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“I’ve heard you’re broke.”
“What else is new? That’s the independent oil business. It’s either dusters or gushers.”
“Do you owe somebody money?”
I saw the cartilage work behind his jaws.
“I’m getting a little on edge here, Dave.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“I drilled my first well with spit and junkyard scrap. I didn’t get a goddamn bit of help from anybody either. No loans, no credit, just me, four nigras, an alcoholic driller from Texas, and a lot of ass-busting work.” He pointed his finger at me. “I’ve kept it together for twenty years, too, podna. I don’t go begging money from anybody, and I’ll tell you something else, too. Somebody leans on me, somebody fires a rifle into my house, I square it personally.”
“I hope you don’t. I’d hate to see you in trouble, Weldon. I’d like to talk with your wife now, please.”
He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and dropped the heavy metal lighter indifferently on the gleaming wood surface of his dining-room table.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Just take it a little bit easy. She’s having a reaction to her medication or something. It affects her blood pressure.”
His wife was a pale, small-boned, ash-blonde woman, whose milk-white skin was lined with blue veins. She wore a pink silk house robe, and she had brushed her hair back over her neck and had put on fresh makeup. She should have been pretty, but she always had a startled look in her blue eyes, as though she heard invisible doors slamming around her. The breakfast room was domed and glassed-in, filled with sunlight and hanging fern and philodendron plants, and the view of the bayou, the oaks and the bamboo, the trellises erupting with purple wisteria, was a magnificent one. But her face seemed to register none of it. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, the pupils shrunken to small black dots, her skin so tight that you thought perhaps someone was twisting the back of her hair in a knot. I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in the same home that had produced a man like Bobby Earl.
She had been christened Bama. Her accent was soft, pleasant to listen to, more Mississippi than Louisiana, but in it you heard a tremolo, as though a nerve ending were pulled loose and fluttering inside her.
She said she had been in bed when she heard the shot and the glass break. But she hadn’t seen anything.
“What about this prowler you reported, Mrs. Sonnier? Do you have any idea who he might have been?” I smiled at her.
“Of course not.”
“You never saw him before?”
“No. He was horrible.”
I saw Weldon raise his eyes toward the ceiling, then turn away and look out at the bayou.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“He must have been in a fire,” she said. “His ears were little stubs. His face was like red rubber, like a big red inner-tube patch.”
Weldon turned back toward me.
“You’ve got all that on file down at your office, haven’t you, Dave?” he said. “There’s not any point in covering the same old territory, is there?”
“Maybe not, Weldon,” I said, closed my small notebook, and replaced it in my pocket. “Mrs. Sonnier, here’s one of my cards. Give me a call if you remember anything else or if I can be of any other help to you.”
Weldon rubbed one hand on the back of the other and tried to hold the frown out of his face.
“I’ll take a walk down to the back of your property, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Help yourself,” he said.
The Saint Augustine grass was wet with the morning dew and thick as a sponge as I walked between the oaks down to the bayou. In a sunny patch of ground next to an old gray roofless barn, one that still had an ancient tin Hadacol sign nailed to a wall, was a garden planted with strawberries and watermelons. I walked along beside the brick retaining wall, scanning the mudflat that sloped down to the bayou’s edge. It was crisscrossed with the tracks of neutrias and raccoons and the delicate impressions of egrets and herons; then, not far from the cypress planks that led to Weldon’s dock and boathouse, I saw a clutter of footprints at the base of the brick wall.
I propped my palms on the cool bricks and studied the bank. One set of footprints led from the cypress planks to the wall, then back again, but somebody with a larger shoe size had stepped on top of the original tracks. There was also a smear of mud on top of the brick wall, and on the grass, right by my foot, was a Lucky Strike cigarette butt. I took a plastic Ziploc bag from my pocket and gingerly scooped the cigarette butt inside it.
