."
Her eyes searched mine, and I saw her face brighten.
"I can fix food for us here. You don't have to spend your money," she said.
I smiled at her.
"I would really like to take you to lunch," I said.
It was a morning of abstinence in which I tried to think in terms of five minutes at a time. I felt like a piece of cracked ceramic. In the clothing store my hands were still trembling, and I saw the salesman step back from my breath. In an open-air food stand on the beach, I drank a glass of iced coffee and ate four aspirins. I squinted upward at the sunlight shining through the branches of the palm tree overhead. I would have swallowed a razor blade for a shuddering rush of Jim Beam through my system.
The snakes were out of their baskets, but I hoped they would have only a light meal and be on their way. I paid a Cuban kid a dollar to borrow his mask and snorkel, then I waded through the warm waves of the lagoon and swam out to open deep water over a coral reef. The water was as clear as green Jell-O, and thirty feet down I could see the fire coral in the reef, schools of clown fish, bluepoint crabs drifting across the sand, a nurse shark as motionless as a log in the reef's shadow, gossamer plants that bent with the current, black sea urchins whose spikes could go all the way through your foot. I held my breath and dove as deep as I could, dropping into a layer of cold water where a barracuda looked directly into my mask with his bony, hooked snout, then zipped past my ear like a silver arrow fired from an archer's bow.
I felt better when I swam back in and walked up on the sand where Robin was lying on a towel among a stand of coconut palms. Also, I had already invested too much of the day in my own misery. It was time to go to work again, although I knew she wasn't going to like it.
"The New Orleans cops think Jerry's in the Islands," I said.
She unsnapped her purse, took out a cigarette and lit it. She pulled her leg up in front of her and brushed sand off her knee.
"Come on, Robin," I said.
"I closed the door on all those dipshits."
"No, I'm going to close the door on them. And like we used to say in the First District, 'weld it shut and burn their birth certificates.'"
"You're a barrel of laughs, Dave."
"Where is he?" I smiled at her and ticked some grains of sand off her knee with my fingernail.
"I don't know. Forget the Islands, though. He used to have a mulatto chick in Bimini. That was the only reason he went over there. Then he got stoned on ganja and dropped her baby on its head. On concrete. He said they've got a coral-rock jail over there that's so black it'd turn a nigger into a white man."
"Where's his mother go when she's not in New Orleans?"
"She's got some relatives in north Louisiana. They used to come in the bar and ask for Styrofoam spit cups."
"Where in north Louisiana?"
"How should I know?"
"I want you to tell me everything Eddie Keats and the Haitian said when they were in your apartment."
Her face darkened, and she looked out toward the surf where some high school kids were sailing a frisbee back and forth over the waves. Out beyond the opening of the lagoon, pelicans were diving into a patch of blue water that was as dark as ink.
"You think my head's a tape deck?" she asked. "Like I should be collecting what these people say while they break my finger in a door? You know what it feels like for a woman to have their hands on her?"
Her face was still turned away from me, but I could see the shiny film on her eyes.
"What do you care what they say, anyway?" she said. "It never makes any sense. They're morons that went to the ninth grade, and they try to act like wiseguys they see on TV. Like Jerry always saying, 'I ain't no swinging dick. I ain't no swinging dick.' Wow, what an understatement. I bet he was in the bridal suite every night at Angola."
I waited for her to continue. She drew on the cigarette and held the smoke down as though she were taking a hit on a reefer.
"The spade wanted to cut my face up," she said. "What's-his-name, Keats, says to him, 'The man don't want us throwing out his pork chops. You just give her a souvenir on her hand or her foot, and I'll bet she'll wear it to church. Under it all, Robin's a righteous girl.' Then the boogie says, 'You always talk with a mouth full of shit, man.'
"What's-his-name thought that was funny. So he laughs and lights a Picayune and says, 'At least I don't live in a fucking slum so I can be next to a dead witch.'
"How about that for clever conversation? Listening to those guys talk to each other is like drinking out of a spittoon."
"Say that again about the witch."
"The guy lives in a slum around a witch. Or a dead witch or something. Don't try to make sense out of it. These guys buy their brains at a junkyard. Why else would anybody work for Bubba Rocque? They all end up doing time for him. I hear when they get out of Angola he won't give them a job cleaning toilets. What a class guy."
I picked up her hand and squeezed it. It was small and brown in mine. She looked at me in the warm shade, and her mouth parted slightly so I could see her white teeth.
"I have to go back this afternoon."
"Big news flash."
"No cuteness, kiddo. Do you want to go to New Iberia with me?"
"If your conscience bothers you, go to church."
"I have a bait business I could use some help with. I have a little girl living with me, too."
"Life down on the bayou isn't my style, Streak. Come on back here when you're serious."
"You always think I'm running a shuck on you."
"No, you're just a guy that makes impossible rules for himself. That's why you're a mess. Buy a girl lunch, will you?"
Sometimes you leave a person alone. This was one of them.
Out on the ocean a pelican lifted from a green trough and flew by overhead, a bloody fish dripping from its beak.
7
THE NEXT MORNING when I awoke, back in New Iberia, I heard blue jays and mockingbirds in my pecan trees. I put on my gym shorts and tennis shoes and jogged all the way to the drawbridge in the early blue light, drank coffee with the bridge tender, then hit it hard all the way home. I showered and dressed, ate a breakfast of strawberries and Grape-Nuts on the picnic table in the backyard, and watched the breeze ruffle the delicate leaves of the mimosa tree. It had been over thirty hours since I had had a drink. I was still weak, my nerve endings still felt as though they had been touched with lighted matches, but I could feel the tiger starting to let go.
I drove to Lafayette and talked with two priests who had worked with the pilot of the plane that had gone down at Southwest Pass. What they told me was predictable: Father Melancon, the drowned priest, had been a special piece of work. He had been an organiser of migrant farm workers in Texas and Florida, had been busted up with ax handles by company goons outside Florida City, and had served three months' county time in Brownsville for slashing the tires of a sheriff's van that was loaded with arrested strikers. Then he got serious and broke into a General Electric plant and vandalised the nose cone of a nuclear missile. Next stop, the federal pen in Danbury for three years.