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“Who were the guys?”
“I got an idea who one of them was.”
“You told the cops that?”
He twisted his mouth into a button. He was wearing half-top boots that looked like buckets on his feet and seemed out of character. “I come here to get your opinion on something,” he said.
“Why me?”
“I checked out you and that fat-ass friend of yours. Y’all got in a shoot-out down in Louisiana and flushed the grits of some guys just like Love Younger and his crowd.”
“You have reason to believe Love Younger sent these three men after you?”
“One guy had a tattoo on the back of his hand. I’ve seen it before.”
“On somebody who works for Love Younger?”
“Here’s what don’t compute. I got nothing on Love Younger. He’s rich and powerful, and I’m an ex-con and rough-stock supplier at state fairs. Why would I be a threat to him?”
“Who was the woman they attacked?”
“Her name is Bertha Phelps.”
“The lady at the rez?”
“She probably never hurt a soul in her life. With time she may get over it. But she won’t be the same. They never are.”
“If I understand you correctly, these guys did everything they could to provoke you, but they managed to leave you alive, knowing what you’d probably do.”
“None of them tried to pull a piece. Maybe they wasn’t carrying. Maybe they just wanted to shake me up. They ain’t high-end operators, that’s for sure. One of them stole my cordovan Tony Lama boots.”
“You think you’re being set up?”
“Ever see a bullfight? Before the matador comes out, the banderilleros stick the banderillas in the bull’s neck. They’re like miniature harpoons. The barbs hurt like hell and get the bull into a rage. That’s when he makes mistakes and gets a sword in the soft spot between the shoulder blades.”
“Knowing all that, you still want to get even?”
“An eye for an eye.”
“That’s not what the admonition means.”
“What it means is don’t tread on me. I celled with a guy in Texas whose kid was murdered by a pedophile. He chain-drug him down a highway. What do you think of that?”
He took a sip from his beer, looking sideways at me, waiting for me to answer. His mind-set was one that every Southerner recognizes. Whether it’s a defective element in the gene pool or an atavistic throwback to the peat bogs of Celtic Europe, it is nonetheless the family heirloom of a class of people who are not only uneducable but take pride in their ignorance and their potential for violence. If you have the opportunity, study their faces carefully in a photograph, perhaps one taken at what they call a “cross lighting,” and tell me they descend from the same tree as the rest of us.
“You just conceded somebody is trying to throw you a slider. Why swing on it?” I said.
“Maybe I got tricks they don’t know about. Maybe I’ll call down fire and lightning on the whole bunch.”
“You think you have that kind of power?”
He shook his head. “No, I ain’t got no power at all. I was just talking. They done permanent harm to Miss Bertha, and they got to pay for it, Mr. Robicheaux. You’d do the same. Don’t be telling me you wouldn’t. I know the kind of man you are. You might try to hide it, but I can see it in your eyes.”
He climbed down from the fence, favoring one foot. He clasped the neck of the beer bottle with three fingers and tilted it to his mouth and drank until it was empty. Then he stuck it in one coat pocket and picked the empty off the grass and stuck it in his other pocket. He winked at me. “See, I always keep my word,” he said.
I was wrong about Wyatt Dixon. If this man could be placed in a category, I had no idea what it was.
I COULDN’T BLAME CLETE for what he did next. He had never done well when he left South Louisiana. Most GIs hated Vietnam and its corruption and humid weather and the stink of buffalo feces in its rice paddies. Not Clete. The banyan and palm trees, the clouds of steam rising off a rain forest, the French colonial architecture, the neon-lit backstreet bars of Saigon, a sudden downpour clicking on clusters of philodendron and banana fronds in a courtyard, the sloe-eyed girls who beckoned from a balcony, an angelus bell ringing at six A.M., all of these things could have been postcards mailed to him from the city of his birth.
