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The decals in the windows left little doubt about the environmental and geopolitical convictions of the vehicles’ owners. They ranged from the flag wrapped around the beams of a Christian cross to a child urinating on “all Muslims and liberals” and an image of a bird falling from the blast of a shotgun, under which were the words “If it flies, it dies.” But these were the visual expressions of people who got up each morning trying to define who they were. The men at the shoot-out were pros who did not attract attention to themselves or serve perverse abstractions created for them by others. The men at the river had no quarrel with either the mercenary nature of their mission or the black flag under which they carried out their deeds. If you have ever met them, you are already aware they share a commonality that never varies: There is no light in their eyes. Search for it as long as you wish; you will not find it. And maybe that is why they are so good at not leaving behind any trace of themselves. Whatever they once were has long since disappeared from their lives.
It was breezy in the parking lot, and the oak trees that stood on the boulevard and in the Oil Center itself made a sweeping sound in the wind, their branches and leaves changing shape and color in the glow of the streetlamps. Clete stared at the southern sky and the flickers of lightning over the Gulf, his eyes like hard green marbles, his face taut. “It’s going to blow,” he said.
“It’s that time of year,” I said.
“I got a funny feeling.”
“It’s just a squall. It won’t be real hurricane season till mid-summer.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I saw something in your face when we were talking in City Park, on the bayou there.”
“Saw what?” I asked, avoiding his gaze.
“You were looking at something down the bayou. By the drawbridge. You rubbed your eyes like you were ti
red, but you were hiding something from me. There wasn’t anything down the bayou except the bridge. I looked, and there wasn’t anything there.”
“That’s right, there wasn’t.”
“Then what were you hiding from me?”
“I don’t remember that happening, Clete,” I said.
He rotated his head as though his collar was too tight, his eyes uplifted at the sky and the electricity playing in the clouds. “I had a dream last night. There was a big clock on my nightstand, one of those windup jobs. The cover on the face was gone. Then some guy came in the room. I tried to see who he was, but all I could see were his eyes looking at me out of a hood. I kept saying to him, ‘Who are you?,’ but he wouldn’t answer. I tried to get my piece off the dresser, but something was holding me down on the bed, like somebody was sitting on my chest. He walked over to the nightstand and picked up the clock and broke off the hands. Then he put the clock back down and walked out of the room. I still never saw who he was.”
“It was just a dream,” I said, trying to keep my face empty, trying to forget the room I had rented in Natchez with a clock that had no cover and no hands.
“Dave, we need to get rid of this Abelard gig. It stank from the jump. Nobody is interested in those dead girls except us. I say we smoke the guys who tried to hurt us and let somebody else add up the score. If we bend the rules, screw it. The guy who clicks off your switch is always the one you never see coming. I don’t want to buy it like that.”
“We’re going to be okay,” I said. “We always come through things, don’t we?”
“It’s waiting for us. Out there. I can feel it.” He waved his hand at the air as though swatting away insects. “It’s like a red laser dot crawling all over us.”
“You never rattled. Not in the Channel or the Desire. Not even in Nam or El Sal.”
“You don’t get it. I’m not talking about me. It’s you. I can see it in your eyes when you think nobody is looking. You see it coming. Stop jerking me around.”
I hooked my arm around his neck. “Let’s go back inside and check out these guys,” I said. “Maybe give them something to remember.”
“What’d you see on the bayou, Dave?”
I didn’t reply and squeezed his neck as though we were two boys in a wrestling match. Then we went inside, Clete behind me, his mouth small and downturned at the corners, his behemoth physique about to split the seams of his clothes.
THE DINERS FILLED their plates and sat at big round tables in a banquet room, at the head of which was a podium and a microphone. Clete and I sat on folding chairs against the back wall. No one seemed to take particular notice of us. Clete kept leaning forward, his hands on his knees, studying the room, the diners, the men who drifted out to the bar and returned with a highball or a dessert for a wife or girlfriend. When the general was introduced and walked to the podium, the entire room rose and applauded. He was tall and wore a gray suit with stripes in it, and was erect in his carriage for a man his age. His clean features and the white strands in his hair gave him the genteel appearance of Wordsworth’s happy warrior, but there was a visceral Jacksonian edge about him, physical incongruities that suggested a humble background not altogether consistent with his dress and manner. His ears were too large for his head, and there were lumps of cartilage under his jaw. His hands were square and rough-looking, his wrists ridged with bone where they protruded from his white cuffs. His facial skin creased superficially with his smile, exposing his teeth, which looked tiny and sharp-edged in his mouth. But it was the martial light in his eyes that you remembered most. It was like that of a choleric man who kept his wounds green and treasured his anger and drew on it the way one turns up the heat register when necessary.
Clete watched him, biting on a hangnail, spitting it off the end of his tongue. “I saw that dude at Da Nang,” he said.
“What did you think of him?”
“I don’t remember,” he replied. “He was standing under an awning. We were standing in the rain. Yeah, I remember that. The rain falling on all those steel pots while he was talking to us.”
The general had a prepared speech in his hands. But before beginning it, he paused and stared into the crowd, his face brightening. “I know when I’m among the right kind of people,” he said. “I was walking through the parking lot a few minutes ago, and I saw a bumper sticker I must share with you. It said, ‘Earth First! We’ll drill the rest of the planets later!’”
The audience roared with laughter.
But Clete was not listening to the general’s joke and the audience’s appreciation of it. He was peering at a table in the corner where Timothy Abelard was sitting in a wheelchair, his grandson, Kermit, seated on one side of him and his caretaker, Jewel, on the other. Also at the table was a dark-skinned man who had a thin nose and wore a pencil mustache and whose lacquered black hair resembled a cap. The other man at the table had his back to us, and I could not see his face. His hair was boxed on the back of his neck, and his right shoulder seemed to hang lower than his left, as though he were uncomfortable in his chair or experiencing lower-back pain, trying to shift the pressure off his spine.
“I thought you said Kermit Abelard was the liberal in the family,” Clete said to me.
