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“No, that’s not what I was thinking about. You just tied the ribbon on the box, partner.”
“You mean the connection between Jewel Fluck, the AB maybe, and this racist politician? But what’s Bobby Earl got to do with your man in New Iberia?”
“Weldon Sonnier is his brother-in-law.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER we were walking under a colonnade on our way back to Clete’s office. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the air had become close with the smell of rain and the ripe fruit that was stacked in boxes on the sidewalk.
“What are you going to do?” Clete said. His face was heated from our pace.
“Head back to New Iberia and check out this guy Raintree.”
“You think that’s the way we ought to do it?”
I looked at him.
“Leave that procedure dogshit to the paper shufflers,” he said.
“Clete, I don’t think the word ‘we’ figures into the equation here.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You got a lot of help from the guys at the First, did you? You got a lot of backup when those three gumballs were trying to paint the furniture with your brains?”
We turned up Toulouse toward Bourbon. He stopped in front of a cigar and news stand. A black man was shining the shoes of a man who sat in an elevated chair. Clete touched me on the jacket lapel with his finger.
“I won’t tell you what to do,” he said. “But when they try to kill you, it gets personal. Then you play it only one way. You go into the lion’s den and you spit in the lion’s mouth.”
“I don’t have any authority here.”
“That’s right. So they won’t be expecting us. Fuck, mon, let’s give them a daytime nightmare.” He stuck a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and grinned. “Come on, think about it. Is there anything so fine as making the lowlifes wish they were still a dirty thought in their parents’ mind?”
He snapped his fingers and rhythmically clicked his fists and palms together. His green eyes were dancing with light and expectation.
IF YOU GREW UP in the Deep South you’re probably fond, as I am, of recalling the summertime barbecues and
fish fries, the smoke drifting in the oak trees, the high school dances under a pavilion that was strung with Japanese lanterns, the innocent lust we discovered in convertibles by shadowed lakes groaning with bullfrogs, and the sense that the season was eternal, that the world was a quiet and gentle place, that life was a party to be enjoyed with the same pleasure and certainty as the evening breeze that always carried with it the smell of lilac and magnolia and watermelons in a distant field.
But there is another memory, too: the boys who went nigger-knocking in the little black community of Sunset, who shot people of color with BB guns and marbles fired from slingshots, who threw M-80s onto the galleries of their pitiful homes. Usually these boys had burr haircuts, jug ears, half-moons of dirt under their fingernails. They lived in an area of town with unpaved streets, garbage in the backyards, ditches full of mosquitoes and water moccasins from the coulee. Each morning they got up with their loss, their knowledge of who they were, and went to war with the rest of the world.
When we meet the adult bigot, the Klansman, the anti-Semite, we assume that he was bred in that same wretched place. Sometimes that’s a correct conclusion. Oftentimes it’s not.
“Did this guy grow up in a shithole or something?” Clete said.
We were parked in my truck across from Bobby Earl’s home out by Lake Pontchartrain.
“I heard his father owned a candy company in Baton Rouge,” I said.
“Maybe he was an abused fetus.” He blew cigarette smoke out the window and looked at the piked fence, the blue-green lawn and twirling sprinklers, the live oaks that formed a canopy over the long white driveway. “There must be big bucks in sticking it to the coloreds these days. I bet you could park six cars on his porch.” He looked at his watch. The sky was gray over the lake, and the waves were capping in the wind. “Let’s give it another half hour, then I’ll treat you to some rice and red beans at Fat Albert’s.”
“I’d better head back pretty soon, Clete.”
He formed a pocket of air in one jaw.
“You always believed in prayer, Streak,” he said.
“Yes?”
