I went inside the bait shop. Alafair was stocking lunch meat and cold drinks in the wall cooler.
“Hi, Dave,” she said. “Who was that lady?”
“Clete s secretary.”
She made a face.
“What's wrong?” I said.
She looked out the window screen. “Where's Batist?” she said.
“Out on the ramp.”
“She was sitting inside a half hour ago, smoking one cigarette after another, smelling the whole place up. Batist gave me his Pepsi because he had to go put some man's boat in. After he went out, she said, ”Better bring that over here, honey.“
”I didn't know what she meant. I walked over to her table and she took the can out of my hand and got a bunch of napkins out of the holder and started wiping the top. She said, “You shouldn't drink after other people.” Then she put it back in my hand and said, “There .. . Maybe now you won't have to scrub your gums with disinfectant. But I'd still pour it down the drain if I were you.”
“What's she doing here, Dave?”
Rufus Arceneaux lived in a wood frame house on Bayou Teche just outside St. Martinville. He had a gas light in his front yard, a new aluminum boat shed under his oak trees, an electric bug killer that snapped and hissed on his gallery. He did not resent his black neighbors because he considered himself superior to them and simply did not recognize their existence. Nor did he envy the rich, as he believed them the recipients of luck passed out by a society that was meant to be inequitable and often blessed the bumbling and the effete. His wary eye, instead, was directed at his peers and those among them who succeeded, he was sure, through stealth and design, and always at his expense.
He brought back a Japanese wife from Okinawa, a small, shy woman with bad teeth who worked briefly in a bakery and who lowered her eyes and covered her mouth when she grinned. One night the neighbors made a 911 call on Rufus's house, but the wife told the responding sheriff's deputies her television set had been tuned too loud, there was certainly no problem in the home.
One morning she did not report to work at the bakery. Rufus called the owner later and said she had mumps. When people saw her in town, her face was heavily made up, marbled with discolorations.
She left town on a Greyhound bus the following year. A Catholic priest who worked with Vietnamese refugees drove her to the depot in Lafayette and refused to tell anyone her destination.
For a while Rufus lived with a topless dancer from Morgan City, then a woman who had been fired from her position as a juvenile probation officer in Lake Charles. There were others, too, who came and went, all out of that seemingly endless supply of impaired or abused women who find temporary solace in the approval of a man who will eventually degrade and reject them. As an ex-NCO, Rufus was not one to argue with long-established systems. The only constants in Rufus's life were his two hunting dogs and his squared-away, freshly painted frame house.
It was twilight when I drove up his dirt drive and parked my truck in the trees and walked behind his house. He was drinking bottled beer in his undershirt on the cement pad that served as a back porch, his knees crossed, a pork roast hissing on a rotisserie barbecue pit. Rufus's shoulders were as smooth as stone, olive with tan, a gold and red Marine Corps emblem tattooed on his right arm. At the foot of his sloping yard a half-flooded pirogue lay in the shadows, its sides soft with green mold.
As was his way, he was neither friendly nor unfriendly. My presence in his life, off the clock, had no more significance than the whir of cars out on the state highway. A brunette woman with unbrushed hair, in cutoff blue jeans, came outside, set a small table with wood salad bowls and plates, and never looked at me. Nor did he attempt to introduce her.
He slid a metal chair toward me with his foot.
“There's some cold drinks in the cooler,” he said.
“I understand you drove Ruthie Jean Fontenot to the airport.”
He put a cigarette in his mouth, worked his lighter out of the watch pocket of his
Levi's. It had a bronze globe and anchor soldered on its side.
“What's the problem on that, Dave?” he said.
“Are you working for the Bertrands?” I tried to smile.
“Not really.”
“I got you.”
“Just doing somebody a favor,” he said.
“I see. You think Ruthie Jean's getting set up?”
“For what?”
“The Bertrands have their own way of doing business.”