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Just before noon I walked down to the sheriff’s office. He was reading a fishing magazine and eating a ham-and-egg sandwich.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said.
He closed the magazine and brushed the crumbs off his mouth with the back of his wrist.
“What is it?” he said.
“I’m sorry about my conduct. It’s not going to happen again.”
“I’m glad to hear you take that position. But you’re on the desk.”
“We’ve got two open homicides. What’s the harm if I help Helen?”
“You tell me. You’ve gone into St. Martin Parish twice now and thrown one black person in the bayou and stomped another one into jelly. We’re lucky we don’t have black people burning down the town. You leave me at a loss for words.”
I could see the genuine bewilderment in his face, as though the simple fact that I worked under his supervision made him doubt his own sanity.
“I guess I dropped in at a bad time,” I said.
“No, it’s just you, Dave. What you’ve never understood is that you resent authority just like the people we lock up. That’s your problem, podna, not all this bullshit you keep dragging into my office,” he said.
“That doesn’t leave a lot unsaid, does it?” I said.
“No, I don’t guess it does,” he replied. He picked up his magazine again, his cheeks blotched with color.
I signed out of the office and wrote the word “dentist” in the destination box. Then I drove my truck across the railway tracks to the shotgun cottage of Marvin Oates.
The yard was covered with trash—shrimp husks, spoiled food, used Q-Tips, disposable female items—that seemed to have been methodically sprinkled from the gallery out to the street. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. The air was hot and close and smelled like brass and distant rain. I walked around back and saw Marvin in a sweaty T-shirt, scuffed boots, and a beat-up cowboy hat, hacking dead banana trees out of the ground with a machete. A bolt of lightning popped across the bayou in City Park. He looked in the direction of the lightning bolt, as though it contained meaning directed specifically at him. He had not heard me walk up behind him, and he remained motionless, the machete dripping from his hand, listening, watching the storm-clouds that creaked with thunder, the wind blowing leaves out of the trees. “Who threw garbage all over your front yard?” I said.
He jumped at the sound of my voice. “Folks that belong on chain gangs, if you ask me,” he said.
“You seem to be a pretty good student of Scripture, Marvin. Maybe you can help me with a question that’s been bothering me. What does the Old Testament admonition about an eye for an eye actually mean?” I said.
He grinned. “That’s easy. The punishment ain’t s’pposed to be greater than the crime. It’s got to be in equal measure,” he replied.
“So if you were a judge, what would you do to the people who raped and killed the Boudreau girl?”
“Send them to the Death House up at Angola.”
“Cancel their whole ticket?”
“She never harmed nobody. Them men didn’t have no right to do what they done.”
“I see. This guy Antoine Patout, the one who hit you upside the head with a beer bottle?”
“Miss Helen was already out here. I ain’t gonna talk no more about that fellow got his rear end slashed. Think what y’all want.”
“I think his punishment fit the crime. He broke a bottle on your head and maybe he or some of his friends trashed your yard. So now he won’t be sitting down for a while. But Frankie Dogs was a special case. You know, shoving your face into a toilet bowl like that while other people watched? Maybe he made fun of you while he did it, too. I heard he dumped your magazines and Bibles all over the bathroom floor. I figure a guy like that deserves to get smoked.”
“You asked me a question about the Boudreau girl, but you try to turn my words around and use them against me. People has been doing that to me my whole life, Mr. Robicheaux. I dint think you was that kind of man,” he said.
“It’s nothing personal.”
“When folks treat you simple-minded, it’s real personal.”
He went back to his work, slashing the machete across the base of a banana tree that had already given fruit and whose stalk had gone mushy with rot. He pushed against the stalk until it snapped loose from the root system in a shower of loam, exposing the concentric circles of brown pulp inside.
“See, it’s plumb eaten up with ants and cockroaches. You got to prune back the tree to free it of disease and give it new life. It’s God’s way,” he said, and flung the stalk on a fire.
