The door to the trailer opened and a woman stepped out on the small porch. But before she could close the door behind her, a voice shouted out, "Goddamnit, I didn't say you could leave. Now, you listen, hon. I don't know if the problem is because your brains are between your legs or because you think you've got a cute twat, but the next time I tell that pissant to rewrite a scene, you'd better not open your mouth. Now you get the fuck back to work and don't you ever contradict me in front of other people again."
Even in the sunlight her face looked refrigerated, bloodless, the lines twisted out of shape with the humiliation that Billy Holtzner bathed her with. He shot an ugly look at Cisco and me, then slammed the door.
I turned to go.
"There's a lot of stress on a set, Dave. We're three million over budget already. That's other people's money we're talking about. Th
ey get mad about it," Cisco said.
"I remember that first film you made. The one about the migrant farmworkers. It was sure a fine movie."
"Yeah, a lot of college professors and 1960s leftovers dug it in a big way."
"The guy in that trailer is a shithead."
"Aren't we all?"
"Your old man wasn't."
I got into the cruiser and drove through the corridor of trees to the bayou road. In the rearview mirror Cisco Flynn looked like a miniature man trapped inside an elongated box.
THAT NIGHT, AS BOOTSIE and I prepared to go to bed, dry lightning flickered behind the clouds and the pecan tree outside the window was stiffening in the wind.
"Why do you think Jack Flynn was killed?" Bootsie asked.
"Working people around here made thirty-five cents an hour back then. He didn't have a hard time finding an audience."
"Who do you think did it?"
"Everyone said it came from the outside. Just like during the Civil Rights era. We always blamed our problems on the outside."
She turned out the light and we lay down on top of the sheets. Her skin felt cool and warm at the same time, the way sunlight does in the fall.
"The Flynns are trouble, Dave."
"Maybe."
"No, no maybe about it. Jack Flynn might have been a good man. But I always heard he didn't become a radical until his family got wiped out in the Depression."
"He fought in the Lincoln Brigade. He was at the battle of Madrid."
"Good night," she said.
She turned toward the far wall. When I spread my hand on her back I could feel her breath rise and fall in her lungs. She looked at me over her shoulder, then rolled over and fit herself inside my arms.
"Dave?" she said.
"Yes?"
"Trust me on this. Megan needs you for some reason she's not telling you about. If she can't get to you directly, she'll go through Clete."
"That's hard to believe."
"He called tonight and asked if I knew where she was. She'd left a message on his answering machine."
"Megan Flynn and Clete Purcel?"
I WOKE AT SUNRISE the next morning and drove through the leafy shadows on East Main and then five miles up the old highway to Spanish Lake. I was troubled not only by Bootsie's words but also by my own misgivings about the Flynns. Why was Megan so interested in the plight of Cool Breeze Broussard? There was enough injustice in the world without coming back to New Iberia to find it. And why would her brother Cisco front points for an obvious psychopath like Swede Boxleiter?