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“Which minister?”
“That fellow in Baton Rouge, what’s-his-name.”
“Lyle Sonnier?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. I tried to make a joke out of it, and I said, ‘Vic, what could you possibly have against that man up there?’ He said, ‘The same thing the rooster’s got against the baby chick that thinks the brooder house is his.’ Talking with Vic could be a little bit like walking through cobwebs. Or accidentally raking your hand across a yellow-jacket nest.”
We talked to a half-dozen men in the dormitory, and they all had the same vacant response and benign, vacuous expressions that they wore and used as habitually as the identities and personal histories that they had created for themselves in hundreds of drunk tanks and trackside jungle camps. They reminded me of figures in a van Gogh or Munch painting. Palm fronds and the sunlit leaves of banana trees rustled against the screen windows, but in contrast the men inside looked wind-dried, the color of cardboard, weightless in their emaciation, their hollow chests devoid of heartbeat, the skin of their arms wrapped as tight as fish scales around their bones. Their squared-away bunks, which cast no shadows because of the sun’s position, looked in their exactitude like a line of coffins.
Why the morbidness over a bunch of drunks? Because they brought back the ever-present knowledge in my life that I was one drink away from their fate—despair, murder of the soul, insanity, or death—and that realization was like someone working my heart muscle with an angry thumb.
The Salvation Army officer and I walked out of the dormitory into the sunlight, into the clean sweep of wind through oak and myrtle trees and a twirling water sprinkler on the grass.
“How would you describe that odor they have?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That smell. They all have it. How would you describe it?”
“Oh. It’s those short-dogs they drink. It’s one step above paint-thinner.”
“It’s like they have liquefied mothballs in their blood, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, something like that.”
“Would you say it smelled like embalming fluid?”
He scratched one sideburn with a fingernail.
“I was never a mortician,” he said, “but, yeah, that seems to come pretty close. Yeah, some of those ole boys are mite near dead and don’t know it yet. Poor fellows.”
He didn’t understand the direction of my questions, and I didn’t explain it to him. I simply gave him my business card and said, “If Vic comes back here, call me. Don’t mess with him. I think your intuitions about him are correct. He’s probably a deranged and dangerous man.”
“What’s he done?”
“I think only Vic Benson and God could tell you that. I don’t think the rest of us would even want to know. He’s one of those who make you want to believe that all of us didn’t fall out of the same tree.”
“It’s got something to do with children, doesn’t it?”
“How did you know?”
“One of the old-timers told me Vic flipped a hot cigarette in the face of a little colored boy who was pestering him. I kind of put it out of my mind because I didn’t want to believe it.”
His face looked momentarily sad, then he shook hands with me and walked back across the wet, shining lawn into the gloom of the dormitory.
I WENT BACK to the office, planning to call Lyle Sonnier in Baton Rouge to ask if he had any idea where his father might have gone. Just as I picked up the phone, I looked through the window and saw Clete Purcell park his automobile in a yellow zone, step out on the street, and stretch his arms like a bear coming out of hibernation. Two fishing rods were sticking out of a back window. I didn’t wait for him to come into the office. At best, my colleagues thought of Clete as a happy zoo animal; others had a way of disappearing from a room as soon as he entered it.
I met him outside on the walk.
“What’s happening, Dave?” he said. “Did you eat lunch yet?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s eat some red beans and rice, then drown some worms after you get off work.”
He wore a sleeveless tropical shirt, Budweiser shorts that hung off his navel, and his powder-blue porkpie hat slanted over one eye. His huge biceps were glowing with sunburn.
“We’re going down to Cypremort Point for crabs tonight. You’re welcomed to go with us,” I said.
