Johnny Carp had made a pilgrimage to New Iberia, his second attempt at reconciliation. He was a mercurial head case a functioning drunk, a physiological caricature, a libidinous nightmare whose sexual habits you tried never to think about, but, most important, Johnny, like all drunks, was driven by a self-centered fear that made his kind see blood in tap water and dead men walking out of the surf.
I called Helen Soileau at the sheriff's department.
“What's the deal on Patsy Dapolito?” I asked.
“He has a rental dump by a pipe yard on the Jeanerette Road. Somebody popped one right through his bedroom window.”
“It was a nine-millimeter?”
“Or a .38. It was pretty beat up. Why?”
“Johnny Carp thinks Sonny was the shooter.”
“Big reach from the salt.” She paused. “Sorry,” she said.
“Sonny's nine-millimeter is still in Possessions, isn't it?” I said.
“I hate to admit this, but I asked that question myself. No.”
“What happened to it?”
“We didn't charge him with carrying a concealed weapon because we busted him in Orleans Parish. So when he skated on the murder beef, he was home free and got his nine back. A Smith & Wesson, right?”
“What's the status on Dapolito?”
“We painted his doorknobs with roach paste so he can't go outside. Come on, Dave, what status? Even New Orleans doesn't know how to deal with this guy. We get three or four calls a day on him. He took a leak in the washbasin at Mulate's.”
“Thanks for your help, Helen.”
“It's not right what the old man did. I told him what I thought, too.”
“You shouldn't take my weight.”
She was quiet, as if she was deciding something, perhaps a choice about trust, which was always Helen's most difficult moment.
“I've got an awful feeling, Streak. It's like somebody put out a cigarette on my stomach lining. I get up in the morning with it.”
“Feeling about what?”
“They tore Delia Landry apart with their bare hands. They took down Sonny Marsallus in broad daylight. You watch your butt, you understand me?”
“Don't worry about me.”
I heard her hand clench and squeak on the receiver.
“I'm not explaining myself well,” she said. “When I dropped those two perps, I saw my face on theirs. That's how I feel now. Do you understand what I'm talking about?”
I told her it was her imagination, to get away from that kind of thinking. I told her Batist was waiting for me down at the dock.
My answer was not an honest one.
Later, I sat in the backyard and tried to convince myself that my evasiveness was based on concern for a friend. A physician turns his eyes into meaningless glass, shows no expression when he listens through a stethoscope, I told myself. But that wasn't it. Her fear, whether for me or herself, had made me angry.
When you buy into premonitions, you jinx yourself and everyone around you. Ask anyone who's smelled its vinegar reek in the man next to him.
I remembered a helicopter hovering against a fiery red ball that could have been heated in a devil's forge, its blades thropping monotonously, the red dust and plumes from smoke grenades swirling into the air. But for those of us who lay on poncho liners, our wounds sealed with crusted field dressings and our own dried fluids, the dust was forming itself into an enormous, animate shape-domed, slack-jawed, leering, the nose a jagged hole cut in bone, a death's head that ballooned larger and larger above the clearing and called our names through the churning of the blades, the din of voices on the ground, the popping of small-arms fire that was now part of somebody else's war, just like the watery sound of a human voice speaking into an electric fan.
And if you did not shut out the syllables of your name, or if you looked into the face of the man next to you and allowed the peculiar light in his eyes to steal into your own, your soul could take flight from your breast as quickly as a dog tag being snipped onto a wire ring.