"It's very convincing."
He beat out a staccato with his hands on the chair arms.
"Will you stop that and tell me what's on your mind?" I said.
"This cat Billy Holtzner. I've seen him somewhere. Like from Vietnam."
"Holtzner?"
"So we had nasty little marshmallows over there, too. Anyway, I go, 'Were you in the Crotch?' He says, 'The Crotch?' I say, 'Yeah, the Marine Corps. Were you around Da Nang?' What kind of answer do I get? He sucks his teeth and goes back to his clipboard like I'm not there."
He waited for me to speak. When I didn't he said, "What?"
"I hate to see you mixed up with them."
"See you later, Streak."
"I'm coming with you," I said, and stuck the Hanged Man in my shirt pocket.
WE ATE LUNCH AT Lagniappe Too, just down from The Shadows. Megan sat by the window with her hat on. Her hair was curved on her cheeks, and her mouth looked small and red when she took a piece of food off her fork. The light through the window seemed to frame her silhouette against the green wall of bamboo that grew in front of The Shadows. She saw me staring at her.
"Is something troubling you, Dave?" she asked.
"You know Lila Terrebonne?"
"The senator's granddaughter?"
"She comes to our attention on occasion. The other day we had to pick her up at the church, sitting by herself under a crucifix. Out of nowhere she asked me about the Hanged Man in the Tarot."
I slipped the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the tablecloth by Megan's plate.
"Why tell me?" she said.
"Does it mean something to you?"
I saw Clete lower his fork into his plate, felt his eyes fix on the side of my face.
"A man hanging upside down from a tree. The tree forms a cross," Megan said.
"The figure becomes Peter the Apostle, as well as Christ and St. Sebastian. Sebastian was tied to a tree and shot with darts by his fellow Roman soldiers. Peter asked to be executed upside down. You notice, the figure makes a cross with his legs in the act of dying?" I said.
Megan had stopped eating. Her cheeks were freckled with discoloration, as though an invisible pool of frigid air had burned her face.
"What is this, Dave?" Clete said.
"Maybe nothing," I said.
"Just lunch conversation?" he said.
"The Terrebonnes have had their thumbs in lots of pies," I said.
"Will you excuse me, please?" Megan said.
She walked between the tables to the rest room, her purse under her arm, her funny straw hat crimped across the back of her red hair.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" Clete said.
THAT EVENING I DROVE to Red Lerille's Health amp; Racquet Club in Lafayette and worked out with free weights and on the Hammer-Strength machines, then ran two miles on the second-story track that overlooked the basketball courts.
I hung my towel around my neck and did leg stretches on the handrail. Down below, some men were playing a pickup basketball game, thudding into one another clumsily, slapping one another's shoulders when they made a shot. But an Indonesian or Malaysian man at the end of the court, where the speed and heavy bags were hung, was involved in a much more intense and solitary activity. He wore sweats and tight red leather gloves, the kind with a metal dowel across the palm, and he ripped his fists into the heavy bag and sent it spinning on the chain, then speared it with his feet, hard enough to almost knock down a kid who was walking by.
He grinned at the boy by way of apology, then moved over to the speed bag and began whacking it against the rebound board, without rhythm or timing, slashing it for the effect alone.
"You were at Cisco's house. You're Mr. Robicheaux," a woman's voice said behind me.
It was Billy Holtzner's daughter. But her soapy blue eyes were focused now, actually pleasant, like a person who has stepped out of one identity into another.
"You remember me?" she asked.
"Sure."
"We didn't introduce ourselves the other day. I'm Geraldine Holtzner. The boxer down there is Anthony. He's an accountant for the studio. I'm sorry for our rudeness."
"You weren't rude."
"I know you don't like my father. Not many people do. We're not problem visitors here. If you have one, it's Cisco Flynn," she said.
"Cisco?"
"He owes my father a lot of money. Cisco thinks he can avoid his responsibilities by bringing a person like Swede Boxleiter around."
She gripped the handrail and extended one leg at a time behind her. Her wild, brownish-red hair shimmered with perspiration.
"You let that guy down there shoot you up?" I asked.
"I'm all right today. Sometimes I just have a bad day. You're a funny guy for a cop. You ever have a screen test?"
"Why not get rid of the problem altogether?"
But she wasn't listening now. "This area is full of violent people. It's the South. It lives in the woodwork down here. This black man who's coming after the Terrebonnes, why don't you do something about him?" she said.
"Which black man? Are you talking about Cool Breeze Broussard?"
"Which? Yeah, that's a good question. You know the story about the murdered slave woman, the children who were poisoned? If I had stuff like that in my family, I'd jump off a cliff. No wonder Lila Terrebonne's a drunk."
"It was nice seeing you," I said.
"Gee, why don't you just say fuck you and turn your back on people?"
Her skin was the color of milk that has browned in a pan, her blue eyes dancing in her face. She wiped her hair and throat with a towel and threw it at me.
"That kick-boxing stuff Anthony's doing? He learned it from me," she said.
Then she raised her face up into mine, her lips slightly parted, speckled with saliva, her eyes filled with anticipation and need.
ON THE WAY BACK home I stopped in the New Iberia city library and looked up a late-nineteenth-century reminiscence written about our area by a New England lady named Abigail Dowling, a nurse who came here during a yellow fever epidemic and was radicalized not by slavery itself and the misery it visited upon the black race but by what she called its dehumanizing effects on the white.
One of the families about which she wrote in detail was the Terrebonnes of St. Mary Parish.
Before the Civil War, Elijah Terrebonne had been a business partner in the slave trade with Nathan Bedford Forrest and later had ridden at Forrest's side during the battle of Brice's Crossing, where a minié shattered his arm and took him out of the war. But Elijah had also been below the bluffs at Fort Pillow when black troops who begged on their knees were executed at point-blank range in retaliation for a sixty-mile scorched-earth sweep by Federal troops into northern Mississippi.
"He was of diminutive stature, with a hard, compact body. He sat his horse with the rigidity of a clothes pin," Abigail Dowling wrote in her journal. "His countenance was handsome, certainly, of a rosy hue, and it exuded a martial light when he talked of the War. In consideration of his physical stature I tried to overlook his imperious manner. In spite of his propensity for miscegenation, he loved his wife and their twin girls and was unduly possessive about them, perhaps in part because of his own romantic misdeeds.
"Unfortunately for the poor black souls on his plantation, the lamps of charity and pity did not burn brightly in his heart. I have been told General Forrest tried to stop the slaughter of negro soldiers below the bluffs. I believe Elijah Terrebonne had no such redemptive memory for himself. I believe the fits of anger that made him draw human blood with a horse whip had their origins in the faces of dead black men who journeyed nightly to Elijah's bedside, vainly begging mercy from one who had murdered his soul."
The miscegenation mentioned by Abigail Dowling involved a buxom slave woman named Lavonia, whose husband, Big Walter, had been killed by a falling tree. Periodically Elijah Terrebonne rode to the edge of the fields and called her away from her work, in view of the other slaves and the white overseer, and walked her ahead of his horse into the woods, where he copulated with her in an unused sweet potato cellar. Later, he heard that the overseer had been talking freely in the saloon, joking with a drink in his hand at the fireplace, stoking the buried resentment and latent contempt of other landless whites about the lust of his employer. Elijah laid open his face with a quirt and adjusted his situation by moving Lavonia up to the main house as a cook and a wet nurse for his children.