"It ain't your fault, no."
"I helped set up Aaron Crown, Batist. I didn't know it, but I was giving somebody permission to wipe me off the slate, too."
"Who been doing all this, Dave? What we done to them?"
"They're right up there on the Teche. Buford and Karyn LaRose."
His eyes closed and opened as though he were on the edge of sleep or looking at a thought inside his mind.
"It ain't their way," he said.
"Why?"
"Their kind don't never see bad t'ings, Dave. Any black folk on a plantation tell you that. The white folk up in the big house don't ever want to know what happen out in the field or down in the quarters. They got people to take care of that for them."
The nurse and the doctor came through the door and looked at us silently.
"You going to be all right for a while?" I said.
"Sure. They been treating me good," Batist said.
"I'm sorry for this," I said.
He moved his fingers slightly on the sheet and patted the top of my hand as my father might have done.
Clete followed me home and went to sleep in our guest room. I lay in the dark next to Bootsie, with my arm over my eyes, and heard rainwater ticking out of the trees into the beds of leaves that tapered away from the tree trunks. I tried to organize my thoughts, then gave it up and fell asleep when the stars were still out. I didn't wake until after sunrise. The room, the morning itself, seemed empty and stark, devoid of memory, as it used to be when I'd wake from alcoholic blackouts. Then the events of the previous night came back like a slap.
Batist's first reaction when he had seen me in the hospital had been to prevent me from worrying about his pain. He'd had no thought of himself, no desire for revenge, no sense of recrimination toward me or the circumstances that placed him in the path of a sadist like Mookie Zerrang.
I spent ten months in Vietnam and never saw a deliberate atrocity, at least not one committed by Americans. Maybe that was because most of my tour was over before the war really warmed up. I saw a ville after the local chieftain had called in the 105's on his own people, and I saw some Kit Carsons bind the wrists of captured Viet Cong and wrap towels around their faces and pour water onto the cloth a canteen at a time until they were willing to trade their own families for a teaspoon of air. Someone always had an explanation for these moments, one that allowed you to push the images out of your mind temporarily. It was the unnecessary cruelty, the kind that was not even recognized as such, that hung in the mind like an unhealed lesion.
A mental picture postcard that I could never find a proper postage stamp for: The mamasan is probably over seventy. Her dugs are withered, her skin as shriveled as a dried apple's. She and her granddaughter clean hooches for a bunch of marines, wash their clothes, burn the shit barrels at the latrine. Two enlisted men fashion a sign from cardboard and hang it around her neck and pose sweaty and barechested with her while a third marine snaps their photo with a Polaroid camera. The sign says miss north Dakota. If the mamasan comprehends the nature of the insult, it does not show in the cracked parchment of her face. The marines are grinning broadly in the photo.
Voltaire wrote about the cruelty he saw in his neighbor who was the torturer at the Bastille. He described the impulse as insatiable, possessing all the characteristics of both lust and addiction to a drug. Had he not been hired by the state, the neighbor would have paid to continue his tasks in those stone rooms beneath the streets of Paris.
Mookie Zerrang was not simply a hit man on somebody's payroll. He was one of those who operated on the edges of the human family, waiting for the halt and the lame or those who had no voice, his eyes smiling with anticipation when he knew his moment was at hand.
I couldn't swallow my food at breakfast. I went into the living room and finished cleaning the spot on the floor where we had found Batist. I stuffed the throw rug he had lain on and the paper towels I had used to scrub the cypress planks into a vinyl garbage bag
"I'm going down to the bait shop," I said to Bootsie.
"Close it up for today," she replied.
"It's Saturday. There might be a few customers by."
"No, you want to make a private phone call. Do it here. I'll leave," she said.
"We didn't get much sleep, Boots. It's not a day to hurt each other."
"Tell it to yourself."
There was nothing for it. I unlocked the bait shop and dialed Buford LaRose's home number.
"Hello?" Karyn said.
"Where's Buford?"
"In the shower."