Then I felt his huge arm knock me backward, away from Johnny's body, which was curled in an embryonic position next to the brass bar rail, his yellow shirt streaked with saliva and blood, his fists clenched on his head.
Then Clete laced his fingers under my arm, a paper bag crushed against the contour of his palm, and drew me back toward the door with him, a pistol-grip, sawed-down double-barrel twelve-gauge pointed at Johnny's men. The only sound in the room was the service door to the kitchen flipping back and forth on its hinges. The faces of the diners were as expressionless as candle wax, as though any movement of their own would propel them into a terrible flame. I felt Clete push me out into the darkness and the cold odor of an impending electric storm that invaded the trees like a fog. He shoved the sawed-down twelve-gauge into the paper bag and threw it on the seat of his convertible.
”Oh Dave,“ he said. ”Noble mon .. .“ He shook his head and started his car without finishing his sentence, his eyes hollow and lustrous with a dark knowledge, as though he had just seen the future.
Chapter 25
MONDAY MORNING nothing had happened. No knock at the door from New Orleans plainclothes, no warrant cut. To my knowledge, not even an investigation in progress.
The sky was clear and blue, windless, the day warm, the sun as bright as a shattered mirror on the bayou's surface. After the early fishermen had left the dock and I had started the fire in the barbecue pit for the lunches Batist and I would sell later, I called Clete at the office on Main.
”You need me for anything?“ I said.
”Not really. It's pretty quiet.“
”I'm going to work at the dock today.“
He s coming, JJave. ”I know.“
The priest sits next to me on the weathered planks of the bleachers by the baseball diamond at New Iberia High. The school building is abandoned, the windows broken by rocks, pocked with BB holes. The priest is a tall, gray, crewcut man who used to be a submarine pitcher for the Pelicans back in the days of the Evangeline League and later became an early member of Martin Luther King's Southern
Christian Leadership Conference. Today he belongs to the same AA group I do.
”Did you go to the restaurant with that purpose in mind?“ he asks.
”No.“
”Then it wasn't done with forethought. It was an impetuous act. That's the nature of anger.“
It's dusk and the owner of the pawn and gun shop on the corner rattles the glass in his door when he slams and locks it. Two black kids in ball caps gaze through the barred window at the pistols on display.
”Dave?“
”I tried to kill him.“
”That's a bit more serious,“ he says.
The black kids cross the street against the red light and pass close to the bleachers, in the shadows, oblivious to our presence. One picks up a rock, sails it clattering through a tree next to the school building.
I hear a faint tinkle of glass inside.
”Because of your friend, what was his name, Sonny Boy?“ the priest says.
”I think he put the hit on Sonny. I can't prove it, though.“
His hands are long and slender, with liver spots on the backs.
His skin makes a dry sound when he rubs one hand on top of the other.
”What bothers you more than anything else in the world, Dave?“
”I beg your pardon?“
”Vietnam? The death of your wife Annie? Revisiting the booze in your dreams?“
When I don't reply, he lifts one hand, gestures at the diamond, the ruined school building that's become softly molded inside the fading twilight. A torn kite, caught by its string on an iron fire escape, flaps impotently against a wall.
”It's all this, isn't it?“ he says. ”We're still standing in the same space where we grew up but we don't recognize it anymore. It's like other people own it now.“