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Helen and I got in front. She started the engine, then turned and looked back through the wire-mesh screen that separated us from Marvin Oates. Lightning splintered the sky on the other side of the pecan trees that lined the coulee.
“Marvin, have you ever noticed you never answer a question directly? Can you tell us why that is?” she said.
“The Bible is my road map. The children of Israel used it, too. They crossed the Red Sea of destruction and God done seen them safely through. That’s all I can say,” he replied.
“That’s very illuminating. Thanks for sharing that,” she said, and shifted the cruiser into gear.
Fifteen minutes later we dropped him in front of his house. He hefted his suitcase out of the trunk and ran through the rain, his straw hat clamped on his head, his hand-tooled cowboy boots splashing on the edge of the puddles in his tiny yard, his shirt flapping in the wind.
“You think those scars on his back are from hot cigarettes?” Helen asked.
“That’d be my guess.”
“It’s a great life, huh?” she said.
I’m sure I knew a glib reply to her remark, which she had obviously intended to hide her feelings, but the image of a child being systematically burned, probably by a parent or stepparent, was just too awful to talk about.
Through the window I saw a man walk against the red light at the intersection, a heavy piece of rolled canvas draped over his shoulders, like a cross, his unlaced work boots sloshing through the water.
“Let’s take that fellow to the shelter,” I said.
“You know him?” Helen said.
“He was a medic in my outfit. I saw him in New Orleans. He must have hopped a freight back to New Iberia.”
She turned in the seat and looked into my face. “Run that by me again.”
“When I was hit, he carried me piggyback into the slick and kept me alive until we got to battalion aid,” I said.
“I’m a little worried about you, Pops,” she said.
CHAPTER 23
I rose before dawn the next morning and walked down to the dock to help Batist open up. I fixed chicory coffee and hot milk and heated an egg sandwich and ate breakfast by an open window above the water and listened to the moisture dripping out of the trees in the swamp and the popping of bluegill that were feeding along the edge of the hyacinths. Then the stars went out of the sky and the wind dropped and the stands of flooded cypresses turned as gray as winter smoke. A moment later the sun broke above the rim of the earth, like someone firing a furnace on the far side of the swamp, and suddenly the tree trunks were brown and without mystery, streaked with night damp, their limbs ridged with fern and lichen, the water that had been layered with fog only moments ago now alive with insects, dissected by the V-shaped wakes of cottonmouths and young alligators. I washed my dishes in the tin sink and was about to walk back up to the house when I heard a car with a blown muffler coming down the road. A moment later Clete Purcel came through the bait shop door, wearing new running shoes, elastic-waisted, neon-purple shorts that bagged to his knees, a tie-dye strap undershirt that looked like chemically stained cheesecloth on his massive torso, and his Marine Corps utility cap turned sideways on his head.
“What d’you got for eats?” he asked.
“Whatever you see,” I replied.
He went behind the counter and began assembling what he considered a healthy breakfast: four jelly doughnuts, a quart of chocolate milk, a cold pork-chop sandwich he found in the icebox, and two links of microwave boudin. He glanced at his watch, then sat on a counter stool and began eating.
“I’m jogging three miles with Barbara this morning,” he said.
“Three miles? Maybe you should pack another sandwich.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I replied, my face blank.
“I’ve done some more checking on our playboy lawyer LaSalle. If I were you, I’d take a closer look at this guy.”
“Would you?”
“Big Tit Judy Lavelle says he’s got a half-dozen regular pumps in the Quarter alone. She says his flopper not only has eyes, it’s got X-ray vision. A female walks by and it pokes its way out of his fly.”
“So what?” I said.
“So he’s hinky. Sex predators can have college degrees, too. He uses people, then throws them over the gunnel. He got it on with both Barbara and Zerelda, then treated them like yesterday’s ice cream. His whole family made their money on other people’s backs. You see a pattern here?”
