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“Lupus. I lost my previous wife to a pair of killers who used shotguns.”
Leslie was quiet a long time. The rain was whipping across the windows. The image made me think of the scene in Shane when Alan Ladd is accused of cowardice at a meeting of sodbusters and he goes outside without replying and stands in the rain by himself, but only the little boy sees him.
Leslie got up from the couch and turned off the television. She looked at me with one hand propped on her hip. “You think I’m coarse? Vulgar? Whatever?”
“I think you’re admirable and brave. I think Adonis Balangie is a bum and has no business being around you. I’d better go. I’ve got to be at the department at oh-eight-hundred.”
She seemed to study her hands. “You meant that about admirable and brave?”
“You sell yourself short. It’d be an honor to be the lover of a woman like you.”
“Say again?”
“You heard me,” I said, getting up from the couch. “I’ve got to boogie.”
“Stay for some ice cream.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“You called Adonis a bum. I know what Adonis is. The problem is me. I’m his whore.”
“Don’t talk about yourself like that.”
She stepped closer to me, breathing hard. I could feel her breath on my face. “I don’t have a way out.”
“Just tell him to beat feet.”
“And roll the dice with my daughter?” she said.
“Don’t give up, Leslie. You’re one of the good guys. Do the short version of the Serenity Prayer: Fuck it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She sank her nails in the back of my neck and pulled my face to hers. But she kissed me only on the cheek, then walked into the kitchen and left me in a male condition I certainly didn’t need.
“You coming?” she said from the doorway.
I waited a few moments, then went into the kitchen and sat at the table while she filled two bowls of ice cream and sprinkled cinnamon on them.
“I have a DVD of The Green Mile,” she said.
“That’s a good one,” I said.
“Let’s go back in the living room.”
I cannot be sure of the events that followed. I remember her inserting the DVD into the player, and I remember eating the ice cream, then setting down the dish on the coffee table, the spoon clinking. I felt my head sink on my chest and heard the voices of the actors who played the guards at a Louisiana penitentiary. I heard the voice of the condemned Cajun about to be executed in the electric chair. I felt myself lean over sideways into a pillow, and then I felt Leslie’s fingers in my hair and on my neck and brow.
But I was no longer in Louisiana. A dream, a door into a separate reality, or perhaps simply the exhaustion of the day had taken me back to the last scene in Shane, except I was the little boy running through the dusk calling Shane’s name. The mountaintops were purple, glistening with snow, and made me think of a woman’s breasts, and I found myself mounted on a horse that surged rhythmically under me, then a woman’s voice whispered wetly in my ear, her tongue touching the skin, I’ve waited for you a long time. I was born to be with you. Oh, oh, oh.
I woke trembling, unsure of where and who I was.
Chapter Nineteen
THE WEEK WENT by without incident. Clete came back to New Iberia and spoke little of the unexplainable experiences we had shared. I said nothing about my visit to the home of Leslie Rosenberg. We were deep down in the fall now, hovering on the edge of winter, our two-lane back roads striped with impacted mud from the cane wagons on their way to the mills, the air cold and dense with an odor like brown sugar spilled on a woodstove.
Late Saturday afternoon I drove to Henderson Swamp with my outboard and fished by myself in lily pads that had already stiffened and turned brown on top of the water. The western sun wobbled like a candle flame in the current flowing between the two willow islands where I was anchored. I was surrounded by miles of water, all of it dotted with flooded cypress trees and duck blinds and the remnants of abandoned oil platforms. There was not another boat in sight. I wore a canvas coat and an old fedora tied under my chin with a scarf, but just the same I could not get warm. Years ago I would have had a bottle of brandy in the bottom of the boat. Now I had a 1911 army-issue .45 in a zippered case tucked in my tackle box. Beside it I also had a drop, a five-shot .22 revolver cast from metal that was one cut above scrap.
