I gave my friend four hundred for the Appaloosa, and for another three hundred he threw in the tack and a homemade trailer. Almost all the way home Alafair stayed propped on her knees on the front seat, either looking b
ackward through the cab glass or out the window at the horse trailer tracking behind us, her fine hair flattening in white lines against her scalp.
On Monday I walked up to the house for lunch, then stopped at the mailbox on the road before I went back to the dock. The sun was warm, the oak trees along the road were full of mockingbirds and blue jays, and the mist from my neighbor’s water sprinkler drifted in a wet sheen over his hydrangea beds and rows of blooming azalea and myrtle bushes. In the back of the mailbox was a narrow package no more than ten inches long. It had been postmarked in New Orleans. I put my other mail in my back pocket, slipped the twine off the corners of the package, and cracked away the brown wrapping paper with my thumb.
I lifted off the cardboard top. Inside on a strip of cotton was a hypodermic needle with a photograph and a sheet of lined paper wrapped around it. The inside of the syringe was clouded with a dried brown-red residue. The photograph was cracked across the surface, yellowed around the edges, but the obscene nature of the details had the violent clarity of a sliver of glass in the eye. A pajama-clad Vietcong woman lay in a clearing by the tread of a tank, her severed head resting on her stomach. Someone had stuffed a C-ration box in her mouth.
The lined paper looked like the kind that comes in a Big Chief notebook. The words were printed large, in black ink.
Dear Sir,
The guy that took this picture is one fucked up dude. He liked it over there and didn’t want to come back. He says he used this needle in a snuff flick out in Oakland. I don’t know if I’d believe him or not. But your little pinto bean gets on the bus at 7:45. She arrives at school at 8:30. She’s on the playground at 10 and back out there at noon. She waits on the south corner for the bus home at 3:05. Sometimes she gets off before her stop and walks down the road with a colored kid. It’s hardball. Don’t fuck with it. It’s going to really mess up your day. Check the zipperhead in the pic. Now there’s somebody who really had a hard time getting her C’s down.
“For what your face like that? What it is, Dave?”
Batist was standing behind me, dressed in a pair of navy bellbottoms and an unbuttoned sleeveless khaki shirt. There were drops of sweat on his bald head, and the backs of his hands and wrists were spotted with blood from cleaning fish.
I put the photograph, letter, and torn package back in the mailbox and walked hurriedly down to the dock. I called the elementary school, asked the principal to make sure that Alafair was in her classroom, then told her not to let Alafair board the school bus that afternoon, that I would be there to pick her up. When I walked back toward the house Batist was still at the mailbox. He was illiterate and so the letter inside meant nothing to him, but he had the photograph cupped in his big palm, an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth, and there was an ugly glaze in his eyes.
“Que ça veut dire, Dave? What that needle mean, too?” he said.
“Somebody’s threatening Alafair.”
“They say they gonna hurt that little girl?”
“Yes.” The word created a hollow feeling in my chest.
“Who they are? Where they at, them people that do something like this?”
“I believe it’s a couple of guys in Lafayette. They’re oil people. Have you seen any guys around here who look like they don’t belong here?”
“I ain’t paid it no mind, Dave. I didn’t have no reason, me.”
“It’s all right.”
“What we gonna do?”
“I’m going to pick up Alafair, then I’ll talk to the sheriff.” I picked the photograph out of his palm by the edges and set it back inside the mailbox. “I’m going to leave this stuff in there, then take it in later and see if we can find fingerprints on it. So we shouldn’t handle it anymore.”
“No, I mean what we gonna do?” he said. His brown eyes looked intently into mine. There was no question about his meaning.
“I’m going to pick up Alafair now. Watch the store and I’ll be back soon.”
Batist’s mouth closed on his dry cigar. His eyes went away from me, stared into the shade of the pecan trees and moved back and forth in his head with a private thought. His voice was quiet when he spoke.
“Dave, in that picture, that’s where you was at in the war?”
“Yes.”
“They done them kind of things?”
“Some did. Not many.”
“In that letter, it say that about Alafair?”
I swallowed and couldn’t answer him. The hollow feeling in my chest would not go away. It was like fear but not of a kind that I had ever experienced before. It was an obscene feeling, as though a man’s hand had slipped lewdly inside my shirt and now rested sweatily on my breastbone. The sunlight shimmered on the bayou, and the trees and blooming hyacinths on the far side seemed to go in and out of focus. I saw a cottonmouth coiled fatly on a barkless, sun-bleached log, its triangular head the color of tarnished copper in the hard yellow light. Sweat ran out of my hair, and I felt my heart beating against my rib cage. I snicked the mailbox door shut, got into my truck, and headed down the dirt road toward New Iberia. When I bounced across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche, my knuckles were white and as round as quarters on the steering wheel.
On the way back from the school the spotted patterns of light and shadow fell through the canopy of oaks overhead and raced over Alafair’s tan face as she sat next to me in the truck. Her knees and white socks and patent leather shoes were dusty from play on the school ground. She kept looking curiously at the side of my face.