I woke with a jerk, a weight like an anvil on my chest, pushing me into a dark pool.
“Hey,” Clete said. “You’re having a dream. Wake up.”
I held my head. I looked at my watch. I’d been asleep fifteen minutes. I didn’t know where I was.
“Must have been a whameroo,” Clete said.
I looked at Homer and tried to shake the train from my mind. He had put on weight, the right kind. His hair was long and straight, mahogany-colored like an Indian’s, his skin coppery, his eyes blue. I had the feeling he would be a tall boy, maybe a soldier, an underwater welder, a chopper pilot flying out to the rigs, but something out of the ordinary, something that required courage and paying dues. The restoration of his life was due to one man only, and that was Clete Purcel.
Homer was holding a huge mud cat on a stringer that was wrapped around his wrist.
“Is that yours or Clete’s?” I said.
“I caught it on a throw line with a piece of liver,” he said.
“You know how to skin one without getting spiked?”
“Yes, sir.”
I opened my Swiss Army knife and handed it to him backward.
“I don’t have no pliers,” he said.
“Any pliers,” Clete said.
“Any pliers,” Homer repeated.
“They’re in the tackle box,” Clete said. “There’s a nail on that gum tree by the water.”
We waited until Homer was out of earshot.
“Something happen?” Clete said.
I told him about the shooting at Labiche’s house. He listened quietly, showing no expression. Then he said, “It sounds like our guy lost his Kool-Aid. That is, if it’s the nutcase who steals ice cream trucks.”
“It’s got to be the same guy. He just got sloppy.”
“Like he’s losing control?” Clete said.
“That’s my guess. Sherry Picard was at the house this morning.”
“What for?”
“She didn’t know where you were. She also said some cops in Jeff Davis want to screw you over.”
“With the adoption?”
I nodded.
“Maybe this isn’t just about some pinheads wanting to do payback,” he said. “I’ve been making some calls about Nightingale. That bombing down in South America he told you about? Did he give you specifics?”
“He said he didn’t see the aftermath,” I replied.
“I bet. There were more than three dozen people maimed and blinded and killed. The government burned and bulldozed their village and moved them two hundred miles away. Nightingale’s family owned the company. Did he tell you that?”
“No.”
“I’m going to fix him. I mean legit. I know a couple of wire-service guys in New Orleans.”
I didn’t reply.
“That’s not going to slide down the pipe?” he said.
“How many people cared about the things you saw in El Sal?”
He went to his boat and opened his cooler and took out two cans. He sat down next to me on the mound of compacted dirt and broken bricks. “You were dreaming about ’Nam?”
“Not directly.”
He looked around at the cabins, the pools of heat in the corrugated roofs that had been added during Reconstruction, when the former Confederate colonel who owned Angola Plantation turned it into a rental convict farm to replace the slaves set free by the Emancipation Proclamation.
“It’s still with us, isn’t it?” he said.
“What do I know?”
He put a cold can of Dr Pepper in my hand. “Drink up, big mon. Let’s take it to these motherfuckers. Whoever they are.”
High above us, a burnt-orange pontoon plane was working against a headwind, frozen against a satin-blue sky, droning like an angry bee.
We got the ballistics back late Monday afternoon. The rounds fired in Labiche’s home came from the same .357 used to kill the St. Mary deputy and the two drug dealers in Algiers.
The same afternoon Alafair came home in a huff from filming in the backyard of a plantation east of Jeanerette. “I quit.”
“Because of Nemo?” I said.
“Along with his skanks and his lowlife hangers-on.”
“Good for you.”
“But it’s Levon who disappoints me,” she said.
“You have to leave people to their own destiny, Alf.”
We were in the kitchen. She hadn’t noticed Mon Tee Coon sitting on the counter. “When did this happen?”
“I fed him in the house a couple of times. Now he pops right in, just like Tripod.”
Snuggs, our short-haired, thick-necked white cat, walked across the floor and joined Mon Tee Coon on the counter with a thump. Snuggs’s body rippled with muscle when he walked, his tail springing back and forth. His badges of honor were his chewed ears and the pink scars embedded in his fur.
Alafair picked up Snuggs and cradled him in her arms. She looked down into his face. “Want to be a screenwriter? That’s what I thought. You wouldn’t touch Hollywood with your bare seat.”
“You told Tony Nemo or Levon you were through?” I asked.
“Both of them.”
“Nemo said something to you?”
“It’s not important.”
“Yes, it is.”
“He said I’m lucky I’m beautiful because my books stink.”
She focused her attention on Snuggs and jiggled his tail.
“What else did he say?”
“Nothing. He’s a fat idiot.”
“Tell me, Alafair.”
“He said, ‘I bet you give good head.’ ”
I gazed out the window at the bayou, the shadows and spangled reflections of the sun that were like gold coins in the branches, the smoke from a barbecue pit in the park, the children playing among the camellia bushes.
“I need to pick up some milk at the store,” I said. “Were y’all filming at Albania Plantation today?”
“Why?”
“I just wondered. Is all the gang still there?”
“Leave it alone, Dave.”
“There’s an open can of sardines in the icebox,” I said. “Why don’t you treat these guys to a fine meal?”
Jeanerette was a fifteen-minute ride back into the antebellum era, if that’s what you wanted to look for. Albania Plantation was a magnificent place. The live oaks surrounding it were so large that the main house stayed in shadow throughout the brightest and hottest of days. Some of the original slave quarters, constructed of logs, were still standing. I parked my truck and walked around the side of the house. The backyard sloped down to the bayou. The film crew had turned the yard into the setting of a French cotillion when the year was 1862 and the Yankees had been whipped at both First and Second Manassas and the Lost Cause was not lost at all.
The trees were strung with paper lanterns. The actresses wore hoop dresses, and the actors wore the tailored steel-gray uniforms of the Army of Northern Virginia, many with silk sashes, and the band played the songs of Stephen Foster. The dying sun seemed to conspire with an Islamic moon and light the sky like a scene from One Thousand and One Nights. The food and punch on the tables were real. Imaginary or not, the evening had become a tribute to a moment in history that would not come aborning again. The people on the lawn seemed delighted with their departure from the twenty-first century.