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"I'm not buying into this discussion," I said, and walked away.
When I looked back out the kitchen window Father Jimmie was heaving more leaves onto the fire, his clothes and skin auraed with smoke and dust in the shafts of sunlight breaking through the trees.
God protect me from martyrs and saints, I thought.
Clete and I hitched up my boat trailer to the back of my pickup and a half hour later slid the boat into the water at Bayou Benoit in St. Martin Parish. The surrounding water shed looked both enormous and desolate in a strange, autumnal way. There wasn't a sound from the bays or the inlets, not even the flopping of a bass or a gator back in a cove. A painter would have called it a beautiful evening. The western sky was still pale blue, the clouds like strips of fire, the leaves of the cypress and willow trees golden and motionless in the dead air. But the closed shutters on the houseboats and the lines of ducks and geese transecting the sun made something sink in my heart, as though I were the last man standing on earth.
As we headed across a long bay into a flooded woods, Clete sat in the bow, humped over, his back to me, the collar of his denim coat pulled up, his Marine Corps utility cap snugged down on his head. He ripped the tab off a can of beer and drank it, then began eating a Vienna sausage sandwich. I cut the engine and let the boat drift on its wake into the trees. Clete reached into the ice chest and tried to hand me a diet Dr. Pepper.
"No, thanks," I said.
He clipped a Mepps spinner on his monofilament and cast it deep into the cove. "Something happen today?" he asked.
I told him about my encounter with Frank Dellacroce at the motel, about his attempt to put me on a pad, about his mention that Clete had once taken juice from the Mob. Clete retrieved his lure, his face never changing expression.
"So what's the point?" he said.
"I don't like a degenerate bad-mouthing my friends. I don't like being offered a bribe," I replied.
He waited a long time before he spoke again. "I don't think that's the problem, noble mon," he said.
"Oh?"
"You think all this belongs in a time capsule," he said, making a circle in the air with his hand. "Outsiders aren't supposed to come here, particularly grease balls and Wal-Mart and these cocksuckers grinding up the trees with bulldozers. It's always supposed to be 1950."
"I see."
"The truth is you wish you had all these bastards locked in your sights inside a free-fire zone."
"Glad you've figured it all out."
"At least I don't sleep with a nine-millimeter anymore."
"Don't be offended when I say this, but, Clete, you can really piss me off sometimes."
"You worry me, mon. I think you're going into a place inside yourself that people don't come out of."
I saw a bass roll among the flooded trees, like a green-gold pillow of air violating the symmetry of the surface. I cast my Rapala above the place he had broken the water, hoping to retrieve it across his feeding area. Instead, the balsa wood lure clacked against the trunk of a willow and the treble hooks went deep into the bark.
"I'll row us over there," Clete said.
"Not on my account," I said. I jerked the monofilament with my hand and snapped it off. The sun disappeared on the horizon like a flame dying on a wet match.
Way leads on to way.
I tried to go to bed early that night but I couldn't sleep. Rain began to click on the trees, then on the tin roof of my house, and I dressed and drove up the bayou road in the rain to St. Martinville. On the edge of the black district I went into a brightly lit cafe and ordered a cup of coffee and a small bowl of gumbo at the counter. A door with a beaded curtain was cut in one wall, and in the adjoining room a man was playing an accordion, while another man, with thimbles on his fingers, accompanied him on an aluminum rub board that had been molded to fit the contours of his chest.
The people in the other room were all light-skinned people of color, often called Creoles, although o
riginally the term Creole had denoted a person of French or Spanish ancestry who had been born in the New World. The people in the next room were blue-collar mulattos whose race was hard to determine. They drifted back and forth across the color line, married into both white and black families, still spoke French among themselves, and tended to be conscious of manners and family traditions.
Seated in one corner by himself was Frank Dellacroce, a shot and a glass of beer by his hand, his legs crossed, his silk shirt unbuttoned in order to expose his chest hair and the gold chain and medallion that rested on it. He tossed back the whiskey and flexed his mouth as though he had just performed a manly act. Then he tilted back his head, the small of his back against the seat of the chair, and seemed to resume his concentration on the music. The song the accordionist was playing was "Jolie Blon," the most haunting and unforgettable lament I have ever heard. Then I realized that the object of Frank Dellacroce's attention had nothing to do with music, or a song about unrequited love and the loss of the Cajun way of life: Frank Dellacroce's attention was fixed on the shapely form of a young Creole woman dancing by herself.
Her name was Sugar Bee Quibodeaux. Her eyes were turquoise, her hair the color of mahogany, fastened in back with a silver comb, her gold skin dusted with sun freckles. She also had the mind of a seven year old. She had conceived her first child when she was twelve and at age fifteen was taken to a state hospital by her grandparents and sterilized. Sometimes a local cop or a kind neighbor or business person tried to protect her from herself, but ultimately no one could restrain Sugar Bee's love of boys and men and the excitement and joy her own body gave her.
I finished eating and paid my check at the register. Through the beaded curtain I could see Sugar Bee sitting at Frank Dellacroce's table, a bottle of beer and a glass in front of her. She was leaning forward, listening to something he was saying. He leaned forward, too, his hand deep under the table Then the two of them stood up and she picked up her purse, one with white sequins and tassels on it, and hung it by a string from her shoulder. They walked through the beaded curtain toward the front door.
"That's far enough, Frank," I said.
