“Talk to Emmeline.”
“Adios. Next time come back with your attorney.”
He stood up. His lips were gray. A strand of his hair hung over one eye. “You ever do something really bad, something you can’t get rid of? It messes up your thinking.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Hell if I know. Sometimes I think life is a pile of shit. Sometimes I feel like putting my grits on the ceiling.”
“Bad way to think.”
“I try to be the best guy I can. Most people don’t believe that. Do you sleep through the night?”
“I killed people I had nothing against, Jimmy. That one doesn’t go away.”
“Join the fucking club,” he said.
He went out the door and didn’t bother to close it. I looked at the photos of the hit-and-run on I-10. The homeless man who was killed was run over by not one but two cars, neither of which slowed down as they ground his body into the asphalt. Who were the drivers? Perhaps someone I’d meet on the street or see in church or watch sacking my groceries and never have a clue.
Chapter 11
My home group of Alcoholics Anonymous met in a small frame house on Center Street right across from old New Iberia High. Most of the regulars were provincial and decent and middle-income people who simply wanted to live better lives, free of alcohol and alcoholism. Their histories were seldom dramatic. Few had been arrested for driving while intoxicated or causing a disturbance in public. Sometimes their sensibilities were tender.
At the meeting, I owned up to slipping, or what we call “going out.” The room was dimly lit, the street empty of traffic, a freight train creaking slowly through town on Railroad Avenue. As I told the group how I had found the pirogue wedged against the dock at the foot of my property, and how I had drifted up the bayou and under the drawbridge to the bar-and-grill, I felt the oxygen leave the room. I had years of sobriety. I went regularly to meetings and worked the steps and sponsored other alcoholics, and yet I’d chosen to get drunk again and destroy not only my own life but also the faith and trust of my fellows.
Previously, I had told Alafair that I’d gone out because I’d wanted to. It wasn’t quite that simple. I’ve always believed that alcoholism and depression are first cousins. This isn’t an excuse. It’s part of the menu. No one who has not experienced clinical or agitated depression, coupled with psychoneurotic anxiety, can appreciate a syndrome that, in an earlier time, was treated with a lobotomy. It’s a motherfucker, no matter what you call it or how you cut it. There’s blood in your sweat; your head feels like a basketball wrapped with barbed wire; you’d eat a razor blade for a half cup of Jack or a handful of reds or a touch of China white. There’s another alternative: the Big Exit, with both barrels propped under the chin, the way Hemingway did it.
For me, the presences that the early Celts tried to keep inside the trunks of trees by knocking on wood always came out in the evenings, particularly in spring and summer, when the crepe myrtle and the pale green of a weeping willow seemed at odds with each other. In the croaking of the frogs, the dying of the light, the tide rising along the banks of the Teche, I felt a sensation like spiritual malaria imprisoning my soul. In an instant the sky would turn to carbon. I think that’s why I sometimes went out to Spanish Lake at sunset. I would see the boys in butternut sloshing through the flooded stands of cypress and willows, and somehow their loss became mine, allowing me to join the dead and escape the spiritual death I couldn’t describe to others.
I didn’t try to explain these things to my friends at the Solomon House meeting in New Iberia, Louisiana. As I spoke, their eyes were downcast, their hands folded in their laps. Their embarrassment and pain were palpable. I did not tell them of the blackout, because I had burdened them enough. After the meeting, they shook hands with me and patted me on the back. I didn’t deserve to be in their presence, or at least that was how I felt. I also wondered what they would think if I told them they may have been sitting next to a murderer.
On Saturday morning, I walked down to our old redwood picnic table by the bayou, where Alafair was typing on her laptop. The trees were quaking with hundreds of robins, and a blue heron was standing in the shallows, pecking at its feathers. I hadn’t intended to disturb Alafair, but she heard my footsteps in the leaves. “Hi, Dave. Just the man I want to see. I started a treatment for a screenplay.”
“Really?”
“Levon Broussard wrote a historical novel about his ancestor, a Confederate soldier who taught a slave girl how to read. It’s probably one of his best books, but no one pays it much attention.”
I knew nothing of screenplays and had not read Levon’s book about his ancestor. “Sounds like an interesting story.”
“It would make a great independent film.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I didn’t ask permission.”
“Do high school kids have to ask an author’s permission to write a book report about the author’s work?”
“It isn’t a legal problem unless I go to a producer or director with it or pretend that I represent Levon. I just thought he might be touchy.”
“Just tell him what you’re doing. If he doesn’t like it, put the project aside.”
“You don’t think he’d mind?”
“He’s an admirer of your work. He’ll probably be happy.”
“How you feeling?” she said.
“Fine.”
She searched my face. “No, you’re not. You didn’t sleep.”
“I’ve had worse problems.”
“You didn’t kill that fellow, Dave.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I know you. Your war has always been with yourself, not others. I’m going to find out who’s behind this.”
“Bad idea. And lay off the analysis, will you?”
“There are people who hate you and will do whatever they can to destroy you. It’s foolish to pretend otherwise.”
“I don’t know how my fingerprints got on Dartez’s window glass. Outside of the crime scene, I’d never seen his truck except at his house. I didn’t touch it.”
“I don’t care if your prints were on it or not,” she said. “You didn’t kill him. You get those thoughts out of your head.”
She stared at me boldly, as though words and righteous anger could change reality.
That same morning, Clete put down the top on his Caddy, placed his saltwater rod and reel and an icebox load of beer and food into the backseat, and headed for the Gulf by way of Jennings and the trailer home of Kevin Penny. The shed that housed Penny’s dirt bike was scorched by the fire I had set; the curtains were closed on the trailer’s windows; there was no sound or movement inside. Clete got out of the car and picked up several pieces of gravel and pinged them one at a time against the trailer.
Penny opened the door in his pajamas, his eyes rheumy, his face unshaved. There was a knot above one eye and an angular orange and purple bruise across his face where I had caught him with the pool cue. “What do you think you’re doing, asshole?”
“Want to go fishing?” Clete replied.
“Are you off your nut?”
“Have a beer.”
Penny stepped out on the stoop, looking both ways. He was barefoot. A young woman hovered in the shadows behind him, peeking over his shoulder.
“Where’s your friend?” he asked.
“Which friend?”
“The one who attacked me with a pool cue.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Clete said. “Kev, did I ever jam you?”
Penny seemed to consider. “No. What about it?”
“I need your help. I’m being honest, here.”