”Are you going to be mad at Danny?“
”He shouldn't be buying beer for you guys.“
”I got out of the truck and walked. I was scared. They were mixing it with something called “Ever Clear,” it's like pure grain alcohol or something.“
”Danny didn't try to take you home?“
”No.“ She dropped her eyes to the floor. ”So we leave Danny alone in the future. You did the right thing, Alafair.“
”That's not all that happened, Dave … It started to rain and the wind was blowing real hard out of the swamp. A car came up the road with its lights on. The man who got Tripod out of the coulee, the man you handcuffed, he rolled down his window and said he'd take me home …“
”Did you get in the-“
”No. The way he looked at me, it was sickening. His eyes went all over me, like they were full of dirty thoughts and he didn't care if I knew it or not.“ I sat on the stool next to her, put my hand on her back. ”Tell me what happened, Alf,“ I said. ”I told him I didn't want a ride. I kept walking toward the house. The rain was stinging my face and he kept backing up with me, telling me to get in, he was a friend of yours, I was gonna catch cold if I didn't get in.“
”You didn't do anything wrong, Alf. Do you understand me?“
”He started to open his door, Dave. Then this other man came out of nowhere. He had red hair and a black rain hat on with rain pouring off it, and he walked like he was hurt. He said, “I don't want it to go down in front of a kid, Emile. Time for you to boogie.”
“The man in the car turned white, Dave. He stepped on the gas and threw mud and water all over us. You could see sparks gashing off his bumper when he crossed the drawbridge.” I looked out the window into the darkness, tried to clear an obstruction, like a fish bone, in my throat. “Have you ever seen the man in the raincoat before?” I said. “It was hard to see his face in the rain. It was pale, like it didn't have any blood .. . He said, ”You shouldn't be out here by yourself.“
He walked with me till we could see the lights on the dock. Then I turned around and he was gone.” I took Tripod out of her lap and set him on the counter, then bent over her and hugged her against my chest, pressed my cheek against the top of her head. “You're not mad?” she said. “Of course not.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners when she looked up at me. I smiled emptily, lest she sense the fear that hovered like a vapor around my heart. The next morning the sun rose yellow and hot into a bone white sky. There was no wind, and the trees and flowers in my yard were coated with humidity. At 9 A.M. I glanced through my office window and saw Luke Fontenot park his car on the street and walk toward the entrance of the sheriff's department, his rose-colored shirt peppered with sweat. Just before he went through the door, he rubbed his mouth unconsciously. When he sat down in the metal chair in front of my desk, he kept glancing sideways through the glass at the uniformed deputies who passed in the corridor. “It's all right, Luke,” I said. “I been in custody here. For killing a white man, back when things was a li'l different. You believe in the gris-gris, Mr. Dave?”
“No.”
“Aint Bertie do. She put the gris-gris on Moleen Bertrand, now she say she cain't get it off.”
“That stuff's superstition, partner.”
“Come out to the cafe where she work.”
“Bertie can take care of herself.”
“I ain't worried about that old woman. It's Ruthie Jean. Suh, ain't it time you listen a li'l bit to what black folks got to say?” Bertie Fontenot worked off and on in a black-owned clapboard cafe up Bayou Teche in Loreauville. She sat under a tarp extended on poles behind the building, next to a worktable and two stainless steel cauldrons that bubbled on a portable butane burner. The surrounding fields were glazed with sunlight, the shade under the tarp as stifling as a wool blanket on your skin. Through the back screen I could hear the jukebox playing, I searched for you all night in vain, baby. But you was hid out wit' another man. “Tell him,” Luke said. “What for? Some people always know what they know,” she said. She lifted her mammoth weight out of the chair and poured a wood basket filled with artichokes, whole onions, corn on the cob, and peeled potatoes into the cauldrons. Then she began feeding links of sausage into the steam, her eyes watering in the evaporation of salt and cayenne pepper. Stacked on the table were three swollen gunnysacks that moved and creaked with live crawfish. “Aint Bertie, he took off from his work to come up here,” Luke said. She wiped the perspiration off her neck with a tiny handkerchief and walked to her pickup truck, which was parked by an abandoned and partially collapsed privy, and came back into the shade with an old leather handbag drawn together at the top by a leather boot lace. She put her hand inside and removed a clutch of pig bones. They looked like long pieces of animal teeth against her coppery palm. “It don't matter when or where I trow them, they come up the same,” she said. “I ain't got no power over what's gonna happen. I gone along with Ruthie Jean, even though I knowed it was wrong. Now I cain't undo any of it.” She cast the bones from her hand onto the plank table. They seemed to bounce off the wood as lightly as sewing needles. “See, all the sharp points is at the center,” she said. “Moleen Bertrand dragging a chain I cain't take off. For something he done right here, it's got to do wit' a child, out on a dirt road, in the dark, when Moleen was drunk. There's a bunch of other spirits following him around, too, soldiers in uniforms that ain't nothing but rags now.
Every morning he wake up, they sitting all around his room.”
“You told me you were worried about Ruthie Jean,” I said to Luke.
“She's in a rooming house in New Orleans, off Magazine by the river.
Waiting for Moleen to get his bid ness things together, take her to the Islands,” he said.
“Some people give they heart one time, keep believing when they ain't suppose to believe no more,” Bertie said. She unfolded the curved blade of a banana knife from its case, pulled a gunnysack filled with crawfish across the table toward her. “Moleen gonna die. Except there's two bones in the middle of the circle. Somebody going wit him.”
“Maybe Moleen thinks New Orleans is a better place for her right now.
Maybe he's going to keep his word,” I said.
“You wasn't listening, Mr. Dave,” Luke said. “We ain't tole you Moleen Bertrand sent her to New Orleans. It was a police officer, he come down here at night, carried her on down to the airport in Lafayette.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You got him right down the hall from you, Mr. White Trash himself, Rufus Arceneaux, same man run errands for Julia Bertrand,” she said.
She ripped the sack along the seam with her banana knife, then shucked it empty into the cauldron, where the crawfish stiffened with shock, as though they had been struck with electricity, and then roiled up dead in the churning froth.
That night the air was breathless, moonlit, filled with birds, stale with dust and the heat of the day that lingered in the baked wood and tin roofing of the house. It was long after midnight when the phone rang in the kitchen.