“I get it,” Clete said, rising also, his grin back in place. “You’re cutting us some slack. Otherwise the hired help might just stomp the shit out of us. But this ain’t nigger-town. And it’s no time for bad press, right? I’ve changed my mind about you, Mr. Earl. You’ve got real Kool-Aid. I dig it.” He blew cigarette smoke at an upward angle into the violet air and gazed approvingly about the grounds. “What a place. I’ve been in the wrong line of work.”
Then the butler fitted his hand around Clete’s biceps to point him toward the driveway.
Clete pivoted and lifted his huge fist into the butler’s stomach. It was a deep, unexpected blow, in the soft place right under the sternum, and the butler’s face went white with shock. His mouth gasped, and his eyes locked open as big as half dollars.
Then Clete grabbed him by the back of his jacket and threw him spread-eagled across the table that had been set for two.
“Back off, Clete!” I said.
“Yeah? Take a look at the lollipop our man’s got in his pocket?” He held up a leather-hided slapjack in one hand, and tossed it over his shoulder into the pool. “Let’s see what other items Bonzo’s holding. How about this? A .25-caliber Beretta. What were you going to do with this, fuckhead?”
The side of the butler’s face was pressed flat against the table; spittle dripped into his chin beard.
“Answer me. You think this is Beirut?” Clete said, his hand tight on the back of the butler’s neck.
Then he straightened his back, released the clip from the pistol’s magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, and sailed the pistol over a hedge. He threw the clip and the ejected round into the pool.
The gateman’s eyes flicked back and forth between us and Bobby Earl; then he stepped hesitantly out on the flagstones, the skin around his mouth tight with expectation.
“You don’t get paid enough money for it, partner,” I said.
“You want me to call the cops, Mr. Earl?” he said.
Bobby Earl didn’t answer him. Instead he looked at me.
“You’ve made a grave mistake,” he said. The pupil in his right eye was round and black, like a large, broken drop of India ink.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think you’re dirty. I think you’re involved with the death of a police officer. In Louisiana you don’t skate when you kill a cop. Do some research on the Red Hat and find out who they’ve processed through there.”
“The what?” The rim below his right eye was red and trembling with anger.
“The Red Hat House. You’re in the legislature. Call up at Angola and check it out. They used to have a sign on one wall that said, This is where they knock the fire out of your ass. I think they meant it.”
Clete and I walked across the lawn toward my truck. I looked back over my shoulder before I opened the door. Bobby Earl was staring after us, his face bathed in the yellow-red light of a flaming gas torch by the pool. The blonde girl in the pink swimsuit and terry-cloth robe clung to his arm like a frightened acolyte, her mouth a silent O. The 1970s photograph of Bobby Earl in silken robes, a cross crawling with fire in the background, no longer seemed out of place and time.
CHAPTER 4
THE HOUSE WAS DARK when I got back home. I looked in on Alafair, who was sleeping with her thumb in her mouth and her stuffed frog on the pillow next to her. Her room was filled with souvenirs from our vacation trips to Houston, Key West, Biloxi, and Disney World: an Astros space helmet, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill, conch shells, dried starfish, a huge inflated Goofy figure, rows of sand dollars, a coral-encrusted cannon ball that I had chopped out of Seven-Mile Reef. I took her thumb out of her mouth and stroked her hair when her eyes fluttered temporarily awake. Then I latched her screen window, which had become part of a silent conspiracy three or four nights a week when she forgot to hook it after letting Tripod in her room
against house rules.
Then I undressed in the main bedroom and sat on the side of the bed in my skivvies next to Bootsie’s sleeping form. The sky had cleared, and the pecan trees clicked with moonlight in the breeze off the bayou; I could smell the fecund odor of bream spawning in the marsh. In the distance I heard a freight train blowing down the line.
I tried to let go of the day’s concerns, let all the heat and fatigue and anger drain out of my hands and feet; but I was genuinely wired, wrapped so tight that my skin felt like a prison. I could hear the tiger pacing in his cage, his paws softly scudding on the wire mesh. His eyes were yellow in the darkness, his breath as fetid as meat that had rotted in the sun.
Sometimes I imagined him prowling through trees in William Blake’s dark moral forest, his striped body electrified with a hungry light. But I knew that he was not the poet’s creation; he was conceived and fed by my own self-destructive alcoholic energies and fears, chiefly my fear of mortality and my inability to affect the destiny of those whom I could not afford to lose.
Then Bootsie rolled against me, and I felt her hand brush my thigh and touch my sex. I took off my shorts and undershirt and lay down next to her, slipped my arms around her back, and put my face in her hair. Her body was warm from sleep, and she spread one leg around my calf, placed me inside her, and pressed her palm in the small of my back. When we made love I always had several images in my mind of Bootsie and I never saw her as one person, maybe because we had both known each other since we were nineteen. I remembered her in an organdy evening dress and the bright redness of her sunburned shoulders under the Japanese lanterns when we first met at a college dance out on Spanish Lake; I saw the fearful innocence in her face when we lost our virginity together in my father’s boathouse, the rain dripping out of the cypress trees into the dead water as loudly as the beating of our hearts; and I still saw the pain in her eyes when I rejected her, hurt her deeply, and caused her to marry another man, all because of my own self-loathing and inability to explain to anyone else the dark psychological landscape I had wandered in and out of since I was a child.
But just as Alafair had been given to me in a wobbling bubble of air below the Gulf’s surface, I believed my Higher Power had given me back Bootsie when I had lost all claim to her, had undone my youthful mistakes for me, and had made that wonderful summer of 1957 as immediate and tangible and ongoing as the four o’clocks that bloomed nightly under the moon on Bayou Teche.
But how do you cast out the canker from the rose, I thought.
Then she put both her legs in mine, held me tightly inside her, her mouth open and wet against my cheek, and in my mind’s eye I saw a wave bursting in a geyser of foam against the hard outline of a distant jetty, a coral boulder ripping loose from the ocean’s floor, and a flurry of silver ribbon fish rising from the mouth of an underwater cave.
BY THE NEXT AFTERNOON I had received the files and photos of Jewel Fluck and Eddy Raintree from the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C.; police departments in New Orleans, Jackson, Biloxi, and Baton Rouge; and Angola and Parchman penitentiaries. Both men belonged to the great body of psychologically misshapen people that I refer to as The Pool. Members of The Pool leave behind warehouses of official paperwork as evidence that they have occupied the planet for a certain period of time. Their names are entered early on in welfare case histories, child-abuse investigations, clinic admissions for rat bites and malnutrition. Later on these same people provide jobs for an army of truant officers, psychologists, public defenders, juvenile probation officers, ambulance attendants, emergency-room personnel, street cops, prosecutors, jailers, prison guards, alcohol- and drug-treatment counselors, bail bondsmen, adult parole authorities, and the county morticians who put the final punctuation mark in their files.
The irony is that without The Pool we would probably have to justify our jobs by refocusing our attention and turning the key on slumlords, industrial polluters, and the coalition of defense contractors and militarists who look upon the national treasury as a personal slush fund.