He started to wipe down the counter, then flipped his rag into the bucket.
"They ain't nothing for it, is they?" he said.
"Beg your pardon?"
"They out there, they in here. Don't nobody listen to me," he said, and waved his arm toward the screened windows, the floodlighted bayou, the black wall of shadows on the far bank. "It ain't never gonna be like it use to. What for we brought all this here, Dave?"
He turned his back to me and began dropping the board shutters on the windows and latching them from the inside.
CHAPTER 19
early saturday morning I made coffee and fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and blueberries in the bait shop and ate breakfast by myself at the counter and watched the sun rise over the swamp. It had rained, then cleared during the night, and the bayou was yellow with mud and the dock slick with rainwater. A week ago Jerry Joe's vending machine company had delivered a working replica of a 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox while I wasn't in the shop; it sat squat and heavy in the corner, its plastic casing marbled with orange and red and purple light, the rows of 45 rpm records arrayed in a shiny black semicircle inside the viewing glass. I had resolved to have Jerry Joe's people remove it.
I still hadn't made the phone call.
I punched Jimmy Clanton's "Just a Dream," Harry Choates's 1946 recording of "La Jolie Blon," Nathan Abshire's "Pine Grove Blues."
Their voices and music were out of another era, one that we thought would never end. But it did, incrementally, in ways that seemed inconsequential at the time, like the unexpected arrival at the front gate of a sun-browned oil lease man in khaki work clothes who seemed little different from the rest of us.
I unplugged the jukebox from the wall. The plastic went dead and crackled like burning cellophane in the silence of the room.
Then I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana library in Lafayette.
Buford's bibliography was impressive. He had published historical essays on the Knights of the White Camellia and the White League and the violent insurrection they had led against the federal occupation after the War Between the States. The articles were written in the neutral and abstruse language of academic journals, but his sentiments were not well disguised: the night riders who had lynched and burned had their roles forced upon them.
His other articles were in psychological and medical journals. They seemed to be diverse, with no common thread, dealing with various kinds of phobias and depression as well as hate groups that could not tolerate a pluralistic society.
But in the last five years he seemed to have changed his professional focus and begun writing about the science of psychopharma-cology and its use in the cure of alcoholics.
I returned the magazines and journals to the reference desk and was about to leave. But it wasn't quite yet noon, and telling myself I had nothing else to do, I asked the librarian for the student yearbooks from the early 1970s, the approximate span when Karyn LaRose attended U.S.L.
She hadn't been born into Buford's LaRose's world. Her father had been a hard-working and likable man who supplied gumballs and novelties, such as plastic monster teeth and vampire fingernails, for dimestore vending machines. The family lived in a small frame house on the old St. Martinville road, and the paintless and desiccated garage that fronted the property was rimmed along the base with a rainbow of color from the gumballs that had rotted inside and leaked through the floor. If you asked Karyn what her father did for a living, she always replied that he was in the retail supply business.
Most of us who attended U.S.L. came from blue-collar, French-speaking families or could not afford to attend L.S.U. or Tulane. Most of us commuted from outlying parishes, and as a result the campus was empty and quiet and devoid of most social life on the weekends.
But not for Karyn. She made the best of her situation, and her name and photograph appeared again and again in the yearbooks that covered her four years at U.S.L. She made the women's tennis team and belonged to a sorority and the honor society; she was a maid of honor to the homecoming queen one year, and homecoming queen the next. In her photographs her face looked modest and radiant, like that of a person who saw only goodness and promise in the world.
I was almost ready to close the last yearbook and return the stack to the reference desk when I looked again at a group photograph taken in front of Karyn's sorority house, then scanned the names in the cutline.
The coed on the end of the row, standing next to Karyn, was Persephone Giacano. Both of them were smiling, their shoulders and the backs of their wrists touching.
I began to look for Persephone's name in other yearbooks. I didn't find it. It was as though she had appeared for one group photograph in front of the sorority house, then disappeared from campus life.
The administration building was still open. I used the librarian's phone and called the registrar's office.
"We have a Privacy Act, you know?" the woman
who answered said.
"I just want to know which years she was here," I said.
"You're a police officer?"
"That's correct."
I heard her tapping on some computer keys.
"Nineteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-three," she said.