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“I don’t believe that. She brought me the iPod in the recovery unit in New Orleans. I talked to her on the phone. She’s alive.”
“I can’t have this kind of conversation with you anymore,” Molly said.
She went back in the bedroom and closed the door. I sat for a long time in the dark, the message machine blinking in sync with my heart, daring me to push the play button. Maybe with a touch of the finger, I could be back on the full-tilt boogie, free of worry and moral complications, delighting in the violence I could visit upon my enemies, getting back on the grog at the same time, surrendering myself each day to the incremental alcoholic death that preempted my fear of the grave.
The rain seemed to rekindle its energies, thudding as hard as hail on the roof. I walked into the kitchen and stood at the counter and pressed the play button with my thumb.
“Hi, Mr. Dave,” the voice said. “I hope you don’t mind me bothering you again, but I’m real scared. There ain’t nobody here except a nurse and a doctor that comes sometimes ’cause of a problem I got. I need to get off this island, but I ain’t sure where it is. The people that owns it has got a big boat. One of the men here said we was sout’east of the chandelier. That don’t make no sense. Mr. Dave, the man I’m wit’ is a good man, but I ain’t sure about nothing no more. I don’t know where Blue is at. They say she’s all right, that she went out to Hollywood ’cause her voice is good as mine is and she’s gonna do fine out there. The medicine they been giving me makes me kind of crazy. I ain’t sure what to believe.”
On the machine I heard a door slam in the background and another voice speaking, one I didn’t recognize. Then the recording ended.
The Chandeleur Islands, I thought. The barrier islands that formed the most eastern extreme of Louisiana’s landmass. That had to be it. I woke Molly and asked her to come into the kitchen. She was half asleep, her cheek printed by the pillow. “I thought I heard a woman’s voice,” she said.
“You did. Listen to this.”
I replayed Tee Jolie’s message. When it was over, Molly sat down by the breakfast table and stared at me. She was wearing a pink nightgown and fluffy slippers. She seemed dazed, as though she couldn’t extract herself from a dream.
“You’re not going to say anything?” I asked.
“Don’t get anywhere near this.”
“She’s asking for help.”
“It’s a setup.”
“You’re wrong. Tee Jolie would never do anything like that.”
“When will you stop?”
“Stop what?”
“Believing people who know your weakness and use it against you.”
“Mind telling me what this great weakness is?”
“You’re willing to love people who are corrupt to the core. You turn them into something they’re not, and we pay the price for it.”
I took a carton of milk out of the icebox and walked down to the picnic table in the backyard and sat down with my back to the house and drank the carton half empty. I could hear Tripod’s chain tinkling as he dragged it down the wire stretched between two live oaks. I reached down and picked him up and set him on my lap. He rubbed his head against my chest and flipped over on his back, waiting for me to scratch his stomach, his thick tail swishing back and forth. A tug passed on the bayou, its green and red running lights on, its wake slapping against the cypress roots. I longed to pour a half pint of whiskey into the milk carton and chugalug it in one long swallow, until I pushed all light out of my eyes and sound from my ears and thoughts from my mind. At that moment I would have swallowed broken glass for a drink. I knew I would not fall asleep before dawn.
&n
bsp; At 6:13 A.M., just as I finally nodded off, the phone rang. It was Clete Purcel. “Gretchen’s back from Miami,” he said.
“So what?” I said.
“She says she found her mother.”
“Keep her away from Molly and Alafair and me.”
I hung up the phone, missing the cradle and dropping the receiver on the floor, waking my wife.
JESSE LEBOEUF HAD never thought of himself as a prejudiced man. In his mind, he was a realist who looked upon people for what they were and what they were not, and he did not understand why that was considered bad in the eyes of others. People of color did not respect a white man who lowered himself to their level. Nor did they wish to live with whites or be on an equal plane with them. Any white person who had grown up with them knew that and honored the separations inherent in southern culture. Saturday-night nigger-knocking was a rite of passage. If anyone was to blame for it, it was the United States Supreme Court and the decision to integrate the schools. Shooting Negroes with BB guns and slingshots and throwing firecrackers on the galleries and roofs of their homes didn’t cause long-term damage to anyone. They had to pay some dues, like every immigrant group, if they wanted to live in a country like this. How many people in those homes had been born in Charity Hospital and raised on welfare? Answer: all of them. How would they like living in straw villages back in Africa, with lions prowling around the neighborhood?
But when Jesse reviewed his life, he stumbled across an inalterable fact about himself that he didn’t like to brood upon. In one way or another, he had always needed to be around people of color. He not only went to bed with Negro girls and women as a teenager, he found himself coming back for more well into his forties. They feared him and shrank under his weight and cigarette odor and the density of his breath, while their men slunk away into the shadows, the whites of their eyes yellow and shiny with shame. After each excursion into the black district, Jesse felt a sense of power and control that no other experience provided him. Sometimes he made a point of drinking in a mulatto bar near Hopkins just after visiting a crib, drinking out of a bottle of Jax in the corner, looking nakedly into the faces of the patrons. His sun-browned skin was almost as dark as theirs, but he always wore khaki clothes and half-top boots and a fedora and a Lima watch fob, like a foreman or a plantation overseer would wear. The discomfort Jesse caused in others was testimony that the power in his genitals and the manly odor in his clothes were not cosmetic.
It ended with affirmative action and the hiring of black sheriff’s deputies and city police officers. It had taken Jesse thirteen years and three state examinations and four semesters of night classes at a community college to make plainclothes. In one day, a black man was given the same pay grade as he and assigned as his investigative partner. The black man lasted two months with Jesse before he resigned and went to work for the state police.
Jesse became a lone wolf and was nicknamed “Loup” by his colleagues. If an arrest might get messy or require undue paperwork, the Loup was sent in. If the suspect had shot a cop or raped a child or repeatedly terrorized a neighborhood and barricaded himself in a house, there was only one man for the job; the Loup went in carrying a cut-down twelve-gauge pump loaded with pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks. The paramedics would have the body bag already unzipped and spread open on the gurney, ready for business.
