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“I heard you hung around Bobby Earl because you wanted his mailing list. I never believed that,” I said.
“It’s politics. This is Louisiana.”
“I remember many situations when I said it was just Vietnam.”
Jimmy pulled the cork from a green half-empty bottle of wine. “Here’s to neocolonialism everywhere.”
I wasn’t up to his cynicism. I looked at the oaks, the moss lifting in the wind, purple dust rising from a cane field, Bayou Teche glinting in the sun like a Byzantine shield. La Louisiane, the love of my life, the home of Jolie Blon and Evangeline and the Great Whore of Babylon, the place for which I would die, the place for which there was no answer or cure.
I said nothing more and walked to my vehicle, rude or not.
RECOVERING ALCOHOLICS HAVE ways of setting themselves up. Some get the toxins out of their system and stop attending meetings. Maybe they hang with the old crowd. They drop by a saloon to watch a football game on a Saturday afternoon. They convince themselves their problems had to do with excess rather than compulsion and metabolic addiction and a deep-seated neurosis armor-plated in the unconscious. Or they nurse resentment and fuel their anger on a daily basis, like a primitive fur-clad creature methodically dropping sticks into a fire.
Or maybe they want to cancel their whole ticket but are afraid to lose their soul. If they’re in this category, they’ll commit suicide in an incremental fashion, one glass or bottle at a time. And if the process isn’t fast enough, they will put themselves in dangerous situations involving guns and knives and people who belong in steel cages.
I went to a meeting at the Episcopalian cottage on Center Street, across from old New Iberia High. When the moderator asked if anyone was attending A.A. for the first time, or if anyone was returning from a slip and wanted a twenty-four-hour sobriety chip, I let my face go empty and stared at the floor in the semidarkness. At the end of the meeting, I said little or nothing to friends with whom I had been in the program for years, and drove to my house in a heavy white fog that had moved in from the Gulf, and parked my truck in the porte cochere and went inside and sat in the living room in the dark, the television off, the silence as loud as a scream.
The operative acronym for every A.A. member is HALT, which means don’t get hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. I was all of those. I called Clete’s cell phone, which went immediately to voicemail. I didn’t want the food in my icebox. I woke lifeless and exhausted with every sunrise. My hands opened and closed at my sides for no reason. I deliberately revisited memories of a human face dissolving in a bloody mist when I squeezed off round after round from my army-issue 1911-model .45.
I’m not proud of any of these things. I hated them then; I hate them now. But they live in me like a snake that slowly swallows its prey, compressing it into a canister of despair and pain.
I went into the kitchen and filled a large glass with tap water and drank it to the bottom. In the darkness I heard the claws of an animal scratching at the screen. I set the glass quietly in the sink and went through the mudroom and opened the screen door. A raccoon that must have weighted twenty-five pounds jumped from the windowsill and thumped on the ground, then scampered through the leaves past Tripod’s old hutch and disappeared inside the fog.
I walked down the slope, looking for him. The air was cold, the fog hanging in huge clouds on the bayou and in the trees. I heard a splash, like a gator slapping its tail. I took a penlight from my pocket and shone it on the ground. The tracks of a raccoon and probably a possum or an armadillo were stenciled along the mudflat. The tracks disappeared into the cattails. Farther down, inside clouds of fog that rose four feet above the water, I heard a soft knocking sound, like a friend at the door in the early hours. I shined the light ahead of me. The tide was coming in, and an unmoored pirogue had floated up the bayou and lodged against a decayed and collapsed dock at the foot of my property.
I picked up a fallen tree branch and hooked it on the pirogue’s bow and scraped it onto the bank. There was a paddle inside, an empty rucksack, a minnow bucket, a newspaper that was two weeks old, and a fish stringer. My earliest memories of my father were fishing with him in a pirogue. There is no more emblematic symbol of life on Bayou Teche than the humble pirogue.
I stepped into the pirogue and steadied my weight, then eased down on the wood seat. The fog was so thick that the lights in the houses along the bayou, even the floodlamps in the backyard of the Shadows and the warning lights on the drawbridge at Burke Street, were hardly more than smudges. I shone the penlight on the rucksack again. A pint bottle of brandy lay in a half inch of rainwater. I touched it with the penlight beam and watched its color flare on my hand and wrist. I pushed with the paddle until the pirogue swung into the current and began to drift toward the bridge and one of the places that had been waiting for me since I was a child, when, in my innocence, I believed the paradisiacal world into which I had been born would always be there for me.
* * *
THIS PARTICULAR BAR-AND-GRILL was located on the water, but because of the fog and the intermittent rain, the chairs and tables on the deck had been stacked, and all the patrons had gone inside and crowded into the bar. The windows were lighted, the glass beaded, the patrons happy and warm, safe from the elements. The only problem I had with this place upstream from the drawbridge was that almost everyone there knew me and my history.
When I opened the door, the bartender looked at me without speaking. I pointed at the men’s room. He smiled. “Yeah, go ahead, Dave,” he said.
I went into the cubicle inside the restroom and shut the door. I waited until I was sure the room was empty, then exited the cubicle and clicked off the light to lessen my visibility and opened the restroom door and went to the end of the bar in the shadows. A young barmaid I didn’t recognize was filling the beer box.
“One of those and two shots of Jack on shaved ice,” I said. “In fact, make that two doubles. I got a friend coming.”
She was pretty and young and had a small red mouth and the amber-colored hair characteristic of many Cajun women. “Aren’t you . . .”
“Aren’t I who?”
“You know, a policeman. You work in the big building on the bayou. I seen you when I paid a traffic ticket there.”
“Yeah, that was probably me. I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“Don’t set your pants on fire, no.”
I stood by the stool. I looked at my hands. I looked down at the bar rail. I could feel a hundred eyes burrowing into my back or the side of my face. When I looked up, no one was paying me any attention. “M
iss, I’d really appreciate it if you’d hurry.”
“Yes, suh, coming up,” she said.
After I finished both glasses of whiskey, chasing each with Heineken, I thought my knees would fold.
“You gonna be all right?” the barmaid said.
