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“I don’t care. Just do it. I’m too old for this kiddie-car stuff, and so are you. What else is going on?”
“Kiddie-car stuff?”
“Yeah, because I have a hard time taking this girl seriously. If she wants to be Bonnie Parker, she’s picked a pretty small stage to do it on. Anything else on your mind?”
“I think Alexis Dupree was an SS officer at Auschwitz. I think his real name is Karl Engels.”
“You’ve got evidence to that effect?”
“Nothing that’s going to put him in handcuffs.”
I could hear her breathing in the silence. “Okay, stay with it,” she said. “One way or another, the Duprees are mixed up with Tee Jolie’s disappearance and the murder of her sister. Let’s use whatever we can to make life interesting for them.”
“I’ve got to be honest with you, Helen. Gretchen Horowitz is the real deal. She’s not to be taken lightly.”
“Look, sometimes I turn a deaf ear to you and pretend you create problems that in actuality are already there. You’re bothered by injustice and can’t rest till you set things right. In other words, you’re an ongoing pain in the ass. In spite of that, I don’t know what I’d do without you. Say a prayer for Ilene. She might not make it.”
“I’m sorry, Helen.”
“Don’t let me down, bwana,” she said, and hung up.
THAT NIGHT IT rained again, the way it alway
s does with the advent of winter in Louisiana, clogging the rain gutters on the house with leaves, washing the dust and black lint from the sugar mills out of the trees, sometimes filling the air with a smell that has the bright clarity of rubbing alcohol. These things are natural and good, I would tell myself, but sometimes the ticking of the rain on a windowsill or in an aluminum pet bowl can take on a senseless, metronomic beat like a windup clock that has no hands and that serves no purpose except to tell you your time is running out.
I have never liked sleep. It has always been my enemy. Long before I went to Vietnam, I had nightmares about a man named Mack. He was a professional bourré and blackjack dealer in the gambling clubs and brothels of St. Landry Parish. He seduced my mother when she was drunk and blackmailed her and made her his mistress while my father was working on a drill rig offshore or fur-trapping on Marsh Island. Mack drowned my cats and held his fingers to my nose after he was with my mother. I hated him more than any man I had ever met, and in Vietnam I sometimes saw his face superimposed on those of the Asian men I killed.
Mack lived in my head for many years and dissipated in importance only after I began to assemble a new collection of specters and demons—the shadowy figures who came out of the trees and used our 105 duds to booby-trap a night trail, the suspended corpse of a suicide dancing with maggots that Clete and I cut down from a rafter, the discovery of a child inside a refrigerator that had been abandoned in a field not far from a playground, a black man strapped in a heavy oak chair, his face and nappy hair bejeweled with sweat just before the hood was dropped over his face.
It’s my belief that images like these cannot be exorcised from one’s memory. They travel with you wherever you go and wait for their moment to come aborning again. If you are rested and the day is sunny and cool and filled with the fragrances of spring, the images will probably remain dormant and seem to have little application in your life. If you are fatigued or irritable or depressed or down with the flu, you’ll probably be presented with a ticket to your unconscious, and the journey will not be a pleasant one. One thing you can count on: Sleep is a flip of the coin, and you are powerless inside its clutches unless you’re willing to drink or drug yourself into oblivion.
It was 11:07 P.M., and I was reading under the lamp in the living room. The kitchen was dark and I could see the message light on the machine blinking on and off, like a hot drop of blood that glowed and died and then glowed again. Molly and Alafair were awake, and I could have gotten up and retrieved the message without disturbing anyone, but I didn’t want to, in the same way you sometimes hesitate to answer the door when the knock is more forceful than it should be, the face of your visitor obscured by shadows.
“Did you drop your pills in the bathroom sink?” Molly said behind my chair.
“Maybe. I don’t remember,” I replied.
“Over half of them are gone. They have morphine in them, Dave.”
“I know that. That’s why I try not to use them.”
“But you’ve been taking them?”
“I was taking them two or three times a week. Maybe not even that much. I haven’t felt a need for them in the last few days.”
She sat down across from me, the capped plastic bottle in her hand. She held her eyes on mine. “Can you go without them altogether?”
“Yeah, toss them out. I should have done that already.” But my words sounded both hollow and foolish, like those of a man standing in a breadline and pretending he doesn’t need to be there.
“It’s late. Let’s go to sleep,” she said.
I closed my book and looked at the title. It was a novel about British soldiers in the Great War, written by an eloquent man who had been gassed and wounded and had seen his best friends mowed down by Maxim guns, but I could remember hardly anything in it, as though my eyes had moved across fifty pages and registered almost nothing. “Maybe you and Alafair should visit your aunt in Galveston,” I said. “Just for a few days.”
“We’re not going anywhere.”
I stood up and pulled the tiny chain on the reading lamp. Through the doorway, I could see the reflection of the red light in the window glass above the sink. The driveway was completely black, and in the window glass, the red light was like a beacon on a dark sea. “Tee Jolie is out there somewhere,” I said.
“She’s dead, Dave.”
