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"Something like that."
"How do I atone for Kelly? How do I make up for that one, Dave?" He stared out at the late red sun over the cane-field so I couldn't see his eyes.
"You get those thoughts out of your head. Kelly's dead because we have a psychopath in our midst. Her death doesn't have anything to do with you."
"You can say that all you want, but I know better."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah."
I could see the clean, tight line of his jaw and a wet gleaming in the corner of his eye.
"Tell me, did you respect Kelly?" I asked.
He swiveled around on the picnic bench. "What kind of question is that?"
"I'm going to be a little hard on you, El. I think you're using her death to feel sorry for yourself."
"What?" His face was incredulous.
"When I lost my wife I found out that self-pity and guilt could be a real rush, particularly when I didn't have Brother Jim Beam to do the job."
"That's a lousy fucking thing to say."
"I was talking about myself. Maybe you're different from me."
"What the hell's the matter with you? You don't think it's natural to feel loss, to feel grief, when somebody dies? I tried to close the hole in her throat with my hands, her blood was running through my fingers. She was still alive and looking straight into my eyes. Like she was drowning and neither one of us could do anything about it." He pressed his forehead against his fist; his flexed thigh trembled against his slacks.
"I got four of my men killed on a trail in Vietnam. Then I got drunk over it. I used them, I didn't respect them for the brave men they were. That's the way alcoholism works, El."
"I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me be for a while."
"Will you go to the meeting?"
He didn't answer. There was a pained light in his eyes like someone had twisted barbed wire around his forehead.
"You don't have to talk, just listen to what these guys have to say about their own experience," I said.
"I'd rather pass tonight."
"Suit yourself," I said.
I told Bootsie where I was going and walked out to the truck. The cicadas droned from horizon to horizon under the vault of plum-colored sky. Then I heard Elrod walking through the leaves and pecan husks behind me.
"If I sit around here, I'll end up in the beer joint," he said, and opened the passenger door to the truck. Then he raised his finger at me. "But I'm going to ask you one thing, Dave. Don't ever accuse me of using Kelly again. If you do, I'm going to knock your teeth down your goddamn throat."
There were probably a number of things I could have said in reply; but you don't deny a momentary mental opiate to somebody who has made an appointment in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The black jukejoint in St. Martinville was set back in a grove of trees off a yellow dirt road not far from Bayou Teche. It was one of those places that could be dropped by a tornado in the middle of an Iowa cornfield and you would instantly know that its origins were in the Deep South. The plank walls and taped windows vibrated with noise from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night. Strings of Christmas-tree lights rimmed the doors and windows year round; somebody was barbecuing ribs on top of a tin barrel, only a few feet from a pair of dilapidated privies that were caked under the eaves with yellow jacket and mud-dauber nests; people copulated back in the woods against tree trunks and fought in the parking lot with knives, bottles, and razors. Inside, the air was always thick with the smell of muscatel, smoke, cracklings, draft beer and busthead whiskey, expectorated snuff, pickled hogs' feet, perfume, body powder, sweat, and home-grown reefer.
Sam Patin sat on a small stage with a canopy over it hung with red tassels and miniature whiskey bottles that clinked in the backdraft from a huge ventilator fan. His white suit gleamed with an electric purple glow from the floor lamps, and the waxed black surfaces of his twelve-string guitar winked with tiny lights. The floor in front of him was packed with dancers. When he blew into the harmonica attached to a wire brace on his neck and began rolling the steel picks on his fingers across an E-major blues run, the crowd moaned in unison. They yelled at the stage as though they were confirming a Biblical statement he had made at a revival, pressed their loins together with no consciousness of other people around them, and roared with laughter even though Hogman sang of a man who had sold his soul for an ox-blood Stetson hat he had just lost in a crap game:
Stagolee went runnin'
In the red-hot boilin' sun,
Say look in my chiffro drawer, woman,
