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“You ain’t understood me, darlin’,” she said. “When your lifeline’s gone, his kind get it back by stealing somebody else’s.” She folded my thumb and fingers into a fist, then pressed it into a ball with her palms. I could feel the heat and oil in her skin. “You hold on to it real hard, Mr. Streak. That tiger don’t care who it eat.”
I HAD HAD TROUBLE finding a parking place earlier and had left my pickup over by Rampart Street, not far from the Iberville welfare project. When I rounded the corner I saw the passenger door agape, the window smashed out on the pavement, the flannel-wrapped brick still in the gutter. The glove box had been rifled and the stereo ripped out of the panel, as well as most of the ignition wires, which hung below the dashboard like broken spaghetti ends.
Because First District headquarters was only two blocks away, it took only an hour to get a uniformed officer there to make out the theft report that my insurance company would require. Then I walked to a drugstore on Canal, called Triple A for a wrecker, and called Bootsie and told her that I wouldn’t be home as I had promised, that with any luck I could have the truck repaired by late tomorrow.
“Where will you stay tonight?” she asked.
“At Clete’s.”
“Dave, if the truck isn’t fixed tomorrow, take the bus back home and we’ll go get the truck later. Tomorrow’s Friday. Let’s have a nice weekend.”
“I may have to check out a lead on the way back. It might be a dud, but I can’t let it hang.”
“Does this have to do with Drew?”
“No, not at all.”
“Because I wouldn’t want to interfere.”
“This may be the guy who tried to take my head off with a crowbar.”
“Oh God, Dave, give it up, at least for a while.”
“It doesn’t work that way. The other side doesn’t do pit stops.”
“How clever,” she said. “I’ll leave the answering machine on in case we’re in town.”
“Come on, Boots, don’t sign off like that.”
“It’s been a long day. I’m just tired. I don’t mean what I say.”
“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine. I’ll call in the morning. Tell Alafair we’ll go crabbing on the bay Saturday.”
I was ready to say goodnight, then she said, as though she were speaking out of a mist, “Remember what they used to teach us in Catholic school about virginity? They said it was better to remain a virgin until you married so you wouldn’t make comparisons. Do you ever make comparisons, Dave?”
I closed my eyes and swallowed as a man might if he looked up one sunny day and felt the cold outer envelope of a glacier sliding unalterably into his life.
WHEN I WAS recuperating from the bouncing Betty that sent me home from Vietnam, and I began my long courtship with insomnia, I used to muse sometimes on what were the worst images or degrees of fear that my dreams could present me with. In my innocence, I thought that if I could face them in the light of day, imagine them perhaps as friendly gargoyles sitting at the foot of my bed, even hold a reasonable conversation with them, I wouldn’t have to drink and drug myself nightly into another dimension where the monsters were transformed into pink zebras and prancing giraffes. But every third or fourth night I was back with my platoon, outside an empty ville that stunk of duck shit and unburied water buffalo; then as we lay pressed against a broken dike in the heated, breathless air, we suddenly realized that somebody back at the firebase had screwed up bad, and that the 105 rounds were coming in short.
The dream about an artillery barrage can be as real as the experience. You want to burrow into the ground like an insect; your knees are pulled up in a fetal position, your arms squeezed over your pot. Your fear is so great that you think the marrow in your skull will split, the arteries in your brain will rupture from their own dilation, blood will fountain from your nose. You will promise God anything in order to be spared. Right behind you, geysers of mud explode in the air, and the bodies of North Vietnamese regulars are blown out of their graves, their bodies luminescent with green slime and dancing with maggots.
I had seen Vietnamese civilians who had survived B-52 raids. They were beyond speech; they trembled all o
ver and made mewing and keening sounds that you did not want to take with you. When I would wake from my dream my hands would shake so badly that I could hardly unscrew the cap on the whiskey bottle that I kept hidden under my mattress.
As I slept on Clete’s couch that night, I had to deal with another creation of my unconscious, one that was no less difficult than the old grainy filmstrips from Vietnam. In my dream I would feel Bootsie next to me, her nude body warm and smooth under the sheet. I would put my face in her hair, kiss her nipples, stroke her stomach and thighs, and she would smile in her sleep, take me in her hand, and place me inside her. I would kiss the tops of her breasts and try to touch her all over while we made love, wishing in my lust that she were two instead of one. Then as it built inside of me like a tree cracking loose from a riverbank, rearing upward in the warm current, she would smile with drowsy expectation and close her eyes, and her face would grow small and soft and her mouth become as vulnerable as a flower.
But her eyes would open again and they would be as sightless as milk glass. A scaled deformity like the red wings of a butterfly would mask her face, her body would stiffen and ridge with bone, and her womb would be filled with death.
I sat up in the darkness of Clete’s living room, the blood beating in my wrists, and opened and closed my mouth as though I had been pulled from beneath the ocean’s surface. I stared through the window and across the courtyard at a lamp on a table behind a curtain that was lifting in the breeze from a fan. I could see someone’s shadow moving behind the curtain. I wanted to believe that it was the shadow of a nice person, perhaps a man preparing to go to work or an elderly woman fixing breakfast before going to Mass at St. Louis Cathedral. But it was 4 A.M.; the sky overhead was black, with no hint of the false dawn; the night still belonged to the gargoyles, and the person across the courtyard was probably a hooker or somebody on the downside of an all-night drunk.
I put on my shirt and slacks and slipped on my loafers. I could see Clete’s massive form in his bed, a pillow over his face, his porkpie hat on the bedpost. I closed the door softly behind me. The air in the courtyard was electric with the smell of magnolia.
The bar was over by Decatur, one of those places that never closes, where there is neither cheer nor anger nor expectation and no external measure of one’s own failure and loss.
The bottles of bourbon, vodka, rum, gin, rye, and brandy rang with light along the mirror. The oak-handled beer spigots and frosted mugs in the coolers could have been a poem. The bartender propped his arms impatiently on the dish sink.
“I’ll serve you, but you got to tell me what it is you want,” he said. He looked at another customer, raised his eyebrows, then looked back at me. He was smiling now. “How about it, buddy?”
