'That's good,' he said. ''Cause you do, I'm gonna be back.'
Then he was gone, out of the red light, and down the dirt lane to his car. The pecan and oak trees around the house were black-green and coated with dust; the dry coldness of the air felt like a windburn against the skin. I hid when my mother called me from the back porch. Behind the barn, I sat in the weeds and watched our two roosters peck a blind hen to death. They mounted her with their talons, their wings aflutter with triumph, and drove their beaks deep into her pinioned neck. I watched them do it for a long time, until my mother found me and took me back inside the kitchen and, while she fixed our supper, told me that Mack had helped her find a good job as a waitress at a beer garden in Morgan City.
The day after my trouble with Tommy Lonighan, I received a phone call from Clete Purcel at my office.
'I hear you pistol-whipped Tommy Bobalouba,' he said.
'Who told you that?'
'A couple of the Caluccis' lowlifes were talking about it in the Golden Star this morning.'
'Ah, the Caluccis again.'
'That's what I was trying to tell you, mon. They're going across tribal lines.'
'Who were these two guys?'
'Nickel-and-dime gumballs. Were you trying to sweat Tommy about that sub?'
'Yeah, but I didn't get anywhere.'
'Dave, maybe there's another way to get Buchalter out of the woodwork. What if you can find that sub again, you mark it, then you tell The Times-Picayune and every salvage company in town about it?'
'It's a thought.'
'By the way, congratulations on getting Lonighan's attention. Somebody should have mopped up the floor with that guy a long time ago… Why the silence?'
'I shouldn't have hit him.'
'Why not?'
'He's a tormented man. The guy's got a furnace in his head.'
'I'm weeping on my desk, Dave. Oh, that's great, mon. Tommy Lonighan, the tormented man…' He was laughing loudly now. 'Did you see the body of the guy Tommy drowned with the fire hose? It looked like the Michelin Man. Tommy shoved the nozzle down the guy's mouth. Tommy, the tormented man, oh Dave, that's beautiful…'
I went home early that evening, with plans to take Bootsie and Alafair to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge for crawfish. When the deputy who was on guard by the drive saw my truck approaching, he started his engine and headed back toward New Iberia. At the head of the drive, close by the house, was a two-door white Toyota that I didn't recognize.
I walked down to the end of the dock, where Alafair was skipping stones across the water into a cypress stump.
'Want to go eat some crawfish, Alf?' I said.
'I don't care,' she said. Her face was sullen. She whipped another stone across the bayou.
'What's wrong, little guy?'
'I told you I don't like 'little guy' anymore, Dave.'
'All right. Now, what's wrong, Alf?'
'Nothing. Bootsie says she's sick. That's all.'
'"Says" she's sick?'
'She's been in her room all afternoon. With the door shut. She says she's sick. I told you.' She propped one hand against a post and brushed dried fish scales off the planks into the water with her tennis shoe.
'Tell me the rest of it, Alf.'
Her eyes followed a cottonmouth moccasin that was swimming across the bayou into a flooded cane brake.