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“What else am I going to do? Grimes should have been cycled through a septic tank a long time ago.”
I heard the front door open behind me. “I thought I heard your voice, Clete. You’re just in time for dinner,” Molly said. “Is everything okay out here?”
CLETE TURNED DOWN the invitation, claiming he was meeting someone for supper down the street at Clementine’s, which meant he would close the bar there and probably sleep in the back of his car that night or in his office on Main or perhaps at the motor court down the bayou, where he rented a cottage. Regardless of how the evening ended, it was obvious Clete had returned to his old ways, mortgaging tomorrow for today, holding mortality at bay with vodka and weed and a case of beer he kept iced down in the backseat of the Caddy, and in this instance maybe toying with the idea of premeditated murder.
After we ate supper, I tried to read the paper and put Clete’s problems with Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly out of my mind. I couldn’t. Clete would always remain the best friend I’d ever had, a man who once carried me down a fire escape with two bullets in his back, a man who would give up his life for me or Molly or Alafair.
“I’m going to take a walk,” I said to Molly. “You want to go?”
She was baking a pie in the kitchen, and there was a smear of flour on her cheek. Her hair was red and cut short, her skin powdered with freckles. Sometimes her gestures and expressions would take on a special kind of loveliness, like a visual song, without her being aware of it. “You’re going to talk to Clete?” she said.
“I guess.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason.”
“Clete won’t talk openly if I’m there.”
“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “You look beautiful.”
I picked up the iPod given to me by Tee Jolie Melton and strolled down East Main under the canopy of live oaks arching over the street. The streetlamps had just come on, and fireflies were lighting in the trees and bamboo along Bayou Teche. I walked out on the drawbridge at Burke Street and looked down the long dark tidal stream that eventually dumped into the Gulf. The tide was coming in, and the water was full of mud and sliding high up on the banks when a boat passed, the lily pads in the shallows rolling like a green carpet. For me, Louisiana has always been a haunted place. I believe the specters of slaves and Houma and Atakapa Indians and pirates and Confederate soldiers and Acadian farmers and plantation belles are still out there in the mist. I believe their story has never been adequately told and they will never rest until it is. I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind-numbing, on a level with telling fond tales about one’s rapist.
But these are dismal thoughts, and I try to put them aside. As I gazed down the Teche, I clicked on the iPod and found one of Tee Jolie’s recordings. She was singing “La Jolie Blon,” the heartbreaking lament that you hear once and never forget for the rest of your life. Then I remembered that Alafair had said she had not been able to find Tee Jolie’s songs in the contents. How was that possible? There on the bridge, in the gloaming of the day, while the last of the sunlight blazed in an amber ribbon down the center of the bayou, while the black-green backs of alligator gars rolled among the lily pads, I listened to Tee Jolie’s beautiful voice rising from the earphones that rested on the sides of my neck, as though she were speaking French to me from a bygone era, one that went all the way back to the time of Evangeline and the flight of the Acadian people from Nova Scotia to the bayou country of South Louisiana. I did not realize that I was about to relearn an old lesson, namely that sometimes it’s better to trust the realm of the dead than the world of the quick, and never to doubt the existence of unseen realities that can hover like a hologram right beyond the edges of our vision.
When I went into Clementine’s, Clete was standing at the bar, a tumbler of vodka packed with shaved ice and cherries and orange slices and a sprig of mint in front of him. I sat down on a stool and ordered a seltzer on ice with a lime slice inserted on the glass’s rim, a pretense that for me probably disguised thoughts that are better not discussed. “You want me to go back to New Orleans with you?” I said.
“No, I put my sister on a cruise, and my niece is visiting a friend in Mobile, so they’re okay for now,” he said.
“How about later on?”
“I haven’t thought it through. I’ll let you know when I do,” he said.
“Don’t try to handle this on your own, Clete. There’re lots of ways we can go at these guys,” I said.
“For instance?”
“Go after Grimes for vehicular homicide of the child.”
“Using what for evidence? The testimony of his junkie parents who already flushed the kid down the drain for their next fix?”
The bar was crowded and noisy. Inside the conversation about football and subjects that were of no consequence, Clete’s face seemed to float like a red balloon, estranged and full of pain. “I grew up around guys like Golightly and Grimes. You know how you deal with them? You take them off at the neck.” He put two aspirins in his mouth and bit down on them. “I’ve got this twisted feeling high up in my chest, like something is still in there and it’s pushing against my lung.” He took a deep drink from his vodka, the ice making a rasping sound against the glass when he set it down on the bar. “You know the biggest joke about all this?” he said.
“About what?”
“Getting shot. Almost croaking. I would have bought it righ
t there on the bayou if the bullet hadn’t hit the strap on my shoulder holster. I got saved by my holster rather than by my piece. That’s the story of my fucking life. If anything good happens to me, it’s because of an accident.”
“Sir, would you hold down your language, please?” the bartender said.
“Sorry,” Clete said.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“No, I like it here. I like the bar and the food and the company, and I have no reason to leave.”
“Meaning I do?” I said.
