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Vic Benson stared straight into my face. His thin nose was hooked, like a hawk’s beak.
“It looks like you drove up here for nothing, don’t it?” he said.
I looked back into his face. His puttylike skin was incapable of wearing an expression, and his surgically devastated mouth was cut back into a keyhole over his teeth; but his eyes, which seemed to water as though they were smarting from smoke, contained a malevolent, jittering light that made me want to look away.
“I’ve got a feeling about you, partner,” I said. “I think you not only want revenge against your children. I think you want to do something spectacular. A real light show.”
“Go shit in your plate.”
“You might even be thinking about torching Lyle’s house, particularly if you could get Weldon and Drew inside with Lyle at the same time. I suspect fire stays on your mind quite a bit.”
His red eyes shifted to the maid, her large breasts, her dress that
tightened across her rump as she reached upward to dust cobwebs off a bug lamp. He took a lucifer match out of his shirt pocket and rolled it across his teeth with his tongue.
“Fire don’t know no one place. Fire don’t know no one man,” he said.
“Are you threatening me, Vic?”
“I don’t waste my time on twerps,” he said.
THE MOON WAS DOWN that night, but the pecan trees in the yard seemed to shake with a sudden white-green light when the wind blew out of the south and dry lightning trembled in the marsh. I couldn’t sleep. I thought of fire, the vortex of flame that had swirled about Vic Benson (or Verise Sonnier) in a Port Arthur chemical plant, the sheets of hot metal that had buried him alive and branded his soul, the hateful energies that he must have carried with him like a burning chain draped around his neck. He was one of those for whom society had no solution. His life was ashes; he was morally insane and knew it; and his thoughts alone could make a normal person weep. The sight of pity in our eyes made him grind his back teeth. Years ago his kind were lobotomized.
He had nothing to lose. He was a living nightmare to hospital employees; prisons didn’t want him; psychiatrists considered him pathological and hence untreatable; and even if he was convicted of a capital crime, judges knew that he could turn his own execution into an electronic carnival of world-class proportions.
Would he take an interest in my home and family? I had no answer. But I was convinced that, like Joey Gouza or Bobby Earl, he was one of those who had gone across a line at some point in his life and had declared war on the rest of us. Whether we elected to recognize that fact or not, Vic would be at work with a penny book of matches or a strand of wire that he would pop musically between his fists. The time of his appearance in our lives would be of his choosing.
I fixed a cup of coffee and walked down the slope of my yard to the dock. The stars looked white and hot in the sky; on the wind I could smell the sour reek of mud and rotted humus in the marsh, and the wet, gray odor of something dead. A white tree of lightning splintered across the southern sky. Sweat ran down my sides. It was going to be a scorching day.
I unlocked the door of the bait shop and went inside and pulled the chain on the electric bulb that hung over the counter. Then I saw the diagonal slash across the back screen window that gave onto the bayou.
But it was too late. He rose up from behind the bait tanks and gently pressed the barrel of a pistol behind my ear.
“No, no, don’t turn around, my friend. That’d get both of us in trouble,” he said.
The light threw both of our shadows on the floor. I could see his extended arm, the pistol rounded by his fist, and an object, a sack perhaps, that seemed to dangle from his other hand.
“The till’s empty. I’ve got maybe ten dollars in my wallet,” I said.
“Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Give me a little credit.” The accent was New Orleans, the voice one I had heard before.
“What do you want, partner?”
“To give you something. You just shouldn’t have come to work so early. . . . No, no, don’t turn around—”
He shifted his position so that his face was well behind my range of vision. But when he did I saw his distorted silvery reflection on the aluminum side of a horizontal lunchmeat and cold-drink cooler. Or rather I saw the reflected metal caps and fillings in his mouth.
Then he stooped, set something on the floor, and nudged me toward the counter.
“Lean on it, Mr. Robicheaux. You probably don’t pack when you come down to your bait shop, but a guy can’t take things for granted,” he said, and moved his free hand down my hips and pockets and over my ankles.
“Look, a black man who works for me is going to be here soon. I don’t want him to walk in on this. How about telling me what’s on your mind and getting out of here?”
“Your ovaries don’t get heated up too easy, do they?” He clicked off the light. “What time’s the colored man get here?”
“Anytime now.”
“That sure would change your luck in a bad way, believe me.” Then he said, “Listen, the man I work for has fixations. Right now you’re one of them. Why? Because you keep bugging the shit out of him. It’s time you lay off, man. This is an important guy. There’s people up in Chicago don’t want him puking blood all over New Orleans because of nervous anxiety. . . . No, no, eyes forward—”
