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“How often do you go to the blood bank?” I asked.
“Once or twice a week. Depends on how many is in town. They keep records.”
“Where do you receive your VA checks?”
“What?”
“Your disability payments.”
“I don’t get them no more. I ain’t gone in to certify in five or six years.”
“Why not?”
“?’Cause I don’t like them sonsabitches.”
“I see,” I said, then I spoke to him in French.
“I don’t speak it,” he said.
“I think you’re not telling me the truth, Vic.”
He dropped his cigarette to the cement and mashed it out with his foot.
“You interested in my life story, run my prints,” he said, and turned up his palms. “We were buttoned down when they put one up our snout. I was the only guy got out. The hatch burned me all the way to the bone when I pushed it open. I don’t know no preacher, except at the mission. You saying I look in people’s windows, you’re a goddamn liar.”
His breath was stale, his eyes like heated marbles inside his red, manikin-like face.
“Where are you staying?” I said.
“At the Sally, in Lafayette.”
“I don’t have anything to hold you on, Vic. But I’m going to ask you to stay out of Iberia Parish. If these same people are bothered by a man who looks like you, I want to know that you were somewhere else. Do we have an agreement on that?”
“I go where I want.”
I tapped my fountain pen on the back of my knuckles, then stood up and swung the door wide for him.
“All right, podna. The deputy at the end of the corridor will drive you back to Lafayette,” I said. “But I’ll leave you with a thought. If you’re Verise Sonnier, don’t blame your children for your unhappiness. They’ve had their share of it, too. You might even learn to be a bit proud of them.”
“Get out of my way,” he said, and walked past me, tucking in his shirt over his skinny hips.
I WENT HOME, turned on the window fan in the bedroom, and slept for four hours. On the edge of my sleep I could hear Alafair and Bootsie weeding the flower beds under the windows, walking through the leaves, scraping ashes out of the barbecue pit. When I awoke, Bootsie was in the shower. Her figure was brown and softly muted through the frosted glass, and I could see her washing her arms and breasts with a rag and a bar of pink soap. I took off my underwear and stepped into the stall with her, rubbed the smooth muscles of her back and shoulders, worked my thumbs up and down her spine, kissed the dampness of her hair along her neck.
Then I dried her off like she was a little girl, although it was I who often had the heart of a child while making love. We lay on top of the sheets, and the fan billowed the curtain and drew its breeze across us. I kissed her thighs and her stomach and put her nipples in my mouth. When I entered her, her body was so hot she felt like she was burning with a high fever.
Later, I took Alafair to Saturday evening Mass at the cathedral, then attended an AA meeting. When it was my turn to talk, I did a partial fifth step before the group, which consists of admitting to ourselves, to another human being, and to God the exact nature of our wrongs.
Why?
Because I had gone to Lyle Sonnier’s house in Baton Rouge and compromised my faith in my Higher Power. I had let Him down, and by doing so—seeking out the help of a man whom I had considered a charlatan—I had let Bootsie down, too. Even Lyle had said so.
When he had hit the light switch in his kitchen, the chrome, yellow plastic, white enamel, and flowered wallpaper leaped to life with the brilliance of a flashbulb. He took a bottle of milk and pecan pie from the icebox, set forks, plates, and crystal glasses on the table, then sat across from me, wan-faced, tired, obviously unsure of where he should begin.
“We can talk a long time, Dave, but I guess I ought to tell you straight out I can’t give you what you want,” he said.
“Then you are a fraud.”
“That’s a tough word.”
