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"Yeah, I know all about that. What can I do for you?" Guillot said.
Clete cleaned an ear with one finger, looking sideways again as he did it, his face filling with thought. "I think I know who you are," he said.
"You do?" Guillot said.
"You popped a doctor from Loreauville in your driveway. Guy was some kind of weirded-out Vietnam vet, right? That's some kind of irony, huh? Guy probably had a thousand AK rounds shot at him, then loses his Kool-Aid and gets smoked in the suburbs."
Guillot looked across the table at his friend and tapped his fingernail on the cover of his wristwatch. The two men started to get up.
"Whoa," Clete said.
"Whoa, what}" Guillot said.
"The lady up there in the trailer, the one you're banging? She's got a little boy. The guy next door happens to be a sex predator. So while you're getting your twanger taken care of, the freak who was just patting her kid on the head is figuring out ways to sodomize him. My suggestion is you take your mind off your dick long enough to move the lady and her son out of that shithole before the kid's life is ruined. Can you relate to that?"
"You've got some fucking nerve," Guillot said.
The owner of the cafe had come from behind the counter and was standing behind Clete now, resolute, his feet planted, his thumb raised in the air.
"Out," he said.
"No problem," Clete said. He pulled two one-dollar bills from a brass money clip and dropped them on his table.
But outside Clete could not give it up, standing by his car door, flipping his keys back and forth, his face growing darker. He watched Will Guillot and the electrical subcontractor with him get in their car. "Hold on a minute," he said.
"Get a life, queer bait," Will Guillot said from the passenger window as his car rolled past Clete.
Clete watched the two men cross the steel bridge over the Teche and turn down the tree-shaded back road that led past the row of antebellum homes. In his mind's eye he saw himself running them off the road, strolling back to their car, his blackjack in his side pocket, moving the situation on up to the full-tilt boogie. Why not? he thought. The day couldn't get any worse than it was already.
He got into his Caddy, slammed the door, and turned the ignition. He heard a dry, clicking sound, then nothing. The battery was as dead as a butcher block.
It took an hour for a filling station a half block away to send a truck that gave him a quick-start. He sat behind the wheel, revving the engine to
charge the battery, oil smoke pouring from under the frame,
bird-shit smears on his clothes, all immediate hope of squaring the beef with Will Guillot gone.
He looked through the windshield at the trailer slum by the bayou and the parolee who was now drinking a can of beer on his steps and talking to the little boy from next door.
Clete retrieved a pair of leather work gloves from under the seat and put them in his pocket, then dropped the Caddy into low gear and rolled into the trailer slum, gravel and oyster shells ticking softly under his tires.
"You Bobby Joe Fontenot?" he said.
The man on the steps was relaxed, smoking a cigarette with his beer, barefoot in the sunshine, his arms flecked with blue tattoos done by an needle improvised from the guts of a ballpoint pen. He wore imitation black leather pants and a tie-dyed strap undershirt, his black hair scalped on the sides and braided into a matador's pigtail in back.
"I'm gonna take a guess. Casting director from, what's that TV show called, Survivor}" he said, squinting against the sunlight.
Clete grinned and got out of the Caddy, opening his badge holder briefly. "Looking for your friend who jumped his bond with Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater," he said. "Slipped his cuffs this morning and left me with shit on my nose."
"Haven't seen him."
"Mind if I look inside?"
"Get yourself a beer. It's in the icebox."
"Thanks," Clete said, and gave him the thumbs-up sign.
Clete stepped inside. The garbage can in the small kitchen was overflowing, the counters covered with pizza and fried-chicken cartons. A television set was playing without sound, the VCR under it lighted, a cassette pushed halfway into the loading slot. Clete shoved the cassette all the way into the unit with his thumb and waited for the video image to transfer to the screen. Then he clicked off the set and the figures on the screen shrank to a small dot. He slipped on his work gloves and called through the screen door: "Did you know you have a gas leak in your stove?"
