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"I cain't go back out there."
"That's right."
"I went to the bathroom in my pants. That's what you done, man."
"You're never coming back here, Bobby. You're going to treat this bus depot like it's the center of a nuclear test zone."
"I got a crib . . . a place . . . two blocks from here, man. What you—"
"Do you know who—is?" I used the name of a notorious right-wing racist beat cop from the Irish Channel.
His hand stopped mopping at his nose with the towels.
"I got no beef wit' that peckerwood," he said.
"He broke a pimp's trachea with his baton once. That's right, Bobby. The guy strangled to death in his own spit."
"What you talkin' 'bout, man? I ain't said nothing 'bout —I know what you're doin', man, you're—"
"If I catch you in the depot again, if I hear you're scamming runaways and young girls again, I'm going to tell —you've been working his neighborhood, maybe hanging around school grounds in the Channel."
"Who the fuck are you, man? Why you makin' me miserable? I ain't done nothing to you."
I unlocked the bolt on the door.
"Did you ever read the passage in the Bible about what happens to people who corrupt children?" I said.
He looked at me with a stupefied expression on his face.
"Start thinking about millstones or get into another line of work," I said.
I had seventeen dollars in my billfold. I gave twelve to the two runaway girls and the address of an AA street priest who ran a shelter and wouldn't report them.
Chapter 9
Outside, the air tasted like pennies and felt like it had been superheated in an electric oven. Even the wind blew off the pavement like heat rising from a wood stove. I started my truck, unbuttoned my shirt to my waist, and headed toward I-10 and home.
When I passed Lake Pontchartrain, the moon was up and small waves were breaking against the rim of gray sandy beach by the highway. I wanted to stop the truck, strip to my skivvies, wade out to the drop-off, then dive down through the descending layers of temperature until I struck a cold, dark current at the bottom that would wash the last five hours out of my pores.
But Lake Pontchartrain, like the city of New Orleans, was deceptive. Under its slate-green, capping waves, its moon-glazed surfaces, its twenty-four-mile causeway glowing with electric light, waste of every kind lay trapped in the dark sediment, and the level of toxicity was so high that it was now against the law to swim in the lake.
I kept the truck wide open, the plastic ball on the floor stick shaking under my palm, all the way to the Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge. Then I rolled down the elevated causeway through the Atchafalaya marsh and the warm night air that smelled of sour mud and hyacinths blooming back in the trees. Out over the pewter-colored bays, the dead cypress trunks were silhouett
ed against burning gas flares and the vast black-green expanse of sawgrass and flooded willow islands. Huge thunderclouds tumbled one upon another like curds of black smoke from an old fire, and networks of lightning were bursting silently all over the southern sky. I thought I could smell raindrops on the wind, as cool and clean and bright as the taste of white alcohol on the tip of the tongue.
Outside our bedroom window the pecan trees were motionless and gray, soaked with humidity, in the false dawn. Then the early red sun broke above the treeline in the marsh like a Lucifer match being scratched against the sky.
Bootsie slept on her side in her nightgown, the sheet molded against her thigh, her face cool, her auburn hair ruffled on the pillow by the window fan. In the early morning her skin always had a glow to it, like the pale pink light inside a rose. I moved her body against mine and kissed her mouth lightly. Without opening her eyes she smiled sleepily, slipped her arms around my back, widened her thighs, and pressed her stomach against me.
Out on the bayou, I thought I heard a bass leap from the water in a wet arc and then reenter the surface, slapping his tail, as he slid deep into the roots of the floating hyacinths.
Bootsie put her legs in mine, her breath warm against my cheek, one hand in the small of my back, her soft rump rolling against the bed; then I felt that heart-twisting moment begin to grow inside me, past any point of control, like a log dam in a canyon resisting a flooded streambed, then cracking and bursting loose in a rush of white water and uprooted boulders.
I lay beside her and held one of her hands and kissed the thin film of perspiration on her shoulders.
She felt my face with her fingers and touched the white patch in my hair as though she were exploring a physical curiosity in me for the first time.
"Ole Streak," she said, and smiled.
