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“Try to make me feel bad all you want. You don’t bother me no more. I passed the lie detector,” he said.
He faced the bandstand and upended his beer cup, the foam rilling down the sides of his mouth, the corner of his eye like a prosthetic implant. His self-satisfaction and stupidity made me want to hit him.
I started back through the crowd to find Bootsie and Alafair and bumped against the father of Amanda Boudreau. His body was hard, his feet planted solidly, his gaze unblinking behind his wire-rim glasses. His wife’s arm was tucked inside his, the two of them like an island of grief that no one saw.
“Excuse me. I wasn’t watching where I was going,” I said.
“That was Bobby Hulin you were talking to, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Boudreau said.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s correct,” I said.
“He’s here, playing at a concert, and the man who supposedly represents our daughter chats with him by the beer stand. I can’t quite express my feelings. You’ll have to forgive me,” she said, and pulled her arm from her husband’s and walked quickly toward the rim of the park, pulling a handkerchief from her purse.
“You got a daughter, Mr. Robicheaux?” her husband asked.
“Yes, sir. Her name’s Alafair,” I replied.
He fixed his glasses up on his nose with his thumb. “You have to pardon my wife. She’s not doing too good. I probably don’t make it any easier for her, either. I hope your daughter has a wonderful life. I truly do, sir.”
And he walked away, limping like a man whose gout gave him no peace.
That night I had drunk dreams and woke at two in the morning, wired, my mouth dry, my ears filled with sounds that had no origin. I could not remember the images in the dreams, only the nameless feeling they left me with. Like being slapped awake when no one else was in the room.
Like stepping unexpectedly off a ledge one hundred feet below the Gulf’s surface and plummeting into a chasm filled with coldness and rough-skinned finned creatures whose faces flared at you out of the silt.
I went to the kitchen and sat in the dark, the luminous numbers of my watch glowing on my wrist. A bottle of vanilla extract sat on the windowsill in the moonlight, the curtains blowing around it. In the distance I heard a train and I thought of the old Southern Pacific, its lounge car lit, the passengers sipping highballs at the bar as the locomotive pulled them safely across the dark land to an improbable country of blue mountains and palm trees and pink sunrises where no one ever died.
I wanted to get in my truck and bang down corrugated roads, grind gears, thunder across plank bridges. I wanted to drive deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp, past the confines of reason, into the past, into a world of lost dialects, gator hunters, busthead whiskey, moss harvesters, Jax beer, trotline runners, moonshiners, muskrat trappers, cockfights, bloodred boudin, a jigger of Jim Beam lowered into a frosted schooner of draft, outlaw shrimpers, dirty rice black from the pot, hogmeat cooked in rum, Pearl and Regal and Grand Prize and Lone Star iced down in washtubs, crawfish boiled with cob corn and artichokes, all of it on the tree-flooded, alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time.
All you had to do was release yourself from the prison of restraint, just snip loose the stitches that sewed your skin to the hairshirt of normalcy.
I got in the truck and drove full-bore down the four-lane, the frame shaking in the Gulf wind, until I saw the bridge spanning the Atchafalaya River at Morgan City and the network of adjoining bayous and canals and the shri
mp and pleasure boats moored in the moss-green, softly muted tropical ambience that defines almost every unimpaired waterway in southern Louisiana. I turned into a clapboard bar that looked like it had floated out of the mist onto the road, one window scrolled with a green and gold Dixie beer sign.
I sat for five minutes in the false dawn, my hand trembling on the floor stick, my upper lip beaded with sweat. Then I drove back down the highway, fifteen miles under the speed limit, cars whizzing by me, their horns blowing, all the way back to New Iberia and the apartment where Clete Purcel was now living, wondering how in the name of a merciful God I could have a Sunday morning hangover without touching a drop of alcohol.
. . .
I sat at the counter in his small kitchen while Clete fixed coffee and stirred a skillet filled almost to the brim with a half-dozen eggs, strips of bacon, chunks of sausage and yellow cheese, and a sprinkling of chopped scallions to disguise enough cholesterol to clog a sewer main. He wore clacks and his Marine Corps utility cap and a pair of boxer undershorts, printed with fire engines, that hung on his hips like women’s bloomers. “But you didn’t go in the bar?” he said, not looking at me.
“No.”
“Helen thinks you’re doing speed.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “You got a hearing problem this morning?”
“I ate a few of Bootsie’s diet pills.”
“What else?”
“A few whites.”
“Maybe you ought to go all out. Chop up some lines. Start hanging with the rag noses in north Lafayette,” he said.
He filled a plate for me and clattered it down on the counter.
We ate in silence. Outside, the morning was taking hold, wind blowing in a sugarcane field, buzzards circling over a grove of trees. I put four teaspoons of sugar in my coffee and drank it black, in one long swallow.
“I’d better get going,” I said.
