Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

I do not remember Saturday at all. At least twenty-four hours of my life had disappeared, just like a large decayed tooth excised from the gums. Later, the odometer on my truck would show I had driven sixty-three miles I could not account for. When I woke Sunday morning, I was in a cabin that was dry and snug, cool from a breeze that inched along the floor. Through the window was a vast, stump-filled lake dimpled by rain. The sky was gray, and when the wind blew the cypress trees on the far side of the lake, the canopy turned a bright green against the somberness of the day, as though the trees drew their color from the wind.

Inside my head I could hear the original 1946 recording of Harry Choates's "Jolie Blon," the song that will always remain for me the most haunting, unforgettable lament ever recorded. Had I dreamed the song? Had I been with someone who had played it over and over again? I had no idea.

I sat for a long time on the side of the bunk bed in the cabin. The flop hat I wore on fishing trips and my raincoat lay on a chair. My skin had no sensation, as though it had been refrigerated or dry-frozen; my hands were stiff and as thick-feeling as cardboard. I didn't have the shakes or sweats, nor were there nightmarish images painted on the backs of my eyelids. Instead, I felt nothing — no hunger, thirst, or erotic need, neither guilt nor remorse, as though I had simply ceased to exist.

My holstered .45 rested on a table, next to a bottle of Scotch, a paper plate containing the remains of a fried-shrimp dinner, a scattered deck of playing cards, and three empty glasses. The .45 was mine; the rest I had no memory of.

I stood up from the bed, then felt my knees cave and the blood drain from my head. I lay back down, my head buried in a pillow that smelled of unwashed hair, my jaws like emery paper.

I slept until early afternoon, and woke trembling and sick, willing to cut off my fingers one at a time with tin snips for the Scotch I had seen earlier.

Except it was gone.

A Creole woman, with one eye that looked like a milky-blue marble pushed deep into the side of her face, sat on a chair by the door, her feet in flip-flops, her wash-faded print dress puffing from a floor fan under her. "Where you going?" she said.

"To the restroom," I replied.

"There ain't no restroom. The privy's in back. Don't go up to the bar, Mr. Dave."

"How do you know me?"

"I belong to your church in Jeanerette. I see you at Mass every Sunday," she replied. Her face was lopsided, perhaps misshaped at birth. Her good eye held on me just a moment, then looked away.

"Why are you here? Why are you watching me?" I said.

"You had bad men in here. Poachers and men carrying knives. What you doin' to yourself, a Christian man, you?"

I used the outbuilding in back. My truck was parked in a clump of gum trees, the paint and body unmarked by an accident. My credit cards and most of my money were still in my wallet. On the lakefront was a bar nailed together from unpainted scrap wood and corrugated tin. I could hear music inside and through a window see men drinking long-necked beers. The wind shifted, and I could smell the fish in the lake, barbecue grease dripping into an outdoor fire, ozone from another storm building out on the Gulf.

Perhaps it was a happy day after all. Maybe nothing truly bad had happened because of my brief fling with the dirty boogie. Maybe all I needed was a couple of beers to straighten out the kinks, medicate the snakes a bit, whisk the spiders back into a dusty corner. What was wrong with that? I was not sure where I was, but the woods were hung with air vines, the oaks and swamp maples and persimmon trees widely spaced, the coulees layered with yellow and black leaves. It was Louisiana before someone decided to insert it in the grinder.

"Oh, there you are," I heard Molly Boyle say behind me. She and the Chalons family handyman, Andre Bergeron, walked down a leafy knoll on the edge of the lake. "We were watching the alligators in the shallows. How about something to eat?" she said.

She drove with me in the truck back toward New Iberia. Her friend, the black man, followed. At Jeanerette, I saw his car turn off the highway. I had hardly spoken since leaving the fish camp deep in the Atchafalaya Basin. Each time we passed a bar I felt as though a life preserver were being pulled from my grasp. "How'd you know where I was?" I asked.

"The lady who was watching you called me. Her husband owns the bar," she replied.

"Why was the Chalonses' handyman with you?" I said.

"Andre helps me in any way he can. He's always been protective of us," she replied. "Don't be angry, Dave."

"I'm not. I just got jammed up," I said irrationally, my hands tightening on the steering wheel, my breath a noxious fog.

Molly was silent. When I looked over at her, she was staring out the side window. "I'll go to a meeting with you," she said.

"I'd better drop you by your house," I said.

"That's not going to happen, trooper. If you try to pick up a drink today, I'm going to break your arm."

I looked at her again, in a more cautious way.

We drove down East Main toward my house, the nineteenth-century homes and manicured lawns and wet trees rushing past me, all of it curiously unchanged, a study in Sunday-afternoon normalcy and permanence to which I had returned like an impaired outsider. I pulled the truck deep into the driveway, past the porte cochere, so that it was almost hidden from the street by the trees and bamboo. I cut the engine and opened the driver's door. When I did, a shiny compact disk fell to the ground. Just next to the edge was a tiny reddish-brown smear that looked like blood.

"What's that?" Molly said.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what it is." Vainly, I tried to explain to myself where the CD had come from or who could have placed it in my truck. I touched the crusted smear on the surface and was sure I was touching blood. I slipped the CD in my pants pocket and unlocked the back door, my hands shaking.

Even if Molly had not been with me, my home offered no succor for the drunk teetering on the edge of delirium tremens. I had returned all the booze I'd purchased at Winn-Dixie. There was not even a bottle of vanilla extract in a cabinet. But at least my brother was not home and did not have to see me in the condition I was in.