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"You leave me the hell alone."
I sat down on the grass by the edge of the slope.
"It's not my intention to bother you, Mr. Hebert," I said. "But you're refusing to cooperate with a police investigation and you're creating problems for both of us."
"He done . . . I don't know what he done. What difference does it make?" His eyes glanced sideways at the mulatto woman.
"You seem to have a good memory for detail. Why not about DeWitt Prejean?"
The woman rose from her seat on the bucket and walked farther down the bank, trailing her cork bobber in the water.
"He done nigger work," Hebert said. "He cut lawns, cleaned out grease traps, got dead rats out from under people's houses. What the fuck you think he did?"
"That doesn't sound right to me. I think he did some other kind of work, too."
His nostrils were dilated, as though a bad odor were rising from his own lap.
"He was in bed with a white woman here. Is that what you want to know?"
"Which woman?"
"I done tole you. The wife of a cripple-man got shot up in the war."
"He raped her?"
"Who gives a shit?"
"But the crippled man didn't break Prejean out of jail, Mr. Hebert."
"It wasn't the first time that nigger got in trouble over white women. There's more than one man wanted to see him put over a fire."
"Who broke him out?"
"I don't know and I don't care."
"Mr. Hebert, you're probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I'm just going to go away?"
The skin of his chest was sickly white, and under it were nests of green veins. "It was better back then," he said. "You know it was."
"What kind of work did he do, Ben?"
"Drove a truck."
"For whom?"
"It was down in Lafayette. He worked for a white man there till he come up here. Don't know nothing about the white man. You saying I do, then you're a goddamn liar." He leaned over to look past me at the mulatto woman, who was fishing among a group of willows now. Then his face snapped back at me. "I brung her out here 'cause she works for me. 'Cause I can't get in and out of the car good by myself."
"What kind of truck did he drive?" I asked.
"Beer truck. No, that wasn't it. Soda pop. Sonofabitch had a soda pop truck route when white people was making four dollars a day in the rice field." He set down his cane pole and began rolling a cigarette. His fingernails looked as thick and horned as tortoiseshell against the thin white square of paper into which he poured tobacco. His fingers trembled almost uncontrollably with anger and defeat.
I DROVE TO TWINKY LEMOYNE'S BOTTLING WORKS IN Lafayette, but it was closed for the day. Twenty minutes later I found Lemoyne working in his yard at home. The sky was the pink of salmon eggs, and the wind thrashed the banana and lime trees along the side of his house. He had stopped pruning the roses on his trellis and had dropped his shears in the baggy back pocket of his faded denim work pants.
"A lot of bad things happened back in that era between the races. But we're not the same people we used to be, are we?" he said.
"I think we are."
"You seem unable to let the past rest, sir."
