“I wouldn’t get carried away with that,” I said.
“Look at me.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t want to seem forward.”
“About what?” I said.
She picked up my hand in hers. “I don’t want to sit by and watch while you hurt your career. You’re doing things that make no sense, and I think they have something to do with me.”
“I’m an expert at messing up things on my own.”
She squeezed my hand, hard. “You listen to me. I’ve worked with cops who should be in cages. We can’t afford to lose people like you.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
She released my hand. “The human race. That’s what it’s about. The good guys against the bad guys. I said that to Desmond. That’s what the last scene in My Darling Clementine is about. Wyatt Earp has a higher destiny.”
“That scene is about death,” I said.
She stood up and swiped off her rump. I stood up also. She looked up in my face. “Can I say something?”
“Go ahead.”
“I don’t care about convention.”
I looked away from her, then back at her face. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t read her expression. I cleared my throat but didn’t speak.
“I don’t measure people by their age,” she said. “I think those things are stupid. Am I getting through here?”
“Yes, ma’am, you are,” I said. I picked up my hat and dumped the pecans on the ground, put my hat on my head, then removed it. “Bailey Ribbons. Did I ever tell you I love that name?”
“I think that is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me,” she replied.
I heard Mon Tee Coon springing from limb to limb overhead. I wanted to believe the natural world had given me an exemption that people my age do not earn and are seldom granted.
I had lunch with Clete at Victor’s and told him of Bailey’s visit. His eyes roamed around the room as though the earth were shifting. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
“I’m just quoting what Bailey said.”
“There are two types of broads who get involved with old guys: gold diggers and basket cases who don’t mind sleeping with mummies or guys in adult diapers.”
People at the next table turned and stared.
“Will you lower your voice?” I said.
“When you stop lying to yourself,” he said.
“She was trying to be kind.”
“What, you’re a charity case?”
I didn’t try to argue. My behavior and thinking were foolish, and I knew it.
“We’re simpatico?” he said. “All thoughts about boom-boom with the wrong woman out of your head?”
The people at the next table moved.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. I don’t know what you’d do if I weren’t around.” He rubbed his eyes, his face tired. “Know what the real problem is? You hear the clock ticking. You want to go out like a Roman candle instead of dripping into a can.”
I had just started on my dessert. I put my spoon down.
“You mentioned Little Nicky Scarfo,” he said. “There’s a guy I want to talk to on that subject.”
“Which guy?”
“Remember Cato Carmouche?”
“The midget who got fired out of a circus cannon into a steel pole?”
“Eat up and let’s boogie,” he said.
Acadiana, like New Orleans, is filled with eccentrics, primarily because it has never been fully assimilated into the United States. It’s a fine place to be an artist, a writer, an iconoclast, a bohemian, or a drunk. Some Cajuns are virtually unintelligible to outsiders, yet nurse their accent and inverted sentence structure and forget the outside world. If you wish, anonymity is only a boat ride away. The Atchafalaya Basin is the largest wetland and swamp in the United States. With the purchase of a houseboat, you can live in places that have no name because they didn’t exist yesterday and can be gone tomorrow.
Modernity has always been our undoing. Our ancestors were farmers and fisher people expelled from Canada by the British in 1755. Unlettered and pacifist in nature and unable to understand the clash of empires, the Acadians wandered for years before they found a home on Bayou Teche. Maybe for that reason, we have a greater tolerance for others who are different or who have been collectively rejected. The disposition and mind-set of Acadiana is little different from those of San Francisco. Maybe that’s why Cato Carmouche lived on a houseboat on the bayou south of Jeanerette, in violation of any number of state and parish regulations.
Most Cajuns don’t like to travel. Many will admit they have never been out of the state. Not Cato. He hooked up with a circus and became a human cannonball, until the night the cannon was slanted too high and Cato was sent flying over the net into the audience.
When he came out of a six-week coma, he discovered that his brain had taken on a facility with numbers no one could explain. He could process percentages and numerical probabilities as fast as a computer. One week after he was released from the hospital, he flew to Atlantic City. Then to Reno and Vegas and Puerto Rico. Cato found paradise in the glitter and cheapness and garish mix of fountains splashing with colored lights and the air-conditioned stink of cigarette smoke. The dice jumping across the felt, the coins rattling in the slots, the snap of a card on the blackjack table, the women whose breasts bulged from their evening gowns, the smell of fine liquor, the ball bouncing inside the roulette wheel — where had these gifts been all his life? At four-feet-one, with a scar like a lightning bolt on his shaved head, he stood or sat at the gaming tables and let the blessings of a meretricious deity shower down on him.
For the first six months on the circuit, he kept his wins low. Then he got greedy at Harrah’s and went into the Griffin Book. Not to be undone, Cato hired on with the casinos and sat with the brass and monitored the eye in the sky and identified the grifters and card counters who thought they knew every hustle in the game. By anyone’s standards, Cato became well-to-do and could have lived anywhere. Instead he came back to Southwest Louisiana and lived by himself on a houseboat painted with the green and purple colors of Mardi Gras and bedecked with glass beads that tinkled in the breeze.
“How’s it hanging, Cato?” Clete said as we walked across the reinforced plank onto the houseboat.
“It’s hanging very nicely, t’anks,” Cato said. “How about yours?”
Cato always had a scrubbed look, and took meticulous care with his clothes and hair, the part as exact as a ruler, each oiled strand a gleaming piece of wire. His voice sounded like it came out of a tin box with gears and springs inside. His eyes were tiny lumps of coal. For some reason he reminded me of Desmond Cormier, as though they shared a similar loneliness, the kind that is usually the fate of the artistically talented.
“What can I do for youse gentlemen?”
“ ‘Youse’?” Clete said.
“I spent a lot of time in Jersey.”
“We know your history with the casino industry, Mr. Cato,” I said. “We’re wondering about the funding for a motion picture group.”
“Go ahead and ax me your questions,” he said. “And you don’t got to call me mister, either.”
His houseboat was moored in the shade of an oak. A cheap rod and reel was propped against the deck rail, the bobber and line floating in an S next to the lily pads in the shallows.
“We hear Desmond Cormier is being financed by the gaming industry,” I said.
“Gaming it is not. Getting soaked it is,” Cato said.
“You got some information for us, sir?” I said.
“Jersey money is Jersey money. The tracks are full of it. Some of it is hot, some not. The track and the casino are the washeterias. I got to check my line. Then I got to shower and change. A lady friend is picking me up, if you know what I mean, no crudeness intended here.”