"You're buying unregistered guns?" I said.
"You want to hear me or not?… So he go, 'Willie, in your line of work, you don't need no cold piece.'
"I go, 'This ain't for work. I got in bad wit' some local guys, maybe you heard. But I ain't got no money right now, so I need you to front me the piece.'
"He say, 'You feeling some heat from somewhere, Breeze?' And he say it wit' this smart-ass grin on his face.
"I say, 'Yeah, wit' the same dudes who freeze-wrapped your brother's parts in his own butcher shop. I hear they drank eggnog while he was spinning round over their heads.'
"He say, 'Well, my brother had some sexual problems that got him into trouble. But it ain't Italians you got to worry about. The word is some peckerwoods got a contract to do a black blabbermouth in New Iberia. I just didn't know who it was.'
"I say, 'Blabbermouth, huh?'
"He go, 'You was ripping off the Giacanos and selling their own VCRs back to them? Then you snitch them off and come to New Orleans figuring somebody's gonna front you a piece? Breeze, nothing racial meant, but you people ought to stick to pimping and dealing rock'."
"Who are these peckerwoods?" I asked.
"When I tole you the story about me and Ida, about how she wrapped that chain round her t'roat and drowned herself, I left somet'ing out."
"Oh?"
"A year after Ida died, I was working at the Terrebonne cannery, putting up sweet potatoes. Harpo Delahoussey run the security there for Mr. Terrebonne. We come to the end of the season and the cannery shut down, just like it do every winter, and everybody got laid off. So we went on down to the unemployment office and filed for unemployment insurance. Shouldn't have been no problem.
"Except three weeks go by and the state sends us a notice we ain't qualified for no checks 'cause we cannery workers, and 'cause the cannery ain't open, we ain't available to work.
"I went on down to see Mr. Terrebonne, but I never got past Harpo Delahoussey. He's sitting there at a big desk wit' his foot in the wastebasket, sticking a po'boy sandwich in his mout'. He go, 'It's been explained to you, Willie. Now, you don't want wait round here till next season, you go on down to New Orleans, get you a job, try to stay out of trouble for a while. But don't you come round here bothering Mr. Terrebonne. He been good to y'all.'
"'Bout a week later they was a big fire at the cannery. You could smell sweet potatoes burning all the way down to Morgan City. Harpo Delahoussey jumped out a second-story window wit' his clothes on fire. He'da died if he hadn't landed in a mud puddle."
"You set it?"
"Harpo Delahoussey had a nephew wit' his name. He use to be a city po-liceman in Franklin. Everybody called him Li'l Harpo."
"You think this is one of the peckerwoods?"
"Why else I'm telling you all this? Look, I ain't running no more."
"I think you're living inside your head too much, Breeze. The Giacanos use mechanics out of Miami or Houston."
"Jimmy Fig tole me I was a dumb nigger ought to be pimping and selling crack. What you saying ain't no different. I feel bad I come here."
He got up and walked down the dock toward his truck. He passed two white fishermen who were just arriving, their rods and tackle boxes gripped solidly in their hands. They walked around him, then glanced over their shoulders at his back.
"That boy looks like his old lady just cut him off," one of them said to me, grinning.
"We're not open yet," I said, and went inside the bait shop and latched the screen behind me.
EIGHT
YOU READ THE JACKET ON a man like Swede Boxleiter and dismiss him as one of those genetically defective creatures for whom psychologists don't have explanations and let it go at that.
Then he does or says something that doesn't fit the pattern, and you go home from work with boards in your head.
Early Monday morning I called Cisco Flynn's home number and got his answering service. An hour later he returned my call.
"Why do you want Swede's address? Leave him alone," he said.
"He's blackmailing you, isn't he?"
"I remember now. You fought Golden Gloves. Too many shots to the head, Dave."
"Maybe Helen Soileau and I should drop by the set again and talk to him there."
BOXLEITER LIVED IN A triplex built of green cinder blocks outside St. Martinville. When I turned into his drive he was throwing a golf ball against the cement steps on the side of the building, ricocheting it off two surfaces before he retrieved it out of the air again, his hand as fast as a snake's head, click-click, click-click, click-click. He wore blue Everlast boxing trunks and a gauzy see-through black shirt and white high-top gym shoes and leather gloves without fingers and a white bill cap that covered his shaved and stitched head like an inverted cook pan. He glanced at me over his shoulder, then began throwing the ball again.
"The Man," he said. The back yard had no grass and lay in deep shade, and beyond the tree trunks the bayou shimmered in the sunlight.
"I thought we'd hear from you," I said.
"How's that?"
"Civil suit, brutality charges, that kind of stuff."
"Can't ever tell."
"Give the golf game a break a minute, will you?"
His eyes smiled at nothing, then he flipped the ball out into the yard and waited, his sunken cheeks and small mouth like those of a curious fish.
"I couldn't figure the hold you had on Cisco," I said. "But it's that photo that began Megan's career, the one of the black man getting nailed in the storm drain, isn't it? You told the cops where he was coming out. Her big break was based on a fraud that cost a guy his life."
He cleaned an ear with his little finger, his eyes as empty of thought as glass.
"Cisco is my friend. I wouldn't hurt him for any reason in the world. Somebody try to hurt him, I'll cut them into steaks."
"Is that right?"
"You want to play some handball?"
"Handball?"
"Yeah, against the garage."
"No, I-"
"Tell the dyke I got no beef. I just didn't like the roust in front of all them people."
"Tell the dyke? You're an unusual man, Swede."
"I heard about you. You were in Vietnam. Anything on my sheet you probably did in spades."
Then, as though I were no longer there, he did a handstand in the yard and walked on stiffened arms through the shade, the bottoms of his gym shoes extended out like the shoulders of a man with no head.
CLETE PURCEL SAT IN the bow of the outboard and drained the foam out of a long-necked bottle of beer. He cast his Rapala between two willow trees and retrieved it back toward him, the sides of the lure flashing just below the surface. The sun was low on the western horizon and the canopy overhead was lit with fire, the water motionless, the mosquitoes starting to form in clouds over the islands of algae that extended out from the flooded cypress trunks.
A bass rose from the silt, thick-backed, the black-green dorsal fin glistening when it broke the water, and knocked the Rapala into the air without taking the treble hook. Clete set his rod on the bow and slapped the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm.
"So this guy Cool Breeze is telling you a couple of crackers got the whack on him? One of them is maybe the guy who did these two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?" he said.
"Yeah, that's about it."
"But you don't buy it?"
"When did the Giacanos start using over-the-hill peckerwoods for button men?"
"I wouldn't mark it off, mon. This greaseball in Igor's was complaining to me about how the Giacano family is falling apart, how they've lost their self-respect and they're running low-rent action like porno joints and dope in the projects. I say, 'Yeah, it's a shame. The world's really going to hell,' and he says, 'You telling me, Purcel? It's so bad we got a serious problem with somebody, we got to outsource.'
"I say, 'Outsource?'
"He goes, 'Yeah, niggers from the Desire, Vietnamese lice-heads, crackers who spit Red Man in Styrofoam cups at the dinner table.'