“You’re stand-up, Sean. Nobody can take that from you. Secretly, Devereaux fears you.”
“You should have been a preacher.”
“If you have any more trouble with these guys, let me know.”
“Nope.”
“Nope, what?”
“My old man always said you got to carry your own canteen. I only told you because I thought you had a right to know what Devereaux and them others is up to.”
He lifted his line and dropped it in a different spot, his forehead pink with sunburn.
Two days passed with no progress in the bizarre murders of Lucinda Arceneaux and Joe Molinari. In fact, there was no evidence to link the two. Arceneaux’s death obviously had been committed by someone driven by ritualistic obsession, but the upside-down positioning of Molinari’s body in the fish net and the configuration of his legs could have been coincidental and not necessarily related to the tarot. Maybe the victim simply owed somebody money or slept with another man’s wife or ran into someone loaded on hallucinogens.
On Friday night Clete Purcel was knocking back shots with a beer chaser in a ramshackle black dump that offered blues from the Spheres and barbecue chicken that could break your heart, when a white man he didn’t want to see again came through the door and tried to pick up a black woman at the end of the bar. The man was unshaved and drunk, his face greasy with booze and presumption and a level of lust he didn’t try to disguise.
The bartender leaned in to Clete. “You know that guy down there?”
“Yeah.”
“Do him a favor.”
“He’s on his own,” Clete said.
“On his own is gonna get him facedown on a cooling board.” The bartender tipped a bottle of Jack into Clete’s glass. “On the house.”
Clete folded a five-spot and tucked it between the bartender’s fingers. “Maybe I’ll get time off from purgatory.”
He walked to the end of the plank bar and rested his hand on the drunk man’s shoulder. There were two blue stars tattooed on the back of his neck and a line of green tears dripping from one eye.
“Time to get some fresh air, Travis,” Clete said.
Travis’s bottom lip hung from his teeth; he resembled a fish with its mouth open. “You look like Clete Purcel.”
“I don’t believe this,” Clete said.
Two white men came through the front door and sat in the corner. Clete recognized one, a deputy sheriff out of uniform. What was the name? Axel Dickwad or something? Both were looking in Clete’s direction.
“That’s heat over there,” Clete said to Travis. “They jamming you?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Travis said. “Just bought a new car. Wanted to take this lady for a ride.”
“A ride, all right,” said the woman sitting next to him. Even though it was summer, she wore a short navy blue coat with big brass buttons, maybe because of the air-conditioning blowing on her neck. “This boy in the AB but that don’t mean he don’t like blackberries and cream.”
The two men in the corner had not ordered. The shorter one lit a cigarette, the flame flaring on his features. His nostrils were thick with hair.
“I think they’re dogging you, Travis,” Clete said.
“Only guy dogging me is you.”
“Glad you said that.” Clete slapped him hard on the back. A whoosh of BO welled out of his shirt. “Keep fighting the good fight.”
Clete went back to his shot glass of Jack and half glass of flat beer. Up on a stage a female guitarist in a purple dress sprinkled with sequins was seated on a high stool, a solitary spotlight trained on her hands and electric guitar. Her hair was jet-black, her lips covered with gloss, her nails arterial red. A scar as thick as a night crawler circumscribed half of her neck. She went into a song Clete had never heard a woman sing: I have a hard time missing you, baby, when my gun is in yo’ mouth.
Clete poured his shot glass into his beer and drank it to the bottom. He felt the hit spread through his stomach and loins and chest like an old friend putting a log on the fire. Two or three more, and his liver would go operatic. He looked at the singer’s mouth, the shine on her breasts, the way her nails seemed to click up and down on the frets. Rain was hitting on a window in back. He could almost smell an odor that was like the smell of a field mortuary in a tropical country, but he didn’t know why. You’re zoned, that’s all, he told himself. Slow it down.
He went into the restroom and unzipped and propped himself on one arm above the urinal and let go. Someone came through the door and let it slam on the spring. A shadow joined his on the wall.
“Mr. White Trash is in trouble.”
He turned around and looked into the face of the black woman Travis had tried to pick up. He zipped up and washed his hands in the sink.
“You deaf?” she said.
“If you haven’t noticed, this is the men’s room.”
“They about to take him off somewhere. When they get finished wit’ him, he won’t know his name.”
Clete dried his hands. “What’s it to you?”
“Axel Devereaux stuffed a dirty sock in my brother’s mout’ at the jail and almost choked him to deat’.”
Clete wadded up the paper towel and arced it at the trash can. It bounced onto the rim and fell on the floor. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
He went back to the bar and ordered a double shot and a longneck, ice-cold and ready to go down as hard as brass. The singer was smoking a cigarette on the stool, blowing the smoke in an upward stream. Her eyes seemed to fasten on his. He saw her lips move, as though she were whispering. He looked around the room. The wood trim was painted red. The lights above the back counter were red, too, although he had never noticed before. He wiped at his mouth, momentarily unsure where he was.
“Can you turn the air conditioner down?” he asked the bartender. “I think I’m getting a chill.”
The bartender’s head resembled a brown bowling ball that was too small for his shoulders. He dried a glass, not looking up.
“Do I need to use sign language?” Clete said.
“There’s bars down the bayou,” the bartender said.
“I asked you a question. The place is an icebox. Or maybe my malaria is kicking in.”
“Life’s a skull-fuck, then you die.”
“You learn that in a Buddhist monastery?”
The bartender didn’t answer. Clete tipped the shot glass to his lips, then did it a second time and drained it, chasing it with half the longneck. He took out his wallet. The bills in it seemed to go in and out of focus. His stomach was roiling. He knew the signs. Somewhere down in the basement, the cannon on the Zippo track had fired to life, arcing a flame into a straw hooch, the slick hovering overhead, people from the ville splashing into a rice paddy.
“We’re square,” the bartender said.
“You poisoned my drink?”
“We’re kind to people with pickled brains.”
Clete picked up his porkpie hat from the bar and put it on. “Don’t let me in here again.”
He went outside into a misting rain and the smell of the bayou. In the distance he could see lights burning in the sugarcane refinery and smoke rising from the stacks, electricity leaping through the thunderheads. A gas-guzzler was idling in the parking lot, the driver’s door open, the ignition wires hanging under the dashboard. Travis Lebeau had assumed the position, both hands on the hood, his legs spread.
Don’t do this, said a voice inside Clete’s head.
“Why y’all bracing this poor bastard?” Clete said.
“We know you?” Axel said.
“Clete Purcel. I got a PI office on Main Street.”
“So you know what ‘on the job’ means. In your case, it also means get lost.”