“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing. It’s just a little headache. It’ll pass.”
“That man made you mad or something?”
“No, he’s just one of those guys who’ll always have his elevator stuck between floors.”
“What?”
“Nothing, little guy. Don’t worry about it.”
I chewed my food and looked silently out the window at the shadows and the cool gold light on the backyard. I heard Alafair wash her dishes in the sink, then walk toward the front of the house. A moment later she was back in the kitchen.
“That man’s still out there. Just sitting in his car. What’s he doing, Dave?” she said.
“Probably figuring out ways to sell the Rocky Mountains to Arab strip miners.”
“What?”
“Just ignore him.”
But I couldn’t. Or at least I couldn’t ignore the twelfth-step AA principle that requires us to help those who are afflicted in the same way we are. Or maybe I knew that I had asked for all my own troubles, and it wasn’t right any longer to blame it on Dixie Lee. I set my knife and fork down on my plate and walked outside to his car. He was deep in thought, a cigarette burned almost down to his fingers, which rested on top of the steering wheel. His face jerked around with surprise when he heard me behind him.
“Lord God, you liked to give me a heart attack,” he said.
“You can’t drink while you stay with us,” I said. “If you do or if you come home with it on your breath, you’re eighty-sixed. No discussion, no second chance. I don’t want any profanity in front of my daughter, and you go outside if you want to smoke. You share the cooking and the cleaning, you go to bed when we do. The AA group down the street has a job service. If they find you some work, you take it, whatever it is, and you pay one third of the groceries and the rent. That’s the deal, Dixie. If there are any rules here you can’t live with, now’s the time to tell me.”
“Son, you say ‘Frog’ and I’ll say ‘How high?’”
He began unloading the backseat of his car. His face wore the expression of a man who might have been plucked unexpectedly from the roof of a burning building. As he piled his boxes and suitcases and clothes on the sidewalk, he talked without stop about the 1950s, Tommy Sands, Ruth Brown, the Big Bopper, the mob, cons in Huntsville, the actress wife who paid goons to beat him up behind Cook’s Hoe Down in Houston. I looked at my wa
tch. It was five minutes to six.
He was still talking while I looked up the number of the Eastgate Lounge.
“—called him ‘the hippy-dippy from Mississippi, yes indeed, Mister Jimmy Reed,’” he said. “When that cat went into ‘Big Boss Man,’ you knew he’d been on Parchman Farm, son. You don’t fake them kind of feelings. You don’t grow it in New York City, either. You don’t put no mojo in your sounds unless you picked cotton four cents a pound and ate a mess of them good ole butter beans. My daddy said he give up on me, that somebody snuck me into the crib, that I must have been a nigra turned inside out.”
Alafair sat delighted and amazed as she listened to Dixie Lee’s marathon storytelling. I dialed the Eastgate Lounge, then listened to the hum and clatter of noise in the background while a woman called Clete to the phone. I heard him scrape the receiver off a hard surface and place it to his ear.
“Streak?”
“Yep.”
“Did I surprise you? Did you think maybe your old partner had headed for Taco Greaso Land again?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“I don’t rattle, mon. At least not over the shitbags.”
“Maybe you should be careful what you tell me.”
“Do I sound like I’m sweating it? When are you going to stop pretending you still got your cherry?”
“You’re starting to get to me, Clete.”
“What else is new? All I did was save your life today.”
“Is there something you want to say?”