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Chapter Three
I RETURNED TO NEW Iberia and my shotgun house on East Main, not far from the famed antebellum home called the Shadows. I was living the life of a widower back then, in the days before 9/11, a recluse trying to hide from my most destructive addictions, Jack on the rocks with a beer back and my love affair with the state of Louisiana, also known as the Great Whore of Babylon. For me she has always been the embodiment of every vice on the menu, starting with racetracks and bourré tables and casinos and lakes of gin and vodka and sour mash and hookup joints with a honky-tonk special on every stool aching to get it on in four/four time.
Think I’m giving you a shuck? People of color have a saying: If you’re black on Saturday night, you’ll never want to be white again. The same kind of thinking applies in Louisiana, but on a wider scale and not on a basis of race or the day of the week. The southern half of the state is the cultural equivalent of the Baths of Caracalla; the only difference is the coon-ass accents and the fact the slop chutes never close. I knew a famous country musician who moved to a farmhouse in Carencro to get sober, even surrendering his car keys to his wife. Yeah, I know, with the help of A.A, miracles happen and you can get sober anywhere. That’s what the musician’s wife thought until Mardi Gras kicked into gear and her husband drove the lawn mower eight miles down the highway to Lafayette so he could march in the parade and get soused out of his mind.
I fished in the evening with a cane pole among people of color, and watched the August light drain out of the sky and gather inside the oaks and disappear on the bayou’s surface in a long brassy band that, as a child, I believed was a conduit to infinity. It was a strange way to be, I guess. I had been suspended or fired from three law enforcement agencies, and even though I was relatively young, I felt the tug of the earth at eveningtide and a gnawing hole in my stomach that told me the great mysteries would always remain the great mysteries, and that the war between good and evil was so vast and unknowable in nature and origin that my ephemeral efforts meant absolutely nothing.
The weeks passed without any contact from Marcel LaForchette. Then on a Sunday afternoon, when I was walking in City Park, I saw two men in a purple Oldsmobile pull onto the grass and park under the oaks and get out and remove a golf bag from the trunk. They were stout men in their prime, tanned perhaps as much by chemicals as sun, dressed in sport clothes, the kind of men who probably played college football one or two semesters and later sold debit insurance, ex-jocks you felt sorry for.
Until you looked at the scar tissue in the hairline, or the big hands with too many rings on them, or the white teeth that were too wet, the smile like that of a hungry man staring at a roast.
They teed up on the grass and whocked two balls down the bayou, watching them arch and splash in the distance.
“Excuse me,” I said behind them.
They turned around, resting their clubs, their faces full of sunshine.
“This isn’t a driving range,” I said.
“Didn’t think anyone would mind,” the shorter man said. He had thick lips and hair that was long and hung in ringlets and was as bright as gold, like a professional wrestler’s, his biceps as solid as croquet balls. “Did you think anyone would mind, Timmy?”
“Not unless we hit a fish in the head,” Timmy said.
“A lot of people seem to think Louisiana is a garbage dump,” I said. “We’ve got trash all over the state.”
“Yeah,” the shorter man said. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?”
“He’s talking about us,” Timmy said. “Right? You’re saying we’re trash?” His brown hair was soft-looking and dry and cut in a 1950s flattop and looked like an upturned shoe brush. His smile never left his face.
“I’m a police officer,” I said. “I’d appreciate y’all not using the bayou as a golf course. That’s all.”
“We’re not troublemakers,” Timmy said. “The opposite. We’re problem solvers.”
The man with gold hair that hung in ringlets licked his lip. “That’s right. We wouldn’t jump you over the hurdles, sir.”
“I look like an old man?” I said.
“A show of respect,” he said.
“You guys like zoos?” I said.
“Yeah,” Timmy said. “You got one here?”
“No, but there’s a nice one in Houston,” I said. “In Hermann Park, off South Main.”
“Without much work, this town could be a zoo,” the shorter man said. “Circle it with some chicken wire, then charge people admission.”
“Yeah, our man here could probably run it,” Timmy said. “What do you say about that, slick?”
The oak tree above us swelled with wind. A white speedboat sliced down the middle of the bayou, its wake washing organic detritus over the cypress knees and bamboo roots that grew like half-buried knuckles along the mudflats. “I think you boys passed me on the highway when I was driving up to Huntsville,” I said. “Tarantulas were crossing the road, hundreds of them. It’s quite a phenomenon to witness.”
The speedboat engine whined in the distance like a Skilsaw cutting through a nail.
“We passed you?” Timmy said. “I think you got us mixed up with somebody else.”
“I’m not real popular these days,” I said. “Why do you want to bird-dog a guy like me?”
“Because Marcel LaForchette is a button man for the Jersey Mob,” said the man with the gold hair. “Because he made the street four days ago. Because you had something to do with getting him out.”
