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“Uncle Didi was the man. That's the old days we're talking about.”
“You have a lot of people's respect, Johnny.”
“Yeah? The day I go broke I start being toe jam again. You want to know about Marsallus? He came out of the womb with a hard-on.”
“What's that mean?”
“He's read enough books to sound like he's somebody he ain't, but he's got sperm on the brain. He uses broads like Kleenex. Don't let that punk take you over the hurdles. He'd stand in line to fuck his mother … I say something wrong?”
“No,” I said, my face blank.
He folded his hands, his elbows splayed, and leaned forward. “Serious,”
he said, “somebody's trying to whack out Sonny?”
“Maybe.”
He looked sideways out the window, thinking, his coat bunched up on his neck. “It ain't anybody in the city. Look, Sonny wasn't never a threat to anybody's action, you understand what I'm saying? His problem is he thinks his shit don't stink. He floats above the ground the rest of us got to walk on.”
“Well, it was good seeing you, Johnny.”
“Yeah, always a pleasure.”
I pulled on my earlobe as I got up to go.
“It's funny you'd tell me Sonny uses women badly. That was never his reputation,” I said.
“People in the projects don't work. What do you think they do all day, why you think they have all them kids? He's a nickel-and-dime street mutt. The head he thinks with ain't on his shoulders. I'm getting through here?”
“See you around, Johnny.”
He cocked one finger at me, drank from his glass of milk and Scotch, his compressed features almost disappearing behind his hand and wrist.
I don't remember the psychological term for it, but cops and prosecutors know the mechanism well. It involves unintended acknowledgment of guilt through the expression of denial. When Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody after the assassination of President Kennedy, he seemed to answer truthfully many of the questions asked him by cops and newsmen. But he consistently denied ownership of the 6.5 millimeter rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, the one piece of physical evidence to which he was unquestionably and inextricably linked.
Delia Landry had been murdered, in all probability, because of her association with Sonny. The first remark out of Johnny's mouth had been a slur about Sonny's misuse of women, as if to say, perhaps, that the fate of those who involved themselves with him was Sonny's responsibility and not anyone else's.
But maybe I was simply in another cul-de-sac, looking for meaning where there was none.
As I got into my truck three of Johnny Carp's hoods were standing by the back of his Lincoln. They wore slacks with knife creases, tasseled loafers, short-sleeve tropical shirts, gold chains on their necks, and lightly oiled boxed haircuts. But steroids had become fashionable with the mob, too, and their torsos and arms were thick with muscle like gnarled oak about to split the skin.
They were taking turns firing a .22 revolver at tin cans and the birds feeding along the dirt road that led between the trash heaps. They glanced at me briefly, then continued shooting.
“I'd like to drive out of here without getting shot,” I said. There was no response. One man broke open the revolver, shucked out the hulls, and began reloading. He looked at me meaningfully. “Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said. I drove down the road, tapping my horn as cattle egrets on each side of me lifted into the air. In my rearview mirror I saw Johnny Carp walk out of his office and join his men, all of them looking at me now, I was sure, with the quiet and patient energies of creatures whose thoughts you never truly wish to know.
Friday night I went to the parish library and began to read about Jean Lafitte. Most of the material repeated in one form or another the traditional stories about the pirate who joined forces with Andrew Jackson to defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans, the ships he “robbed on the high seas, the gangs of cutthroats he lived with in Barataria and Galveston, his death somewhere in the Yucatan. He had been considered a romantic and intriguing figure by New Orleans society, probably because none of them had been his victims. But also in the library was an article written by a local historian at the turn of the century that did not treat Lafitte as kindly. His crimes did not stop with piracy and murder. He had been a blackbirder and was transporting African slaves into the country after the prohibition of 1809. He sold his stolen goods as well as human cargo on the banks of the Teche. Milton and Shakespeare both said lucidity and power lay in the world of dreams. For me, that has always meant that sleep and the unconscious can define what daylight and rationality cannot. That night, as a wind smelling of salt and wet sand and humus blew across the swamp, I dreamed of what Bayou Teche must have been like when the country was new, when the most severe tool or weapon was shaped from a stone, the forest floor covered with palmettos, the moss-hung canopy so thick and tall that in the suffused sunlight the trunks looked like towering gray columns in a Gothic cathedral. In the dream the air was breathless, like steam caught under a glass bell, an autumnal yellow moon dissected with a single strip of black cloud overhead, and then I saw a long wood ship with furled masts being pulled up the bayou on ropes by Negroes who stumbled along the banks through the reeds and mud, their bodies rippling with sweat in the firelight. On the deck of the ship were their women and children, their cloth bundles gathered among them, their eyes peering ahead into the bayou's darkness, as though an explanation for their fear and misery were somehow at hand.
The auction was held under the oaks at the foot of the old Voorhies property. The Negroes did not speak English, French, or Spanish, so indigenous histories were created for them. The other property did not offer as great a problem. The gold and silver plate, the trunks filled with European fashions, the bejeweled necklaces and swords and scrolled flintlocks, all had belonged to people whose final histories were written in water somewhere in the Caribbean.
In a generation or two the banks of Spanish Lake and Bayou Teche would be lined with plantations, and people would eat off gold plate whose origins were only an interesting curiosity. The slaves who worked the sawmills, cane fields, and the salt domes out in the wetlands would speak the language and use the names of their owners, and the day when a large sailing ship appeared innocuously on a river in western Africa, amidst a green world of birds and hummocks, would become the stuff of oral legend, confused with biblical history and allegory, and finally forgotten.
I believed the dream. I remembered the oak trees at the foot of the Voorhies property, when lengths of mooring chain, driven with huge spikes into the trunks, grew in and out of the bark like calcified rust-sheathed serpents. Over the years, the chains had been drawn deeper into the heart of the tree, like orange-encrusted iron cysts in the midst of living tissue or perhaps unacknowledged and unforgiven sins.
At breakfast Saturday morning Bootsie said, ”Oh, I forgot, Dave, Julia Bertrand called last night. She invited us out to their camp at Pecan Island next Saturday.“
The kitchen window was open, and the sky was full of white clouds.
”What'd you tell her?“ I said. ”I thought it was a nice idea. We don't see them often.“
