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“Oh, hey, what say, Purcel?” Swede replied, studying his watch. “How’s it hanging?”
“I saw you on the set behind Albania Plantation. You were wearing a Confederate uniform.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.”
“They paying you okay?”
“Yeah, union scale, all that stuff.”
Clete waited for Swede to thank him. It didn’t happen. “You don’t have a conflict with your chauffeur job?”
“The Nightingales are flexible. Sorry, I got to boogie.”
“Yeah, the sky’s about to fall. Look at me.”
“Like I said—” Swede began.
“No, you didn’t say anything. Your eyes are going everywhere except my face. In the meantime, you’re blowing me off. It’s called rude.”
“Thanks for what you did. I got a ton of things to do. Nice seeing you.”
Clete stepped in his way. “Don’t talk shit to me, Swede.”
Swede looked like an animal with a limb caught in a trap.
“Did you know fear smells like soiled cat litter?” Clete said.
Swede almost ran through the door.
* * *
THAT WEEKEND, SOUTHERN Louisiana was sweltering, thunder cracking as loud as cannons in the night sky; at sunrise, the storm drains clogged with dead beetles that had shells as hard as pecans. It was the kind of weather we associated with hurricanes and tidal surges and winds that ripped tin roofs off houses and bounced them across sugarcane fields like crushed beer cans; it was the kind of weather that gave the lie to the sleepy Southern culture whose normalcy we so fiercely nursed and protected from generation to generation.
I could not sleep Sunday night, and on Monday I woke with a taste like pennies in my mouth and a sense that my life was unspooling before me, that the world in which I lived was a fabrication, that the charity abiding in the human breast was a collective self-delusion, and that the bestial elements we supposedly exorcised from civilized society were not only still with us but had come to define us, although we sanitized them as drones and offshore missiles marked “occupant” and land mines that killed children decades after they were set.
These are signs of clinical depression or maybe a realistic vision of the era in which we live. During moments like these, no matter the time of day or night, I had found release only in a saloon. The long bar and brass foot rail, the wood-bladed fans, the jars of cracklings and pickled eggs and sausages, the coldness of bottled beer or ice-sheathed mugs, the wink in the barmaid’s eye and the shine on the tops of her breasts, the tumblers of whiskey that glowed with an amber radiance that seemed almost ethereal, the spectral bartender without a last name, the ringing of the pinball machine, all these things became my cathedral, a home beneath the sea, and just as deadly.
Thoughts like these are probably a form of alcoholic insanity. But on that particular Monday morning, I preferred my own madness to what I had begun to feel, as Helen and Clete did—namely, that an inchoate sickness was in our midst, and it was as palpable in the hot wetness of the dawn as the smell of lions in the street at high noon.
At 9:33 A.M., I received another call from Sherry Picard.
“I need to talk to you or Clete,” she said. “Since he’s not in his office and not answering his cell phone, I called you.”
“Thanks,” I replied.
“I was warned about you two.”
“This is a business line,” I said. “If you have a personal issue, call me at home.”
“My ass. Did you try to dime me with the FBI?”
“That’s probably one of the craziest things I’ve heard in a while.”
“Because an agent just left my office. I have the distinct feeling that I’m being looked at for the Penny homicide.”
“Talk to the U.S. Justice Department,” I said. “The feds hate Clete’s guts. I don’t have contact with them. Most of them wouldn’t take the time to spit on us.”
“Don’t give me that. They’re in contact with your boss, which means they’re in contact with you.”
