THE SUN WAS WHITE in the sky and the brick drive was dappled with light as bright as gold foil. Through the cruiser's front window I saw Cisco Flynn walk toward me from a trailer, his palms raised for me to stop.
He leaned down on the window.
"Take a walk with me. I got to keep my eye on this next scene," he said.
"Got to go, Cisco."
"It's about Swede Boxleiter."
I turned off the ignition and walked with him to a canvas awning that was suspended over a worktable and a half dozen chairs. Next to the awning was a trailer whose air-conditioning unit dripped with moisture like a block of ice.
"Swede's trying to straighten out. I think he's going to make it this time. But if he's ever a problem, give me a call," Cisco said.
"He's a mainline recidivist, Cisco. Why are you hooked up with him?"
"When we were in the state home? I would have been anybody's chops if it hadn't been for Swede."
"The Feds say he kills people."
"The Feds say my sister is a Communist."
The door to the trailer opened and a woman stepped out on the small porch. But before she could close the door behind her, a voice shouted out, "Goddamnit, I didn't say you could leave. Now, you listen, hon. I don't know if the problem is because your brains are between your legs or because you think you've got a cute twat, but the next time I tell that pissant to rewrite a scene, you'd better not open your mouth. Now you get the fuck back to work and don't you ever contradict me in front of other people again."
Even in the sunlight her face looked refrigerated, bloodless, the lines twisted out of shape with the humiliation that Billy Holtzner bathed her with. He shot an ugly look at Cisco and me, then slammed the door.
I turned to go.
"There's a lot of stress on a set, Dave. We're three million over budget already. That's other people's money we're talking about. They get mad about it," Cisco said.
"I remember that first film you made. The one about the migrant farmworkers. It was sure a fine movie."
"Yeah, a lot of college professors and 1960s leftovers dug it in a big way."
"The guy in that trailer is a shithead."
"Aren't we all?"
"Your old man wasn't."
I got into the cruiser and drove through the corridor of trees to the bayou road. In the rearview mirror Cisco Flynn looked like a miniature man trapped inside an elongated box.
THAT NIGHT, AS BOOTSIE and I prepared to go to bed, dry lightning flickered behind the clouds and the pecan tree outside the window was stiffening in the wind.
"Why do you think Jack Flynn was killed?" Bootsie asked.
"Working people around here made thirty-five cents an hour back then. He didn't have a hard time finding an audience."
"Who do you think did it?"
"Everyone said it came from the outside. Just like during the Civil Rights era. We always blamed our problems on the outside."
She turned out the light and we lay down on top of the sheets. Her skin felt cool and warm at the same time, the way sunlight does in the fall.
"The Flynns are trouble, Dave."
"Maybe."
"No, no maybe about it. Jack Flynn might have been a good man. But I always heard he didn't become a radical until his family got wiped out in the Depression."
"He fought in the Lincoln Brigade. He was at the battle of Madrid."
"Good night," she said.
She turned toward the far wall. When I spread my hand on her back I could feel her breath rise and fall in her lungs. She looked at me over her shoulder, then rolled over and fit herself inside my arms.
"Dave?" she said.
"Yes?"
"Trust me on this. Megan needs you for some reason she's not telling you about. If she can't get to you directly, she'll go through Clete."
"That's hard to believe."
"He called tonight and asked if I knew where she was. She'd left a message on his answering machine."
"Megan Flynn and Clete Purcel?"
I WOKE AT SUNRISE the next morning and drove through the leafy shadows on East Main and then five miles up the old highway to Spanish Lake. I was troubled not only by Bootsie's words but also by my own misgivings about the Flynns. Why was Megan so interested in the plight of Cool Breeze Broussard? There was enough injustice in the world without coming back to New Iberia to find it. And why would her brother Cisco front points for an obvious psychopath like Swede Boxleiter?
I parked my truck on a side road and poured a cup of coffee from my thermos. Through the pines I could see the sun glimmering on the water and the tips of the flooded grass waving in the shallows. The area around the lake had been the site of a failed Spanish colony in the 1790s. In 1836 two Irish immigrants who had survived the Goliad Massacre during the Texas Revolution, Devon Flynn and William Burke, cleared and drained the acreage along the lake and built farmhouses out of cypress trees that were rooted in the water like boulders. Later the train stop there became known as Burke's Station.
Megan and Cisco's ancestor had been one of those Texas soldiers who had surrendered to the Mexican army with the expectation of boarding a prison ship bound for New Orleans, and instead had been marched down a road on Palm Sunday and told by their Mexican captors to kneel in front of the firing squads that were forming into position from two directions. Over 350 men and boys were shot, bayoneted, and clubbed to death. Many of the survivors owed their lives to a prostitute who ran from one Mexican officer to the next, begging for the lives of the Texans. Her name and fate were lost to history, but those who escaped into the woods that day called her the Angel of Goliad.
I wondered if Cisco ever thought about his ancestor's story as material for a film.
The old Flynn house still stood by the lake, but it was covered by a white-brick veneer now and the old gallery had been replaced by a circular stone porch with white pillars. But probably most important to Megan and Cisco was the simple fact that it and its terraced gardens and gnarled live oaks and lakeside gazebo and boathouse all belonged to someone else.
Their father was bombed by the Luftwaffe and shot at by the Japanese on Guadalcanal and murdered in Louisiana. Were they bitter, did they bear us a level of resentment we could only guess at? Did they bring their success back here like a beast on a chain? I didn't want to answer my own question.
The wind ruffled the lake and the longleaf pine boughs above my truck. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the sheriffs cruiser pull in behind me. He opened my passenger door and got inside.
"How'd you know I was out here?" I asked.
"A state trooper saw you and wondered what you were doing."
"I got up a little early today."
"That's the old Flynn place, isn't it?"
"We used to dig for Confederate artifacts here. Camp Pratt was right back in those trees."
"The Flynns bother me, too, Dave. I don't like Cisco bringing this Boxleiter character into our midst. Why don't both of them stay in Colorado?"
"That's what we did to Megan and Cisco the first time. Let a friend of their dad dump them in Colorado."
"You'd better define your feelings about that pair. I got Boxleiter's sheet. What kind of person would bring a man like that into his community?"
"We did some serious damage to those kids, Sheriff."
"We? You know what your problem is, Dave? You're just like Jack Flynn."
"Excuse me?"
"You don't like rich people. You think we're in a class war. Not everybody with money is a sonofabitch."
He blew out his breath, then the heat went out of his face. He took his pipe from his shirt pocket and clicked it on the window jamb.
"Helen said you think Boxleiter might be a pedophile," he said.
"Yeah, if I had to bet, I'd say he's a real candidate."
"Pick him up."
"What for?"
"Think of something. Take Helen with you. She can be very creative."
Idle words that I would try to erase from my memory later.