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He looked up at me. “Can you give me something to work with here?”
“So you can exclude me?”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“Do you have any witnesses?”
“I’m not supposed to discuss that. We’ve got to tow your truck in. Are you solid with that?”
“What for?”
“An anonymous tipster said he saw a beat-up blue truck slam the rear end of a black truck close to the convenience store. You told Helen you were headed to St. Martinville. So we got to have a look at your truck, Robo.”
“I don’t know who gave you permission to give me a nickname, but I advise you to stop using it.”
“Ease up on the batter, bubba.”
“Get out of my office.”
He flipped the notebook shut. “Have it your way.”
“I plan to.”
But I was all rhetoric. The truth is, the backs of my legs were shaking.
* * *
THE ELECTRIC TIGER caught up with me at eleven Saturday night. That’s what I used to call the heebie-jeebies. I first got them in Vietnam, along with the malaria I picked up in the Philippines. I came home with a hole in my chest and a punji scar like a flattened worm on my stomach and shrapnel in my hip and thigh that set off alarms when I went through metal sensors. The real damage I carried was one nobody saw. I’d hear the tiger padding around the house at three or four in the morning, then he’d sniff his way into the bedroom, glowing so brightly that the air would glisten and warp and my eyes would sting.
The strange phenomenon about alcoholic abstinence is that while you’re laying off the hooch and working the program, your disease is doing push-ups and waiting for the day you slip. You can ease back into the dirty boogie or hit the floor running, but I promise you, the electric tiger, or your version of it, will come back with a roar.
My truck was in the pound, but I had a rental parked in the driveway. I drove to a liquor store in Lafayette and bought a pint of vodka, a bottle of Collins mix, a jar of cherries, a plastic cup, a small bag of crushed ice, and drove into Girard Park, next to the University of Louisiana campus, and got serious. The vodka went down cold and warm and sweet and hard as ice, all at the same time. When I closed my eyes, a lantern lit up the inside of my head, as if I had punched a hypodermic loaded with morphine into my arm.
It was an easy slide into the basement. The things I did next were not done in a blackout. I knew exactly what I was doing. I had put a sawed-off pool cue on the backseat before I left home, one that was weighted heavily at the base. I started the engine and got on I-10 and headed west, the speedometer maxed out.
MAYBE PENNY WAS sleeping one off. It’s hard to say. I knotted a bandana around my face and set fire to the shed with the dirt bike in it, and tapped on the door and waited by the rear of the trailer. There was no reaction inside. A raincloud burst directly overhead, and the fire went out. I smashed on the door with my fist and was standing directly in front of it when Penny jerked it open.
“What’s the haps?” I said, swinging the pool cue at a forty-five-degree angle across his face.
He stumbled backward, a hand pressed against one eye and the other eye bulging, so his face looked like it had been sawed down the middle. “Who the—”
I stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and caught him with the weighted end of the cue on the ear. He crashed on the breakfast table, his mouth wide with either pain or surprise. I swung the cue on his neck and back and spine as though I were chopping wood. When he tried to stand, I shoved him onto the floor of the toilet cubicle. He was wearing only his socks and Jockey shorts. Blood was leaking from his ear. “Why you doing this? Who the fuck are you, man?”
I kicked him in the face and dropped a full roll of toilet paper in the bowl and drove his head into the water and kept it there. I could feel him struggling, his forehead wedging the roll into the bottom of the commode, the water rising to his shoulders. I pushed down the handle to refill the bowl. Water was sloshing over the sides. My arm and shoulder were trembling with the pressure it took to keep him down.
I began to count the seconds under my breath. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi. I stepped on his calf so he couldn’t get purchase on the linoleum. Four-Mississippi, five-Mississippi, six-Mississippi. I shoved harder and saw bubbles the size and color of small oranges rise to the surface with a gurgling sound. Thirteen-Mississippi, fourteen-Mississippi, fifteen-Mississippi. His arms had turned as flaccid as noodles and were flipping impotently at his sides.
I pulled him dripping from the bowl and threw him onto the floor. He gasped and made a sound like a sheet of tin being ripped out of a roof. He gagged and cupped his mouth.
“When your son comes home, you’ll act like a decent father. If you hurt him in any way, I’ll be back.”
I stomped on his stomach. His mouth opened, and I shoved a bar of soap into it and mashed it down his throat with my shoe.
I got into my rental and drove away. In the rearview mirror, I could see white smoke rising from the shed, as though the fire I had started wanted to have another go at it.
By six A.M., I was teetering on the edge of delirium tremens. By seven they’d passed and I was sound asleep in my skivvies, facedown on the sheets, as though I had gone through a painless evisceration. Strangely, I felt at peace. I had no explanation. I went to Mass that evening in Lafayette and caught a meeting before returning to New Iberia.
* * *
