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“You want something to eat?” I asked.
“No.”
“Take a ride with me,” I said.
“Where?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied.
There was no place for him, really. He was trapped inside memories that no human being should have to bear, and he would do the time and carry the cross for those makers of foreign and military policy who long ago had written their memoirs and appeared on televised Sunday morning book promotions and moved on in their careers.
I took him to a motel and put two nights’ rent on my credit card and gave him thirty dollars from my wallet.
“There’s a Wal-Mart down the street. Maybe you can get yourself a razor and some clothes and a couple of food items,” I said.
He was sitting on the bed in his motel room, staring at the motes of dust in a column of sunlight. I studied his face and his hair and eyes. I tried to remember the face of the medic who had cradled me in his arms as the AK-47 rounds from the trees below whanged off the helicopter’s frame.
“How’d you get to New Orleans?” I asked.
“Rode a freight.”
“The medic who saved my life was Italian. He was from Staten Island. You from Staten Island, troop?” I said.
“The trouble with killing somebody is it makes you forget who you used to be. I get places mixed up,” he said. He rubbed his face on his sleeve. “You gonna pop that guy you was talking about in the meeting?”
Huey Lagneaux, also known as Baby Huey, had been hired as a bartender and bouncer at his uncle’s club because of his massive size, the deep black tone of his skin, which gave him the ambience of a leviathan rising from oceanic depths, and the fact he only needed to lay one meaty arm over a troublemaker’s shoulders in order to walk him quietly to the door. But the uncle had also given him the job out of pity. Baby Huey had not been the same since he had been kidnapped by a collection of white men from New Orleans and prodded at gunpoint through a cemetery, down to the water’s edge on Bayou Teche, and systematically tortured with a stun gun.
The club was on a back road out by Bayou Benoit, an area of deepwater bays, flooded cypress and willow and gum trees that under the rising moon was dented with what looked like rain rings from the night feeding of bream and largemouth bass. On Friday nights the club thundered with electronic sound, and the parking lot, layered from end to end with flattened beer cans, clattered like a tin roof under the hundreds of automobiles and pickup trucks driving across it.
Tee Bobby Hulin was behind the microphone, up on the bandstand, in black slacks and a sequined purple shirt, his fingers splayed on the keys of an accordion whose case had the bright, wet shine of a freshly sliced pomegranate. The air was gray with cigarette smoke, heavy with the smell of body powder and sweat and perfume and okra gumbo. Baby Huey wiped down the bar and began rinsing a tin sink full of dirty glasses. When he looked up again, he saw a sheep-sheared white man in a tailored suit and a tropical shirt walking toward him, oblivious to the stares around him or even to the people who stepped out of his way before they were knocked aside.
“You know me?” the white man asked.
“Hard to forget, Mr. Zeroski,” Baby Huey answered. He bent over the sink and washed the dish soap from his hands and wrists.
“A white man named Legion Guidry just went to the service window. Then I lost him. I hear he’s got a camp around here,” Joe said.
Baby Huey’s face remained impassive, his gaze focused on the bandstand, the dancers out on the floor.
“You hear me?” Joe asked.
“I knew your daughter. She was nice to people. If I knew who killed her, I’d tell you. That night on the bayou, you didn’t have no right to hurt me like that.”
“You should have said that on the bayou. Maybe it would have gone down different.”
“You wasn’t looking for the troot. You was looking to get even,” Baby Huey said.
Joe scratched at his cheek with the balls of his fingers.
“You keep the wrong company, you pay dues. They ain’t always fair,” he said. He took a one-hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and creased it lengthwise and placed it on the bar like a miniature tent.
Baby Huey pushed it away and dried a glass. “I ain’t axed you for nothing. In case you ain’t noticed, you in the wrong part of town,” he said.
“Yeah, I got that impression when I walked in. You want to earn that hunnerd bucks and another hunnerd like it, or keep blaming me ’cause you decided to be a pimp and sell crack?”
Baby Huey filled a bowl with gumbo and put a spoon in it and set it on a napkin in front of Joe.
“It’s on me. I made it this afternoon,” Baby Huey said. “You want a beer wit’ it?”
