"You had a hard night," I said.
"I've had worse."
"You should have taken him somewhere else. You might have gotten away with it."
"What are you talking about?"
"I dug him up. The cane knife, too."
She drank from her glass and puffed on the cigarette again. Her eyes looked vaguely amused.
"Drink it up, Claudette. You're going on a big dry."
"Oh, I wouldn't count on that, pumpkin. You ought to watch more television. Battered wives are in fashion these days."
I slipped the handcuffs off the back of my belt, took the cigarette out of her mouth and dropped it on the floor, and cuffed her wrists through the back of the chair.
"Oh, our law officer is so uncorruptible, so noble in his AA sobriety. I bet you might like a slightly bruised fuck, though. It's your last chance, sugarplum, because I'll be out on bond tomorrow morning. You should give it some thought."
I turned a chair around backwards and sat across from her.
"You did three years and you think you're conwise, but you're still a fish," I said. "Let me give you the script. You won't do time because you cut Bubba's throat. Nobody cares when somebody like Bubba gets killed, except maybe the people he owes money to. Instead, a jury of unemployed roughnecks, fundamentalist morons, and welfare blacks who don't like rich people will send you up the road because you're an ex-con and a lesbian.
"Of course, you'll think that's unfair. And you'll be right, it is. But the greatest irony is that the people who'll send you back to St. Gabriel will never hear the name of the innocent girl you had murdered. Some people might call it comedy. It'll make a good story in the zoo."
Her reddish-brown eyes were narrow and mean. The bruise over the lid of one eye looked like a small blue mouse. I walked to the pay phone on the wall by the bar and called the sheriff's office. Just as I was about to hang up, I heard Claudette scrape the chair across the floor and smash it with her weight against the wall. She snapped the back loose from the seat, and then with the broken wood supports hanging from her manacled wrists, she went out the screen door into the rain.
I followed her across a field toward the railroad tracks. The bottom of her yellow dress was flecked with mud, and her bandanna fell off her head and her hair stuck wetly to her face. The rain was driving harder now, and the drops were big and flat and cold as hail. I grabbed her by the arm and tried to turn her back toward the truck stop, but she sat down in a puddle of gray water. Her arms, twisted behind her by the handcuffs, were rigid with muscle.
I leaned over and tried to lift her to her feet. She sat in the water with her legs apart, her shoulders stooped, her head down. I pulled her by the arms, her dead weight and wet skin slipping out of my
hands. She fell sideways in the water, then she got to her knees and I thought she was going to stand up. I bent down beside her and lifted under one arm. She looked up at me in the rain, as though she were seeing me for the first time, and spit in my face.
I stepped back from her, used my handkerchief, and threw it away. She stared fixedly across the fields at the green line of trees on the horizon. Water ran in rivulets out of her soaked hair and down over her face. I walked to an empty freight car on the siding and pulled an old piece of canvas off the floor. It was stiff and crusted with dirt but it was dry. I spread it over her so that she looked like she was staring out of a small, peaked house.
"It's the Mennonite way of doing things," I said.
But she wasn't interested in vague nuances. She was looking at the sheriff's deputies and Minos Dautrieve stepping out of their cars in the truck-stop parking lot. I stood beside her and watched them make their way across the drenched field toward us. Through the open doors of the freight car I could see chaff spinning in the wind, and in the distance the gray buildings of the cement plant looked like grain elevators in the rain. Minos was calling to me in the echo of thunder across the land, and I thought of drowned voices out on the salt and wheat fields in the rain. I thought of white-capping troughs out on the Gulf and sunflowers and wheat fields in the rain.
* * *
EPILOGUE
I WORKED TWO more weeks with the sheriff's department and then hung it up. In August the sun came up white every morning and the air was hazy with humidity and even your lightest clothes stuck to your body like wet paper. I rented a clapboard bungalow by the Texas coast, and Robin and Alafair and I spent two weeks fishing for gafftop and white and speckled trout. At dawn, when the tide was drawn out over the flats, the gulls squeaked and circled in the sky and dipped their beaks into the pools of trapped shellfish, then the long, flat expanses of wet sand became rose-tinted and purple, and the palm tree in our side yard would stand like a black metal etching against the sun.
It was always cool when we took the boat out in the morning, and the wind would come up out of the southeast and we could smell the schools of trout feeding under the slicks they made on the water. We took the boat across a half-moon bay that was bordered on each side by sand pits, sawgrass, and dead cypress, and just as we crossed over the last sandbar into deep water and entered the Gulf, we would see those large floating slicks, like oil that had escaped from a sunken freighter, and we'd bait our hooks with live shrimp, cast on the edge of the slick, and pop our wood floats loudly against the surface. Occasionally we'd hook gafftop, and we always knew it was a catfish by the way he'd pull straight down for the bottom and not break the surface until we had socked the treble hook all the way through his head and forced him to the top. But a speckled trout would run and strip line off the drag, turn across your bow or stern and go under your boat if he could, and even when you got the net under him he'd still try to break your rod across the gunnel.
We'd put cold drinks and sausage, cheese, and onion sandwiches in the ice chest, and by noon, when we had eaten our lunch and the sun was straight up in the sky and the salt was crusty on the hot bow of the boat, the ice would be covered with rows of silver trout, their gills open and red, their teeth hooked wide, their eyes like black glass.
It was late August when we went back to New Iberia, and then one morning Robin was gone. I read the letter at the breakfast table in my underwear while the backyard turned from blue to gray in the early light. She had left coffee for me on the stove and a bowl of Grape-Nuts and strawberries on the table.
I had the cab stop up on the road so I wouldnt wake you. Goodbyes and apologys are for the Rotary and the dipshits, right? I love you, babe. Its important you understand and believe that. You turned me around and cared about me when nobody else did. And I mean nobody. Your not like any guy I new before. You hurt for other people and for some reason you feel guilty about them. But thats not love, Dave. Its something else and I dont understand it really. I think maybe you still love Annie. I guess thats the way its suppose to be. But I think youve got to find out for yourself and you dont need me in the way.
Hey, this is no big deal. Im going to work as a cashier at your brothers resterant on Dauphine, so if you ever want to hit on a hot broad you know where to go. Im off the juice and pills too thanks to a good hearted roach I know. Thats not a bad thing to put on your score card.
My love to Alafair
Take it easy,