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"There's no problem here, Clete."
"Yeah, I bet. That broad couldn't buy you, so she decided to fuck your head." He stood up from the barstool, then grimaced slightly. "I feel like an upended bottle. Come on, let's get out of here. Remind me in the future to drink in low-class dumps that aren't full of the right people."
"You're the best, Cletus."
He put his arm on my shoulder, and we walked together toward the elevator like two impaired Siamese twins trying to get in sync with each other.
The next morning I was part of the caravan that escorted Karyn and Buford back to their home on the Teche. It was balmy an
d gray after the rain, and you could smell the wet earth in the fields and hear the clanging of the sugarcane refinery down the bayou. It was a fine, late-fall morning, disjointed from the events of last night, as though I had experienced them only in a drunken dream.
From my car I watched Karyn and her husband enter their front door, their faces opaque, perhaps still numb from the alcohol of the night before, or perhaps masking the secrets they waited to share or the buried anger they would vent on each other once inside.
Bootsie was in the backyard, at the redwood picnic table, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette when I parked in the drive. She wore sandals and a terrycloth red shirt and a pair of khakis high on her hips.
"Hi," I said.
Her legs were crossed, and she tipped her ashes in an inverted preserve jar cap and looked at the ducks skittering across our pond.
"You don't smoke," I said.
"I'm starting."
I sat down across from her. Her eyes moved up to meet mine.
"I told you the truth last night," I said.
"For some reason that doesn't make it any easier."
"Why?"
"How'd she come to have this obsession with you? What's your end of it?"
"I didn't want to go out to their house when we were first invited there. I tried to avoid her."
"Who are you putting on?"
I felt my throat close. My eyes burned, as though I were looking into a watery glare.
She threw her cigarette in a flower bed full of dead leaves by the back wall of the house. Her cheeks were hot and streaked with color. Before I went into the house, I removed the burning cigarette from the leaves and mashed it out in the jar cap in front of her, my gesture as foolish as my words were self-serving.
The wall phone was ringing in the kitchen. I picked it up, my eyes fixed on Bootsie's back through the window. Her hair was thick and woven with gold in the gray light.
"Aaron Crown dumped the boat down by Maurice," the sheriff said.
"Did anybody see him?"
"No, just the boat."
"He'll be back."
"You say that almost with admiration."
"Like an old gunbull said, Aaron's a traveling shit storm."
"Anyway, you got your wish. You're off it."
When I didn't reply, he said, "You're not going to ask me why?"
