He looked over his shoulder. “There’s no one at the end of the bar, asshole.”
I stared into the gloom. A faux-1950s Wurlitzer against the far wall glowed on the empty stools. “So you and your dog drink up for me,” I said. “If that’s not cool, maybe you and I can stroll outside and have a chat.”
“You’d better get out of here, fuckball.”
I felt as though something had pulled loose inside my head. In AA we call it a dry drunk. The room was tilting. I wanted to break Harvey up, stomp his face and break his teeth and leave him in a ball on the floor. I wanted to fill my hand with the heavy coldness and lethality of my 1911-model .45 auto. I walked unsteadily out of the lounge and kept going bareheaded in the rain to the town square and the great spreading live oak on Bayou Teche, where some claimed to have seen Evangeline waiting for her lover. The bayou was at high tide, the tops of the elephant ears floating like a green carpet at the edge of the banks. Above my head, the enormous sheltering limbs of the oak, scaled with lichen as coarse as a dragon’s hide, seemed to reach into the clouds and the stars and rain like a conduit into both the past and endless black space.
It was under this tree, at age nineteen, that I first kissed Bootsie Mouton. Later that same evening, in a rain just like this one, we lost our virginity on top of an inflated rubber cushion in a boathouse on the bayou while hailstones clattered on the roof. After the murder of my wife, Annie, Bootsie and I married, but I lost her to lupus. Then Molly’s life was taken by a benighted, ignorant man who rounded a curve on squealing tires with the joy of a Visigoth smashing works of art in a cathedral.
I watched the bayou rise and the ducks huddling in the cattails and the steam rising off the graves in the cemetery between the great oak and a church built in 1836. But the past is the past, and you don’t get it back. Unfortunately, I’ve never learned that lesson. Maybe no one does. Or maybe you have to murder your heart in order to extract yourself from your own memories. If that’s the case, I’ve never had the courage.
I knew where I was going. Even before I went to the lounge, I knew. Maybe it was wrong and I’ll be judged for it. But the world I came from is dead and the land I’ve loved all my life is strewn with litter and our water is polluted and our principles are for sale. At least these are the things I told myself as I walked through the rain to Bella Delahoussaye’s house.
It took her a long time to answer the door. She was wearing hoop earrings, and her hair was tied on top of her head. “You look like you went down with the ship.”
“The ship wouldn’t have me.”
She studied my face. “I ain’t no Polk Salad Annie, baby.”
“I believe you.”
“Ain’t got nothing to offer you but the blues.”
“That would be more than enough,” I said.
She hooked her finger into my shirt and raised her face to mine, her lips parting.
Chapter Twenty-One
I woke on the couch at four in the morning. The rain was sluicing off the roof. Bella’s acoustic guitar was propped facedown on a stuffed chair. Her bedroom door was open. She was sleeping on her side, the covers half on the floor.
I had dried my clothes in front of a fan and put them back on. I barely remembered coming to her house and believed for a moment that I was losing my mind. I had heard about dry blackouts but had never experienced one. I closed her door and went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. Through the window I could see the first glimmer of light in the east, water pooling in the alley, raindrops sliding off a banana frond that was bumping against the glass.
“You ain’t leaving wit’out saying goodbye, are you?” she said.
I turned around. She was wearing a bathrobe. A thick strand of her hair hung across the scar on her throat. The Maltese cross given to her by Hilary Bienville was tied around her neck. Her lipstick was purple, the features of her face like carved ebony.
“Sorry for barging in on your life, Bella.”
“Nobody barges in on my life. They get invited.”
“You’re the best.”
“You wouldn’t let me do nothing for you. You hurt me a little bit.”
“It’s not because of you. I’m bad news.”
She stepped closer and fitted her hand around the back of my neck, sinking her nails into my hairline. She kissed me on the mouth, pushing her tongue inside. Then she stared into my eyes. “They gonna kill you, baby.”
“No, they’re not.”
“You don’t get it. It’s what you’re looking for.”
“That’s not true.”
“You won’t blow out your own wick because you’re a churchgoing man. You think Mr. Death don’t know what you’re doing?”
I stepped back from her, hitting the stove.
“Stay wit’ me,” she said.
“I have to work.”
“We’re alike. You know the world ain’t real. You know what most people believe ain’t real.”
“I think you’re right.”
She kneaded my throat with her thumbs, pressing on my windpipe, her eyes searching inside my head. “You don’t need to come back. You don’t need to feel guilty, neither.”
“Don’t say that. I mean about not coming back.”
“Take care of yourself. You’re stacking time on the hard road. You just ain’t heard that ball and chain clanking.”
I went out the door and walked to my truck. The hood was open, my battery gone.
The streets and the town square were almost empty, the gutters running. A cherry-red convertible, the top up, pulled alongside me. The driver rolled down his window. “Engine trouble?”
It was Lou Wexler. His thick body, his craggy good looks and tangle of sun-bleached hair, his physicality, if you will, seemed too large for the car he drove. He reminded me of other mercenaries I had known. At heart they were secular Calvinists and believed their fellow man was born in a degraded state; consequently, they oversaw atrocities with equanimity and substituted pragmatism for compassion and slept the sleep of the dead.
I don’t know why I had all these thoughts about Lou Wexler. I was unshaved, unshowered, my body clammy, my self-respect tattered. There’s nothing like having a scapegoat show up when you need him.
“Somebody helped himself to my battery,” I said. “I didn’t know you lived in St. Martinville.”
“I rented a place just up the bayou. I’ll treat you to breakfast and we’ll get a Triple A fellow out here.”
“I’m not a member, but I’ll take a ride back to New Iberia.”
“Hop in,” he said.
I got into the passenger seat. The rain had quit, and the leather felt warm and snug and comfortable. I looked back at the Evangeline Oak and the small church and the cemetery next to it and the bayou running smooth and high and yellowish brown in the gloom, and for some reason I felt a large piece of my life slipping away from me, this time forever.
As we drove toward the black district, I saw Bella in her yard, still in her bathrobe, waving my wallet at us.
“Pull over, will you?” I said. “This will take just a minute.”
“Got a car behind me,” Wexler said. “I’d better pull into the drive.”
I looked behind us. The car behind us was halfway down the street. We bounced into Bella’s driveway. I looked hard at Wexler’s profile. He showed no reaction. I rolled down my window. Bella leaned down and handed me my wallet. “You dropped this on the floor.”
“Thank you,” I said. “This is Lou Wexler, Bella. He’s a movie producer.”
“Can I have a role?” she asked.
“Anytime,” he said.
She laughed and went back inside. Wexler backed into the street and drove through the black district to the state road that led to New Iberia. He looked straight ahead. He turned on the radio and turned it off.