“There he is, Esau,” Daddy mouthed to me, his breath sweet with venison jerky. He smiled that crooked hound-dog grin and motioned with his rifle. The buck was looking the other way, but I believe I could have stared at his innocent, pure-souled face and popped the trigger anyway, Bambi eyes or no. All I saw was Daddy smoking a pipe in the den and pointing to the antlers on the wall and saying “my youngest brought that one down, summer seventy-eight.” My volley was high, probably wide too but I took no notice. My first thought was that the gun had misfired and the round had exploded in the chamber. I dropped the rifle in shock at the sting of my hands while the echo of the shot — BLAM — bounced inside my brain from lobe to lobe.
“Dern,” said Daddy soon as he realized I’d dropped my weapon. He took a bead on the deer but by then it had discerned its circumstances and begun to bolt for cover. David, who had set up a 45-degree triangle of crossfire (something he’d learned as a child watching coverage of Vietnam without realizing it, he of the unexplored, deaf-mute subconscious), damn near felled the animal, but it spun on a dime, hind quarters twisting grotesquely before it camouflaged itself.
“David!” Daddy screamed. “You ever risk ruining a rump like that again, I’ll heat you up good!” He had nary a word for my high shot, and to this day I don’t know what to make of it. Did he think I could not take a licking like my brother? Did he think the poor shot simply bad luck? If David had failed to follow up an easy mark like that, there would have been hell to pay. Sometimes, at night when my brain won’t slow to my body’s fatigue level, when six espressos and three double shifts converge, I ask my Daddy why he was so light on me that day, so easy on David after he lit me afire. Sometimes I suppose he wanted us to grow up confident, be secure that our actions would meet with approval. But then I have to chastise myself for presupposing such courageous intentions upon the man who killed my own Momma.
I said all that just to say this: I didn’t take Chase’s gun for the same reason I didn’t take my rifle — too goddamn noisy. Daddy’s Colt had a silencer, the one he’d bought after that trip; bought it so I’d practice my shooting and not shit my drawers in the process.
Oil cans, stop signs, empty beer bottles, it made no difference. Sundown meant Daddy would walk the mile and a quarter home and I’d be expected to obliterate some still life. Once Daddy figured out it was the noise spooking me high and saw what I could do with some focus and a quiet piece, he bought me the silencer and the Colt was effectively mine. Among the many thoughts shaken loose in my brain as I tumbled into that camp fire a year later was: if David could still outshoot me, I’d be making him a smore right now.
I tossed the pistol nonchalantly into the trunk along with my cheap nylon gym bag which held a change of clothes and a loaded syringe. When this was all over, I wanted to be able to medicate A.S.A.FuckingP. Chase’s play-by-play told me that Gabriel Arentino would be watching the Mississippi State Bulldogs most of the night as they tanked to the U.K. Wildcats. Chase told me where and when I should be able to find my prey alone, and how I’d be able to slip out without a trace. His generous details helped fuel my suspicion that this was supposed to be his mission. The smack made me calm, and I at least felt confident that although I had obviously been set up, I hadn’t been set up to fail. After all, if I got busted, the trail led clearly back to Chase. I felt the code of the woods would let me trust him: don’t shit where you eat.
Most people who have never been there think New Orleans is fairly isolated by the Mississippi, cut off from civilization like Walton mountain before the telegraph. But the truth is that I-10, running west to east, cuts through the heart of the city, providing easily two-thirds of the nation’s drug trade. Too many convenient entry points, too few patrols. I was less than ninety minutes from my sacrificial lamb, who was at this very moment most likely pressing with three sevens and a four-hand losing streak taunting him.
I had an hour to burn before I was supposed to light out, but I didn’t want to spend it at home. The horse was already starting to wear off, or else my body was so primed by the first sip it had in days that the well seemed to dry up awful early. Either way, I didn’t want to be home and sobering up and contemplating a murder. There’d been too much death associated with that house already: the fall of my honesty with Faith; the decay of my pride when I did up while watching Emily alone for the evening; the collapse of my marriage — hell, the place was paid for with blood money.
So instead I drove Dauphine to Esplanade to Ten East. I remember the first time I drove on heroin I thought it should be required medication for the elderly. I saw the other lanes, the other cars, the signals — everything — so clearly. It was too easy to understand how every vehicle operated as a component of the infrastructure, each little tin auto playing its role like tiny corpuscles in a massive cardiovascular system. You know those people on the road who anticipate changing conditions like Bobby Fischer, always four moves ahead? That’s us, baby, the hop heads, guardians of the three-seconds rule, purveyors of the stale green light.
I drove about half an hour, hoping maybe traffic would be heavy, what with it being two days after Carnival. But everyone had either bugged out broke and hung-over or they were still hanging on to the party after it should have been over, like Elvis at the end. You hear about how heroin makes you numb to the world around you, but I had never experienced that before now. Yeah sure it cost me my wife and my kid and all that shit, but through it all I was still Creole. I knew who was president and who led the NFC West and how to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Heroin was just a way to unwind, okay? But now, driving along a lonely stretch of increasingly rural Louisiana, I realized I’d missed the Mardi Gras, had no idea if there’d been calm or the cops had been uptight or the tips good or the ta-tas plentiful or any damn thing about it other than that it had been two days ago, which meant Sunday was Lent.
I could hear the second syringe calling me from the trunk. It’s odd how much honor this drug has. It could taunt you, call you a cock-sucking mother-fucker and cut a two-inch notch in your pee hole and you’d thank it politely and invite it into your home and not even ask it to wipe its feet. But it doesn’t. It just gently reminds you — doesn’t even nag, just nudges a recollection — that you need it. And then it goes to work. Heroin is the June Cleaver of narcotics.
I didn’t want to answer that call, not ’til the deed was done, and since I was still way ahead of schedule, I pulled off at a truck stop in Alton. The sign from the highway said simply “Gas” but I knew that on Ten, outside the city limits “gas” meant “Diner.”
I expected three or four greasy spoons duking it out by the town’s only red light, where every night the people gave thanks that the state legislature had seen fit to bless their small marsh with an exit. But I was disappointed to find only one truck stop and it was beside only a flashing yellow. It didn’t have a name, or not one that was posted. But in a tiny Southeast borough off the interstate, the only sign you need is a couple of rigs in your lot and a red and white “OPEN” in your glass door. Even the parking lot was paved, not dirt, so the stereotypical dust failed to envelop my car as I braked and lumbered out.
Inside, the rebellion continued. Couldn’t these people see I was a junkie just off a jones about to commit an abominably immoral act; didn’t they know I needed a little stability from the outside world while the chaotic vortex of my inner one whirled destructively faster? No tin sounding radio playing Merle Haggard tunes in mono, no stuffed armadillos on the counter tops, and the waitress neither had high-hair nor chewed gum. And her name tag had the audacity to read “Patricia.” Not Linda Lou or Tammi with an i, just plain vanilla, waspy Patricia. I immediately dubbed her “Patsy” and felt a little better about the situation.