AllFreeNovel
Share Us
They went on talking to each other, as though my presence was perfectly natural, but I could see their eyes, the positions of their bodies, already disassociating themselves from the situation.
Bobby Earl wore a brown pinstripe suit and a yellow silk tie, and his thick hair looked blow-dried and recently cut.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Do you know that Joey Gouza’s in custody?”
“No.”
I set my notebook on the tablecloth and peeled back several pages. It contained nothing but notes from old investigations and a grocery list I had made out at the office yesterday.
“I interviewed him in his cell yesterday and your name came up,” I said.
“What?”
“Gouza is charged with ordering two men to nail Drew Sonnier’s hand to a gazebo. When I questioned him your name came up in the conversation. That fact bothered me, Mr. Earl. Is it your statement that you don’t know Joey Gouza?”
“I’m not making a statement. What are you trying to do here?”
A man at the end of the table coughed quietly into his fist and went to the restroom.
“You and Joey Gouza seem to have the same friends. Your lines keep crossing in this case, Mr. Earl. Originally I questioned you about Eddy Raintree. Now someone has blown Eddy’s face off with a shotgun. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“No, I don’t know anything about this. You listen—”
His voice level rose, and the man next to him excused himself to talk with friends at the bar.
“You’re harassing me,” Earl began again. “I can’t prove it, but I suspect you have a political motivation for what you’ve been doing. It won’t work. It just makes my cause stronger. If you doubt me, call the Morning Advocate and check the polls.”
“Let me tell you what Gouza said and you can come to your own conclusions. We were talking about you, then he begins to tell me that if he goes down for what is called the ‘bitch,’ which is a life sentence given to habitual criminals, he’s going to take others down with him. What does that seem to suggest to you, Mr. Earl?”
“It suggests you’re going to have a lawsuit against you for slander.” His monocular right eye, with the enlarged pupil like a spot of India ink, was fixed on my face. The skin along the bottom rim was trembling with anger.
I folded my notebook and put it in my shirt pocket. I picked up a package of crackers from the breadbasket, then dropped it in the basket again.
“You’re an intelligent man, and I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Earl,” I said. “I think Joey might be in on a bum rap. But unfortunately for him, nobody cares if a guy like Joey is innocent or not. People just want him put away in a cage for a long time, and they don’t care how it’s done. The prosecutor will probably get a new political career out of it, his lawyers will get rich on his appeals while he’s chopping sugarcane at Angola, his wife and mistresses will clean out his bank accounts and sell everything he owns, and his hired stooges will go to work for his competitors and forget they ever heard of him. In the meantime, there are probably some sadistic gunbulls who will ejaculate at the thought of busting Joey’s hump on their work gangs.
“Now, if you were Joey Meatballs and facing a prospect like that, wouldn’t you be willing to cut a deal, any deal, including maybe putting your mother in harness on a dogsled team?”
The other men at the table had gone quiet now and had given up the pretense of conviviality. They looked at their watches, touched nervously at their mouths with their napkins, stared at a remote part of the restaurant. The cost of their lunch with Bobby Earl was not one they had anticipated.
I rose from the table.
“You like primitive law and vigilante solutions to complex problems, Mr. Earl,” I said. “Maybe you’ve stumbled into one of your own creations this time. But I wouldn’t end up as Joey Gouza’s fall partner. He doesn’t care about political causes. He had his own brother-in-law fed into an airplane propeller. What do you think his lawyers might have planned for you?”
The tables around Bobby Earl’s had now become quiet, too. He turned to speak to the men seated next to him, but their eyes were fixed on the flower arrangement in the center of the table. But I learned then that Bobby Earl was not easily undone in a public situation. He rose from the table, put his napkin neatly by his plate, and walked toward the men’s room, pausing to let a black drink waiter pass. His gaze was level, his face handsome, almost pleasant-looking, his thick brown hair tousled by the cool currents from the air conditioner.
I realized then that Bobby Earl might burn inside with banked fires, and that perhaps I had indeed inserted some broken glass in his head that would saw through brain tissue later; but in front of an audience he was a tragedian actor, a protean figure who could create an emanation of himself out of willpower alone and become as benign, photogenic, and seemingly anointed by history as Jefferson Davis in defeat.
I had a feeling this one would go into extra innings.
CHAPTER 12
THAT EVENING BOOTSIE, Alafair, and I went to a shrimp boil in the park on Bayou Teche. The air smelled of flowers and new-cut grass, the clouds were marbled with pink, the oak trees around the wood pavilion were dark green and thick with birds. School was out for the summer, and Alafair and some other kids played kickball on the baseball diamond with the sense of dusty, knee-grimed joy that’s the special province of children during summer. In fact, Alafair’s aggressiveness at play made me wonder if she didn’t have a bent for adversarial roles. Her cheeks were dirt-streaked and flushed with excitement; she charged without blinking at the kicker and took the volleyball full in the face, and then ran after it again, sometimes knocking another child to the ground.
The last four days with Bootsie had been wonderful. The new balance of medicine seemed to be working. Her eyes smiled at me in the morning, her posture was erect and self-assured, and she helped me and Batist at the dock and in the bait shop with cheerful eagerness. Only an hour ago I had looked up from my work and caught her in a moment when she was unconscious of my glance, just as though I had clicked the camera lens and frozen her in the pose of the healthy and unworried woman that I prayed she would become again for both of us. She had just emptied the bait tanks, her denim shirt stuck wetly to her uplifted breasts, and she was staring abstractedly out the screen window at the bayou, eating a carrot stick, her hair touched by the breeze, one hand set jauntily on her hip, the muscles in her back and neck as strong and firm as a Cajun fishergirl’s.
At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn’t in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn’t bothered to be grateful for the things I had.
