"Yesterday . . . I took Dock Green out there."
His swivel chair creaked when he leaned back in it. His teeth made a clicking sound on the stem of his dead pipe.
At dawn the next morning I cut the gas on my outboard engine north of the LaRose plantation and let the aluminum boat float sideways in the current, past the barbed wire fenceline that
extended into the water and marked the edge of Buford's property. The sun was an orange smudge through the hardwood trees, and I could hear horses nickering beyond the mist that rose out of the coulee. I used a paddle to bring the boat out of the current and into the backwater, the cattails sliding off the bow and the sides, then I felt the metal bottom bite into silt.
I could see the black marble crypt and the piked iron fence that surrounded it at the top of the slope, the silhouette of a state trooper who was looking in the opposite direction, a roan gelding tossing its head and backing out of spiderwebs that were spread between two persimmon trunks.
Part of the coulee had caved in, and the runoff had washed over the side and eroded a clutch of wide rivulets in the shape of a splayed hand, down the embankment to the bayou's edge. I pushed the paddle hard into the silt and watched the trees, the palmettos, a dock and boathouse, and the pine-needle-covered, hoof-scarred floor of the woods drift past me.
Then I saw it, in the same way your eye recognizes mortality in a rain forest when birds lift suddenly off the canopy or the wind shifts and you smell an odor that has always lived like a dark thought on the edge of your consciousness.
But in truth it wasn't much—a series of dimples on the slope, grass that was greener than it should have been, a spray of mushrooms with poisonous skirts. Maybe my contention with the LaRoses had broached the confines of obsession. I slipped one of the oar locks, tied a handkerchief through it, and tossed it up on the bank.
Then I drifted sideways with the current into the silence of the next bend, yanked the starter rope, and felt the engine's roar reverberate through my palm like a earache.
At sunset I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did a mile and a half to the drawbridge, waved at the bridge tender, and turned back toward home, the air like a cool flame on my skin. Ahead of me I saw a Buick pull to the side of the road and park, the front window roll down, then the door open halfway. Jerry Joe remained seated, his arms propped in the window as though he were leaning on a bar, a can of Budweiser in one hand, a pint of whiskey in the other. He looked showered and fresh, and he wore a white suit with an open-collar lavender shirt. A flat cardboard box lay on the leather seat next to him.
"You gonna bust me for an open container?" he said.
"It's a possibility."
"I'm sorry about getting in your face yesterday."
"Forget it."
"You remember my mother?"
"Sure."
"She used to make me go to confession all the time. I hated it. She was a real coonass, you know, and she'd say, 'You feel guilty about you done something to somebody, Jerry Joe, you gonna try to pretend you don't know that person no more 'cause he gonna make you remember who you are and the bad thing you done, or maybe you're gonna try to hurt him, you. So that's why you gotta go to confess, you.'"
He tilted the bottle and threaded a thin stream of bourbon into the opening of his beer can. Then he drank from the can, the color in his eyes deepening.
"Yes?" I said.
"People like Karyn and Buford reinvent themselves. It's like my mother said. They don't want mirrors around to remind them of what they used to be."
"What can I do for you, partner?"
"I ain't lily white. I've been mixed up with the LaRose family a long time. But the deal going down now . . . I don't know . . . It ain't just the money . . . It bothers me."
"Tell somebody about it, Jerry Joe. Like your mom said." I tried to smile.
He reached around behind him and picked up the cardboard box from the seat. "I brought you something belongs to you. It was still buried behind the old house."
I rested the box on the window and lifted the top. The hand crank to our old phonograph lay in the middle of a crinkled sheet of white wrapping paper. The metal was deformed and bulbous with rust, and the wood handle had been eaten by groundwater.
"So I returned your property and I got no reason to be mad at you," he said. He was smiling now. He closed his car door and started his engine.
"Stay on that old-time R&B," I said.
"I never been off it."
I walked the rest of the way home. The sun was gone now and the air was damp and cold, and the last fireflies of the season traced their smoky red patterns in the shadows.
CHAPTER 23