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“Maybe you ought to put the hooch away today,” I said.
Mistake.
He pulled the cork and upended the bottle, one eye fixed on my face. “See, no problem. The world hasn’t ended,” he said. “Marse Daniel never lets me down.”
“Who are you kidding?”
“I told you, I needed a drink. So I took one. I think my liver is shot. I take one hit and it’s like mainlining. That means I drink less.” He waited for me to argue with him, but I didn’t. “What do you think you’re going to find up here?” he asked.
“The last time Surrette was on the hill, he tried to lead Gretchen into a bear trap,” I said. “I followed his trail over the crest to the far side. His tracks led to a rock outcropping, then disappeared. He had to go south to get to the highway. There are two or three deer trails that would have taken him there, but his tracks weren’t on them. I don’t get it.”
“What if he headed north?”
“He’d end up in a blind canyon. It was night. He would have to climb out of it in the dark. Where would his vehicle be?”
“What’s in the canyon?”
“Three or four houses. People Albert knows,” I replied.
Clete took another hit off the bottle. I could see a chain of tiny air bubbles sliding up the neck as he drank. He set the bottle on his leg. “I shouldn’t do this in front of you. But I’m not doing too good today, and I need it.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“Not at all?” he said.
“Maybe a little. Like a thought that’s buried in the unconscious. Like an old girlfriend winking at you on the street corner.”
“That bad?”
“It comes and goes. I don’t think about it as often; I dream about it. The dreams are always nightmares. Sometimes I can’t wake myself up, and I walk around thinking I’m drunk.”
“How often do you dream about it?”
“Every third night, about four A.M.”
“All these years?”
“Except when I was back on the dirty boogie. Then I didn’t have to dream. My life was a nightmare twenty-four hours a day,” I said.
He stared through the trees into the sunlight. Down below, Albert was watering the grass. I could hear birds singing and chipmunks clattering in the rocks. I thought of all the days Clete and I had hiked through woods to get to an isolated pond in the Atchafalaya Basin. I thought about diving the wreck of a German sub that drifted up and down the Louisiana coast, and knocking down ducks inside a blind on Whiskey Bay, and trolling for marlin south of Key Largo, the bait bouncing in our wake. I thought of all the Cubans and Cajuns and Texas fisherpeople we had known along the southern rim of the United States, and the open-air oyster bars we had eaten in and the boats on which we had hauled tarpons as thick as logs over the gunwales. What is the sum total of a man’s life? I knew the answer, and it wasn’t complicated. At the bottom of the ninth, you count up the people you love, both friends and family, and you add their names to the fine places you’ve been and the good things you’ve done, and you have it.
Clete stood up and dusted off the seat of his trousers. “Let’s hike on up a bit higher,” he said.
“Where’s Gretchen?”
“I wish I knew. When it comes to her old trade, she’s a loner. She said something I hadn’t thought about. That Surrette is going to come apart.”
“Why?” I asked.
“She’s known guys like him, guys the Mob took out. She said they’re all anal-retentives. They’ve got a master plan. When it doesn’t work out, their world goes to shit.”
“What’s Surrette’s master plan?”
“Breaking Felicity.”
I didn’t look at his face. The implication in his voice was enough. I heard him lift the bottle again, the whiskey sloshing inside the neck.
“Sometimes you have to keep an empty space in your head and not let the wrong thoughts get in it,” I said.
