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“Excuse me?”
“You were talking about chickenshit. I thought you were the sun coming up in the morning. That’s what I thought you were.”
I felt the skin of my face tighten in the humid air.
“I went to Vietnam. Do you remember what you though
t about people who went to Vietnam?” I said.
“That wasn’t it at all, and you know it. You blew it with Bootsie, and I was ‘just passing through.’ That’s what chickenshit means.”
“You’re wrong.”
She took a drink from the bottle and looked away toward the bayou so I couldn’t see her face.
“I always respected you,” I said. “You got upset yesterday because under it all you have a tender heart, Drew. Nobody is expected to be a soldier every day of his life. I start every other day with a nervous breakdown.”
Her face was still turned away from me, but I could see her back shaking under her shirt.
I put my hand lightly on her shoulder. Her fingers came up and covered mine, rested there a moment, then she lifted my hand up and released it.
“It’s time for you to go, Dave,” she said.
I didn’t reply. I walked across the thick Saint Augustine grass, through the shadows and the tracings of fireflies in the trees. When I turned and looked back at her, I didn’t see a barefoot woman pushing at her eyes in the smoke but a little Cajun girl of years ago whose bare legs danced in the air while a switch whipped across them.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I sent two uniformed deputies to check the missions and the shelters in Iberia and Lafayette parishes for a man who had been disfigured in a fire. I also told them to check the old hobo jungles along the S.P tracks.
“What do we do when we find him?” one deputy said.
“Ask him to ride down with you.”
“What if he don’t want to come?”
“Call me and I’ll come out.”
“Half the guys in that hobo camp look like their mothers beat on them with a baseball bat.”
“This guy’s face looks like red rubber.”
“Can we take him out to lunch?” He was grinning.
“How about getting on it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then I called Clete’s hospital room in New Orleans, but was told by a nurse that he was in X-ray. I asked her to have him call me collect when he got back to his room. Fifteen minutes later I was drinking coffee, eating a doughnut, and looking out the window at a black man who was selling rattlesnake watermelons and strawberries off the back of his pickup truck, when my phone extension rang. It was Weldon Sonnier.
“What’s the idea of leaning on my sister?” he said.
“I think you’ve got it turned around.”
“What did you say to her?”
I set my doughnut down on a napkin.
“I think that’s none of your business,” I said.
“You’d damn well better believe it is.”
