He sat on a log with his head between his legs and let the blood and saliva drain out of his mouth. When he looked up at me again, his face was changed.
”You're a pair of white clowns playing big shit out in the wood,“ he said. His sharp, tiny teeth looked like they were stained with Mercurochrome.
Clete stepped toward him. I put my hand on his chest.
”What the fuck y'all know?“ Sweet Pea said. ”Yall ever hear there's a glow hanging over the ground at night on the Bertrand place? Where all them convicts was killed and buried in their chains. You t'ink you shit vanilla ice cream?“
”You're not making much sense, Sweet Pea,“ I said.
”The juke where I bring my broads, how's it stay open? It's Bertrand's.“
”
That's not true, partner. I've seen the deeds on all the land around here.“
”It's part of a con … a cons or .. . something .. . what do you call it?“ he said.
”Consortium.“
”Yeah,“ he said. ”Hey, Purcel, you look like you need an enema. Why don't you shove that gun up your ass?“
Clete took a Lucky Strike out of his pocket and lit it. Then he pulled a strand of tobacco off his lip and dropped it in the air. The lighted windows of the Amtrak streamed by on the train tracks across the cane field. Sweet Pea sat on the log and looked at the train and scratched his cheek as though we were no longer there.
”You got a lot of luck, Sweet Pea,“ I said.
”Yeah? Tell your wife I got an opening. For an older broad like that, I'll make an exception, too. Just straight dates, no sixty-nines,“ he said.
I dream that night of people who live in caves under the sea. Their arms and shoulders are sheathed in silver feathers; their abalone skins dance with fiery sparks.
I once knew a helicopter pilot from Morgan City whose Jolly Green took an RPG right through the door. He had been loaded with ammunition and wounded civilians, and when they crashed in the middle of a river, most of the civilians burned to death or drowned. He became psychotic after the war and used to weigh and sink plastic statues of Jesus all over the waterways of southern Louisiana. He maintained that the earth was wrapped with water, that a bayou in the Atchafalaya Basin was an artery that led to a flooded rice plain in the Mekong Delta, that somehow the presence of a plastic statue could console those whose drowned voices still spoke to him from the silt-encrusted wreckage of his helicopter.
When he hung himself, the wire service story made much of his psychiatric history. But in my own life I had come to believe in water people and voices that can speak through the rain. I wondered if Sonny would speak to me.
It was a blue-gold morning, the sky clear, the wind balmy out of the south, when the sheriff parked his cruiser by the boat ramp and walked down the dock. I was shirtless, sanding dried fish scales out of the guardrail, the sun warm on my back, the day almost perfect. I didn't want to hear about someone else's troubles, their guilt, or even an apology for wrongs real or imagined.
”We've got Patsy Dapolito in lockup,“ he said.
”That seems like a good place for him.“
”He says somebody stole the tip he left in the motel restaurant. He made quite a scene. Scared the shit out of everybody in the place.
This guy is probably as close to Freddy Kruger as New Iberia will ever get.“
I drew the sandpaper along the grain of the wood and brushed the dust out into the sunlight.
21)
”It doesn't concern you anymore, huh?“ the sheriff said.
”Not unless he comes around here.“
”I wish I could tell you it's that easy, Dave.“
I started sanding again, my eyes on his.
”The FBI called yesterday. They thought you were still with us.“ He shrugged off the discomfort of his own remark. ”They've got a tap on some of Johnny Carp's people. Your name came up in a conversation.“
”I'm not a player anymore, Sheriff. Maybe it's time you and the Feds got the word out.“