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“Yeah?”
“Why would your father want to hurt Weldon?”
He looked away into the trees, his face shadowed, and brushed idly at the chain of scar tissue that seemed to flow out of the corner of his eye.
“He has reason to want to hurt all of us. After we thought he was dead, we did something to somebody who was close to him.” He looked back into my face. “We hurt this person bad.”
“What did you do?”
“I’ve made my peace on it. Somebody else will have to tell you that.”
“Then I don’t know what I can do for you.”
“I can tell you what Weldon did to him. Or at least what the old man thinks Weldon did to him.” He waited, and when I didn’t respond he continued. “When we were kids the old man had this obsession. He was going to be an independent wildcatter, a kind of legend like Glenn McCarthy over in Houston. He started off as a jug hustler with an offshore seismographic outfit, roughnecked all over Texas and Oklahoma, then started contracting board roads in the marsh for the Texaco Company. After a while he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya basin and buying up a bunch of rusted junk to put his first rig together. A geologist from Lafayette told him the best place to punch a hole was right there on our farm.
“Except the old man had a problem with that. He was a traiture, you know, and always claimed he could cure warts, stop bleeding in cut hogs, blow the fire out of a burn, cause a woman to have a boy or a girl, all that kind of ‘white witch’ stuff. But he also told us there were Indians buried in an old Spanish well in the middle of our sugarcane field, and if he drilled a hole on our property their spirits would be turned loose on us.
“He was afraid of spirits in the ground, all right, but I think of a different kind. My uncle got drunk once and told me the old man hired this black man for thirty cents an hour to plow his field. The black man ran the plow across a rock and busted it, then just lay down under a tree and took a nap. The old man found the busted plow and the mule still in harness in the row, and he walked over to the tree and kicked this fellow awake and started hollering at him. That black fellow made a big mistake. He sassed my old man. The old man went into a rage, chased him across the field, and broke open his skull with a hoe. My uncle said he buried him somewhere around that Spanish well.”
“What does this have to do with Weldon?”
“Are you sure you’re listening to me? As greedy and driven to be a success as he was, the old man was afraid to drill on his own property. But not Weldon, podna. That’s where he built his first rig, and he cored right down through the center of that Spanish well, I think just to make a point. A floorman on that rig told me the drill bit brought up pieces of bone when they first punched into the ground.”
“I’ll keep all this in mind. Thanks for coming out, Lyle.”
“You don’t look upon it as the big breakthrough in your case?”
“When people go about trying to kill other people with forethought and deliberation, it’s usually over money. Not always, but most times.”
“Well, a man hears when it’s time for him to hear.”
“Is that right?”
“I was never a good listener. At least not till somebody up on high got my attention. I don’t fault you, Dave.”
“Do you know what passive-aggressive behavior is?”
“I never went to college, like you and Weldon. It sounds real deep.”
“It’s not a profound concept. A person who has a lot of hostility learns how to mask it in humility and sometimes even in religiosity. It’s very effective.”
“No kidding? You learn all that in college? It’s too bad I missed out.” He grinned with the side of his mouth, his teeth barely showing, like a possum.
“Let me ask you something fair and square, with no bullshit, Lyle,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“Do you hold your last day against me?”
“What do you mean?”
“In Vietnam. I sent you into that tunnel. I wish we’d blown it and passed it on by.”
“You didn’t send me down there. I liked it down there. It was my own underground horror show. I made those zips think the scourge of God had crawled down into the bowels of the earth. It wasn’t a good way to be, son.” He flinched good-naturedly and raised his hands, palms outward, in front of him. “Sorry, it’s just a manner of speaking.”
I looked at my watch.
“I guess that’s my cue to go,” he said. “Thanks for your time. Say good-bye to Bootsie for me, and don’t think too unkindly of me.”
