"Back there. Against the railroad sign."
"We'll take it from here. Thanks for you help," I said.
The deputy nodded and drove off in his car.
"Shake this guy down, Cecil. I'll be back in a minute," I said.
I walked back to the railroad crossing, where an old Louisiana law-stop sign was postholed by the side of the gravel bedding. The wooden boards were stained with a dark, wet smear. I picked up pieces of glass out of the gravel and sootblackened weeds until I found two amber-colored pieces that were hinged together by an apricot brandy label.
I started back toward the parking lot with the two pieces of wet glass in my shirt pocket. Cecil had the tattooed man spread on the front of the fender of the Chevette and was ripping his pockets inside out. The tattooed man turned his head backwards, said something, and started to stand erect, when Cecil simultaneously picked him up in the air by his belt and slammed his head down on the hood. The man's face went white with concussion. Some oilfield roughnecks in tin hats, their denims spattered with drilling mud, stopped in the bar entrance and walked towards us.
"We're not supposed to bruise the freight, Cecil," I said.
"You want to know what he said to me?"
"Ease up. Our man here isn't going to give us any more trouble. He's already standing in the pig slop up to his kneecaps."
I turned to the oilfield workers, who obviously didn't like the idea of a redbone knocking around a white man.
"Private party, gentlemen," I said. "Read about it in the paper tomorrow. Just don't try to get your name in the story today. You got my drift?"
They made a pretense of staring me sullenly in the face, but a cold beer was much more interesting to them than a night in the parish jail.
The tattooed man was leaning on his arms against the front fender again. There were grains of dirt on the side of his face where it had hit the hood, and a pinched, angry light in his eyes. His blond hair was uncut and as thick and dry as old straw. Two Tootsie Roll wrappers lay on the floor of his car.
I looked under the seats. Nothing was there.
"You want to open the hatchback for us?" I said.
"Open it yourself," he said.
"I asked you if you wanted to do that. You don't have to. It beats going to jail, though. Of course, that doesn't mean you're necessarily going to jail. I just thought you might want to be a regular guy and help us out."
"Because you got no cause."
"That's right. It's called 'probable cause.' Were you in Raiford? I like the artwork on your back," I said.
"You want to look in my fucking car? I don't give a shit. Help yourself," he said, pulled the keys from the ignition, popped up the hatchback, and pulled open the tire well. There was nothing inside it except the spare and a jack.
"Cuff him and put him behind the screen," I told Cecil.
Cecil pulled the man's hands behind his back, snapped the handcuffs tightly onto his wrists, and walked him back to our car as though he were a wounded bird. He locked him behind the wire mesh that separated the back and front seats, and waited for me to get into the passenger's seat. When I didn't, he walked back to where I stood by the Chevette.
"What's the deal? He's the one, ain't he?" he said.
"Yep."
"Let's take him in."
"We've got a problem, Cecil. There's no gun, no hat, no nylon stocking. Your cousin's not going to be able to identify him in a lineup, either."
"I seen you pick up them brandy glass. I seen you look at them Tootsie Roll paper."
"That's right. But the prosecutor's office will tell us to kick him loose. We don't have enough evidence, podna."
"My fucking ass. You get a beer, you. Come see in ten minutes. He give you that stocking, you better believe, yeah."
"How much money was in his wallet?"
"A hunnerd maybe."
"I think there's another way to do it, Cecil. Stay here a minute."
I walked back to our car. It was hot inside, and the handcuffed man was sweating heavily. He was trying to blow a mosquito away from his face with his breath.
"My partner wants to bust you," I said.
"So?"
"There's a catch. I don't like you. That means I don't like protecting you."
"What are you talking about, man?"
"I went off duty at five o'clock. I'm going to get me a shrimp sandwich and a Dr. Pepper and let him take you in. Are you starting to see the picture now?"
He shook back his damp hair from his eyes and tried to look indifferent, but he didn't hide fear well.
"I have a feeling that somewhere between here and the jail you're going to remember where you left that gun and stocking," I said. "But anyway it's between you and him now. And I don't take stock in rumors."
"What? What the fuck you talking about rumors, man?"
"That he took a suspect into the woods and put out his eye with a bicycle spoke. I don't believe it."
I saw him swallow. The sweat ran out of his hair.
"Hey, did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?" I asked. "There's a great scene in there when this Mexican bandit says to Humphrey Bogart, 'I like your watch. I think you give me your watch.' Maybe you saw it on the late show at Raiford."
"I ain't playing this bullshit, man."
"Come on you, you can do it. You pretend you're Humphrey Bogart. You drive your car back to that convenience store and you give the owner your hundred dollars and that Gucci watch you're wearing. It's going to brighten up your day. I guarantee it."
The mosquito sat on the end of his nose.
"Here comes Cecil now. Let him know what you've decided," I said.
The light was soft through the trees as I drove along the bayou road toward my house that evening. Sometimes during the summer the sky in southern Louisiana actually turns lavender, with strips of pink cloud in the west like flamingo wings painted above the horizon, and this evening the air was sweet with the smell of watermelons and strawberries in somebody's truck patch and the hydrangeas and night-blooming jasmine that completely covered my neighbor's wooden fence. Out on the bayou the bream were dimpling the water like raindrops.
Before I turned into my lane I passed a fire-engine-red MG convertible with a flat tire by the side of the road, then I saw Bubba Rocque's wife sitting on my front step with a silver thermos next to her thigh and a plastic cup in her fingers. She wore straw Mexican sandals, beige shorts, and a low-cut white blouse with blue and brown tropical birds on it, and she had pinned a yellow hibiscus in her dark hair. She smiled at me as I walked toward her with my coat over my shoulder. Once again I noticed that strange red cast in her brown eyes.
"I had a flat tire. Can you give me a ride back to my aunt's on West Main?" she asked.
"Sure. Or I can change it for you."
"There's no air in the spare, either." She drank from the cup. Her mouth was red and wet, and she smiled at me again.
"What are you doing down this way, Mrs. Rocque?"
"It's Claudette, Dave. My cousin lives down at the end of the road. I come over to New Iberia about once a month to see all my relatives."
"I see."
"Am I putting you out?"
"No. I'll be just a minute."
I didn't ask her in. I went inside to check on Alafair and told the baby-sitter to go ahead and serve supper, that I would be back shortly.
"Help a lady up. I'm a little twisted this evening," Claudette Rocque said, and reached her hand out to mine. She felt heavy when I pulled her erect. I could smell gin and cigarettes on her breath.
"I'm sorry about your wife," she said.
"Thank you."
"It's a terrible thing."
I held the truck door open for her and didn't answer.
She sat with her back at an angle to the far door, her legs slightly apart, and moved her eyes over my face.
Oh boy, I thought. I drove out of the shadows of the pecan trees, back onto the bayou road.
"You look uncomfortable," she said.
"Long day."
"Are you afraid of Bubba?"
"I don't think about him," I lied.