“Go kill this man. Then we’d know once and for all his death means much more to you than taking care of your own family. We’re a little sick of it, Dave. Just thought you should know,” she said, her voice starting to break, her eyes glistening now.
I tried to clear an obstruction out of my throat. A battered car passed on the road, the windows down, a denim-shirted man behind the wheel, the backseat filled with children and fishing rods. The driver and the children were all laughing at something.
“I’m sorry, kiddo,” I said.
“You should be,” she said.
That night I lay in the dark, sleepless, the trees outside swelling with wind, the canopy in the swamp trembling with a ghostly white light from the lightning in the south. I had never felt more alone in my life. Once again, I burned, in almost a sexual fashion, to wrap my fingers around the grips and inside the steel guard of a heavy, high-caliber pistol, to smell the acrid odor of cordite, to tear loose from all the restraints that bound my life and squeezed the breath from my lungs. And I knew what I had to do.
CHAPTER 24
Later the same night I drove past a deserted sugar mill in the rain and parked my truck on a dead-end paved street in a rural part of St. Mary Parish. I jumped across a ditch running with brown water and cut through a hedge to the stoop of a small house with a tin roof set up on cinder blocks. I slipped a screwdriver around the edge of the door and prized the door away from the jamb, stressing the hinges back against the screws until a piece of wood splintered inside and fell on the linoleum and the lock popped free. I froze in the darkness, expecting to hear movement inside the house, but there was no sound except the rain tinking on the roof and a locomotive rumbling on railway tracks out by the highway. I pushed back the door and walked through the kitchen and into the bedroom of Legion Guidry.
He was sleeping on his back, in a brass bed, the breeze from an oscillating fan ruffling his hair, dimpling the sheet that covered his body. Even though the air outside was cool and sweet smelling from the rain, the air in the bedroom was close and thick with the odor of moldy clothes, unwashed hair, re-breathed whiskey fumes, and a salty, gray smell that had dried into the sheets and mattress.
A blue-black .38 revolver lay on the nightstand. I picked it up quietly and went into the bathroom, then came back out and sat in a chair by the side of the bed. Legion’s jaws were unshaved, but even in sleep his hair was combed and the flesh on his face kept its shape and didn’t sag against the bone. I placed the muzzle of my .45 against his jawbone.
“I suspect you know what this is, Legion. I suspect you know what it can do to the inside of your head, too,” I said.
A slight crease formed across his forehead, but otherwise he showed no recognition of my presence. His eyelids remained closed, his bare chest rising and falling with no irregularity, his hands folded passively on top of the sheet.
“Did you hear me?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
But he used the word “yes,” not “yeah,” as would be the custom of a Cajun man with no education, and I would have sworn there was no accent in his pronunciation.
“Don’t bother looking for your .38,” I said, and opened my left hand and sprinkled the six rounds from the cylinder of his revolver on his chest. “I put your piece in the toilet bowl. I notice you don’t flush after you take a dump.”
He opened his eyes but kept them on the ceiling and did not look at me.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” he asked.
My skin shrunk against my face. His voice sounded like a guttural echo rising through a chunk of sewer pipe, the Cajun accent completely gone.
I started to speak, then felt the words seize in my throat. I pushed the .45 harder into his jaw and caught my breath and tried again. But he cut me off.
“Ask me my name,” he said.
“Your name?” I said dumbly.
“Yes, my name,” he said.
“All right,” I heard myself say, as though I had stepped inside a scenario that someone other than I had written. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Legion,” he replied.
; “Really?” I said, my eyes blinking, my heart racing. “I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.”
But my rhetoric was bravado and I felt my palm sweating on the grips of the .45. I cleared my throat and widened my eyes, like a man trying to stretch sleep out of his face. “Here it is, Legion,” I said. “I’m a recovering drunk. That means I can’t hold resentments against people, even a piece of human flotsam like you, no matter what they’ve done to me. This may seem like I’m pulling a mind-fuck on you, but what I’m telling you is straight up. You’re going down, as deep in the shitter as I can put you, but it’ll be by the numbers.”
I blew air out of my nostrils and wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist.
“Afraid?” he said.
“Not of you.”