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“We got any kind of priority?” he said.
“Tell them it’s part of a homicide investigation,” I replied.
That afternoon Clete Purcel picked up Barbara Shanahan after work, and the two of them drove to a western store, located on the south end of town among strip malls and huge discount outlets whose parking lots were blown with trash. Clete sat in his convertible and listened to the radio while Barbara went inside and bought a western shirt and a silver belt buckle as a birthday gift for her uncle. While the clerk processed her credit card, she felt a sense of uneasiness that she could not explain, a tiny twitch in her back, a puff of fouled air on her neck, although the front door of the store was closed and no one stood behind her. Then she smelled cigarette smoke, even though the store was supposedly a smoke-free environment. She turned and looked down an aisle lined with racks of cowboy boots and hand-tooled leather purses and saw a tall, sinewy man, with vertical furrows in his face, wearing a snap-button, long-sleeved maroon shirt, a Panama hat at a jaunty angle, starched khaki trousers, and a chrome belt buckle with a rearing brass horse on it.
The man was smoking a nonfiltered cigarette with two fingers that were yellow with nicotine. His eyes moved over her face, her breasts and stomach, her hips and thighs. Inside the shadow of his hat brim, a smile wrinkled at the corner of his mouth.
For some reason her credit card did not clear. The clerk started to excuse himself.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“The line’s down. I don’t know what’s wrong. I have to use a separate line,” he replied.
“I can pay cash,” she said.
“That’s all right, ma’am. I’ll be right back,” he said, and walked away.
She looked straight ahead, examining a row of antique firearms on the wall. Then she smelled an odor behind her, like sweat and unrinsed soap detergent ironed into someone’s clothes. No, that wasn’t it. It was far worse, raw and dead smelling, like a rat buried inside a wall.
She turned and stared into Legion Guidry’s face, only inches from her own. He took a puff off his cigarette and averted his face and blew his smoke at an upward angle.
“Is there something I can help you with?” she said.
“I seen you. Both you and him,” he said. He nodded toward the parking lot, where Clete sat in his car, reading a magazine.
“You saw me? What are you talking about?” she said.
“What you t’ink? T’rew your window. You must be hard up, you. To let some shithog like that one out yonder put his dick in you.”
She tried to step back from his words, from the smell that seemed auraed on his body. She felt the edge of the glass counter knock into her back.
He laughed under his breath and spit a grain of tobacco off his tongue and started to walk away. Her hand went into her purse.
“Wait,” she said.
He dropped his cigarette to the wood floor and twisted his shoe on it, then turned.
“What you want, bitch?” he said.
Her hand closed around her car and house and office keys. They were mounted on a ring, and the ring was mounted on a stainless-steel handle. She pulled the keys out of her purse and swung them, like a sock filled with scrap iron, across his face.
“You ever look through my window again, you pathetic fuck, I’ll blow your goddamn liver out,” she said.
A narrow welt, needle-pointed with blood, appeared just below his eye. He touched it with the balls of his fingers, then rubbed them against his thumb. He reached out and clenched her hand in his, squeezing, cupping the bones behind the knuckles into a circle of pain, blowing his breath into her face, touching her hair with it, tracing her eyes and mouth with it, causing her to push her free hand against his chest like a child.
“I know where that shithog live. Y’all gonna be seeing a lot more of me. You gonna like it, you,” he said.
Then he walked toward the rear of the store, past customers who stepped back from him, stunned and open-mouthed. He pushed through the back door, and the interior of the store was filled with a hot light like the sun leaping off a heliograph. Then Legion Guidry was gone.
Clete opened the front door and walked into the air-conditioning, his face puzzled.
“Anything wrong? What’s that smell?” he said.
That evening, just at sunset, I ran four miles on the dirt road that wound past my house. The moss was blowing in the trees along the road, and I could smell water sprinklers twirling on my neighbors’ lawns and the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou. The sugarcane and cattle acreage and distant clumps of pecan trees behind the houses had already fallen into shadow, but the summer light still filled the sky, as though somehow it had a life of its own and was not affected by the setting of the sun. Then a huge flock of birds rose out of the swamp and freckled the perfection of the sky directly overhead, and for some reason I thought of a painting by Van Gogh, a cornfield suddenly invaded by black crows. A gas-guzzler passed me, with two figures in the front seat, then stopped at a bend in the road, the muffler rattling against the frame. The driver cut the engine and got out and stood with one arm propped across the top of the door, waiting. He wore a pink shirt unbuttoned on his chest and black trousers, stitched with silver thread, that hung down below his navel. His throat and chest ran with sweat.
I slowed and wiped my face with a bandanna, then tied it around my forehead. “Just taking a drive?” I said.
“I’ll go into that treatment program you was talking about,” Tee Bobby said.
