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I dropped him off at a motel by the four-lane in New Iberia and drove home alone. I waved at the deputy parked in a cruiser by the bait shop and turned into our dirt driveway and cut the engine and listened to it cool and tick while I looked at Bootsie's car and the doves that rose out of my neighbor's field against the late sun and then at Bootsie's face in the middle of a windy swirl of curtains at a window in the rear of the house before she turned away as though I were not there.
I started toward the back door, forming words in my mind to address problems I couldn't even define, then stopped, the way you do when thinking doesn't work anymore, and walked down the slope to the bait shop, into the green, gaslike odor of the evening, the pecan husks breaking under my shoes, as though I could walk beyond the box of space and time and loveless tension that my father's hand-hewn cypress house had become.
The string of electric lights was turned on over the dock and I could hear music through the screens.
"What are you doing, Alf?" I said.
"I got the key to the jukebox out of the cash register. Is that all right?"
"Yeah, that's fine."
She had wheeled Jerry Joe Plumb's jukebox away from the wall, where I had pushed it front end first, and unlocked the door and stacked the 45 rpm records on top of a soft towel on the counter.
"I'm playing each one of them on my portable and recording them on tape. I've already recorded fifteen of them," she said. "You like all these, don't you?"
I nodded, my eyes gazing out the window at the lighted gallery of the house. "That's great, Alf," I said.
"Who's the buttwipe who cut the electric cord on the box?"
"Beg your pardon?"
"The buttwipe who sliced off the cord. What kind of person would do that?"
"How about it on the language?"
"Big deal," she said. She slid a record off her machine and replaced it with another, her face pointed downward so that her hair hid her expression.
"Why are you so angry?" I asked.
"You and Bootsie, Dave. Why don't y'all stop it?"
I sat down on a stool next to her.
"I made some mistakes," I said.
"Then unmake them. You're my father. You're supposed to fix things. Not break the jukebox 'cause you're mad at it."
I crimped my lips and tried to find the right words. If there were any, I didn't know them.
"Everything's messed up in our house. I hate it," she said, her eyes shining, then brimming with tears.
"Let's see what we can do about it, then," I said, and walked up the slope, through the trees, across the gallery and into the stillness of the house.
Bootsie was at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee. She wore a pair of straw sandals and white slacks and a stonewashed denim shirt. The surfaces of her face looked as cool and shiny as alabaster.
"The job's not worth it anymore. It's time to hang it up," I said.
"Is that what you want?"
"I can always do some P.I. stuff with Clete if we get jammed up."
"No."
"I thought you'd approve."
"I had to go to confession this afternoon," she said.
"What for?"
