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“Who gives a shit?” he replied.
“I’ve got twenty bucks here. Sorry it’s not more.”
He balled his hand on the bill I gave him. His nails were as thick as tortoiseshell, gray through the tops with the amounts of dirt impacted under them.
“I had a rosary wrapped around my steel pot. I gave it to you. Don’t let them get behind you, motherfucker,” he said.
After he was gone we opened the windows and Wally the dispatcher had the janitor wipe down the chair the deranged man had sat in.
“You knew that guy?” Wally said.
“Maybe.”
“You want me to have him picked up, take him to a shelter?”
“The war’s over,” I said, and went back to my office.
At ten o’clock my skin was coming off. I drank water at the cooler, chewed two packs of gum, went to Baron’s Health Club and pounded the heavy bag, then returned to the office, sweating inside my clothes, burning with irritability.
I checked out a cruiser and drove out to the home of Amanda Boudreau’s parents. I found Mr. Boudreau at the back of his property, under shade trees by the coulee, uncrating and assembling an irrigation pump. It was a large, expensive machine, the most sophisticated one on the market. But he had no well or water lines to attach it to, no network of ditches to carry the water it would draw from the aquifer.
He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt and new strap overalls, dark blue and still stiff from the box. His face was flushed, his knuckles skinned where his hand had slipped on a wrench.
“I ain’t gonna get caught by drought again,” he said. “Last year almost all my cane dried up. Ain’t gonna allow it to happen again. No, sir.”
“I think the drought is pretty well busted,” I said, looking at a bank of black clouds in the south.
“I’m gonna be ready, me. That’s the way my father always talked. ‘I’m gonna be ready, me,’” he said.
I squatted down next to him.
“I know you and Mrs. Boudreau don’t think well of me, but I lost both my mother and my wife, Annie, to violent people. I wanted to find those people and kill them. There’s nothing wrong in feeling that way. But I don’t want to see a good man like yourself take matters into his own hands. You’re not going to do that, are you, sir?”
He clapped his broad hand on a mosquito that had landed on the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm.
“Lou’sana’s been drying up. Gonna dig me a well. Gonna have ditches and lines all through those fields. It can get dry as a brick in a stove, but I’m gonna have all the water I want,” he said. He went back to his work, twisting a wrench on a nut, his meaty, skinned hand shining with sweat.
I stopped at a phone booth and called Clete’s apartment. “You still have flashbacks?” I asked.
“About ’Nam? Not much. Sometimes I dream about it. But not much.”
“A guy came off the street today. He said he was the medic who took care of me when I was hit.”
“Was he?”
“He was deranged. His hair was blond. The kid who got me to battalion aid was Italian, from Staten Island.”
“So shit-can it.”
“The homeless man had a New York accent. What’s a New York street person doing around here?” I said.
“Where are you, big mon?”
I drove to Jimmy Dean Styles’s New Iberia bar and was told by his bartender that Jimmy Dean was at his other club, the one he owned jointly with a bondsman in St. Martinville. I was there in twenty minutes. Styles was at the bar, reading a newspaper while he dipped cracklings into a bowl of red sauce and ate them, wiping his fingers on a moist towel, his eyes never leaving the page he was reading. “You follow the market?” I asked.
“High-yield municipals, Lou’sana Chuck. Pay twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Like a girl got her groove with the right people, it always working, know what I’m sayin’? I can help you with something?” Styles replied.
“I don’t know if you can or not, but hold that thought. Where’s your rest room?” I said.
