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"Is that all of it, Jody?" I asked.
"Tell him," Helen said.
"They dug a hole and buried him," he said.
"Who?" I asked.
"Everybody. I run off in the trees. I couldn't watch it. . . Maybe he wasn't dead . . . That's what keeps going through my head . . . They didn't get a doctor or nothing . . . They should have put a mirror in front of his nose or something . . ."
"Who was there, Jody?" I asked.
"The guy who just got elected governor."
"You're sure?" I said.
"He was strung out, crying like a little kid. There was some other Americans there had to take care of him."
"Who?" I asked.
"I don't know, man. I blacked out. I couldn't take it. I can't even tell you where I was at. I woke up behind a colored bar in St. Martinville with dogs peeing on me."
His face was swollen, glazed like the red surfaces on a lollipop, decades older than his years. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
Back in my office, Helen said, "What do you think?"
"Take his statement. Put it in the file," I answered.
"That's it?"
"Somebody snipped Jody's brain stem a long time ago."
"You don't believe him?"
"Yeah I do. But it won't stand up. Buford LaRose won't go down until he gets caught in bed with a dead underage male prostitute."
"Too much," she said, and walked out the door.
Saturday morning Clete Purcel drove in from New Orleans, fished for two hours in a light mist, then gave it up and drank beer in the bait shop while I added up my receipts and tried to figure my quarterly income tax payment. He spoke little, gazing out the window at the rain, as though he was concentrating on a conversation inside his head.
"Say it," I said.
"After I got to Vietnam, I wished I hadn't joined the Corps," he said.
"So?"
"You already rolled the dice, big mon. You can't just tell these cocksuckers you don't want to play anymore."
"Why not?"
"Because I keep seeing Jerry Joe's face in my dreams, that's why . . . That's his jukebox back there?"
"Yeah."
"What's on it?"
"Forties and fifties stuff. Every one of them is a Cadillac."
"Give me some quarters."
