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“I don’t want to talk about it, Mr. Dave.”
“You want me to ask your uncle?”
“I ran away with her. I wanted her for myself. She wanted me, too. It was like that for five days, in a motel on the beach in Biloxi. But not because of the acid. It was like she was my sister and my girlfriend and my lover and my wife and the person I never wanted to let go of.”
“It’s called falling in love.”
“It was wrong. I owe my uncle.”
“Get this in your head,” I said. “You and Isolde aren’t the problem. The problem is your uncle and the fact that nobody has shoved a gun in his mouth and put his brains on the wall.”
The three teenage girls were in a corner booth. One of them caught my tone or saw my face and looked away, the blood draining from around her mouth.
“Uncle Mark agreed to be her guardian and godfather,” Johnny said. “It’s a tradition that goes way back in our families.”
“White slavery isn’t a tradition,” I said. “You heard about the two guys who got stuffed in a barrel piece by piece?”
“Down by Vermilion Bay?”
“They worked for your uncle.”
“A lot of people do.”
“Wake up,” I said.
“I’m leaving my uncle’s house. I’m leaving Louisiana.”
“Where you headed?”
“Florida.”
“Fort Lauderdale?”
“How’d you know?”
“That’s where Eddy Firpo has his studio. He’s a bucket of shit, Johnny. He’ll ruin your career, then your life.”
“I don’t care about my career anymore. I lost Isolde. I’ll never get her back. I want to do something awful.”
He was nineteen. I remembered the degree of judgment I had at that age and shuddered.
* * *
IT WAS TIME to up the ante. Marcel LaForchette, the button man I visited in Huntsville, had been getting a free pass, largely because he was one of those undefined and marginal creatures who lived in the murk at the bottom of the aquarium, then one day you discovered he’d eaten everything in the tank.
Marcel hung in places that weren’t good for me. I wasn’t simply an alcoholic; I was a drunkard. What’s the difference? An alcoholic has a deep-seated, armor-plated neurosis buried in the unconscious that keeps him constantly at war with himself. The drunkard cuts to the chase. A chemical form of sackcloth and ashes becomes his coat of arms. He drinks until he passes out, gets up and pours down another fifth, chases it with a case of Tuborg or a half-gallon of dago red and repeats the process until he enters what is called alcoholic psychosis and slides the muzzle of a double-barrel twelve-gauge over his teeth, the way Ernest Hemingway did it, and lets his family clean up the room.
My wife Annie was murdered and my wife Bootsie died of lupus, and my daughter, Alafair, was a student on an academic scholarship at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. I didn’t handle solitude or mortality well. I don’t guess anyone does. Here’s the strange thing about death. At a certain age it’s always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn’t get your real attention until you find yourself alone at home and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about. That’s why most drunks become believers, no matter how long they’ve been atheists or agnostics, and often preface the Lord’s Prayer with the rhetorical question “Who made the stars and keeps us out of bars?”
But on that particular night I went to a low-rent pickup dive on the edge of the black district nine miles up the bayou in St. Martinville. The walls were bright red, the pool table unbalanced, the felt faded and patched with tape, the race of the customers hardly definable, most of the women unhinged and often dangerous. Marcel was by himself at a table in back, playing solitaire, a Coca-Cola bottle by his elbow. The restrooms were ten feet away, hung with red-bead curtains, the light golden behind them, the ammonia smell of urinated beer blowing in the breeze from the electric fans.
He had obviously seen me when I came in, but he kept his gaze on his cards. When my shadow broke across his face, he said, “Doing research on the other half?”
“Just you,” I said, sitting down without being asked. “Your PO doesn’t mind you coming here?”
“Long as I drink Coca-Cola.”
The bottle was half empty. The liquid at the top was diluted, brownish. “I got a beef with you, podna.”
