“They were soldiers?” he said.
“Most of them. Maybe—”
“Maybe what?” he said.
“I killed people accidentally. Or I gave orders that led to the death of IPs.”
“Death of what?”
“Innocent People.”
I could hear him breathing against the receiver. In my mind’s eye, I saw a face with tiny nostrils and eyes that were unreadable and a mouth searching for a teat.
“You still with me?” I said.
“Then you’re not much different from me.”
“Wrong, Smiley.”
“Are you saying I’m not your friend anymore?”
“No, sir. I didn’t say that at all.”
He was silent, as though sifting through his thoughts or rebuilding his fortifications. “I’ll be close by. Maybe we can work together.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Owie,” he said.
“What happened?”
“A man just stepped on my foot. He mashed my toe. Hey, come here, you!”
“No, Smiley. Don’t do that. Leave other people alone. Did you hear me? If you want to be my friend, you can’t hurt other people anymore.”
“Fooled you,” he said. “Bye-bye. You’re a nice man.”
I wanted to smash the phone.
I hooked my boat trailer onto my truck and drove to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. An old problem had come back to me, one that I used to treat with four fingers of Jack and a beer back. I felt as though someone had extinguished a hot cigarette on my eyelids. It’s part of the pucker syndrome. Haven’t heard of it? It’s a level of anxiety you’d eat glass to get rid of. Think about a column of men going down a night trail, rain clicking on their steel pots. The trail is sown with 105 duds or toe poppers or bouncing Betties. You feel as though your skin is being peeled from the bone by a pair of pliers. You wait for the klatch under a man’s boot or the ping of a trip wire, and you fear your insides will turn to water and your sphincter to jelly. To up the ante, Sir Charles blindly fires a grenade with a captured blooker into the jungle, showering dirt and water on the canopy of trees. Your rectum has constricted to the size of a pencil head. That’s the pucker syndrome.
Clete was washing his Caddy in front of his cottage. He squeezed out the sponge and dropped it into a bucket. “You look a little wired.”
“You got a Dr Pepper?”
“Inside.”
I got one out of his icebox and came back out. I told him about Smiley’s call.
“Blow it off,” he said. “Wimple is on third base and knows it.”
“He doesn’t bother me. He only kills people from his own culture.”
“So what’s the problem, noble mon?”
“The guy who killed Lucinda Arceneaux will try to outdo himself.”
“You got the blue meanies, big mon. They go away.”
“With a fifth of vodka, they do.”
He looked at my boat trailer. “Want to entertain the fish?”
We put the boat in at Henderson Levee and shoved off. It was sac-a-lait season, the weather cool and sunny, the sky the same hard blue you see in Montana that time of year. On one flooded island, the swamp maples had turned red and the leaves on the cypress looked exactly like green lace transforming into gold, all of it infused with a glow that seemed to radiate from inside the tree. I eased the anchor down into the silt and felt the stern swing us tight in the current, then hooked a shiner on the end of my line and lobbed the line and bobber and baited hook into a cove ringed with water hyacinths.
Clete was chugging a bottle of Japanese beer, the sunlight dancing inside it.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“A Fujiyama mama I met in the Quarter. She told me she was here with a television crew, except she was staying in a dump off Airline Highway.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew more was coming.
“I was in pretty bad shape when I left in the morning. She gave me a box of Japanese booze. I told her I’d pay her for it. She said, ‘You already pay.’ When I got home, I discovered my wallet was empty.”
“When are you going to grow up?”
“What’s the big deal? It’s all rock and roll.”
I had given up trying to argue with Clete. He was unteachable and incapable of change, and probably the only man I ever knew whose innate goodness was so intense, he could walk through evil and not be blighted by it.
“Dave, here’s the long and short of it,” he said. He flung a Rapala in a high arc and watched it splash, then began retrieving it past the tip of the island, the lure swimming like a wounded minnow. “We’re different in a way you won’t admit. I grew up in a rathole in the Irish Channel. I joined the Crotch to get out of New Orleans. You grew up in a world of sugarcane fields and thousands of ducks flying over and people going to the fais do-do. That world has pretty much slid down the pipe.”
“I think I figured that out, Clete.”
“You still don’t get it. You see the oak trees getting cut down, the marsh disappearing, the trash in the water and the ditches, the politicians chugging pud for anybody with a checkbook, the ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude. But you keep waiting on something to happen that will be so bad, people will see the error of their ways and start doing things differently. Like a big AA meeting. You said it yourself: The Great Whore of Babylon doesn’t go to meetings.”
“You’re saying I want the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb to be dropped on the state I love?”
“That comes close.”
“Thanks for the insight.”
“No problemo, big mon.”
I could have gone on and quietly mocked his logic, but I was the one who had spoken disingenuously. I knew the real reason Clete had ended up in the sack with an Asian woman. The love of his life was a beautiful Vietnamese girl who lived on a sampan at the edge of the South China Sea. She was murdered by the Vietcong because she slept with a good-hearted jarhead whose father had beaten him almost every day of his life with a razor strop.
“What are you thinking about?” Clete said.
“Nothing.”
“I didn’t mean all that stuff about everything ending. It’s never the last waltz. Not unless you want it to be.”
I wasn’t listening. Through the flooded trees, I saw a glint like a reflection off a telescope or maybe a scoped rifle. Then it was gone.
“You see something?” Clete asked.
“Yeah. You got your binoculars?”
“My opera glasses.” He took them out of his tackle box and handed them to me. “What is it?”
I focused the glasses and moved them back and forth across the willows and tupelos and gum trees. “Maybe a guy.”
“What do you mean, maybe?”
Through a clear spot I could see a rotting oil platform, egrets, and a stray pelican flying low across the water, then a man standing in an outboard in the shallows, wearing a windbreaker and a slouch hat, his face shadowed. He had the butt of a rifle propped on his hip. The rifle was scoped.
I started the engine. “Pull the anchor. There’s a guy inside the trees with a scoped bolt-action.”
“Isn’t it deer season?”
“Not with regular firearms.”
Clete pulled the anchor and clunked it into the bow. We headed around the island. The outboard was gone, but we could hear its drone across the water, perhaps from a channel that led into another bay. I cut our engine. Now the only sound was the chop against the hull.
“You see his face?” Clete said.
“No.”
“Is it still alligator season?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“So don’t worry about it,” Clete said. “Right?”
“This is a fishing area, not a target range.”
“So it was a jerkoff who has his gun mixed up with his dork.”