“That guy’s dirty. I don’t know what for, but he’s dirty.” Then he said, “You think his grandfather really sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson?”
“Maybe. I remember he was a boxer.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was lynched in Mississippi,” I said.
But our evening at the club owned by Jimmy Dean Styles and Little Albert Babineau wasn’t over. As Clete and I walked toward my truck, we heard the angry voices of two men behind us, the voices of others trying to restrain or pacify them. Then Tee Bobby and Jimmy Dean Styles burst out the back door into the parking lot, with a balloon of people following them.
There was a smear of blood and saliva on Tee Bobby’s mouth. He swung at Styles’s face and missed, and Styles pushed him down on the oyster shells.
“Touch me again, I’m gonna mess you up. Now haul your freight down the road,” Styles said.
Tee Bobby got to his feet. His slacks were torn, his knees lacerated. He ran at Styles, his arms flailing. Styles set himself and hooked Tee Bobby in the jaw and dropped him as though he had used a baseball bat.
Tee Bobby got to his feet again and stumbled toward the crowd, swinging at anyone who tried to help him. One of his shoes was gone and his belt had come loose, exposing the elastic of his underwear.
“You’re one sorry-ass, pitiful nigger,” Styles said, and fitted his hand over Tee Bobby’s face and shoved him backward into the crowd.
Tee Bobby reached in his pocket and flicked open a switchblade knife, but I doubted he had any idea whom he was going to use it on or even where he was. I started toward him.
“Mistake, Dave,” I heard Clete say.
I came up behind Tee Bobby and grabbed him around the neck and twisted his wrist. There was little strength in his arm and the knife tinkled on the oyster shells. Then he began to fight, as a girl might, with his elbows and nails and feet. I locked my arms around him and carried him down the bank, through the trees, onto a dock, and flung him as far as I could into the bayou.
He went under, then burst to the surface in a cloud of mud and slapped at the water with both hands until his feet gained the bottom. He slipped and splashed through the shallows, grabbing the stems of elephant ears for purchase, his hair and body strung with dead vegetation.
Then, as the crowd from the nightclub flowed down the bank, someone switched on a flood lamp in the trees, burning away the darkness like a phosphorus flare, lighting me and Tee Bobby Hulin like figures frozen in a photograph of a waterside baptism.
At the edge of the crowd I saw Joe Zeroski and his niece Zerelda. Joe’s face was incredulous, as though he had just walked into an open-air mental asylum. Clete lit a cigarette and rubbed the heel of his hand on his temple.
“I don’t listen to you? Dave, you just threw a black man in the bayou while two hundred of his relatives watched. Way to go, big mon,” he said.
I sat in the sheriff’s office early the next morning. He was generally a quiet, avuncular man, looking forward to his retirement and the free time he would have to spend with his grandchildren. He did not contend with either the world or mortality, did not grieve upon the wrongs of his fellowman, and possessed a Rotarian view of both charity and business and saw one as a natural enhancement of the other. But sometimes on a wintry day I would catch him gazing out the window, a liquid glimmer in his eyes, and I knew he was back in his youth, on a long, white road that wound between white hills that were rounded like women’s breasts, the road lined with chained-up Marine Corps six-bys and marching men whose coats and boots and steel pots were sheathed with snow. He had just finished a phone conversation with the chief of police in St. Martinville. He opened the blinds on the window and stared at the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery for a long time, his shoulders erect to compensate for the way his stomach protruded over his belt. His face was slightly flushed, his small mouth pinched. He removed his suit coat and placed it on the back of his chair, then brushed at the fabric as an afterthought but did not sit down. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red veins. I could hear him breathing in the silence.
“You went out of your jurisdiction and made a bunch of people mad in St. Martinville. I can live with that. But you’ve deliberately involved Clete Purcel in department business. That’s something I won’t put up with, my friend,” he said.
“Clete gave me a lead I didn’t have.”
“I got a call earlier from Joe Zeroski. You know what he said? ‘This is how you guys solve cases? Fire up the cannibals?’ I couldn’t think of an adequate reply. Why are you still following Tee Bobby Hulin around?”
“I’m not convinced of his guilt.”
“Who died and made you God, Dave? Tell Purcel he’s not welcome in Iberia Parish.”
I focused my gaze on a neutral space, my face empty.
“You AA guys have an expression, don’t you, something about not carrying another person’s load? How’s it go? You’ll break your own back without making the other person’s burden lighter?” the sheriff said.
“Something like that.”
“Why go to meetings if you don’t listen to what people say at them?” he said.
“Clete thinks Jimmy Dean Styles might be a predator,” I said.
“Go back to your office, Dave. One of us has a thinking disorder.”
Later in the morning I passed the district attorney’s office and saw Barbara Shanahan inside, talking to the young salesman who had dragged a suitcase filled with Bibles and encyclopedias and what he termed “family-type magazines” into my bait shop. What was the name? Oates? That was it, Marvin Oates. He was sitting in a wood chair, bending forward attentively, his eyes crinkling at something Barbara was saying. I saw him again at noon when I was stopped by the traffic light at the four corners up on the Loreauville Road; this time he was pulling his suitcase on a roller skate up a street in a rural black slum by Bayou Teche. He tapped on the screen door of a clapboard shack that was propped up on cinder blocks. A meaty black woman in a purple dress opened the door for him, and h