I came out of the trees and drove through a winter-green field that was filled with snowy egrets and blue herons feeding by a grassy pond. Ahead I could see the coast, the palm fronds whipping in the wind, and the waves cresting and blowing out on Lake Borgne and the Gulf. The air was cool and flecked with sunlight and smelled like salt and distant rain. And I realized that in the west the sun had broken through the gray seal of clouds, and left a rip in the sky like a yellow and purple rose.
* * *
EPILOGUE
Tony was right. Minos didn't believe me, particularly after I gave him a tape recording that contained a long blank space between the fire in the airplane hangar and Jimmie Lee Boggs's watery statement about Tee Beau's innocence in the murder of Hipolyte Broussard. But I didn't care. I had grown weary of federal agents and wiseguys, narcs and stings and brainfried lowlifes, and all the seriousness and pretense we invest in the province of moral invalids. I had decided it was time to let someone else wander about in that neon-lit moonscape, where we constantly try to define the source of our national discontent, until our unsated addictions target an antithetically mixed, quixotic figure like Tony Cardo, and lead us away from ourselves. I don't know what happened to him. The DEA found his Lincoln, his only means of transportation, at the camp, but they matched the tire treads to fresh tire tracks at the hangar where he kept his plane. Perhaps he paid somebody to drive the Lincoln back to camp; however, the DEA also found his plane still in the hangar. One of Minos's fellow workers, one who was enraged at the fact that the additional fifty thousand dollars given me in the sting had been burned up in the hangar fire, theorized that Tony had had someone else fly a plane into the airstrip and pick up him, Paul, and Jess Ornella. But federal agents in Guadalajara who visited Tony's ranch outside Zapopan reported that Tony had not been seen in the area for almost a year. The next time I saw Minos in Lafayette, to plan a fishing trip, I mentioned Tony's name. He yawned, picked up a file folder off his desk, and showed me a photo of a man whose facial features looked back at me with the dirty luminescence and dark clarity characteristic of booking-room photography.
"You know this guy?" he said.
"No."
"He lives in Metairie. He's a new boy on the block. We'd like very much to get him into our gray-bar hotel chain. He—"
But now it was I whose eyes began to glaze, and who tried not to yawn at the sound of the rain on the oak trees outside the window.
Two months later I received a creased and dog-eared envelope postmarked in Lake Charles. Inside it was a color photograph of Paul smiling in a fighting chair on the stern of a sport fishing boat. Squatted down next to the chair, with a four-foot tarpon held in both arms, the enormous hook still protruding from its dead mouth, was Jess Ornella, his jailhouse tattoos as blue against his tan as the sea behind him. With his back turned to the camera was a shirtless man in a huge Mexican sombrero who was baiting a mullet on a feathered spoon. His curly hair was cut short and glistened with sweat above his tiny ears. In the background was a biscuit-colored beach with a few hot-looking, wilted palm trees on it and a desiccated wooden dock, strung with drying butterfly nets, that extended out into the surf.
Someone had written in ballpoint on the back of the photograph:
You said around New Iberia you have to knock the bass back into the water with a tennis racket. That's pretty good. But you ought to try this place. The reefs are so crowded with kingfish there's not room for them all. Just yesterday I saw a couple of them walking down the highway carrying their own canteens. We're living on warm breezes and bananas fried in coconut oil. I'm clean and free, Dave. The tiger went away. Maybe you ought to get yourself a Roman collar, or at least by now I hope you've lost the badge and your dipshit colleagues. Face it, you dug being in the life. Even Jess thought you were one of us. That'd worry me.
Stay solid,
Poncho Gonzales
Tee Beau Latiolais was given a new trial, but before trial date Gros Mama Goula cut a subpoena server's face with a razor and fled New Iberia and the zydeco bar and hot-pillow joint she had operated for thirty years, and the prosecutor's office dropped the murder charge against Tee Beau. But some black people out in the parish said Gros Mama had the powers of a loup-garou, and had changed herself into ball lightning. They said when the fog was white among the cypress trunks, people would see a tangle of pink light roll across the lily pads and dead water and explode against the levee. The grass on the bank would be scorched black, and snakes would writhe on the baked dirt.
But Tee Beau was not one to stay locked in a bunch of mojo fear, or even worry any longer about the months of sexual humiliation and shame that Hipolyte Broussard had inflicted on him. He and Dorothea were married, and today she works as a waitress in a seafood restaurant out on the St. Martinville road. Tee Beau owns his own taxicab. On Sundays he drives Tante Lemon and Dorothea to church in it, and for some reason they look like triplets inside, all three of their heads barely above the bottom level of the windows. Sometimes they make a special trip past my house and leave me a fat jar of cracklins, what we call graton, made with ground-up Tabasco peppers, and the first bite is such a shock to my mouth that sweat runs out of my hair. But every time Tante Lemon gives me another quart, she pats my hand confidently and says, "You eat that, you, and I gonna give you mo'. Just like your daddy give me fish when I didn't have no food, me, I be comin' out and give you mo'."
Saint Augustine once said we should never use the truth to injure. So the edge of my coulee is lined with spaded-in holes that contain dozens of mason jars which one day an archaeologist will probably dig up and identify as artifacts used by an ancient cult in a corn-god burial.
This started out as a story about my own fear, or rather about a time in my life when, because of an injury, I was not sure who I was, when I had to wait each night for a protean figure of my own creation to define me as something weak and loathsome and undeserving of breath. Instead, it became a story of others, people I discovered to be far more brave in their way than I am. And I suppose that what I have learned is a lesson that the years, or self-concern, had begun to hide from me, namely, that the bravest and most loyal and loving people in the world seldom have heroic physical characteristics or the auras of saints. In fact, their faces are like those of people whom you might randomly pull out of a supermarket line, their physical makeup so nondescript and unremarkable that it's hard to remember what they look like ten minutes after they walk out of a room.
Kim Dollinger is the manager of Clete's Club on Decatur now, and Clete has a private investigator's license and an office two blocks from the First District headquarters. He's made enough money running down bail jumpers to pay off all his debts to Tony's old shylocks. He still tries to fight his weight problem by clanking iron up and down in the back of his office and jogging through Louis Armstrong Park in his Budweiser shorts and LSU football jersey, which the black kids from the Iberville welfare project treat like the appearance of a dancing hippo in the middle of their day. People in the Quarter say he and Kim have become an item, but probably not as Clete had expected. When we go out for dinner together she mashes out his cigarettes in the ashtray, cancels his drink order from the bar, and orders low-cholesterol food from the menu for him. But he doesn't complain, and his eyes are gentle when he looks at her.
Bootsie cut her losses and sold out her vending machine business to one of her former in-laws, and that December she and I were married in St. Peter's Church in New Iberia. We took Alafair with us to Key West, where the water is warm year-round, and the late-afternoon sun boils into the Gulf like a molten red planet. At night light-fish swim among the coral like electrified wisps of green smoke. In screened-in restaurants by the water's edge we ate big dinners of oysters on the half shell, fried shrimp, and conch fritters, and we trolled for bonefish in the flats and dove Seven-Mile Reef south of the island. At fifty feet the water was as clear and green as Jell-O, shimmering with sunlight, the sand as white as ground diamond, and I watched Bootsie swim deep into the canyons of fire coral, indifferent to the spiked nests of sea urchins and the dark, triangular shapes of stingrays. Her tanned body would be beset with bluefish; then she would kick her flippers, clouding the water below her with sand, and dispel them like a sudden shuddering of thin metal blades.
Minos persuaded the DEA to replace the boat I lost south of Cocodrie, and he said that actually the DEA was happy with the work that I had done for them, because Tony was gone and the man who had moved in on his action, one of the Houston crowd, had evidently been having an affair with Tony's wife. They spent a lot of their time quarreling, even throwing drinks at one another on one occasion, in public places.
But my financial debts are paid off, and I've given up law enforcement, at least for the time being. Bootsie and I run our boat-rental and bait business on the bayou. We barbecue chickens and links of sausage for midday fishermen, and we seine for shrimp out on the long green roll of the Gulf. It's still winter, but we treat winter in South Louisiana as a transitory accident. Even when the skies are black with ducks, the oak and cypress limbs along the bayou teeming with robins, the eye focuses on the tightly wrapped pink buds inside the dark green leaves of the camellia bush, the azaleas and the flaming hibiscus that have bloomed right through the season. South Louisiana is a party, and I've grown old enough to put away vain and foolish concerns about mortality, and to stop imposing the false measures of calendars and clocks upon my life, or, for that matter, upon eternity.
Sometimes in the evening, when I'm closing up the bait shop and my shoulder twinges from picking up crates of Jax and Pearl beer, when the wind lifts the moss on the dead cypress in the marsh and blows red embers from a burnt cane field into the darkening sky, I think of juju magic and gris-gris charms, I think of Tony and Paul, Kim and Clete, Dorothea, Tee Beau, and Tante Lemon, even ole Jess Ornella, and I have to pause, almost fearfully, at the beating of my heart. Then I see Bootsie and Alafair walk down from the lighted gallery to get me for supper, hand in hand through the pecan trees, and I turn keys in locks and Bootsie and I go back up the path, with Alafair swinging from our arms,
our mismatched shadows fused into a single playful shape under the rising moon.
* * *