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Before I went home that evening I drove to Clete’s apartment, but his blinds were closed and his car was gone. I slipped a note under his door, asking him to call me. When I got home, the sky was maroon-colored, full of birds, the thunderheads over the Gulf banked in a long black line just above the horizon. One of Alafair’s friends was spending the night and had blocked the driveway with her automobile, and I parked my truck by the boat ramp and walked up to the house. A few minutes later I looked through the front window and saw my friend, the ex-soldier, hosing down the truck, then scrubbing the camping shell in back with a long-handled push broom.
I walked back down the slope.
“There’s another storm coming. Maybe you should wait on washing the truck,” I said.
“That’s okay. I just want to get the mud off. Then later I can just run the hose over it,” he said.
“How you getting along?” I asked.
“I had a little trouble sleeping. The sound of your refrigeration equipment comes through the walls. When I put the pillow over my head, I don’t hear it so much.”
“You want to join us for supper?”
“That’s all right, Loot. I went into town with Batist and bought some groceries,” he said.
I turned to walk back to the house.
“There was an old guy here in a red pickup truck,” he said. “He asked if somebody in a purple Cadillac convertible had been around. A guy named Purcel.”
“What’d this guy look like?” I asked.
“Tall, with deep lines in his face. I told him I didn’t know anybody named Purcel.” The ex-soldier scratched his cheek and looked quizzically into space.
“What is it?” I said.
“He told me to go inside and ask the nigger. That’s the word he used, just like everybody did. I told him he should watch what he called other people. He didn’t like it.”
“His name is Legion Guidry, Doc. He’s one of those we don’t let get behind us.”
“Who is he?”
“I wish I knew, partner,” I said.
After supper I walked out on the gallery and tried to read the newspaper, but I couldn’t concentrate. The sky began to darken, and a flock of egrets rose out of the swamp and scattered like white rose petals over the top of my house, then the wind kicked up again and I heard rain clicking in the trees. I folded the newspaper and went back inside. Bootsie was reading a novel by Steve Yarbrough under a floor lamp. She closed her book, using her thumb to mark her place, her eyes veiled. “Do you think your friend, the war vet out there, is a hundred percent?” she said.
“Probably not. But he’s harmless,” I replied.
“How do you know?”
“Good people don’t change. Sometimes bad ones do. But good people don’t.”
“You’re incurably romantic, Dave.”
“Think so?”
She laughed loudly, then went back to her book. I walked into the kitchen, hoping she did not detect my real mood. Because the truth was my skin was crawling with anxiety, the same kind I’d experienced during my flirtation with amphetamines. But this time the cause wasn’t the white worm; it was an abiding sense that my loyal friend Clete Purcel was skating on the edge of another calamity.
“Where you going?” Bootsie said.
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“To Clete’s. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.
“You worried about him?”
“I’ve left him several messages. Clete always calls me as soon as he gets the message.”
“Maybe he’s in New Orleans.”
