Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"That I'd better not hurt him?"

He waited for an answer but I didn't give him one. I fitted on my sunglasses and walked back to the cruiser, my shoes crunching through the leaves the doctor had raked into piles, only to see them blown apart by the wind. The doctor's wife emerged from the front door, wearing a house robe and slippers, a drink in her hand, the makeup on her face like a theatrical mask.

"You think I care about that boy? You think that's what this is about? Where are your brains, man?" the doctor shouted after me.

The following evening I ate supper in the backyard, then went to the old cemetery by the drawbridge in St. Martinville where Bootsie was buried. The air was cold and smelled of distant rain, the sky yellow with dust blown from the fields. Several of the houses bordering the cemetery had signs on the galleries announcing TOMB PAINT FOR SALE. In south Louisiana we bury the dead on top of the ground and it's a tradition to whitewash the crypts of family members on All Saints Day. But it wasn't November yet. Or was it? I had to look at the calendar window on my watch to assure myself the month was still October.

Bootsie's crypt was located by the bayou, and standing next to it I

could look downstream and see on the opposite bank the ancient French church and the Evangeline Oak where she and I had first kissed as teenagers and the stars overhead had swirled like diamonds inside a barrel of black water.

I removed the three roses I had placed in a vase two nights previous and washed and refilled the vase under a tap by the gravel path that led through the cemetery. Then I put three fresh roses in the vase and set it in front of the marble marker that was cemented into the front of Bootsie's crypt. The roses were yellow, the petals edged with pink, the stems wrapped in green tissue paper by a young clerk at the Winn-Dixie store in New Iberia. When he handed me the roses I was struck by the bloom of youth on his face, the clarity of purpose in his eyes. "I bet these are for a special lady," he had said.

I sat on a metal bench with a ventilated backrest for a long time and drank a bottle of carbonated water I had brought from home. Then the wind came up and scattered the leaves from a swamp maple on the bayou's surface, and inside the sound of the wind I thought I heard a loon calling.

I finished the bottle of carbonated water, screwed the top back on, and pitched the bottle at a trash barrel. But the bottle bounced on the rim of the barrel and fell on the gravel path. Rather than get up from the bench and retrieve it, I looked at it dumbly, all my energies dissipated for reasons that made no sense, the light as cold and brittle as if the sun were layered with ice.

I heard footsteps behind me.

"I wasn't going to disturb you but I have to get back home," Theo-dos ha Flannigan said.

"Pardon?" I said.

"Your neighbor told me you'd be here if you weren't at home," she said. "I was parked in my car, waiting for you to come out. Merchie doesn't know where I am. He ducks bullets in Afghanistan, then gets strung out if he breaks a shoelace. It's because of his mother. I think she was lobotomized. That's not a joke."

I couldn't follow what she was saying. I started to get up, but she put her hand on my shoulder and sat down beside me.

"It's about Saturday night. Those two children were in danger of falling in the pond and I just stood there and watched it happening. I feel like shit," she said.

" "Bravery' and 'fear' are relative terms. What counts is you went after them," I said.

"I have some bad memories about that pond," she said. She bit on a hangnail and stared into space. "I never go inside that fence. You must think I'm an awful person."

But the truth was I didn't want to talk about Theo's personal problems. I stood and picked up the plastic bottle that had bounced off the trash can and dropped it inside. When I sat back down I felt the blood rush from my head.

"Are you okay?" she said.

"I still have bouts with malaria sometimes," I said.

She wore a scarf tied under her chin, the points of her hair pressed flat against her cheeks. "Something else is bothering me, too, Dave. I think I make you uncomfortable," she said.

"No, that's not true. Not at all," I said, focusing my eyes on the bayou.

"That night we had the little fling? We'd both been drinking our heads off. Neither one of us was married at the time. I admit I thought you might come back aroun

d, but you didn't. So I wrote it off. It's no big deal."

"You're right, it's no big deal. I didn't say it was a big deal," I replied.

"Then why are you so "

"It's not a problem. That's really important to understand here," I said.

"I'm afraid I've intruded upon you."

"No, you haven't. Everything is fine. Give Merchie my best."

"Will you come out to dinner?"