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nbsp; “Drew came home last night from her Amnesty International meeting and she noticed the light on the back porch was out. She went on into the house, and there was a guy in the kitchen, in the dark, looking at her. He had something in his hand, a screwdriver or a knife. She ran back out the front of the house to the neighbor’s and tried to get hold of Weldon, then she called me up in Baton Rouge.”
“Why didn’t she call the cops, Lyle?”
“She thinks she’s protecting Weldon from something.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. Neither one of them is real convinced about my religious conversion. They tend to think maybe my brain cells soaked up a little too much purple acid when I came back from Vietnam. So they don’t always confide everything in me. But it doesn’t matter. I know who that fellow was.”
“Your father?”
“I don’t have a doubt.”
“Everybody else seems to, including me.”
He took a sip from his pint bottle and looked away at the red sun over the bayou. The wind was warm, and I could smell the reek of natural gas from the wells.
“What does Drew say? What did this man look like?” I asked.
“She didn’t see his face.”
“I’ll talk to her tomorrow. Now I’d better get back home.”
“All right, I’m going to tell you all of it. Then you can do any damn thing you want with it, Loot. But by God, first, you’re going to listen.”
The scars dripping down the side of his face looked like smooth pieces of red glass in the late sunlight.
CHAPTER 5
AND THIS IS the way Lyle told it to me, or as I have reconstructed it.
His mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on a burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink uniform, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard, shucking off their feathers in a caldron of scalding water. The father, Verise, came home later than he should have, parked his pickup by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi’s. His shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with sweat and black hair.
The mother sat on a wood chair, with her knees apart in front of the steaming caldron, her forearms covered with wet chicken feathers. Headless chickens flopped all over the grass.
“I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint. Like you some kind of big ladies’ man,” she said.
“I ain’t been with nobody,” he said, “except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh.”
“You said you’d leave her alone.”
“You children go inside.”
“That gonna make your conscience right ’cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise.”
“I ain’t seen her.”
“You sonofabitch, I smell her on you,” the mother said, and swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across his chest and Levi’s.
“You ain’t gonna act like that in front of my children, you,” he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. “I said y’all get inside. This is between me and her.”
Weldon and Lyle were used to their parents’ quarrels, and they turned sullenly toward the house; but Drew stood mute and tearful under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.
“Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We’re gonna play with the Monopoly game,” Lyle said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.
Then Lyle saw his father’s large, square hand go up in the air, saw it come down hard against the side of the mother’s face, heard the sound of her weeping, as he tried to step into Drew’s line of vision and hold her and her cat against his body, hold the three of them tightly together outside the unrelieved sound of his mother’s weeping.
Three hours later her car went through the railing on the bridge over the Atchafalaya River. Lyle dreamed that night that an enormous brown bubble arose from the submerged wreck, and when it burst on the surface her drowned breath stuck against his face as wet and rank as gas released from a grave.
