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“That’s not the same as apologizing for what happened and telling her you appreciate her work.”
Levon took out his cell phone and found a number in his contacts. His call to Alafair went straight to voicemail. “This is Levon. Tony is a jerk. I need you here, Alafair. Your script is beautiful. I don’t want amateurs messing it up. I sent you two e-mails. Call me.” He closed his cell. “Anything else?”
“I sent the Nightingale chauffeur to you. A guy named Swede Jensen. I hope you didn’t mind.”
“He’s a Confederate soldier. He’s down by the bayou now.”
“No kidding?” Clete said.
“I’d like to eat lunch and get back to work.”
“Sure,” Clete said.
“Do you and Homer want to join us?”
Clete saw a red Frisbee sail over the cannon and Homer jump in the air to catch it, his face split with a smile. “That’d be nice.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT THE rain came again, mixed with hail and bursts of tree-lashing wind. Clete ordered in a pizza, and he and Homer watched My Darling Clementine on Clete’s television set. At the end of the film, when Henry Fonda leaves the woman by the side of the road and rides away into the Arizona wastelands, Homer’s eyes turned wet, and he looked at Clete for an explanation, either for the film or for his emotions.
“See, it’s about the fact that a guy like Wyatt Earp wouldn’t ever be able to enjoy a normal life,” Clete said.
“Clementine is so beautiful,” Homer said. “You can see the love in her eyes. It’s not right to leave her just standing by the road.”
“See, John Ford directed that film, Homer. He was always experimenting with light and shadow. The story is about good and evil. Even though all the Clantons are killed, Wyatt knows more of them are waiting out there in the wastelands. He’s the guy who has to keep the rest of us safe.”
“So maybe he’ll come back and see Clementine again?”
“You never can tell.”
* * *
LATER, AS CLETE lay in the dark with the rain clattering on the roof, his own words brought him to conclusions about himself that he didn’t want to face. He had two kinds of dreams, one in color, one in black and white. Sometimes in his sleep, he returned to the French Quarter of the old days, when Sam Butera and Louis Prima were blowing out the walls at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon, the balconies dripping with flowers along streets that seemed about to collapse in on themselves, the street bands playing for coins and the sidewalk artists setting up their easels in Jackson Square, the black kids dancing with taps as big as horseshoes clamped on their feet, the smell of beignets and café au lait in the Café du Monde, the palms and banana fronds ticking inside the gated courtyards, the arched entranceways dank and cool-smelling, the stone stained with lichen and ponded with water that resembled spilled burgundy in the shadows.
The dreams in black and white went back to an Asian country where, out there in the sweltering dark, beyond the concertina wire and the claymores and the flicker of an offshore battery, Bedcheck Charlie launched grenades randomly with a captured blooker, blowing mud, foliage, and even a sit-down shitter into the air, the detritus raining down on Clete’s poncho and steel pot. Occasionally, Bedcheck Charlie got lucky, and after the explosion, a grunt down the line would scream words at the stars that Clete did not want to attach to an image.
Sleep came to Clete only by way of surrender to a fantasy. Before he went overseas, he saw a black-and-white news film in an art theater in San Fran that showed Vietminh sappers crawling through barbed wire strung by French Legionnaires. The Vietminh wore sandals cut out of rubber tires and sweat-soaked black pajamas that looked like black oil on their skeletal frames. Their only possessions and weapons were a rice ball, a piece of fish tied in a sling on their waist, and a bamboo cylinder packed with explosives tied on their back. Without flinching, they crawled across anti-personnel mines that blew them into dog food; yet they kept coming, undaunted. Clete wondered how desperate a person would have to be in order to become so brave.
At about 0400, he would surrender to his fatigue, the eggs of a malarial mosquito humming in his blood, the sour stench of his body, the jungle ulcers on his skin, the squishiness of trench foot inside his boots, the insects that got into his socks and up his legs, the cut on his nose where his steel pot had scissored down on his face. In surrendering, he put the faces of the sappers on Bedcheck Charlie and, for a brief time, did not think of him as an enemy. Clete gave himself over to a mental opiate, and Bedcheck disappeared into a box.
Clete never spoke to others of the private universe in which he lived; nor did he share his belief that the world was mad, that most politicians were liars who served the interests of corporations, that populists were con artists, and that the poor were kept poor and uneducated as long as possible.
Sunrise brought heat and humidity that felt like fire ants crawling inside his utilities. The dawn also meant rice paddies filled with human feces and trails with poisonous snakes looped around tree branches and booby-trapped 105 duds and Vietnamese knockoffs of our M14 mines and Bouncing Betties that would steal your limbs and eyes or simply take you off at the waist and leave half of you to whisper your last words. In his dreams he saw all of this in black and white, never in color, and he believed the phenomenon had something to do with the distinction between good and evil. The irony was that he had never learned where the difference lay.
He woke with a start at 3:06 A.M., unsure where he was. He saw lightning outside and the silvery-green slashing of an oak limb across the window. But it was not the storm that woke him. Just before waking, he had seen an image in his mind, an incandescent wormlike creature whose heat was so bright and intense that it evaporated the rain and the darkness surrounding it.
He took his snub-nose from under his pillow and put on his slippers and unbolted and unchained the door and stepped out on the stoop in his pajamas, ignoring the rain. “Who’s out there?”
An electric light burned in a boathouse across the bayou. His Caddy was parked in the cul-de-sac, the hood and cloth top sprinkled with leaves and pine needles, the hand-waxed paint job beaded with water. In the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a figure moving through the trees, away from the motor court. Clete walked out on the gravel, rain running into his face, his pajamas sticking to his skin, the snub-nose hanging from his hand. “I saw you, pal. Come out or you might catch one in the brisket.”
No response.
“Hey, shit for brains, I know who you are,” he said.
No answer or any movement in the trees.
“You’re the guy they call Smiley,” he said. “My daughter is Gretchen Horowitz. A fuck like you is lucky to do hundred-dollar hits in Little Havana.”
