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She squeezed her eyes shut, then reopened them. “I can’t believe you. I see you, but I can’t believe someone like you exists. Is your wife doing some kind of penance for something she did in a former life?”
I stepped closer to her, my mouth three inches from her ear. “You need to understand something, Miss Gretchen. If not for me and your father, Sheriff Soileau would have you in a cage full of people like yourself. As it stands, I may have to resign from the department. Plus, I may have to deal with some serious problems of conscience. This isn’t your fault, it’s mine. But I don’t want to listen to any more of your insults.”
I stepped away from her. Her face was white. Dixie Lee Pugh walked toward us, his hand outstretched. “What’s shakin’, Dave?”
“I’d like to introduce you to Gretchen Horowitz. She wants to interview you for her documentary,” I said.
“You’re looking at the boogie-woogie man from la Louisiane, darlin’,” he said. “Where’d you get those eyes, girl? They look like violets.”
“They came out of my mother’s womb with the rest of the unit,” she replied.
“Did Dave tell you we were roommates in college?” Dixie Lee replied.
“You have my sympathies,” she said. She walked down the side aisle toward the rear of the building, her equipment bag swinging on her rump.
“She runs a charm school?” Dixie Lee said.
“I gave her a bad time before you walked up. She’s not to blame,” I said.
His eyes were roving over the crowd, alighting on a familiar face here and there, his paunch resting on his belt. I wondered if he was remembering the glory years and the teenage girls who had fought to touch his shoes when he sang onstage at the Louisiana Hayride, the appearances on American Bandstand, the popping of flashbulbs when he descended the steps from an airliner with his new bride at Heathrow Airport.
“Let’s get some ice cream,” he said.
“Ice cream?”
“I’ve been clean and sober three years now. There’s a truck outside. Look up in the balcony. They’re all eating ice cream. It’s free.”
“I’m happy for you, Dixie.”
“What was the deal with the photographer?”
“Somebody stole her childhood, so she lives every day of her life full of rage.”
“She was molested?” he said, his gaze coming back on mine.
I nodded.
“I’d say she’s ahead of the game.”
“How do you mean?”
“If that happened to me, I think I’d be killing people. Instead, this gal is making films. Sounds like she’s done all right, don’t you think?”
The western band’s first number was “Cimarron.” I was about to rejoin Alafair and Molly and take a pass on Dixie Lee’s invitation when something in our conversation began to bother me, like a piece in a mosaic that is cut wrong and doesn’t fit no matter which way you turn it. I looked up a
t the balcony again. It was filled with children eating ice cream from paper bowls with plastic spoons. They were not eating Popsicles or soft ice cream from a mechanical dispenser. They were eating ice cream that had been hand-scooped from hard-frozen containers, the kind that neighborhood vending trucks didn’t carry.
“You said there’s a truck outside and the ice cream is free?” I asked.
Either Dixie Lee didn’t hear my question or he didn’t consider it worth answering. His deep-set eyes were looking at the crowd and at the tinseled confetti someone was throwing out of the balcony into the beam of the spotlight.
“What kind of truck?” I said.
“A freezer truck. Who cares?” he said. “Look at the women in this place. Great God Almighty, tell me this world ain’t a pleasure. Pull your tallywhacker out of the hay baler and join the party, Dave.”
I WENT OUTSIDE into the coldness of the night and the brilliance of the stars and the smell of barbecue smoke and crawfish boiling in a cauldron of cob-corn and artichokes and whole potatoes, and I saw a tan-colored freezer truck parked between the Sugar Cane Festival Building and the picnic shelters. There were rows of latched freezer compartments on either side of it, and against the background of the tiny white lights strung in the oak trees, its surfaces looked armored and hard-edged and cold to the touch, like a tank parked in the middle of a children’s playground. It was the same kind of truck the Patin brothers used when they tried to blow my head off. The driver was wearing a brown uniform and a cap with a lacquered bill and a scuffed leather jacket, and he was scooping French-vanilla ice cream out of a big round container on a picnic table and placing it in paper bowls for a line of children. His head and face reminded me of an upended ham, his eyes serious with his work, his mouth a tight seam. But when he looked up at me, he smiled in recognition. “I’ll be darned. Remember me?” he said.
“You’re Bobby Joe Guidry,” I replied. “You were in Desert Storm.”
