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“Drive carefully. I’ll tell her you’re coming. I know that will make her happy.”
“Don’t do this to me.”
“
I’m sorry,” the staff member said.
Clete took the four-lane into Lafayette, the needle at ninety. He parked illegally and went through the emergency room into the intensive care unit before anyone could stop him. “Where’s Carolyn Ardoin?” he asked at the desk.
“Are you a relative?” the nurse said.
“Her grandfather. Where is she?”
The nurse raised her eyes from her paperwork.
“I’m a close friend,” he said. “Was it an accident?”
“No,” the nurse said. “Follow me.”
Carolyn was behind a screen. When he saw her, he tried to keep his face empty, his eyes flat. “How you doin’, kid?” he said.
There were streaks of dried blood in her hair. Both eyes were swollen as big as plums. Her bottom lip was stitched. There were finger-shaped bruises on her throat and neck and shoulders.
“Who did this?” he said.
“I was unloading groceries in the driveway. It was dark. Somebody hit me.”
“Was Homer with you?”
“He’s at my mother’s.”
“Was it one guy or more than one guy?”
“I just remember a fist hitting me. Then I was on the ground, and the fists kept pounding my face. I tried to speak—” She couldn’t finish.
“I’m going to take care of Homer. I’m also going to find out who did this. What did the Jennings cops say?”
“They just asked me questions. One was a woman. Sherry something.”
“How’d they treat you?”
“Fine. Everyone has been kind.”
“I have to use the bathroom,” Clete said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“There’s one here.”
“It’s too small for a guy my size.”
He went down the hall to a restroom in the waiting area, but not for the reason he had given. An old Technicolor video, one that held interest for fewer and fewer people these days, had begun replaying itself on a screen inside his head. The slick hung in the air above the ville, its rotary blades throbbing. He heard the treads of the zippo track clanking out of the rice paddy and saw an orange flame arch out of its cannon and smelled a stench like burning kerosene and animal hair. People were running, the hooches bursting alight, the ammunition cached under them popping like strings of Chinese firecrackers. Clete cupped water onto his face and dried himself with paper towels, then went to Carolyn’s room, the video not finished, a navy corpsman from Birmingham hitting him with a syrette of morphine: “Hang on, gunny. Here comes the dust-off. You’re Freedom Bird–bound.”
Carolyn had fallen asleep. He stroked her hair and felt a pain in his chest that he had nowhere to put. Two or three faces floated before his eyes like helium balloons with ugly features painted on them. As he stroked her hair, his left hand curled and uncurled and curled again. He knew where he was going and what he would do when he got there. But there was something else he had do first.
* * *
HE CALLED ME on his cell and told me about the assault.
“Where are you now?” I said.
