I couldn't sleep that night. The air was breathless and dry, and the window and ceiling fans seemed unable to remove the heat that had built up in the wood of the house all day long. The stars looked hot in the sky, and out in the moonlight I could see my neighbour's horses lying down in a muddy slough. I went into the kitchen in my underwear and ate a bowl of ice cream and strawberries, and a moment later Robin stood in the doorway in her lingerie top and panties, her eyes adjusting sleepily to the light.
"It's just the heat. Go back to sleep, kiddo," I said.
She smiled and felt her way back down the hall without answering.
But it wasn't just the heat. I turned off the light and sat outside on the steps in the dark. I wanted to put Claudette and Bubba Rocque away more than anything else in the world; no, I wanted worse for them. They epitomised greed and selfishness; they injected misery and death into the lives of others so they could live in wealth and comfort. And while they had dined on blackened redfish in New Orleans or slept in a restored antebellum home that overlooked carriage house and flower garden and river and trees, their emissaries had torn my front door open and watched my wife wake terrified and alone in front of their shotgun barrels.
But I couldn't take them down by provoking a sociopath into assaulting his wife. This may sound noble; it's not. The alcoholic recovery program I practiced did not allow me to lie, manipulate, or impose design control over other people, particularly when its intention was obviously a destructive one. If I did, I would regress, I would start to screw up my own life and the lives of those closest to me, and eventually I would become the same drunk I had been years ago.
I fixed coffee and drank it out on the front porch and watched the first pale band of light touch the eastern sky. It was still hot, and the sun broke red over the earth's rim and turned the low strips of cloud on the horizon to flame; it was a sailor's warning, all right, but this morning was going to be one of the endings and beginnings for me. I would no longer flay myself daily because I couldn't extract the vengeance my anger demanded; I wouldn't try to control everything that swam into my ken; and I would humbly try to accept my Higher Power's plan for my life.
And finally I would refuse to be a factor in the squalor and violence of Bubba and Claudette Rocque's lives.
As always when I surrendered a problem or a self-serving mechanism inside myself to my Higher Power, I felt as though an albatross had been cut from my neck. I watched the sun's red glow rise higher into the pewter sky, saw the black border of trees on the far side of the bayou become gray and gradually green and distinct, heard my neighbour turn on his sprinkler hose in a hiss of water. There was no wind, and because it hadn't rained in two days there was dust from the road on the leaves of my pecan trees, and the shafts of spinning light between the branches looked like spun glass.
But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel. In my case that meant I didn't want any more damage to Claudette Rocque on my conscience; it meant no more rat-fucking, no more insertion of fishhooks in Bubba's head; the game was simply going into extra innings. It meant telling both of them all that.
I shaved and showered, put on my loafers and seersucker slacks, clipped on my badge and belt hoster, drank another cup of coffee in the kitchen, then drove down the dirt road toward New Iberia and the old highway to Lafayette. The weather had started to change abruptly. A long, heavy bank of gray clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon was moving out of the south, and as the first shadows passed across the sun, a breeze lifted above the marsh, stirred the moss on the cypresses, and flickered the dusty leaves of the oaks along the road.
I could feel the barometric pressure dropping. The bream and goggle-eye had already started hitting along the edge of the lily pads, as they always did before a change in the weather, and the sparrow hawks and cranes that had been gliding on the hot updrafts from the marsh were now circling lower and lower out of the darkening sky. Main Street in New Iberia was full of dust, the green bamboo along the banks of Bayou Teche bending in the wind. At the city limits the Negro owner of a fruit stand, which had been there since I was a boy, was carrying his lugs of strawberries from the shade tree by the highway back inside the stand.
Twenty minutes later I was approaching the Vermilion River and the antebellum home of Bubba and Claudette Rocque. The air was cool now, the clouds overhead blue-black, the sugarcane green and rippling in the fields. I could smell rain in the south, smell the wet earth on the wind. Up ahead I could see the pea-gravel entrance to Bubba's home, the white fences entwined with yellow roses, the water sprinklers twirling among the oak, mimosa, lime, and orange trees on his lawn. Then I saw his maroon Cadillac convertible, the immaculate white top buttoned down on the tinted windows, turn out of the drive in a scorch of gravel and roar down the highway toward me. Its weight and speed actually buffeted my truck as it sucked past me like an arrow off an archer's bow. I watched it grow smaller in the rearview mirror, then saw its brake lights come on by a filling station and restaurant. I turned into his drive.
Even though it was cool, the curtains were drawn on the windows and the fans for the central air-conditioning hummed on the side of the house and a couple of window units upstairs were turned on full blast and dripping with moisture. I walked up on the wide marble porch and twisted the brass bell handle, waited and twisted again, then knocked loudly with my fist. I could hear no sound inside the house. I walked around the side, past a flower bed of wilted geraniums that was sopping from a soak hose, and tapped on the glass of the kitchen door. There was still no answer, but the MG and the Oldsmobile were parked in the carriage house and I thought I could smell fried bacon. The light in the sky had changed, and the air was moist and looked green through the trees, and dead oak leaves clicked and tumbled across the grass like bits of dried parchment.
I put my hands on my hips and looked in a circle at Bubba's clay tennis court and gazebos and myrtle hedges on the river and stone wells hung with ornamental chains and brass buckets and was about to give it up and mark it off when I saw the wind blow smoke and powdered ash and red embers from behind an aluminum lawn shed in back.
I walked across the grass and around the shed and looked down upon an old ash and garbage heap, on top of which were the collapsed and blackened remains of a mattress. The cover had almost all burned away, and the stuffing was smoldering and rising in the wind in black threads. But one side of the mattress had not burned entirely, and on it was a dirty red stain that was steaming from the heat. I opened my Puma knife, knelt, and cut the stained material away. It felt stiff and warm between my fingers as I folded it and placed it in my pocket. Then I found a garden hose in the shed, connected it to a spigot by a flower bed, and sprinkled the mattress until all the embers were dead. A rancid odor rose in the steam.
I walked back across the lawn, pried a brick up from the border of the geranium bed, and knocked out a pane in the back door. I turned the inside handle and stepped into a Colonial-style kitchen of brass pots and pans hung on hooks above a brick hearth. The smell of bacon came from a skillet on the stove and from a single grease-streaked plate on the breakfast table. The air-conditioning was turned so high that my skin felt instantly cold and dead, as though the house had been refrigerated with dry ice. I walked through a pine-paneled television den with empty bookshelves and two black bearskins nailed at angles on the wall, into a chandeliered dining room whose walnut cabinets were filled with shining crystal ware, and finally into the -marble-floored entrance area by the spiral staircase.