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“You don’t understand, Dave. Production money comes from all kinds of places. The studio doesn’t back up an armored truck on your lawn and dump it on the grass. Some of it is casino money out of Jersey. Some of it is from a group building nuclear reactors. There might be a little Russian or Saudi money involved. It’s a consortium.”
“So?”
“I don’t know how all these killings happened. The Jersey guys were worried about their investment. Maybe they’re involved.”
“The Mob is a bunch of tarot fans? When did you discover Lucinda Arceneaux was your half sister?”
“Just a little w
hile back,” he replied, his eyes on mine.
“How far back?”
“A few weeks, maybe.”
“Who told you?”
“My old man. Ennis Patout.”
“A few weeks, huh?”
“Yes,” he said. He blinked and let out his breath without seeming to, his expression benign.
“Lesson in lying, Des,” I said. “Don’t try to control your mannerisms. People who tell the truth are bored by what they’re saying and show it.”
“You know why it’s so hard to talk to you, Dave? It’s because you cloak yourself in AA bromides and try to pass them off as the wisdom of the ages.”
“Who paid for your half sister’s crypt? Her father is a preacher with a few dozen poor people in his congregation. I bet you spent five grand on the crypt and at least half that on the coffin.”
“All right, I paid for it,” he said. “I didn’t want to acknowledge my father or the world in which I grew up. I hate my father, and I hate what he did to my mother.”
“Your mother dumped you, bub. Get your facts straight.”
“If these bars weren’t between us, I’d break your jaw, old man or not.”
“You looked the other way when your sister was murdered,” I said. “Who’s got the problem?”
He tried to grab my shirt. I walked down the corridor, my footsteps ringing like hammers inside a submarine.
• • •
IT WAS ALMOST three in the morning as I drove down East Main. My eyes felt seared, like there was sand in them, as though I had looked into the pure white fire of an arc welder’s rod touching metal. My throat was dry, a pressure band forming on the right side of my head, my heart constricting whenever I took a deep breath.
Why the agitation? Why my unrelieved anger toward Desmond? I was entering a dry drunk. But this one was different. I had taken a hit of Jack at the blues club, and booze stays in the metabolism for as long as thirty days. For an alcoholic, having thirty days of the enemy at work in the heart and blood and brain while not being allowed to drink could probably be compared with practicing celibacy for the same amount of time in a harem.
I knew bars that closed their doors to the public at two a.m. but continued to serve their friends until dawn, and casinos that kept the tap flowing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as long as you stayed at the tables or the machines. If you want to get slop-bucket-deep in an alcoholic culture, there is no better place than the state of Louisiana. It’s a drunkard’s dream, a twenty-four-hour chemically induced orgasm, a slide down a rainbow that lands you with a soft bump in the Baths of Caracalla. Think I’m exaggerating? Ask any souse highballing out of Texas into Lake Charles.
I passed my house and turned at the Shadows and drove around the block to St. Peter Street and circled back to East Main, then parked in front of the old Burke home and walked down to the bayou and sat under a live oak on the water’s edge. I had sat under the same tree with my father, Big Aldous Robicheaux, on V-J Day in 1945. There were still slave cabins on the bayou, although they had been turned into corn and grain cribs for the carriage horses that some people still used to go to church on Sunday morning. I had never been fishing. My father bought a cane pole with a wooden bobber and a hook and a lead weight for twenty-five cents from a man of color. The weight was a perforated .36-caliber pistol ball that the colored man had found on a battle site farther down the bayou. I will never forget swinging the bobber and the lead ball and the baited hook into the current, then watching the line come taut and the backs of the alligator gars rolling on the edge of lily pads when the bobber disturbed them.
My father could not read or write and barely spoke English, but he understood the natural world and the culture of Bayou Teche. To us, the bayou was not simply a tidal stream that knitted together what we call Acadiana; it was part of a biblical epic and, because of its mists and fog-shrouded swamps, a magical place inhabited by lamias and leprechauns and medieval tricksters and voodoo women and the spirits of Confederate soldiers and cannibalistic Atakapa Indians. It was a grand place to grow up. The day I threw my line into the water, I knew I would never leave Bayou Teche, in part because of the event that occurred as a result of my father buying the cane pole from a colored man.
The bobber had been carved from a piece of balsa wood and drilled with a hole into which a shaved stick was inserted to secure the line. I saw the bobber tremble once, then plunge straight down into the silt. I jerked the pole so hard, I broke it in half, and the line and bobber and lead bullet and hook and worm and a big green-gold goggle-eyed perch went flying into a tree limb above us. My father went to the Burke house and borrowed a garden rake and combed the fish out of the tree for me. I still suspect this may be the only time in history that a fish has been caught in a live oak tree with a garden rake.
That postage stamp of a moment has always remained with me as a reminder of the innocent world in which I grew up. Or at least the innocent world in which we chose to live, perhaps to our regret. When I sat under the tree at three in the morning, an old man watching a barge and tug working its way upstream, I knew that I no longer had to reclaim the past, that the past was still with me, inextricably part of my soul and who I was; I could step through a hole in the dimension and be with my father and mother again, and I didn’t have to drink or mourn the dead or live on a cross for my misdeeds; I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.
I drove home and went inside just as the wind came up again and the clouds closed over the moon and white hail began pinging and bouncing on the roof. In minutes I was asleep and had to be shaken awake at dawn by Alafair so I could shower and shave and go to work.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
