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“I guess so. We going to the show?”
“You bet.”
“Batist is going, too?”
“I don’t know, you think he should go?”
She thought about it.
“Yeah, he should go with us,” she said, as though she had just reached a profound metaphysical conclusion.
“You’re the best, little guy.”
“You are, too, big guy.”
We popped Tripod into the hutch, then I swung Alafair up on my back and we walked beneath the sparking of fireflies onto the gallery and into the lighted house, where Bootsie was deep-frying sac-a-lait and listening to a Cajun song that was playing on the radio propped in the kitchen window. The western sky looked like a blood-streaked ink wash, and I could hear the cicadas in a distant woods, all the way across the waving field of green sugarcane at the back of my property.
THE NEXT MORNING Alafair helped Batist and me open the bait shop. She earned her weekly allowance of five dollars by seining the dead shiners out of the bait tanks, seasoning the chickens that we barbecued on a split oil drum for our midday customers, draining the coolers, and pouring fresh ice over the beer and soda pop. But her favorite Saturday-morning job was sitting on a tall stool behind the cash register, her Astros baseball cap low on her head, ringing up worm and shiner sales with a loud bang on the keys.
It was a wonderful morning to fish. The air was still cool and windless, the early pink light muted in the cypress trees, the moon still visible in one soft blue corner of the sky. After we had rented most of our boats, I started the barbecue fire in the oil drum, then fixed coffee and hot milk and bowls of Grape-Nuts for the three of us, and we ate breakfast on one of the telephone-spool tables under an umbrella out on the dock. I had managed to push the Sonnier case completely out of my mind when the phone rang inside the shop and Alafair got up and answered it.
I could see only the side of her face through the screen window as she held the receiver to her ear, but I had no doubt that she was listening to something that she had never expected to come through our telephone. Her eyes were blinking rapidly and her tan cheeks were filled with white discolorations, and I saw her look at me with her mouth parted as though a childish bad dream had become real in the middle of her day.
I went quickly inside the shop and behind the counter and took the receiver from her hand.
“Dave, he called you real bad names,” Alafair said. She was breathing hard through her mouth.
“Who is this?” I said into the receiver.
“You know who it is. Don’t act stupid,” a high, metallic voice, like that of a midget, said. “You cut a deal with Joey Meatballs, didn’t you?”
“You’re not shy about frightening a little girl. How about giving me your name?”
“You don’t know my name?”
I picked up a pencil and scribbled across the top of a lined notepad: “Boots, call office, tell them to trace cal
l in shop.” Then I put the pad in Alafair’s hands and pushed her toward the door.
“What’s the matter, you got nothing wise to say?” the voice asked.
“What do you want, Fluck?”
“I want to know what you’re giving Joey Gee so that he puts a whack out on me.”
“There’s no deal with Joey.”
“You lying sonofabitch. He’s out of the bag one day and everybody in New Orleans hears there’s a five-grand open contract on me. You telling me you don’t have anything to do with it?”
“That’s right.”
“What is it, you guys want to wipe your books clean with my ass? Or is it a personal beef because I almost cooled you out in Sonnier’s house?”
“You’re going down because you killed a police officer and Eddy Raintree.”
“I’m shaking.”
“To tell you the truth, Fluck, I’m busy right now and you’re a boring man to talk to.”
