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“Don’t start, you two,” Molly said.
“I’m not supposed to say anything when Dave insults my friends and patronizes me?” Alafair said. “You actually threatened Kermit? I can’t believe you.”
“I didn’t threaten him.”
“Then what did you say to him?”
“Weingart came to the table in a robe and a thong. He called Clete a gelatinous handful. This man is a walking regurgitant. Clete and I are not the problem.”
“I am? That’s the inference?”
I got up from the table and set my plate on the drainboard, half of my food uneaten. I took a carton of ice cream from the freezer and removed three bowls from the cupboard, unsure what I was doing. I opened the solid door to the back porch, letting in the wind. I could hear frogs croaking and rain leaking out of the oaks and pecan trees into the yard. “Do y’all want strawberries with your ice cream?” I said.
“Why do you try to control other people, Dave? Why do you ruin everything?” Alafair said.
Molly reached across the table and grasped Alafair’s hand. “Don’t,” she said.
“I’m not supposed to defend my friends or myself?”
“Don’t,” Molly repeated, shaking Alafair’s palm in hers.
I put on my rain hat and walked downtown in the twilight. Customers were having drinks under the colonnade in front of Clementine’s restaurant, and across the street, at the Gouguenheim bed-and-breakfast, guests were enjoying the evening on the balcony, and farther down the block a crowd was waiting under the colonnade to go inside Bojangles. I walked to the drawbridge over the Teche at Burke Street and leaned on the rail and looked down the long corridor of trees that was barely visible in the gloaming of the day. What is the proper way for a father to talk to his daughter when she has reached adulthood but is determined to trust men who will only bring her injury? Do you lecture her? Do you indicate that she has no judgment and is not capable of conducting her own life? It’s not unlike telling a drunkard that he is weak and morally deficient because he drinks, then expecting him to stop. How do you tell your daughter that all your years of protecting and caring for her can be stolen in a blink by a man like Robert Weingart? The answer is you cannot.
I could not tell Alafair that I remembered moments out of her childhood that she considered of little consequence today or didn’t remember at all: the burning day I pulled her from the submerged wreck of an airplane piloted by a priest who was flying war refugees out of El Salvador and Guatemala; her pride in the Donald Duck cap with the quacking bill we bought at Disney World; her first pair of tennis shoes, which she wore to bed at night, embossed on the appropriate tips in big rubber letters with the words “left” and “right”; her ongoing war with Batist, the black man who ran our bait shop and boat rental, because Tripod would not stay out of Batist’s fried pies and candy bars; her horse, Tex, who threw her end over end into our tomato plants; Alafair, at age six, mallet-smashing boiled crabs at a screened-in restaurant by Vermilion Bay, splattering everyone at the table; Alafair, at age nine, fishing with me in the Gulf, casting two-handed with a heavy rod and saltwater reel like it was a samurai sword, almost knocking me unconscious with the lead weights and smelt-baited treble hook.
Do you approach your daughter and tell her that no man has the right to track his feet through a father’s memories of his daughter’s young life?
I walked home in the d
ark. The streetlamps were back on and the wind was up, and the frenetic shadows of the live oaks and the moss in their limbs made me think of soldiers running from tree trunk to tree trunk in a nocturnal woods, but I had no explanation why.
THE PHONE RANG at shortly after two in the morning. The caller sounded drunk and black and belligerent. I told him he must have misdialed, and started to hang up on him.
“No, I got the right number. Elmore said to call you. He’s got to talk to you again,” the caller said.
“You’re talking about Elmore Latiolais who’s in prison in Mississippi?”
“Yeah, I was in there wit’ him. I got out yesterday.”
“So you stopped by a bar and got loaded, then decided to call me up in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t mean no kind of disrespect, but I’m going out of my way to make this call. Elmore seen a picture of a white guy in the newspaper. He said he was sure this white guy had been around his sister’s house.”
“What’s the significance of the white guy?” I said.
“Again, I ain’t meaning to disrespect you, but Elmore’s sister was Bernadette. She was killed. This guy tole Bernadette he was gonna make her and her grandmother rich. She come to visit Elmore in jail, and she showed Elmore a picture of her and this white guy together. He’s a famous guy, maybe a great humanitarian or somet’ing like that. Maybe he’s been in the movies. I ain’t sure.”
“Elmore thinks Herman Stanga killed his sister. What’s the white guy got to do with anything?”
“Elmore says the white guy knows Herman. I got to take a leak, man. You got what you need?”
“Give me your name. I’ll meet you tomorrow in a place of your choosing.”
“Lookie here, Elmore said send you a kite. That’s what I done. Elmore showed the picture to Captain Thigpin and axed him to call you again. You ain’t had no call from Captain Thigpin, have you?”
“No.”
“’Cause Captain Thigpin ain’t gonna be he’ping a black man on his road gang to bring down a rich white man. In the meantime, Elmore is going crazy in there. He keeps saying nobody cares about his sister. He says he’s got to get out and find the people that cut her t’roat. ‘She was just seventeen.’ That’s what he keeps saying over and over, ‘She was just seventeen.’”
