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I pulled the cruiser to the curb.
“How about coffee and a doughnut, Doc?” I said.
He squinted up at a palm tree, then watched a helicopter thropping across the sky.
“I don’t mind,” he said.
We packed his duffel bag, his rolled-up tent, and a plastic clothes basket filled with cook gear, magazines, and canned goods into the backseat of the cruiser, then drove to the center of town and crossed the train tracks to a doughnut shop.
“Wait here. I’ll get it to go,” I said.
“You don’t want to go inside?” he asked, his face vaguely hurt.
“It’s a nice day. Let’s eat it in the park,” I replied.
I went inside the store and bought pastry and two paper cups of hot coffee, then drove across the drawbridge into City Park and stopped by one of the tin-roofed picnic shelters next to Bayou Teche.
He sat at the plank table, his coffee and a doughnut on a napkin in front of him, gazing through the live oaks at the children swimming in the public pool.
“You ever been in trouble?” I asked.
“I been in jail.”
“What for?” I asked.
“For whatever they wanted to make up.”
“You’re looking copacetic, Doc.”
“I went to the Catholic men’s shelter in Lafayette. They give me new clothes and a haircut. They’re nice people.”
“What were you doing over on Railroad Avenue yesterday?”
His face colored. He bit a large piece out of his doughnut and drank from his coffee and fixed his attention on the gardens in the backyard of the Shadows, across the bayou.
“You don’t have a girlfriend on Railroad, do you?” I said, and smiled at him.
“The woman didn’t have no cigarettes. So I went in the store and bought some for her.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“She took the cigarettes, then I asked her why she didn’t change her life.”
I kept my eyes averted, my expression flat. “I see. What happened then?” I said.
“She and the other broad laughed at me. They laughed for a long time, real loud.”
“The report says you threw a rock at them.”
“I kicked a rock. It hit their pimp’s car. Take me back where you found me. Or put me in that shit bucket you call a jail. You want a lesson, Loot? Everybody does time. It just depends on where you do it. I do my fucking time wherever I am.” He pointed a stiffened index finger into the side of his head. “I got stuff in here worse than anything you motherfuckers could ever do to me.”
“I believe you,” I said.
In seconds his face had gone from pity to rage. Then, just as quickly, he seemed to disconnect from his own rhetoric and fix his attention on a butterfly that had just come to rest on a camellia leaf, its pink and gray wings gathered together, its purchase on the leaf tenuous and unsteady.
When the breeze came up, the butterfly fell to the ground, among red ants that had nested below the camellia bush. The ex-soldier, who in my encounters with him had given me three different Italian names, got down on all fours and lifted the butterfly up on a twig and walked it down to the bayou, protecting it from the wind with his cupped hand. He stooped and set it inside a hollow cypress on a mound of moss.
I cleaned up our trash and wedged three fingers inside his paper cup and placed it inside the cardboard box containing the rest of our doughnuts. After I dropped him off on Main, I drove out to the crime lab by the airport and asked one of our forensic chemists to lift the latents on the cup and run them through AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
