“Thank you,” I replied.
“Where’d you go last night?” she asked.
“To set some things straight.”
She nodded.
“Why do you ask?” I said.
“I thought maybe you’d gone to a bar. I thought maybe I’d caused you to do that,” she replied.
“You would never do that, Alf. It’s not in your nature.”
She rested her arm across Tex’s withers and looked down the slope at the bait shop.
“I think going away to school isn’t a good idea,” she said.
“Why not?”
“We can’t afford it,” she replied.
“Sure we can,” I lied.
She inserted a booted foot in the left stirrup and swung up in the saddle. She looked down at me, then tousled my hair with her fingers.
“You’re a cute guy for a dad,” she said.
I popped Tex on the flank so that he spooked sideways. But Alafair, as always, was not to be outdone by the manipulations of others. She kicked her heels into Tex’s ribs and bolted through the yard, ducking under branches, thundering across the wooden bridge over our coulee and out into our neighbor’s sugarcane field, her Indian-black hair flying in the wind, her jeans and cactus-embroidered shirt stitched to her hard, young body.
I told myself I would not allow Legion Guidry and the evil he represented to hold any more claim on my life. In the damp, sun-spangled enclosure among the trees, I was convinced no force on earth could cause me to break my resolution.
Later, at the office, Wally walked down the corridor from the dispatcher’s cage and opened my door and leaned inside. “That soldier, the nutjob, the one who claimed he knew you in Vietnam?” he said.
“What about him?” I asked.
“He’s hanging around New Iberia High. They’ve got summer-school classes in session now. One of the teachers called and says they want him out of there.”
“What’d he do?”
“She said he’s got all his junk piled up on the sidewalk and he tries to make conversation with the kids when they walk by.”
“I think he’s harmless,” I said.
“Could be,” Wally replied. His hair was a coppery-reddish color, his sideburns neatly defined. His eyes were bright with an unspoken statement.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You check your mail this morning?”
“No.”
“If you had, you might have seen a note I put in there late yesterday. We got a complaint he was bothering a couple of hookers over on Railroad. On the same corner where Linda Zeroski used to work.”
“Thanks, Wally,” I said.
“Any time. Wish I could be a detective. You guys got all the smarts and stay on top of everything while us grunts clean the toilets. You think I could sharpen up my smarts if I went to night school?” he said.
I checked out a cruiser and drove to the high school. I saw the ex-soldier sitting in a shady spot on his rolled-up tent, his back propped against a fence, watching the traffic roar by. His face was clean-shaved, his hair washed and cut, and he wore a pair of new jeans and an oversize T-shirt emblazoned front and back with an American flag.