Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.
The doors on the bar were all open to let in the cool air after the rain, and the evening shadows and the sun's afterglow had the soft purple-and-gold tone of sugarcane right before the harvest. The streets were filled with people, some of them in uniform, some of them a little drunk, all of them happy because the lights were about to go on again all over the world.
Then my mother picked me up and balanced me on her hip while my father grinned and set his battered fedora on my head. My mother smelled like milk and bath powder, like the mint leaves and bourbon-scented cherries from the bottom of her whiskey glass. It was a happy time, one that I was sure would never end.
But both my parents were dead and so was the world in which I had grown up.
Then another image floated behind my eyes, a fearful and perhaps solipsistic projection of what it might be like if the Will Buchalters of the world were ever allowed to have their way. In my mind's eye I saw a city like New Orleans at nighttime, an avenue like St. Charles, except, as in the paintings of Bavarian villages by Adolf Hitler, there were no people. The sky was a black ink wash, the mosshung oaks along the sidewalks as motionless as stone; the houses had become prisons that radiated fear, and the empty streets were lighted with the obscene hues of sodium lamps that allowed no shadows or places to hide. It was a place where the glands had replaced the heart and the booted and head-shaved lout had been made caretaker of the sun.
The next morning I called the bishop's office again. This time I was told the bishop had gone to Washington and the monsignor was in Opelousas and would not be back until that afternoon. I left my number.
At noon I got a phone call from Tommy Bobalouba.
'I'll treat you to some étouffée,' he said.
'I'm working right now.'
'I drove all the way over here to talk. How about getting your nose out of the air for a little while?'
'The last time you were over here, you set me up as your alibi while somebody tried to clip Nate Baxter.'
'So you lost money? It don't mean I don't respect you.'
'What do you want?'
'I want to talk. I got a heavy fucking problem, man. It's something I can't talk to nobody else about. You don't got thirty minutes, then fuck you, Dave.'
'Where are you?' I said.
I drove up to the seafood restaurant on the back road to St. Martinville and found him inside, seated on a tall stool at the bar, eating raw oysters from a tray. He had covered each oyster with Tabasco sauce,.and sweat was trickling out of his meringue hair. I recognized three of his crew at one of the tables, dour-faced Irish hoods with the mental capabilities of curb buttons, who had always run saloons or upstairs crap games for Tommy or shut down the competition when it tried to establish itself in areas Tommy had staked out for himself.
But Tommy had never used bodyguards and, always desirous of social acceptance by New Orleans's upper classes, did not associate openly with his employees.
'What are you looking at?' he said.
'Your crew seem to be enjoying their meal,' I said.
'I can't bring my boys to your town for a lunch?'
'What's up, partner?'
'I got some personal trouble.' He wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at it.
I waited.
He looked around, closed and opened his eyes, his face flexing like rubber, then stared disjointedly out into space. Then he tried to smile, all in seconds.
'Hey, Dave, you went to Catholic school, you boxed in Golden Gloves,' he said. 'You ever have a mick priest for a coach, guy who'd have all the fighters say a Hail Mary in the dressing room, then tell them to get out there and nail the other guys in the mush?'
'It sounds familiar, Tommy.'
'It was good coming up like that, wasn't it? Them was good days back then.'
'They weren't bad. Are you going to tell me what's on your mind?'
'I tried to get out of this prostate operation. The doc said it might leave me wearing a diaper. So we tried other stuff. Three days ago the doc tells me it's spread. Like a big worm eating its way through my insides. I ain't got to worry about an operation anymore. You understand what I'm saying? It's a funny feeling. It's like you're looking at a clock somebody just snapped the hands off.'
Then I saw it in his face, the grayness and the pinched quality around the mouth, the remoteness in the eyes, the knowledge that he had entered a piece of psychological moonscape on which there was no traveling companion.