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I didn't answer. He was quiet a moment, then he spoke again.
"You want to know who set up the whack on your wife?"
I was breathing deeply now, and wires were trembling inside my chest. I swallowed and kept my voice as flat as possible.
"All I hear from you is noise. You got something to trade, get it out of your mouth or stop bothering me," I said.
"You think I'm talking noise, huh? Try this, motherfucker. You had a fan in your bedroom window. You had a telephone in your hall, except somebody tore it out of the wall for you. And while they did your old lady, you were hiding outside in the dark."
I felt my hand slide up and down my flexed thigh. I had to wet my lips before I could speak again. I should have been silent, said nothing, but the control was now gone.
"I'll find you," I said hoarsely.
"Find me and you find nothing. I got all this from the boon. You want the rest of the story, you come up with a deal that don't leave me in the barrel. You got a guilty conscience, man, and I ain't taking your fall."
"Listen—"
"No, I talk, you listen. You get together with that bunch of farts at the Federal Building and decide what you want to do. You come up with the right numbers—and I'm talking three years max, in a minimum-security joint—then you run an ad in the Times-Picayune that says, 'Victor, your situation is approved.' I see that ad, maybe a lawyer's gonna call up the DEA and see about a meet."
"Eddie Keats tried to dust you. They're going to take you out just like they did the Haitian. You're running out of ratholes."
"Kiss my ass. I ate bugs and lizards for thirty-eight days and came back with eleven gook ears on a stick. I'm buying the paper Sunday morning. After that, forget it. Clean up your own shit."
Before he hung up I thought I heard a streetcar bell clang.
The rest of the afternoon I tried to recreate his voice in my mind. Had I heard it once before, in a rumble of thunder, on my front porch? I couldn't be sure. But the thought that I had held a conversation about plea-bargaining with one of Annie's murderers worked and twisted in my brain like an obscene finger.
Sometime after midnight, I woke with a thick, numb feeling in my head, the kind you have after you've been out in a cold wind a long time by yourself. I sat quietly on the edge of the couch, my bare feet resting in a square of moonlight on the floor, and opened and closed my hands as though I were seeing them for the first time. Then I unlocked Annie's and my bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark.
The bloody sheets and bedspread had been carried off in a vinyl evidence bag, but the mattress and the wooden bedstead were filled with holes that I could fit my fingers into as though I were probing the wounds in Our Lord's hands. The brown patterns all over the bedstead and the flowered wallpaper could have been slung there by a paintbrush. I rubbed my hand across the wall and felt the stiff, torn edges of the paper where the buckshot and deer slugs had torn through the wood. The moon shone through the pecan tree outside and made an oval of light in my lap. I felt as solitary as if I had been sitting in the bottom of a dry, cool well, with strips of silver
cloud floating by against a dark sky.
I thought about my father and wished he were there with me. He couldn't read or write and never once traveled outside the state of Louisiana, but his heart possessed an intuitive understanding about our lives, our Cajun vision of the world, that no philosophy book could convey. He drank too much and he'd fistfight two or three men in a bar at the same time, with the enthusiasm of a boy hitting baseballs, but inside he had a gentle heart, a strong sense of right and wrong, and a tragic sense about the cruelty and violence that the world sometimes imposes upon the innocent.
He told me a story once about a killing that he'd seen as a young man. In my father's mind, the victim's death was emblematic of all the unjust and brutal behavior that people are capable of in groups, although in reality the victim was not an innocent man. It was the winter of 1935, and a criminal who had robbed banks with John Dillinger and Homer Van Meter had been flushed out of Margaret's whorehouse in Opelousas, a brothel that had been operating since the War Between the States. Cops chased him all the way to Iberia Parish, and when his car slid into a ditch, he struck out across a frozen field of sugarcane stubble. My father and a Negro were pulling stumps with a mule and trace chains and burning them in big heaps when the robber ran past them toward the old barn by our windmill. My father said he wore a white shirt with cufflinks and a bow tie, with no coat, and he gripped a straw boater in his hand as though it were his last possession on earth.
A cop fired a rifle from the road, and one of the robber's legs collapsed and he went down in the middle of the stubble.
The cops all wore suits and fedoras, and they walked in a line across the field as though they were flushing quail. They formed a half-circle around the wounded man, while he sat with his legs straight out before him and begged for his life. My father said that when they started shooting with their revolvers and automatic pistols, the man's shirt exploded with crimson flowers.
With crimson flowers that turned brown, that can be bruised into the grain of wood, that flake and shale away under the touch of my fingers. Because they impaled her upon this bedstead and this wall, drove her screams and her fear and her agony deep into this wood, translated these cypress boards, hewn by my father, into her crucifix.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I stared up at Robin, whose face and body looked strangely pale in the moonlight that fell through the pecan tree into the room. She slipped her hand under my arm and pulled me up gently from the edge of the bed.
"It's no good for you in here, Streak," she said quietly. "I'll fix us warm milk in the kitchen."
"Sure. Is the phone still ringing?"
"What?"
"The phone. I heard it ringing."
"No. It didn't ri—Dave, come on out of here."
"It didn't ring, huh? When I used to have the DTs, dead people would call me up on the phone. It was a crazy way to be back then."
That morning I drove back to New Orleans to look for Victor Romero. As I said before, his sheet wasn't much help, and I knew that undoubtedly he was a more intelligent and far more dangerous man that it indicated. However, it was also obvious from his record that he had the same vices and sordid preoccupations and worm's-eye view of the world as did most of his kind. I talked with street people in the Quarter, bartenders, some strippers who hooked on the side, late-hour cabdrivers who pimped for the strippers, a couple of black Murphy artists, door spielers on Bourbon, a fence in Algiers, a terminal junkie who was down to shooting into his wasted thighs with an eye-dropper insulated with the white edge of a one-dollar bill. If they admitted having known Romero, they said they thought he was dead, out of the country, or in federal custody. In each instance, I might as well have held a conversation with a vacant lot.
