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“Then it’s a private matter.”
“As of this moment you’re on suspension.”
“That’s the breaks.”
“That casual, huh?”
“How’d you like Remeta creeping your place?”
“Do what you’re thinking and I’ve got your cell already waiting for you.”
“I didn’t call you because I can’t prove what Gable was doing behind my wife’s person in that pavilion. It would only bring her embarrassment.”
“Behind her person? What the hell does that mean?”
“End of conversation.”
“You’re right. It does no good to talk to you. I wish I hadn’t come here,” he said. He tapped his Stetson against his leg and walked out into the mist, his mouth a tight seam.
I worked with Batist at the dock all day, then drove to the Winn-Dixie in town, filled the back of the pickup with soda pop and loaded the ice chest with lunch meat for the bait shop cooler. Right down the street was the ancient motel where Clete was living. I had not seen him since Saturday afternoon, when I had left him bleary-eyed and alone with a scrap of paper in his hand that could have been torn from the Doomsday Book.
I pulled into the motel entrance and drove under th
e canopy of oaks to the stucco cottage he rented at the end of the row. Leaves were drifting out of the oak branches overhead and he was dusting the exterior of his Cadillac with a rag, flicking the leaves off the finish as though no others would drop out of the tree, the hair on his bare shoulders glowing like a blond ape’s in a column of sunlight.
“What’s the haps, Streak?” he said without looking up from his work.
“You doing all right?” I said.
“I used the medical dictionary at the City Library. From what it says, that stuff’s like going to hell without dying.”
“There’re treatments.”
“The victims look like they’re wrapped in sheets of plastic?”
“How’s Passion?”
“She doesn’t talk about it. At least not to me.” His voice was without tone or inflection. “It’s true, you tore up Jim Gable at the Shrimp Festival?”
“I guess I have to lose it about every six months to remind myself I’m still a drunk.”
“Save the dish rinse. You didn’t lose it. He took it from you.”
“What?”
“Gable never does anything without a reason. You’re trying to bring him down. Now nobody will believe anything you say about him.”
I stared at him. I felt like the confidence game mark who realizes his gullibility has no bottom. Clete threw his dust rag through the open front window of the Cadillac onto the front seat and walked over to my truck.
“You’re just like me, Streak. You never left the free-fire zone. You think aspirin and meetings and cold showers are going to clean out your head. What you want is God’s permission to paint the trees with the bad guys. That won’t happen, big mon,” he said.
“I’m sorry about Passion.”
“Life’s a bitch and then you die,” he replied.
27
Bed Check Charley still visited me in my dreams, crawling on his stomach through the rice fields, his black pajamas twisted like liquid silk on his dehydrated body. He used a French bolt-action rifle with iron sights, and Japanese potato mashers that he whacked on a banyan root, igniting the impact fuze prematurely, before he flung one into our midst. But even though his ordnance was antiquated, Bed Check was punctual and did his job well. We used him in our day as we would a clock.
