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“Which hand?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I lifted his right hand off the chair arm and snipped one end of my handcuffs around his wrist. Then I locked the other end to the D-ring on the floor.
“What do you think you’re doing, Dave?”
“I’m going to have some breakfast. I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Do you want me to bring you anything?”
“You listen—”
“You can start yelling or banging around in here if you want and somebody’ll move you to the tank. I think today they have spaghetti for lunch. It’s not bad.”
He looked simian in the chair, with one shoulder and taut arm stretched down toward the floor, his square face discolored with anger. Before he could speak again I closed the door behind me.
I walked across the street in the sunshine and bought four doughnuts at a café, then returned to the office. I wasn’t gone more than ten minutes. I unlocked the handcuff from his wrist.
“That’s what it’s like,” I said. “Except it’s twenty-four hours a day. You want to eat now?”
He opened and closed his right hand and rubbed his wrist. His eyes measured me as though he were looking down a gun barrel.
“You want a doughnut?” I repeated.
“Yeah, why not?”
“You don’t trust people, Weldon. And maybe I can understand that. But it’s not a private beef anymore.”
“I guess it’s not.”
“Who are the three guys?”
“I’ve heard the name Jewel before. In New Orleans.”
“In connection with what?”
“I flew for some people. Down in the tropics. A lot of different kinds of stuff goes in and out of there, you get my drift?” He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I never saw the guy. But you get in bad with the wrong people and guys like that get turned loose on you sometimes.”
“Which people?”
One tooth made a white mark on the corner of his lip.
“I can’t tell you any more, Dave. If you want to lock me up, that’s the breaks. I’m living in a dark place, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to get out of it.”
His face looked as flat and empty as melted tallow.
THAT SAME AFTERNOON I drove out to his sister Drew’s place on East Main. East Main in New Iberia is probably one of the most beautiful streets in the Old South or perhaps in the whole country. It runs parallel with Bayou Teche and begins at the old brick post office and the Shadows, an 1831 plantation home that you often see on calendars and in motion pictures set in the antebellum South, and runs through a long corridor of spreading live oaks, whose trunks and root systems are so enormous that the city has long given up trying to contain them with cement and brick. The yards are filled with hibiscus and flaming azaleas, hydrangeas, bamboo, blooming myrtle trees, and trellises covered with roses and bugle vine and purple clumps of wisteria. In the twilight, smoke from crab boils and fish fries drifts across the lawns and through the trees, and across the bayou you can hear a band or kids playing baseball in the city park.
Like the other Sonnier children, Drew had never been one to live a predictable life. She had used her share of Weldon’s oil strike on her father’s farm to buy a rambling one-story white house, surrounded with screened-in galleries, on a rolling, tree-shaded lot next to the old Burke home. She had been divorced twice, and any number of other men had drifted in and out of her life, usually to be cut loose unexpectedly and sent back to wherever they came from. She never did anything in moderation. Her love affairs were always public knowledge; she took indigent people of color into her home; she was inflexible in matters of principle and never gave an inch in an argument. She was robust and merry and big-shouldered, and sometimes I’d see her at the health club in Lafayette, clanking the weights up and down on the Nautilus machines, her shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face hot and bright with purpose, a red bandana tied in her wet black hair.
But she did surprise us once, at least until we thought about it. She gave up men for a while and became a lay missionary with the Maryknolls in Guatemala and El Salvador. Then she almost died of dysentery. When she returned home she formed the first chapter of Amnesty International in New Iberia.
I found her behind her house, trimming back the grapevines on the gazebo with two black children. She was barefoot and wore dirty pink shorts and a white T-shirt, and there were twigs and flecks of dead leaves in her hair.
She had a pair of hedge trimmers extended high up on the vine when she turned her head and saw me.
“Hi, Dave,” she said.
“Hello, Drew. How’ve you been?”
“Pretty good. How’s it with you?”
