AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I nodded and looked out the window at the tops of the trees moving in the sunlight.
"Yeah, a real high," he said. "Maybe one a guy doesn't always want to turn loose of. Almost as good as a glass of black Jack on ice with a Tuborg to chase it home. Think about it, Dave. The time to go is right after you hit the daily double."
He folded the pizza box shut and looked directly into my face. His weight made a big dent on the side of the bed. His face was as flat and round as a cake pan.
Later, I phoned New Iberia to check on Alafair, then I called Bootsie to apologize for the things that I had said to her. I hadn't changed my mind about her—if she was involved with the mob in New Orleans, she had become a willing victim—but what right did I have to judge her and wound her again after all these years? It was a difficult conversation because I knew her phone was tapped and I did not want her to compromise herself. But I did apologize.
"It's all right, cher," she said. "I haven't told you everything. Sometime I will."
I was silent.
"You came to some conclusions that most people would," she said.
"Can you come up here?"
"Anytime for you, darlin'."
"Not today, though. Tomorrow morning. I've got the bed spins now. I guess I had a big drop in body temperature out there. I don't look too good, either."
"I'll drop by around nine."
"Boots?" I said.
"What?"
"Boots?" And I wanted to ask her if she knew how it had gone sour out on the salt.
"Yes?"
"I always loved you. All these years. I never forgot that summer of 1957."
"I didn't either, Dave. Who could? You get one like that in a lifetime."
That evening I ate supper from the tray on my bed and watched the light fade above the trees and roofs of houses. Then it was dark, and when people turned on their porch lights I could see the black outlines of the palms and philodendron and stands of bamboo in their front yards, and then the iron streetcar clattering by on the St. Charles esplanade, the closed windows filled with the purple and green neon glow from the Katz and Betzhof drugstore on the corner.
I fell asleep and dreamed that I was sliding down a wave into a great slate-green trough; the horizon was tilted, the sky a dirty veil of gray like incinerator smoke. My ears were filled with the hiss of water and wind humming in a seashell. My legs were atrophied, bloodless with cold, but I knew there were makos and hammerheads turning below me in the depths, and they could find feeling and extract a torrent of color from skin that had puckered as white as a fish's belly.
I felt him at the side of my bed and opened my eyes on the pillow as though someone had clapped his hands close to my face.
"Hey, it's just me," Tony Cardo said, smiling. "I don't want to give you a coronary, too."
I pushed myself up on my arms and licked the dry welt of stitches on my lip.
"You must have some mean dreams," he said.
He wore a striped brown suit, a pale yellow shirt with French cuffs and a dark brown knit necktie, a fedora tilted on his head, wing-tip shoes that were spit-shined to the soft gleam of melted plastic. The man with jailhouse tattoos I had seen waxing Tony's Oldsmobile stood behind Tony, his hands folded patiently in front of him, his expressionless eyes never quite meeting mine, his bristle-flecked cannonball head motionless as though he were listening for something.
"I feel bad about what happened to you out there, Dave," Tony said. "You saw it coming, didn't you, and I didn't listen to you. You're a smart man."
"Not smart enough, Tony. I walked into it. I lost my boat out there, too."
"I know all about it."
"How?"
"The people on the other end. They had to dump a lot of inventory overboard. Your money with it. It was a bad night for business."
"It was a bad night in a lot of ways, Tony."
