“About what?”
I glanced at the girls. “A serious matter.”
“Y’all go he’p your mama,” he said.
His house looked like a boxcar, a poorer version of mine, set up on cinder blocks. The girls went up the wooden steps and let the screen slam behind them.
“You’re from the agency?” he said.
“What agency?”
“The bill-collection one.”
“No, I’m not.”
He looked at nothing. “You’re him, ain’t you?”
“I don’t know who ‘him’ is.”
“The husband of the woman in the accident.”
“Yes, that’s who I am.”
“What you want wit’ me?”
“You know who Tony Nemo is?”
“Who?”
“You may not know him, but he knows you. He says you ran over a child in Alabama.”
“That’s a damn lie.”
“It didn’t happen?”
“I got a DWI for driving drunk in a school zone there. I didn’t hurt nobody. I don’t drink no more, either.”
“But you were driving faster than forty-five when you hit my wife, weren’t you?”
Through the screen, I could see his wife and children staring at us. These were people for whom bad luck was not an abstraction but a constant; a knock on the door, a puff of wind, and their lives could be up the spout.
“You always got your eye on the speedometer when you’re driving at night?” he said. “I think I was driving forty-five. I cain’t say for sure. She come out of the dark.”
“Her lights weren’t on?”
He tried to hold his eyes on mine. “I cain’t remember.”
“Your lawyer told you to say that?”
“Suh?”
“You heard me.”
His expression turned into a pout, like a child’s. “I ain’t got nothing else to say.”
“I hear you tried to pump State Farm.”
“I missed eight days of work. Who’s gonna pay for that? You?”
“My wife was a nun in Central America,” I said.
His mouth moved, but no sound came out.
“She was a former sister. She devoted her life to helping the poor.”
“She’s a farmer—?”
How do you get angry at a man who cannot understand or speak his own language?
“If you were me, what would you do, Mr. Dartez? What would you feel?”
There was a big thickly leafed shade tree by his garage. It was filled with wind, its leaves dark green against an orange sun. He stared at it as though he wanted to hide inside its branches. “This guy you call Tony? He’s a dago gangster you using to scare me?”
“How do you know he’s a gangster?”
“I know what goes on.”
“I’m telling you he took an interest in you. I’m not sure why. I told him to butt out. I’m telling you to learn who your friends are.”
“You’re my friend? A man who comes to my house and scares my wife and children?”
I stepped closer to him. I couldn’t help my feelings, the surge of bile in my stomach, the visceral disgust I felt for his ignorance, my desire to do things with my fists that were ultimately a confession of defeat. He stepped back. “My old lady is calling the cops.”
The wind shifted. I could smell his odor, the barbecue smoke on his skin, the grease in his hair. “You lied to the state trooper. Until you admit your part in the accident, you’ll never have peace.”
“I’m sorry your wife is dead. She come at me. I didn’t do nothing wrong. If you won’t accept that, go fuck yourself.”
“You had your warning,” I said.
“My family heard that. What’s the sheriff gonna say if I call him and tell him that? Answer me that. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Fuck you twice.”
I walked away, the sugarcane fields and the horizon tilting, my long-sleeve white shirt peppered with sweat, a war taking place in my chest that I knew I would never win.
Clete had two offices, one in New Orleans, one in New Iberia. When he worked out of his New Iberia office, he rented a cottage at the Teche Motel on East Main, down the bayou from my house. When I woke Sunday morning, there were clouds of thick white fog bumping against the tree trunks in the backyard, like cotton on the floor of a gin. I saw a raccoon on top of Tripod’s hutch, its coat shiny with dew. I went to the back door and looked through the screen. The coon had climbed into an oak tree and was looking at me from atop a limb. I pushed open the screen. “Tripod?”
Then he was gone. I went outside in my pajamas and slippers and looked up at the branches but saw no sign of him. I went back inside and dressed and ate breakfast and went to Mass at St. Edward’s. When I returned home, Clete’s metallic-purple Cadillac was parked in the driveway, the top up, his stocking feet sticking out the back window. He was asleep on the backseat with a pillow over his face. He smelled like a beer truck.
I went inside and made coffee and warmed a pan of milk and put four cinnamon rolls in the oven, then went into the backyard again and looked for the coon. Tripod had died years ago, but I often dreamed of him in my sleep, as I did my other pets, and I wondered if animals, like people I’ve known, have ways of contacting us again. A half hour later, Clete came through the back door, his face wrinkled on one side by the pillow, his eyes bleary.
“You just hit town?” I said.
“I’m not sure what I did. I was drinking Jack with a beer back in Morgan City, then my lights went out. You got a beer?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll drink kerosene if you’ve got it.” He sat down at the breakfast table. He was wearing his porkpie hat and the long-sleeve tropical shirt he had bought in Miami. “You got any uppers?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“You want me to go?”
“No, I fixed you some breakfast. Just don’t get sick on the floor.”
“Something weird happened yesterday. I was trying to think my way through it. That’s why I was drinking depth charges. You know, when you’re arguing with yourself and wondering if you’re letting somebody work your crank. My head feels like a basketball.”
“What are we talking about, Clete?”
“That douchebag called me.”
“Which douchebag?”
“The one who tried to evict me — Jimmy Nightingale. He says we can work out my problem on the reverse mortgage. I can refinance and let his company have a quarter-acre lot I own in Biloxi. He’ll also introduce me to a stockbroker who’ll let me buy some surefire winners on the margin. I asked him why he was doing all this. He says because you talked to him.”
“I did.”
“You don’t think he’s trying to shaft me?”
“He wants me to introduce him to Levon Broussard.”
Clete looked blank for a moment. “The writer who’s got the wife with outstanding bongos? She jogged by my office a couple of times. I hear she’s nuts.”
“Has anyone ever used the term ‘arrested development’ to you?”
“Yeah, the marriage counselor who was screwing my ex while he was counseling us. You think I should take the deal?”
“What’ll happen if you don’t?”
“The guys I owe in Vegas and Reno are real shitheads. Guys I used to work with. Use your imagination.”
“I have thirty thousand at Vanguard. You can have it.”
“That would be like putting a bicycle patch on the rip in the Titanic.”
I placed the rolls on a plate and set them and a butter dish and a cup of coffee and milk on the table. “Eat up.”
“You’re the best, noble mon,” he replied.
No, Clete was. But no one would ever convince him of that.
Clete checked in to his cottage at the Teche Motel, and I called the home of Levon Broussard and his wife, Rowena. Levon had been on the New York Times bestseller lists for twenty years, and Rowena’s raw-edged paintings and photography were loved by many people in need of a cause and a banner. The only reason I had been given their private number was Levon’s admiration for the novels by my daughter, Alafair. The couple lived up the bayou from me in a spacious home built of teardown South Carolina brick, with floor-to-ceiling windows and ventilated green storm shutters and a wide gallery. The house stayed in almost permanent shadow inside a half-dozen live oaks hung with Spanish moss.