“I don’t.”
“That’s good.”
Without saying anything further, he turned and walked through the dead leaves toward his Cadillac. Then he stopped, rubbed the back of his neck hard, as though a mosquito had burrowed deep into his skin, then turned around and stared blankly at me, his jaw slack with a sudden and ugly knowledge.
“It’s a disease that lives in the blood. It’s called lupus. I’m sorry, Dave. God’s truth, I am,” he said.
My mouth fell open, and I felt as though a cold wind had blown through my soul.
THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday, and the sun came up as pink as a rose over the willow trees and dead cypress in the marsh and the clouds of mist that rolled out of the bays. Batist and I opened up the bait shop at first light, and the air was so cool and soft, so perfect with blue shadows and the smell of night-blooming jasmine, that I forgot about Lyle’s visit and his attempt to appear omniscient about my wife’s illness. I had concluded that Lyle was little different from any other televangelist huckster and that somebody close to Bootsie had told him about her problem. But regardless I wasn’t going to clutter my weekend with any more thoughts about the Sonnier family.
Some people were born to take a fall, I thought, and Weldon was probably one of them. I also had a feeling that Lyle was one of those theological self-creations whose own neurosis would eventually eat him like an overturned basket of hungry snakes.
After we had rented most of our boats, Batist and I seined the dead shiners out of the aluminum bait tanks, poured crushed ice over the beer and soda pop in the coolers, and started the fire in the barbecue pit I had made by splitting an oil drum with an acetylene torch, hinging it, and welding metal legs on the bottom. By eight o’clock the sun was bright and hot in the sky, burning the mist out of the cypress trees, and on the wind yo
u could smell the faint odor of a dead animal back in the marsh.
“You got somet’ing on your mind, Dave?” Batist asked. He had a head like a cannonball; a pair of surplus navy dungarees hung on his narrow hips, and his wash-torn undershirt looked like strips of white rag on his massive coal-black chest and back.
“No, not really.”
He nodded, put a dry cigar in his mouth, and looked out the window at a tangle of dead trees and hyacinths floating past us in the bayou’s current.
“It ain’t bad to have somet’ing on your mind, no,” he said. “It’s bad when you don’t tell nobody.”
“What do you say we season the chickens?”
“She gonna be all right. You gonna see. That’s what they got all them doctors for.”
“I appreciate it, Batist.”
I saw Alafair walk down through the pecan trees from the house with Tripod on his chain. She was in third grade now, a little bit fat across the stomach, so that her old gold-and-purple LSU T-shirt, with a smiling Mike the Tiger on it, exposed her navel and the top of her elastic-waisted jeans. She had shiny black hair cut in bangs, skin that stayed tan year-round, wide-set Indian teeth, and a smile that was so broad it made her dark eyes squint almost completely shut. Nowadays, when I would pick her up, she felt heavy and compact in my arms, full of energy and play and expectation. But three years ago, when I pulled her from a crashed and submerged plane out on the salt, one piloted by a Lafayette priest who was transporting illegal refugees from El Salvador, her lungs had been filled with water, her eyes dilated with terror as we rose in a rush of bubbles toward the Gulf’s surface, her little bones as thin and frail as a bird’s.
Tripod thumped out on the dock, rattling his chain across the board planks behind him.
“Dave, you left the bag of rabbit food on top of the hutch. Tripod threw it all over the yard,” Alafair said. Her face was beaming.
“You think that’s funny, little guy?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, and grinned again.
“Batist says you brought Tripod down to the bait shop yesterday and he got into the hard-boiled eggs.”
Her face became vague and quizzical.
“Tripod did that?” she said.
“Do you know anyone else who would wash a hard-boiled egg in the bait tank?”
She looked across the bayou speculatively, as though the answer to a profound mystery lay among the branches of the cypress trees. Tripod zigzagged back and forth on his chain, sniffing the smell of fish in the dock.
I rubbed the top of Alafair’s head. Her hair was already warm from the sunlight.
“How about a fried pie, little guy?” I said, and winked at her. “But you and Tripod show some discretion with Batist.”
“Show what?”
“Keep that coon away from Batist.”