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“Fortunately it’s not my obligation to argue with them,” Gable replied. “On another subject, would you care to look at my collection of ordnance?” He was grinning again now, his callousness or meanness of spirit or whatever moral vacuity that seemed to define him once more hidden in the smiling
mask that he wore like ceramic.
“Another time,” I said.
But he wasn’t listening. He pushed open two oak doors with big brass handles on them. The inside of the room was filled with glass gun cases, the walls hung with both historical and modern weapons. One mahogany rack alone contained eight AK-47 rifles. On a table under it was a huge glass jar, the kind used in old-time drugstores, filled with a yellow fluid. Gable tapped on the lid with his fingernail so the object inside vibrated slightly and moved against the glass.
I felt a spasm constrict the lining of my stomach.
“That’s a V.C. head. My cousin brought it back. He was in the Phoenix Program,” Gable said.
“We’ve got all we need here,” Clete said to me.
“Have I offended you?” Gable asked.
“Not us. I wish you’d made it over there, Jim. It was your kind of place,” Clete said.
Clete and I both turned to go and almost collided into Gable’s wife. She wore a white silk robe and silver slippers and supported herself on a cane with a rubber-stoppered tripod on it. Her rouged cheeks and lipstick made me think of cosmetics applied in a desperate fashion to a papier-mâché doll. Her yellow hair was like wisps of corn silk. When she smoothed it back, lifting it coyly into place, her temples pulsed with tiny blue veins.
“Have you invited the gentlemen for a late supper?” she asked her husband.
“They’re just here on business, Cora. They’re leaving now,” Gable replied.
“I apologize for not coming out to welcome you. I didn’t realize you were here,” she said.
“That’s quite all right,” I said.
“You mustn’t pay attention to Jim’s war souvenirs. They were given to him or he purchased them. He’s a gentle man by nature,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She placed her hand in mine. It had no more weight or density than a bird’s wing.
“We’d love to see you again, sir,” she said. Her fingers tightened on mine, her eyes more than earnest.
The sky was dark and streaked with rain when Clete and I went back outside. The air smelled of ozone and schooled-up fish out in the bay. Lightning leaped from the horizon to the top of the sky, and I looked out at the pale green color of the sugarcane blowing in the wind and at the crossroads in the distance where we had stopped at the general store next to the abandoned nightclub with the cabins in back, and I remembered when I had been there before.
“My mother ran off with a man named Mack when I was a little boy,” I said to Clete. “She came back for me once and we stayed in one of those cabins behind the nightclub.”
“Let it go, Streak,” he said.
“My father was in jail. Mack dealt cards at that club. My mother was a waitress there.”
“That was a long time before she died, big mon. Don’t hurt yourself like this.”
We had backed out almost to the front gate. I stopped the truck and walked to the front door in the rain and knocked loudly on the door.
Jim Gable opened it with a turkey drumstick wrapped in a paper napkin in his hand. He was grinning.
“You forgot something?” he said.
“You’re from Lafourche Parish, Mr. Gable?”
“I grew up right down this road.”
“My mother’s name was Mae Guillory. I think she was murdered somewhere close by. Zipper says it was around ’66 or ’67. Did you know a woman named Mae Guillory?”
His face transformed itself into the smiling, disingenuous countenance that all dishonest people know how to affect, the light in his eyes deliberately unfocused, the lips parted solicitously.
