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"Handball?"
"Yeah, against the garage."
"No, I—"
"Tell the dyke I got no beef. I just didn't like the roust in front of all them people."
"Tell the dyke? You're an unusual man, Swede."
"I heard abou
t you. You were in Vietnam. Anything on my sheet you probably did in spades."
Then, as though I were no longer there, he did a handstand in the yard and walked on stiffened arms through the shade, the bottoms of his gym shoes extended out like the shoulders of a man with no head.
CLETE PURCEL SAT IN the bow of the outboard and drained the foam out of a long-necked bottle of beer. He cast his Rapala between two willow trees and retrieved it back toward him, the sides of the lure flashing just below the surface. The sun was low on the western horizon and the canopy overhead was lit with fire, the water motionless, the mosquitoes starting to form in clouds over the islands of algae that extended out from the flooded cypress trunks.
A bass rose from the silt, thick-backed, the black-green dorsal fin glistening when it broke the water, and knocked the Rapala into the air without taking the treble hook. Clete set his rod on the bow and slapped the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm.
"So this guy Cool Breeze is telling you a couple of crackers got the whack on him? One of them is maybe the guy who did these two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?" he said.
"Yeah, that's about it."
"But you don't buy it?"
"When did the Giacanos start using over-the-hill peckerwoods for button men?"
"I wouldn't mark it off, mon. This greaseball in Igor's was complaining to me about how the Giacano family is falling apart, how they've lost their self-respect and they're running low-rent action like porno joints and dope in the projects. I say, 'Yeah, it's a shame. The world's really going to hell,' and he says, 'You telling me, Purcel? It's so bad we got a serious problem with somebody, we got to outsource.'
"I say, 'Outsource?'
"He goes, 'Yeah, niggers from the Desire, Vietnamese lice-heads, crackers who spit Red Man in Styrofoam cups at the dinner table.'
"It's the Dixie Mafia, Dave. There's a nest of them over on the Mississippi coast."
I drew the paddle through the water and let the boat glide into a cove that was freckled with sunlight. I cast a popping bug with yellow feathers and red eyes on the edge of the hyacinths. A solitary blue heron lifted on extended wings out of the grass and flew through an opening in the trees, dimpling the water with its feet.
"But you didn't bring me out here to talk about wise guy bullshit, did you?" Clete said.
I watched a cottonmouth extend its body out of the water, curling around a low branch on a flooded willow, then pull itself completely into the leaves.
"I don't know how to say it," I said.
"I'll clear it up for both of us. I like her. Maybe we got something going. That rubs you the wrong way?"
"A guy gets involved, he doesn't see things straight sometimes," I said.
"'Involved,' like in the sack? You're asking me if I'm in the sack with Megan?"
"You're my friend. You carried me down a fire escape when that kid opened up on us with a .22. Something stinks about the Flynn family."
Clete's face was turned into the shadows. The back of his neck was the color of Mercurochrome.
"On my best day I kick in some poor bastard's door for Nig Rosewater. Last week a greaseball tried to hire me to collect the vig for a couple of his shylocks. Megan's talking about getting me on as head of security with a movie company. You think that's bad?"
I looked at the water and the trapped air bubbles that chained to the surface out of the silt. I heard Clete's weight turn on the vinyl cushion under him.
"Say it, Dave. Any broad outside of a T&A joint must have an angle if she'd get involved with your podjo. I'm not sensitive. But lay off Megan."
