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“Thanks for your time, Cato,” I said.
“Yes, suh. It was very nice of youse to come by.”
I walked back on the plank with Clete, then paused under the tree. “Wait here a minute, will you?”
“Whatever he knows, he’s keeping it to himself. Let it go,” Clete said.
“Be right back.”
I crossed back onto the houseboat. Cato was sitting in a folding canvas chair. The sky had darkened, and I could hear thunder in the distance and feel the barometer dropping and smell the fish bunching up under the lily pads. A big gar rolled as smoothly as a serpent by a flooded canebrake.
“I need to share something with you,” I said. “Up the bayou, under a big oak like that one on the shore, I caught my first fish when I was seven years old.”
I paused. Cato gazed at the lightning striking silently i
n a sky that was like purple velvet. The air was damp and sweet and heavy with the smell of sugarcane and the bayou at high tide.
“This is a special place,” I said. “Guys like us remember the way it used to be. But a lot of bad guys got their hands on us, Cato.”
“I know what you mean, suh.”
“Why’d you come back to South Louisiana?”
“I ain’t lost nothing in them other places.”
“Desmond is tight with the casino guys?”
“They go back. Desmond grew up on the Chitimacha Reservation.”
“Is somebody making a big move?”
“It’s about money from overseas. Laundering, that kind of t’ing. Politicians are mixed up in it. It’s stuff I don’t want to know about.”
“Who are the players?”
He looked up at me. “You better not have no truck with them, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Call me Dave. Why should I not have any truck with them?”
“I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dol’ars. You know what people will do for that kind of money? Not just here, anywhere. Them A-rabs didn’t invent greed and the mean t’ings people can do.”
He reeled in his line, his gaze fixed on the sky, and refused to speak again, even to say goodbye.
• • •
I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED the dead roam the earth for many years after we try to weigh them down with stones. I also believe they outnumber us. For that reason I’ve never quarreled with the notion that they enter and try to shape our lives in order to redeem their own. So I was not surprised by the vision I had when I looked out my bedroom at three a.m. the day after my visit with Cato Carmouche.
The clouds of fog on the bayou were as white as cotton, bumping along the ground between the trees, a tug working its way toward the drawbridge, running lights on, glistening with mist. The figure was no more than five-four; he looked made of sourdough. The roundness of his face and limbs and stomach and soft buttocks seemed sketched by an artist. His mouth was a slice of watermelon, his hair as wispy as corn silk.
I wanted to believe I was watching an apparition, a wandering soul trying to unshackle the fetters of the grave and reclaim the coolness and oxygenated vibrancy of the air that the quick take for granted. I knew better, though. I had seen the figure before. I put my hand under my mattress and retrieved the army-issue 1911-model .45 automatic I had bought for twenty-five dollars in Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. I slipped on my khakis and loafers and went through the kitchen into the mudroom. The sky was clear above the fog bank, the tops of the trees lit by the moon. I stepped into the yard. The figure moved behind an oak that was three feet across.
“Is that you, Smiley?” I asked.
There was no reply.
“You gave me quite a start,” I said. “I hope one of us is dreaming.”
The wind gusted through the trees, giving second life to the raindrops on the leaves, filling the air with the tannic smell of autumn and gas and nightshade in a forest that seldom saw sunlight.
