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I walked out of the air-conditioning into the midday sounds of the city, the heat suddenly more oppressive, the gasoline fumes from the street more offensive. I heard Perry open the door behind me and come down the walk, trying to smile, to reclaim what dignity he could from the situation.
“He’s old and uneducated. He’s frightened by what he doesn’t understand. It’s our fault. We denied these people opportunity and access at every turn. Now we have to pay for it,” he said.
Wrong, Perry. Not we, I thought.
That evening I sat by myself for a long time in the backyard. The sky was purple, full of birds, the sun a molten red inside a bank of rain clouds. I felt Bootsie’s hands on my shoulders. “Perry LaSalle called. He says the assault charge probably won’t hold up. Something about Clete seeing a knife,” she said.
“Clete’s testimony is a little bit of an ethical problem,” I said.
“Why?”
“He wasn’t there. He went in later and threw a switchblade under a table.”
I felt her hands leave my shoulders.
“Dave, this seems to go from bad to worse,” she said.
“Clete’s a loyal friend. The sheriff isn’t.”
“He’s an elected official. What’s he supposed to do? Let you kick the shit out of anyone you don’t like?” she said.
I got up from the picnic table and walked down the driveway to my truck. I heard her on the grass behind me, but I started the engine and backed onto the road, then shifted into first gear and drove away, her face slipping past the window like a pale balloon, her words lost in the wind.
The 7 p.m. Wednesday night AA meeting was held in the living room of a small gray house owned by the Episcopalian church, arbored by live oaks, across from the massive stone outline of old Iberia High. The neighborhood, with its firehouse, its ubiquitous trees, its streets glistening from a sun shower, its lawns and small porches on which a boy on a bicycle sailed the afternoon newspaper, the flashing signals dinging at an empty rail crossing, was an excursion into the America that perhaps all of us are nostalgic for, a country secure between its oceans and content with its working-class ambitions, somehow in my mind forever identified with an era when a minor league baseball game or an evening radio show was considered a special pleasure. It was a Big Book meeting, one in which the participants read from the book that is the centerpiece of the fellowship known as Alc
oholics Anonymous. But my purpose in being there was to do what AA members call a Fifth Step, or, more specifically, to admit the exact nature of my wrongs.
Most of the people there were from middle-class backgrounds and did not use profanity at meetings or discuss their sexual lives. By and large, they were the same people you would see at a PTA gathering. When it was my turn to speak, I realized that the world in which I lived and worked and looked upon as fairly normal was not one you shared with people whose worst legal sins might reach the level of a traffic ticket.
I told them all of it. How I had stolen and eaten my wife’s diet pills for the amphetamine in them, then had kicked it up into high gear with white speed I had taken from an evidence locker. How I had bludgeoned Jimmy Dean Styles’s face with my fists, breaking his nose and lips, knocking his bridge down his throat, grabbing his head and smashing it repeatedly on the bar, my hands slick with his blood and the sweat out of his hair, while an insatiable white worm ate a hole in the soft tissue of my brain and I ground my teeth together with a need that no amount of sex or violence or dope would relieve me of, that nothing other than whiskey and whiskey and whiskey would ever satisfy.
The room was silent when I finished. A well-dressed woman got up from her chair and went into the bathroom, and we could hear the water running in the lavatory while she kept clearing her throat behind the door.
The discussion leader that evening was a genial, silver-haired, retired train conductor from Mississippi.
“Well, you got it off your chest, Dave. At least you’re not aiming to kill anybody now,” he said, starting to smile. Then he looked at my face and dropped his eyes.
After the meeting adjourned, I sat by myself in the living room, the light failing in the trees. When I left, the parking area was deserted, the streets empty. I drove to a pool hall in St. Martinville and drank coffee at the bar and watched some old men playing bouree, the shadows from the blades of a ceiling fan breaking on their faces and hands with the rhythmic certainty of a clock that no one watched.
CHAPTER 18
During the night a 911 caller reported an assault with a deadly weapon in a black slum area off the Loreauville Road. A New Orleans man with orange and purple hair by the name of Antoine Patout had been asleep with his girlfriend in his aunt’s house when an intruder climbed through a window, drew back the sheet from Patout’s rump, and sliced him a half-inch deep across both buttocks. While Patout screamed and his girlfriend wadded the sheet and tried to close his wound, the intruder calmly climbed back out the window into the darkness, at the same time folding his knife and slipping it into his back pocket. No one heard an automobile. The girlfriend told the first officer on the scene that she did not see the assailant’s face, nor could she determine his race, but she thought he was one of the neighbors with whom Patout had quarreled over the rap music he played full-blast almost every night until 1 a.m.
Helen Soileau came into my office early Thursday morning.
“You know the name of the guy with the tie-dye hair, follows Jimmy Dean Styles around?” she asked.
“No.”
“You don’t know the name of the guy you hit across the face with a .45?”
“No, I didn’t check it out.”
“Isn’t he the same guy who smashed a beer bottle on Marvin Oates’s head?”
“Could be, Helen. I’m on the desk.”
“Then get off it. While you’re at it, pull the telephone pole out of your ass,” she replied.
