"Let's get it, then, Reverend," the man said.
"You know I'm a minister?" Father Mulcahy said.
The man did not reply. He had not shaved that morning, and there were gray whiskers among the red and blue veins in his cheeks. His smile was twisted, one eye squinted behind the lens of his glasses, as though he were arbitrarily defining the situation in his own mind.
"You came to the rectory… In the rain," the priest said.
"Could be. But I need you to hep me with this chore. That's our number one job here."
The man draped his arm across the priest's shoulders and walked him inside the cabin. He smelled of deodorant and chewing tobacco, and in spite of his age his arm was thick and meaty, the crook of it like a yoke on the back of the priest's neck.
"Your soul will be forfeit," the priest said, because he could think of no other words to use.
"Yeah, I heard that one before. Usually when a preacher was trying to get me to write a check. The funny thing is, the preacher never wanted Jesus's name on the check."
Then the man in the hat pulled apart the staples on the paper bag he had carried on board and took out a velvet curtain rope and a roll of tape and a plastic bag. He began tying a loop in the end of the rope, concentrating on his work as though it were an interesting, minor task in an ordinary day.
The priest turned away from him, toward the window and the sun breaking through the flooded cypress, his head lowered, his fingers pinched on his eyelids.
The parishioner's sixteen-gauge pump shotgun was propped just to the left of the console. Father Mulcahy picked it up and leveled the barrel at the chest of the man in the Stetson hat and clicked off the safety.
"Get off this boat," he said.
"You didn't pump a shell into it. There probably ain't nothing in the chamber," the man said.
"That could be true. Would you like to find out?"
"You're a feisty old rooster, ain't you?"
"You sicken me, sir."
The man in yellow-tinted glasses reached in his shirt pocket with his thumb and two fingers and filled his jaw with tobacco.
"Piss on you," he said, and opened the cabin door to go back outside.
"Leave the bag," the priest said.
FIFTEEN
THE PRIEST CALLED THE SHERIFF'S office in St. Martin Parish, where his encounter with the man in the Stetson had taken place, then contacted me when he got back to New Iberia. The sheriff and I interviewed him together at the rectory.
"The bag had a velvet cord and a plastic sack and a roll of tape in it?" the sheriff said.
"That's right. I left it all with the sheriff in St. Martinville," Father Mulcahy said. His eyes were flat, as though discussing his thoughts would only add to the level of degradation he felt.
"You know why he's after you, don't you, Father?" I said.
"Yes, I believe I do."
"You know what he was going to do, too. It would have probably been written off as a heart attack. There would have been no rope burns, nothing to indicate any force or violence," I said.
"You don't have to tell me that, sir," he replied.
"It's time to talk about Lila Terrebonne," I said.
"It's her prerogative to talk with you as much as she wishes. But not mine," he said.
"Hubris isn't a virtue, Father," I said.
His face flared. "Probably not. But I'll be damned if I'll be altered by a sonofabitch like the man who climbed on my boat."
"That's one way of looking at it. Here's my card if you want to put a net over this guy," I said.
When we left, rain that looked like lavender horse tails was falling across the sun. The sheriff drove the cruiser with the window down and ashes blew from his pipe onto his shirt. He slapped at them angrily.
"I want that guy in the hat on a respirator," he said.
"We don't have a crime on that houseboat, skipper. It's not even in our jurisdiction."
"The intended victim is. That's enough. He's a vulnerable old man. Remember when you lived through your first combat and thought you had magic? A dangerous time."
A half hour later a state trooper pulled over a red pickup truck with a Texas tag on the Iberia-St. Martin Parish line.
THE SHERIFF AND I stood outside the holding cell and looked at the man seated on the wood bench against the back wall. His western-cut pants were ironed with sharp creases, the hard points of his ox-blood cowboy boots buffed to a smooth glaze like melted plastic. He played with his Stetson on his index finger.
The sheriff held the man's driver's license cupped in his palm. He studied the photograph on it, then the man's face.
"You're Harpo Scruggs?" the sheriff asked.
"I was when I got up this morning."
"You're from New Mexico?"
"Deming. I got a chili pepper farm there. The truck's a rental, if that's what's on your mind."
"You're supposed to be dead," the sheriff said.
"You talking about that fire down in Juarez? Yeah, I heard about that. But it wasn't me."
His accent was peckerwood, the Acadian inflections, if they had ever existed, weaned out of it.
"You terrorize elderly clergymen, do you?" I said.
"I asked the man for a can of gas. He pointed a shotgun at me."
"You mind going into a lineup?" the sheriff asked.
Harpo Scruggs looked at his fingernails.
"Yeah, I do. What's the charge?" he said.
"We'll find one," the sheriff said.
"I don't think y'all got a popcorn fart in a windstorm," he said.
He was right. We called Mout' Broussard's home and got no answer. Neither could we find the USL student who had witnessed the execution of the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin. The father of the two brothers was drunk and contradictory about what he had seen and heard when his sons were lured out of the house.
It was 8 p.m. The sheriff sat in his swivel chair and tapped his fingers on his jawbone.
"Call Juarez, Mexico, and see if they've still got a warrant," he said.
"I already did. It was like having a conversation with impaired people in a bowling alley."
"Sometimes I hate this job," he said, and picked up a key ring off his desk blotter.
Ten minutes later the sheriff and I watched Harpo Scruggs walk into the parking lot a free man. He wore a shirt with purple and red flowers on it, and it swelled with the breeze and made his frame look even larger than it was. He fitted on his hat and slanted the brim over his eyes, took a small bag of cookies from his pocket and bit into one of them gingerly with his false teeth. He lifted his face into the breeze and looked with expectation at the sunset.
"See if you can get Lila Terrebonne in my office tomorrow morning," the sheriff said.
Harpo Scruggs's truck drove up the street toward the cemetery. A moment later Helen Soileau's unmarked car pulled into the traffic behind him.
THAT NIGHT BOOTSIE AND I fixed ham and onion sandwiches and dirty rice and iced tea at the drainboard and ate on the breakfast table. Through the hallway I could see the moss in the oak trees glowing against the lights on the dock.
"You look tired," Bootsie said. "Not really."
"Who's this man Scruggs working for?"
"The New Orleans Mob. The Dixie Mafia. Who knows?"
"The Mob letting one of their own kill a priest?"
"You should have been a cop, Boots."
"There's something you're not saying."
"I keep feeling all this stuff goes back to Jack Flynn's murder."
"The Flynns again." She rose from the table and put her plate in the sink and looked through the window into the darkness at the foot of our property. "Why always the Flynns?" she said.
I didn't have an adequate answer, not even for myself when I lay next to Bootsie later in the darkness, the window fan drawing the night air across our bed. Jack Flynn had fought at the battle of Madrid and at Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal; he was not one to be easily undone by company goons hired to break a farmworkers' strike. But the killers had kidnapped him out of a hotel room in Morgan City, beaten him with chains, impaled his broken body with nails as a lesson in terror to any poor white or black person who thought he could relieve his plight by joining a union. To this day not one suspect had been in custody, not one participant had spoken carelessly in a bar or brothel.