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“I’d like a cup of coffee.”
“You want a cup of coffee?”
“Yes.”
“This looks like a place where you get a cup of coffee? Too much, too much,” he said, then began wiping off the counter with a rag.
I heard somebody laugh as I walked back out onto the street. I sat on the railway tracks behind the French Market and watched the dawn touch the earth’s rim and light the river and the docks and scows over in Algiers, turn the sky the color of bone, and finally fill the east with a hot red glow like the spokes in a wagon wheel. The river looked wide and yellow with silt, and I could see oil and occasionally dead fish floating belly up in the current.
CHAPTER 8
MY TRUCK WAS NOT repaired until six o’clock Friday evening. By the time I hit South Baton Rouge the sun was a red molten ball in the western sky. I crossed the Mississippi and swung off the interstate at Port Allen and continued through the Atchafalaya basin on the old highway. The bar that Eddy Raintree may have been using as his mail drop was on a yellow dirt road that wound through thick stands of dead cypress and copper-colored pools of stagnant water.
It was hammered together from clapboard, plywood, and tarpaper, its screens rusted and gutted, the windows pocked from gravel flung against the building by spinning car tires; it sat up on cinder blocks like an elephant with a broken back. A half-dozen Harleys were parked on the side, and in the back a group of bikers were barbecuing in an oil drum under an oak tree. The yellow dust from the road drifted across their fire.
The Atchafalaya basin is the place you go if you don’t fit anywhere else. It encompasses hundreds of square miles of bayous, canals, sandspits, willow islands, huge inland bays, and flooded woods where the mosquitoes will hover around your head like a helmet and you slap your arms until they’re slick with a black-red paste. Twenty minutes from Baton Rouge or an hour and a half from New Orleans, you can punch a hole in the dimension and drop back down into the redneck, coonass, peckerwood South that you thought had been eaten up by the developers of Sunbelt suburbs. It’s a shrinking place, but there’s a group that holds on to it with a desperate and fearful tenacity.
I slipped my .45 in the back of my belt, along with my handcuffs, put on my seersucker coat, and went inside the bar. The jukebox played Waylon and Merle; the men at the pool table rifled balls into side pockets as though they wanted to drive pain into the wood and leather; and a huge Confederate flag billowed out from the tacks holding it to the ceiling.
A metal sign, the size of a bumper sticker, over the men’s-room door said WHITE POWER. I used the urinal. Above it, neatly written on a piece of cardboard, were the words THIS IS THE ONLY SHITHOUSE WE GOT, SO KEEP THE GODDAMN PLACE CLEAN.
The bartender was a small, prematurely balding, suntanned man with thin arms who wore a wash-frayed suit vest with no shirt. On his right forearm was a tattoo of the Marine Corps globe and anchor. He didn’t ask me what I wanted; he simply pointed two fingers at me with his cigarette between them.
“I’m looking for Elton Rupert,” I said.
“I don’t know him,” he said.
“That’s strange. He gets his mail here.”
“That might be. I don’t know him. What do you want?”
“How about a 7-Up?”
He took a bottle out of the cooler, snapped off the cap, and set it before me with a glass.
“The ice machine’s broken, so there’s no ice,” he said.
“That’s all right.”
“That’s a dollar.”
I put four quarters on the bar. He scraped them up and started to walk away.
“It looks like you have some letters in a box up there. Would you see if Elton’s picked up his mail?” I said.
“Like I told you, I don’t know the man.”
“You’re the regular bartender, you’re here most of the time?”
He put out his cigarette in an ashtray, mashing it methodically, then his eyes went out the open front door and across the road as though I were not there. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue.
“I’d appreciate your answering my question,” I said.
“Maybe you should ask those guys barbecuing out back. They might know him.”
“You were in the corps?”
“Yeah.”
