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"The income wouldn't hurt," I said.
Helen's eyes had a way of becoming lid-less when she asked questions of people. "Did you ever consider that maybe these two deputies were telling the truth? That they think you're doing P.I. work for the defense in a homicide? That they're just inept and not very bright?"
"How many redneck cops stop by your house to feed your cat?"
She pulled at an earlobe. "Yeah, that is a little weird," she said. "But the real reason you want your shield back is to start looking into this disappearance in Galveston, right?"
"Maybe."
She tapped the arms of her chair with her palms and made clucking sounds with her tongue. "Love you. Streak, but the answer is no."
I cleared my throat and looked out the window. Across the street I could see the mist blowing off the crypts in the cemetery, and the dull red texture of the bricks through the cracked places in the plaster. Someone was honking a horn angrily at the intersection, like an idiot railing at a television set. "Mind giving me an explanation?" I said.
She leaned forward in her chair. "Yeah, I do mind, and that's because I'm your friend," she said.
I didn't try to sort out the meaning in her words. "Run those two cops for me."
"Why?"
"They're dirty."
She clicked her teeth together. "I forgot what it was like when you were around," she said.
"Would you clarify that?"
"Not in your dreams," she replied.
The church where I attended Mass was on the outskirts of Jeanerette, down the bayou, in St. Mary Parish. Most of the parishioners were people of color and desperately poor. But it was a fine church to attend, built on a green bend of the bayou by an oak-shaded graveyard, and the people in the church had a simplicity and dignity about them that belied the hardship and struggle that characterized their lives.
That evening I drove down the bayou to attend a meeting of our church-annex committee. The back road to Jeanerette is like a geographical odyssey through Louisiana's history and the disparities that make it less than real and difficult to categorize. The pastureland is emerald green in spring and summer, dotted with cattle and clumps of oak and gum trees, the early sugar cane waving in the richest alluvial soil in America. At sunset, Bayou Teche is high and dark from the spring rains; the air smells of gardenia and magnolia; and antebellum homes glow among the trees with a soft electrical whiteness that makes one wonder if perhaps the Confederacy should not have won the War Between the States after all.
But inside that perfect bucolic moment, there is another reality at work, one that doesn't stand examination in the harsh light of day. The rain ditches along that same road are strewn with bottles, beer cans, and raw garbage. Under the bayou's rain-dented surface lie discarded paint and motor-oil cans, containers of industrial solvents, rubber tires, and construction debris that will never biologically degrade.
Across the drawbridge from two of the most lovely historical homes in Louisiana is a trailer slum that probably has no equivalent outside the Third World. The juxtaposition seems almost contrived, like a set in a Marxist documentary meant to discredit capitalistic societies.
But as I drive this road in the sunset, I try not to dwell upon the problems of the era in which we live. I try to remember the Louisiana of my youth and to convince myself that we can rehabilitate the land and ourselves and regain the past. It's a debate which I seldom win.
It was dark when I came out of the meeting at the church, the wind cool off the Gulf, the clouds in the south veined with lightning that gave off no sound. An elderly black man from the congregation came up to me in the parking lot. "That guy find you?" he said.
"Which guy?" I asked.
"He was looking at your truck and ax if it was yours. He said he t'ought it was for sale." The elderly man was named Lemuel Melancon and he had muttonchop sideburns and wore a white shirt and tie.
"It has been, but I took the sign out of the window when I drove here. This was a white or black guy?" I said.
"White. Maybe he'll come back. Pretty good meeting tonight, huh?"
"Yeah, it was. See you Sunday, Lemuel."
I drove back to New Iberia, past a sugar mill on the far side of the bayou and through cane fields and a rural slum at the city limits, then I crossed the drawbridge onto Old Spanish Trail and entered the long tunnel of oaks that led to my home on East Main. The street behind me was empty, serpentine lines of dead leaves scudding across the asphalt.
I parked the truck under my porte-cochere and replaced the FOR SALE placard in the back window. I unlocked the front door of my house, then paused in the gentle sweep of wind across the gallery. Normally, when Snuggs heard my truck, he ran to the front, particularly when he had not been fed. But there was no sign of him. I picked up his pet bowl and went inside, then looked for him in the backyard. Tripod, my three-legged raccoon, was on top of his hutch, staring at me.
"How's it hangin', Tripod? Have you seen Snuggs tonight?" I said.
I patted his head and smoothed down the fur on his back and gave his tail a little tug. He rubbed his muzzle against my forearm.
It was balmy inside the trees, the night alive with wind. A tugboat was passing on the bayou, its wake lit by its running lights. Decayed leaves and pecan husks that were soft with mold crunched under my shoes as I walked back toward the house. Dry thunder pealed slowly across the sky, then I heard Tripod climb down the side of his hutch and jump heavily inside.
