AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She took a step toward him, but he raised his hand in a placating gesture. “All right, we’ve got no problem here,” he said, and went outside in the dusk, into the noise of the street, the smells of stagnant water and overripe produce and flowers blooming on the overhanging balconies, the air crisscrossed with birds.
Clete took a deep breath and looked down at Marvin. “If I falsely accused you of something you didn’t do, I apologize,” Clete said. “But that also means you keep that stupid face out of my life and you don’t get anywhere near certain friends of mine. This is as much slack as you get, Jack. We clear on this?”
“The twelve disciples are my road signs. I ain’t afraid of no bullies. There ain’t no detours in heaven, either,” Marvin said.
“What?” Clete said.
“I dint do nothing wrong. I think you was trying to seduce Miss Barbara and somebody messed it up for you. So you put it on me ’cause I give her a Bible.”
“You listen, shit-for-brains—”
Marvin got out of the car and lifted his suitcase from the backseat, wrapping the pull strap around his wrist, blade-faced under the brim of his hat, a hot bead of anger buried in his eye.
“Come back, Marvin,” Zerelda said from the doorway of the bail bond office.
But Marvin pulled his suitcase down the street between the rows of dilapidated cottages toward Basin, his rumpled pale blue sports coat and coned straw hat and cowboy boots almost lost in the mauve-colored thickness of the evening. Then he crossed Basin amid a blowing of horns and a screeching of tires and tugged his suitcase on its roller skate over the curb and into the bowels of the Iberville Project.
“You’re mean through and through, Clete. I don’t know what I ever saw in you,” Zerelda said.
But Clete wasn’t listening. No Duh was staring into the distance, into the glow of sodium lamps that rose in a dusty haze above the project.
“You know him?” Clete asked.
“Yeah, I definitely seen that guy before,” No Duh said.
“You sure?” Clete said.
“No doubt about it. I don’t forget a face. Particularly not no nutcase.”
“Where did you see him, No Duh?” Clete asked, his exasperation growing.
“He used to sell vacuum cleaners to the coloreds for Fat Sammy Figorelli. It was a scam to get them to sign loans at twenty percent. What, you thought he was somebody else?” No Duh said.
He tilted his head curiously at Clete, his mustache like the extended wings of a tiny bird.
What did Marvin Oates mean by ‘There ain’t no detours in heaven’?” Clete asked the next day as he walked with me from the office to Victor’s Cafeteria. “Who knows? I think it’s a line from a bluegrass song,” I replied.
“Zerelda Calucci says I’m butt crust.”
“How you doing with Barbara?” I said, trying to change the subject.
“Marvin dimed me with her, too. You think the Peeping Tom was Legion Guidry?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
Clete chewed on a hangnail and spit it off his tongue. We were walking past the crumbling, whitewashed crypts of St. Peter’s Cemetery now.
“I put flowers on my old man’s grave when I was in New Orleans. It was a funny feeling, out there in the cemetery, just me and him,” he said.
“Yeah?” I said.
“That’s all. He had a crummy life. It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. He took off his porkpie hat and refitted it on his head, turning his face away so I could not see the expression in his eyes.
That afternoon Perry LaSalle asked me to stop by his office. When I got there, he was just locking the doors. The gallery and lawn and flower beds were deep in shadow, and his face had a melancholy cast in the failing light. “Oh, hello, Dave,” he said. He sat down on the top step of the gallery and waited for me to join him. Through the window behind him I could see the glass-framed Confederate battle flag of the 8th Louisiana Vols that one of his ancestors had carried in northern Virginia, and I wondered if indeed Perry was one of those souls who belonged in another time, or if he was a deluded creature of his own manufacture, playing the role of a tragic scion who had to expiate the sins of his ancestors, when in fact he was simply the beneficiary of wealth that had been made on the backs of others.
“Fine evening,” I said, looking across the street at the Shadows plantation house and the bamboo moving in the wind and the magnificent, lichen-encrusted, moss-hung canopy of the live oaks.
“I’ve got to cut you loose,” Perry said.
