“You heard me. You look my daughter in the face and you apologize, you sonofabitch, before I do something awful.”
Bertrand walked to Otis’s car and stood in front of the passenger door, his back to Otis, blocking Otis’s view of his daughter’s face. While he spoke, Bertrand’s arms were folded on his chest, his head turned to one side. In silhouette, his body looked like it had no arms, like a wood post painted on the air. On the far side of the street, a dog was trying to dig something loose from a pile of smoldering garbage.
Bertrand turned away from the car and walked past Otis toward the front door of the house. He was wiping his nose with the back of his wrist.
“You come here,” Otis said.
“What for?”
“Did you hear me?” Otis said. He fitted his hand under Bertrand’s arm, almost lifting him into the air.
“What you want from me? I done all I could do,” Bertrand said. “If them men who killed Andre and tortured Eddy get their hands on my auntie and grandmother, what you think is gonna happen to them? You tell me that, Mr. Baylor.”
The question Bertrand had asked was legitimate: What did Otis want? To somehow give new life to the spiritual cancer that had fed at his father’s heart? To use his daughter’s suffering to justify beating a man bloody with his fists?
“Daddy?” he heard Thelma say behind him.
He turned and stared into her face.
“Daddy, it’s all right. Let him go,” she said.
“Honey—” he began.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
She took his big hand in both of hers and smiled at him. “Come on, Daddy, we’re finished here,” she said.
Bertrand Melancon remained stationary in the yard as they drove away. He was not sure what had happened between Otis Baylor and his daughter or what he should do next. In fact, he was not sure about anything. He wondered if his grandmother’s soup had grown cold. He wondered if his auntie and grandmother had any idea of the crimes he had committed. He wondered if his mother was still alive someplace and if she ever thought about him or Eddy. He wondered why every event that had transpired in his life was not what he had planned.
How could that be? he asked himself. For just a moment, he wondered if the priest he had killed could give him an answer. That thought set his stomach on fire and caused him to spit blood in his auntie’s yard. Chapter 29
T HE PROBLEM WITH an adrenaline high, unlike one driven by booze, is that you cannot sustain it. When the heart-thundering rush subsides, when the clean smell of ignited cordite is blown away by the wind, you find yourself in the same kind of dead zone that a drunkard lives in. You wake in the morning to white noise that is like a television set turned up full volume on an empty screen. The streets seem empty, the sky brittle, the air stained with industrial odors you do not associate with morning. The sun is white overhead, the way a flashbulb is white, and the trees offer neither birdsong nor shade. Whatever you touch has a sharp edge to it, and ineptitude and remorse seem to wrap themselves around all your thoughts. The world has become an unforgiving prison where the images from a mistaken moment have not disappeared with sleep and instead pursue you wherever you go. You spend your time rationalizing and justifying and eventually you take on the persona of someone you don’t recognize. It’s like stepping around a corner onto a street on which there are no other people. It’s not an experience you come back from easily.
Monday morning Helen came into my office and sat down across from me. “You feeling okay, bwana?”
“Right as rain,” I replied.
I could hear her chewing gum, her jaws working steadily.
“Why do you figure Bobby Mack Rydel came after you?”
“Bledsoe was behind it. He played Rydel just like he plays everybody.”
“You’re sure you didn’t see Bledsoe in the Humvee up on the levee?”
I knew what she wanted me to say.
“I didn’t see the guy in the Humvee,” I said.
>
“Too bad. Look, you’re supposed to be on the desk till IA clears the shoot, but we should have that out of the way by close of business. We need Bledsoe in a cage. I’m with you on this one, Streak. I don’t care how we do it. This creep has spit on us again and again and gotten away with it. Let’s run at it from a different angle.”
“How?”
“Who was it who said, ‘When people say this is not about money, it’s about money’?”
“H. L. Mencken.”