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'See you around, sport,' she said as she slammed the door and walked into the bar, the tip of a white handkerchief sticking out of the back pocket of her Levi's, her bare ankles chafing against the tops of her dusty tennis shoes.
Bad situation in which to leave a distraught lady, I thought, and followed her inside.
It was dark and cool inside and smelled of the green sawdust on the floor and a caldron of shrimp the black bartender was boiling on a gas stove behind the counter. I used a pay phone by the empty pool table to call home. It was the second time I had called that afternoon and gotten no answer. I left another message.
Lucinda drank a whiskey sour in two swallows. Her eyes widened, then she let out her breath slowly, almost erotically, and ordered another.
'Join me?' she asked.
'No thanks.'
She drank from the glass.
'How many times has it happened to you?' she said.
'Who cares?'
'I don't know if I can go back out there again.'
'When they deal the play and refuse the alternatives, you shut down their game.'
'How many times did you do it? Can't you answer a simple question?' she said.
'Five.'
'God.'
I felt a constriction, like a fish bone, in my throat.
'Who'd you rather have out there, people who do the best they can or a lot of cops cloned from somebody like Nate Baxter or that blimp in the motel room?'
She finished her drink and motioned to the bartender, who refilled her glass from a chrome shaker fogged with moisture. She flattened her hands on the bar top and stared at the tops of her fingers.
'I busted Albert four years ago,' she said. 'For stealing a can of Vienna sausage out of a Winn-Dixie. He lived in the Iberville Project with his grandmother. He cried when I put him in the holding cell. His P.O. sent him up the road.'
'A lot of people wrote that guy's script, but you weren't one of them, Lucinda. Sometimes we just end up being the punctuation mark,' I said, slid the whiskey glass away from the ends of her fingers, and turned her toward the door and the mauve-colored dusk that was gathering outside in the trees.
I drove her to her house and walked with her up on the gallery. The latticework was thick and dark with trumpet vine, and fireflies were lighting in the shadows. The lightbulb above our heads swarmed with bugs in the cool air. She paused with her keys in her hand.
'Do you want me to call later?' I said.
'I'll be all right.'
'Is Zoot here?'
'He plays basketball tonight.'
'It might be good if you ask somebody to come over.'
Her face looked up into mine. Her mouth was red; her breath was soft with the smell of bourbon.
'I'll call when I get back to New Iberia,' I said.
Her face looked wan, empty, her gaze already starting to focus inward on a memory that would hang in the unconscious like a sleeping bat.
'It's going to be all right,' I said, and placed one hand on her shoulder. I could feel the bone through the cloth of her blouse.
But nothing was going to be all right. She lowered her head and exhaled. Then I realized what she was looking at. On the tip of her tennis shoe was a red curlicue of dried blood.
