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The other man spoke, but his voice was lost in the rain on the tin roof and a peal of thunder.
"So you come back and do him. It's a lousy hit, anyway. You didn't say nothing about a broad," the first man said. "Sonofabitch, the truck's turning in here. I'm gone. Clean up your own mess next time."
I heard one man jump off the steps and start running. The second man paused, his feet scraped hesitantly on the wood planks, then I heard the step bend under his weight, and a moment later I could see the two of them running at an angle through the trees toward a car parked down by the bayou. With their shotguns at port-arms, they looked like infantry fleeing through a forest at night.
I raced through the front door into the bedroom and hit the light switch, my heart thundering in my chest. Red shotgun shells littered the doorway area; the mahogany foot and headboards of the bed were gouged and splintered with buckshot and deer slugs; the flowered wallpaper above the bed was covered with holes like black dimes. The sheet, which still lay over her, was drenched with her blood, the torn cloth embedded in wounds that wolves might have chewed. Her curly blond head was turned away from me on the pillow. One immaculate white hand hung over the side of the mattress.
I touched her foot. I touched her blood-flecked ankle. I put my hands around her fingers. I brushed my palm across her curly hair. I knelt like a child by the bed and kissed her eyes. I picked her hand up and put her fingers in my mouth. Then the shaking started, like sinew and bone separating inside me, and I pressed my face tightly into the pillow with my wet hair against her forehead.
I don't know how long I knelt there. I don't remember getting up from my knees. I know that my skin burned as though someone had painted it with acid, that I couldn't draw enough air into my lungs, that the room's yellow light was like a flame to my eyes, that all my joints seemed atrophied with age, that my hands were blocks of wood when I fumbled in the dresser drawer, found the .45, and pushed the heavy clip into the magazine. In my mind's eye I was already running through the yard, across my neighbor's pasture, through the sloping woods of oak and pine on the far side where the dirt road passed before it reached the drawbridge over the bayou. I heard a black kid from my platoon yell, Charlie don't want to boogie no more. He running for the tunnel. Blow up their shit, Lieutenant. I saw parts of men dissolve in my fire, and when the breech locked open and I had to reload, my hands shook with anticipation.
But the voice was not a black kid's from my platoon, and I was not the young lieutenant who could make small yellow men in black pajamas hide in their earthen holes. Batist had his big hands on each of my arms, his bare chest like a piece of boilerplate, his brown eyes level and unblinking and staring into mine.
"They gone, Dave. You can't do no good with that gun, you," he said.
"The drawbridge. We can cut across."
"C'est pas bon. lis sont pa'tis."
"We'll take the truck."
He shook his head to say no, then slipped his huge hand down my arm and took the automatic from my palm. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and walked me into the living room.
"You sit here. You don't got to do nothing, you," he said. The .45 stuck up out of the back pocket of his blue jeans. "Where Alafair at?"
I looked at him dumbly. He breathed through his mouth and wet his lips.
"You stay here. Don't you move, no. T'comprends, Dave?"
"Yes."
He walked into Alafair's room. The pecan trees in the yard flickered whitely when lightning jumped across the sky, and the wind swept the rain across the gallery and through my shattered front door. When I closed my eyes I saw light dancing inside a dark window frame like electricity trapped inside a black box.
I rose woodenly from the couch and walked to the doorway of Alafair's room. I paused with one hand on the door-jamb, almost as though I had become a stranger in my preoccupation with my own grief. Batist sat on the side of the bed with Alafair in his lap, his powerful arms wrapped around her. Her face was white and jerking with sobs against his black chest.
"She all right. You gonna be all right, too, Dave. Batist gonna take care of y'all. You'll see," he said. "Lord, Lord, what the world done to this little child."
He shook his head from side to side, an unmasked sadness in his eyes.
* * *
6
IT RAINED THE day of Annie's funeral. In fact, it rained all that week. The water dripped from the trees, ran in rivulets off the eaves, formed brown pools filled with floating leaves in the yard, covered the fields and canebrakes with a dull, gray-green light. Her parents flew down from Kansas, and I picked them up at the airport in Lafayette and drove them in the rain to a motel in New Iberia. Her father was a big, sandy-haired wheat farmer with square, callused hands and thick wrists, and he looked out the car window silently at the sopping countryside and smoked a cigar and spoke only enough to be polite. Her mother was a thick-bodied Mennonite country woman with sun-bright blond hair, blue eyes, and red cheeks. She tried to compensate for her husband's distance by talking about the flight from Wichita, her first experience in an airplane, but she couldn't concentrate on her words and she swallowed often and her eyes constantly flicked away from my face.
They had had reservations about me when I married Annie. I was a divorced older man with an alcoholic history, and as a homicide detective I had lived in a violent world that was even more foreign to rural Kansas than my Cajun accent and French name. I felt they blamed me for Annie's death. At least her father did, I was sure of that. And I didn't have the strength to argue against that unspoken accusation even with myself.
"The funeral is at four o'clock," I said. "I'll let you all rest up at the motel, then I'll be back for you at three-thirty."
"Where's she at now?" her father said.
"The funeral home."
"I want to go there."
I paused a moment and looked at his big, intent face and his wide-set gray eyes.
"The casket's closed, Mr. Ballard," I said.
