”Oh, he's around .. . Did you want me to tell him something?“
”I was just curious.“ I nodded, my face empty. She stood up from the corner of the desk, straightened her shoulders and flattened her stomach, tucked her shirt under her gunbelt with her thumbs. ”You looking at something?“ she said.
”Not me.“
”I was too hard on the guy, that's all. I mean when he was in your office that time,“ she said.
”He's probably forgotten about it, Helen.“
”Tall go fishing a lot?“
”Once in a while. Would you like to join us?“
”I'm not much on it. But you're a cutie,“ she said, walked her fingers across my shoulders, and went out the door.
Moleen Bertrand's camp was located down in the wetlands on a chenier, a plateau of dry ground formed like a barrier island by the tides from water-pulverized seashells. Except for the site of his camp, a four-bedroom frame building with a tin roof and screened-in gallery, the chenier was pristine, the black topsoil bursting with mushrooms and buttercups and blue bonnets, no different than it had been when the first Spanish and French explorers came to Louisiana. The woods were park like the trees widely spaced, the branches and trunks hung and wrapped with vines that had the girth of boa constrictors, the moss-covered canopy of live oaks hundreds of feet above the ground, which was dotted with palmettos and layered with rotting pecan husks.
At the edge of the chenier were bogs and alligator grass and blue herons lifting above the gum trees and acres of blooming hyacinths that were impassable with a boat, and, to the south, you could see the long, slate green, wind-capped roll of the Gulf and the lightning that danced over the water like electricity trapped in a steel box.
Moleen and his wife, Julia, were flawless hosts. Their guests were all congenial people, attorneys, the owner of a sugar mill, an executive from a hot sauce company, their wives and children. Moleen fixed drinks at a bar on the gallery, kept a huge ice chest filled with soda and imported beer, barbecued a pig on a spit under a tin shed and roasted trays of wild ducks from the freez
er. We busted skeet with his shotguns; the children played volleyball and sailed Frisbees; the air smelled of wildflowers and salt spray and the hot brassy odor of a distant storm. It was a perfect spring day for friends to gather on an untouched strip of the Old South that somehow had eluded the twentieth century.
Except for the unnatural brightness and confidence in Julia's face, the wired click in her eyes when she did not assimilate words or meaning right away, and Moleen's ongoing anecdotal rhetoric that seemed intended to distract from his wife's affliction. Each time she returned to the bar she poured four fingers of Jack Daniel's into her glass, with no water or soda, added a half cup of ice, a teaspoon of sugar, and a sprig of mint. We were eating in the main room when she said, out of no apparent context, ”Can any of y'all explain to me why this black congresswoman got away with refusing the Daughters of the Confederacy the renewal of their logo?“
”She didn't do it by herself,“ Moleen said quietly, and touched his lips with his napkin.
”They went along with her“, but she was behind it. That's what I meant, Moleen. I think it's ridiculous,” Julia said.
The other people at the table smiled, unsure of what was being said, perhaps faintly remembering a news article.
“Julia's talking about the Daughters of the Confederacy trying to renew the patent on their emblem,” Moleen said. “The application was denied because the emblem has the Confederate flag on it.”
“That woman's a demagogue. I don't know why people can't see that,”
Julia said.
“I think it's our fault,” a woman down the table said, leaning out over her plate to speak. “We've let the Confederate flag become identified with all kinds of vile groups. I can't blame people of color for their feelings.”
“I didn't say I blamed people of color,” Julia said. “I was talking about this particular black woman.”
“Julia makes a point,” Moleen said. “The DOC's hardly a Fifth Column.”
“Well, I think we should do something about it,” Julia said. She drank from her glass, and the light intensified behind her chemical-green contact lenses.
“Oh, it gives them something to do in Washington,” Moleen said. “It's not a joke, Moleen,” Julia said. “Let me tell you something she did once,” Moleen said, spreading his napkin and replacing it on his lap.
“When she was a cheerleader at LSU. She and these other kids, they hooked up Mike the Tiger's empty cage to a pickup truck, with the back door flopping open, and drove all over nigger town on Saturday afternoon.” He blew a laugh out of his mouth. “They'd stop in front of a bar or barbecue stand and say, ”Excuse me, we don't want to alarm anyone but have y'all seen a tiger around here?“ There were darkies climbing trees all over Baton Rouge.” I stared at him. “Don't tell that story. I didn't have anything to do with that,” Julia said, obviously pleased at the account. “It's a campus legend. People make too much about race today,” he said. “Moleen, that doesn't change what that woman has done. That's what I'm trying to say, which y'all don't seem to understand,” she said. “For God's sakes, Julia, let's change the subject,” he said. The table was quiet. Someone coughed, a knife scraped against a plate. The whites of Julia's eyes were threaded with tiny red veins, the lashes stuck together with mascara. I thought of a face painted on a wind-blown pink balloon that was quivering against its string, about to burst. Later, outside, Moleen asked me to walk with him to the edge of the marsh, where his shotguns and skeet trap rested on top of a weathered picnic table. He wore laced boots, khaki trousers with snap pockets up and down the legs, a shooter's vest with twelve-gauge shells inserted in the cloth loops. He cracked open his double-barrel and plopped two shells in the chambers. “Were you ever stationed in Thailand, Moleen?” I said. “For a little while. Why do you ask?”
“A lot of intelligence people were there. I was just curious.”
He scratched at the corner of his mouth with a fingernail. “You want to bust a couple?” he said.
“No thanks.”
“You looked a little steely-eyed at the table.”
I watched a nutria drop off a log and swim into a cluster of hyacinths.