Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

His triangular back was corded with muscle, his buttocks small and hard under her palms, his mouth always gentle on her body. From the bed in the caretaker's cottage she could look down the corridor of oaks that gave onto the Teche, the limbs and moss and leaves swelling in the wind, and through the dark trunks she could see the moon catch on the water like a spray of silver coins, and it made her think of a picture she had once seen in a children's book of biblical stories.

The picture was titled the Gates of Eden. As a child she had thought of it as a place of exodus and exclusion. Now, as she held Buford between her legs and pressed him deeper inside, she knew those gates were opening for her.

But in August he began to make excuses. He had to begin early training for the football season, to be asleep early, to go to Baton Rouge for his physical, to meet with coaches from Tulane and Ole Miss and the University of Texas who were still trying to lure him away from L.S.U.

On the last Saturday of the month, a day that he had told her he would be in New Orleans, she saw his convertible parked outside Slick's Club in St. Martinville, with three girls in it, sitting up on the sides, drinking vodka collins that a Negro waiter brought them from inside.

She was in her father's car. One headlight was broken and the passenger window was taped over with cardboard and the body leaked rust at every seam. She drove around the block twice, her hands sweating on the wheel, her heart beating, then she pulled up at an angle to the convertible and got out, her words like broken Popsicle sticks in her throat.

"What?" one of the girls said.

"Where is Buford? You're with Buford, aren't you? This is his car," Sabelle said. But her voice was weak, apart from her, outside of her skin, somehow shameful.

The girls looked at one another.

"Buford the Beautiful?" one of them said. The three of them started to laugh, then looked back at her and fluttered their eyes and blew their cigarette smoke at upward angles into the warm air.

Then a huge, redheaded crewcut boy, his hair stiff as metal with butch wax, with whiskey-flushed cheeks, in a gold and purple L.S.U. T-shirt, erupted out the door of the club with someone behind him.

The crewcut boy, who had been an All-State center at New Iberia High, took one look at Sabelle and turned, his grin as wide and obscene as a jack-o'-lantern's, and held up his palms to the person behind him, saying, "Whoa, buddy! Not the time to go outside. Not unless you want the family jewels on her car aerial."

She saw Buford's face in the neon light, then it was gone.

She couldn't remember driv

ing home that night. She lay in the dark in her bedroom and listened to the frogs in the woods, to her father getting up to urinate, to her neighbor, a trash hauler, crushing tin cans in the bed of his truck. She watched an evangelist preacher on the black-and-white television set in her tiny living room, then a movie about nuclear war. The movie made use of U.S. Army footage that showed the effects of radiation burns on living animals that had been left in pens five hundred yards from an atomic explosion.

As she listened to the bleating of the animals, she wanted everyone in the movie to die. No, that wasn't it. She believed for the first time she understood something about men that she had never understood before, and she wanted to see a brilliant white light ripple across the sky outside her window, burn it away like black cellophane, yes, a perfect white flame that could superheat the air, eat the water out of the bayou, and instantly wither a corridor of oaks that in the moonlight had become biblical gates in a children's book.

But her anger and the relief it gave her melted away to fatigue, and when the dawn finally came it was gray and wet and the rain ran down inside the walls of the house, and when she heard the trash hauler's wife yelling at her children next door, then striking one of them with a belt, viciously, the voice rising with each blow, Sabelle knew that her future was as linear and as well defined as the nailheads protruding from the buckled linoleum at her feet.

I hadn't watched the time. I went to get in my truck and head for Lafayette, but Bootsie's Toyota was parked behind me. I heard her open Alafair's bedroom window behind me.

"Take my car," she said. "I can use the truck."

"See you in Lafayette," I said.

"What's your room number?"

"I don't know. Ask at the desk."

I backed out into the dirt road and looked once again at my truck parked in the opening of the old barn that we used as a garage. I almost went back and got it, but it had been running fine since I had gotten it out of the shop.

And I was running late.

What a bitter line to remember.

CHAPTER 17

Years ago Pinhook Road in Lafayette had been a tree-lined two-lane road that led out of town over the Vermilion River into miles of sugarcane acreage. Just before the steel drawbridge that spanned the river was an antebellum home with arbors of pecan trees in the yard. The river was yellow and high in the spring, and the banks were green and heavily wooded. Feral hogs foraged among the trees. The only businesses along the river were a drive-in restaurant called the Skunk, where college and high school kids hung out, and the American Legion Club on the far side of the bridge, where you could eat blue-point crabs and drink pitcher beer on a screened porch that hung on stilts above the water.

But progress and the developers had their way. The oaks were sawed down, the root systems ground into pulp by road graders, the banks of the river covered with cement for parking lots. Overlooking all this new urban environment was the Hotel Acadiana, where builders and developers and union officials from all over the state had come to pay a three-hundred-dollar-a-plate homage to their new governor.

"Do you hear little piggy feet running toward the trough?" Helen Soileau said. We were standing like posts by one side of the banquet room entrance. A jazz combo was playing inside. Helen kept stoking her own mood.

"What a bunch . . . Did you see Karyn in the bar? I think she's half in the bag," she said.

"I don't think she's entirely comfortable with her new constituency."