"I never bet on anything human," he said. "Come inside. I got to get a Pepto or something. Purcel's making me sick."
The pine walls of his front room were hung with the stuffed heads of antelope and deer. A marlin was mounted above the fireplace, its lacquered skin synthetic-looking and filmed with dust. On a long bookshelf was a line of jars filled with the pickled, yellowed bodies of rattlesnakes and cottonmouth moccasins, a hairless possum, box turtles, baby alligators, a nutria with its paddlelike feet webbed against the glass.
Dock went into the kitchen and came back with a beer in his hand. He offered me nothing. Behind him I saw his wife, one of the Giacano women, staring at me, hollow-eyed, her raven hair pulled back in a knot, her skin as white as bread flour.
"Purcel gets under my skin," Dock said.
"Why?"
"Same reason you do."
"Excuse me?"
"You make a guy for crazy, you think you can drop some coins in his slot, turn him into a monkey on a wire. The truth is, I've been down in a place where your eye sockets and your ears and your mouth are stuffed with mud, where there ain't any sound except the voices of dead people inside your head . . . You learn secrets down there you don't ever forget."
"I was over there, too, Dock. You don't have a franchise on the experience."
"Not like I was. Not even in your nightmares." He drank from his beer can, wiped his mouth on the inside of his wrist. His eyes seemed to lose interest in me, then his face flexed with an idle thought, as though a troublesome moth had swum into his vision.
"Why don't you leave me alone and go after that Klansman before he gets the boons stoked up again. At least if he ain't drowned. We got enough race trouble in New Orleans as it is," he said.
"Who are you talking about?"
He looked at me for a long moment, his face a bemused psychodrama, like a metamorphic jigsaw puzzle forming and reforming itself.
"That guy Crown, the one you were defending on TV, he jumped into the Mississippi this morning," he said. "Your shit machine don't have a radio?"
He drank from his beer can and looked at me blankly over the top of it.
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS RAINING AND DARK THE NEXT MORNING when Clete let me off in front of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department, then made an illegal U-turn into the barbecue stand across the street. Lightning had hit the department's building earlier, knocking out all the electricity except the emergency lights. When I went into the sheriff's office, he was standing at his window, in the gloom, with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking across the street.
"Why's Purcel in town?" he asked.
"A couple of days' fishing."
"So he drives you to work?"
"My truck's in the shop."
"He's a rogue cop, Dave."
"Too harsh, skipper."
"He has a way of writing his name with a baseball bat. That's not going to happen here, my friend."
"You made your point, sir," I said.
"Good."
Then he told me about yesterday's events at Angola and later at a sweet potato farm north of Morganza.
Aaron Crown had vomited in his cell, gone into spasms on the floor, like an epileptic during a seizure or a man trying to pass gallstones. He was put in handcuffs and leg chains and placed in the front seat of a van, rather than in the back, a plastic sick bag in his lap, and sent on his way to the infirmary, with a young white guard driving.
The guard paid little attention, perhaps even averted his eyes, when Aaron doubled over with another coughing spasm, never seeing the bobby pin that Aaron had hidden in his mouth and that he used to pick one manacle loose from his left wrist, never even thinking of Aaron as an escape risk within the rural immensity of the farm, nor as an inmate whose hostility and violence would ever become directed at a white man.
Not until they rounded a curve by the river and Aaron's left arm wrapped around the guard's neck and Aaron's right fist, the loose handcuff whipping from the wrist, smashed into the guard's face and splintered his jawbone.