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Joe stared at Marvin a long time, the nails of his right hand cutting into his palm. His nostrils whitened around the rims and his hand floated toward his pants pocket.
“Joe—” I began.
He removed a handkerchief from his back pocket and reached down to Marvin’s face with it.
“He’s got a runny nose. It ain’t nice to look at. You ought to wipe it for him,” Joe said. When he finished, he threw the handkerchief on the ground.
Twenty minutes later Helen Soileau and I watched the paramedics load Clete and Zerelda into an ambulance and take them to an emergency receiving room in Abbeville. The sky was still churning with black clouds, the air loud with crickets and the sound of tree frogs. I looked for the ex-soldier named Sal Angelo but found him nowhere. The last I had seen him, he had walked into the trees, but I could not remember seeing him come out. The coroner and several Vermilion Parish deputies were deep in the woods, almost to the bay, their flashlights bouncing off the trees and scrub brush. “He locked you up with your own cuffs?” Helen said.
“Yeah, I’d left them on the truck seat,” I said.
“Why’d he want to cap Guidry?”
“He knew I was going to do it,” I replied.
“I didn’t hear you say that.”
She watched the coroner and three Vermilion Parish sheriff’s deputies come out of the woods with a zipped body bag. The bag looked heavy, sagging in the center, and the deputies had trouble holding on to the corners.
“Did you talk to the coroner?” Helen asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Your friend must have been the worst shot in the U.S. Army,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“There were no wounds in Guidry’s body. It looks like he was hit by lightning. His boots were blown off his feet,” she said.
“Lightning?” I said.
“Anyway, he didn’t go out alone. He was floating around with a bunch of dead pigs. Buy me coffee, Pops?” she said.
EPILOGUE
It’s winter now, and Clete Purcel and I hunt ducks out on Whiskey Bay like two duffers who have no need to share their war stories anymore and are more interested in the sunrise than the number of birds they knock out of the sky. Barbara Shanahan left town with Perry LaSalle, bound for the Pacific Rim, where cheap labor is called outsourcing and Perry plans to start up a half-dozen new canneries. Whenever Barbara’s name is mentioned in conversation, Clete’s eyes crinkle fondly, and no one ever guesses the nature of the thorn that was left in his heart. In November, the same month Jimmy Dean Styles was sentenced to death and Tee Bobby Hulin to life, the Easter Bunny returned to New Iberia and creeped the mayor’s house. Then he robbed a pet store in Lafayette and took two huge blue-and-yellow-and-red-flecked parrots with him. The next night he robbed the home of a notorious ex-Klansman and candidate for the U.S. Senate on Lake Pontchartrain while the ex-Klansman was promoting his most recent anti-Semitic book in Russia.
A week later the ex-Klansman’s bank statements and record of receipts from his donors were mailed to the IRS and the FBI. The Easter Bunny left the stolen parrots in the house and the following day reported his own crime. The cops who investigated the break-in said the house was layered end-to-end with bird shit.
Marvin Oates was convicted of kidnapping, felony assault, and second-degree homicide in the death of Frankie Dogs. But he skated on the murder of Linda Zeroski and perhaps the murder of Ruby Gravano, the prostitute in St. Mary Parish. Helen Soileau and I and two ADAs from the prosecutor’s office gave up trying to manipulate him into a confession. Whenever pressed about his crimes, he sang the lyrics from “I’m Using My Bible for a Road Map” and stared back at us with eyes that seemed incapable of guile or even momentary retention of violent thoughts.
Our psychiatrist said Marvin was sane. A fundamentalist preacher and a half-dozen church people testified as to his character. As I watched him on the stand, I was bothered by the nagging speculation that has troubled me since I became a police officer, namely, that no matter how heinous the crime or evil the deed, human beings feel at the time they commit the act that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
I never again saw the ex-soldier who called himself Sal Angelo. I didn’t want to think any more about his coming to New Iberia, virtually out of nowhere, dressed in rags and madness, or his claim that it was he who had carried me on his back out of the elephant grass and loaded me onto a helicopter bound for battalion aid. What did it matter who he was? I told myself. Legion Guidry was dead and I was glad. Let my friend keep his tattered mystique and let Vietnam remain a decaying memory.
But eventually I put in an information request with the Veterans Administration.
A soldier named Sal Angelo, from Staten Island, New York, had indeed been a medic in my outfit and had served in the same area as I in late 1964 and early 1965. But one month after I was hit, he had been killed ten miles from the Laotian border.
In the fall Alafair went away to Reed College and returned to us at Christmastime. It’s been a wet and foggy winter this year, good for the ducks and me and Clete and for dinners and parties at the house with Bootsie and Alafair and Alafair’s reassembled high school friend
s.
But sometimes amid the gaiety in our living room and the tinkle of glass ornaments on the Christmas tree, I look out at the swamp in the failing light, the denuded cypresses and wisps of moss stark against the sky, and I think about a black field woman of years ago and old man Julian and the moments of weakness and need they shared, and I think about a bullet-rent and sun-faded battle flag encased in glass like the dried blood of a saint, and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.
But those concerns are fleeting ones now, and when they occur during my workday, I concentrate on hunting down the Easter Bunny, the trickster in our midst, the buffoon and miscreant who lives in us all and allows us to laugh at evil and ourselves.
I don’t think it’s a bad way to go.
