"Oh, yeah, anytime. I always had aspirations to be a bus driver," he said, and went out the door, his eyes flat.
"Who you think is on your side, Breeze?" I said.
"Me."
"I see. Your daddy says you're going to get even. How you going to do that? You know who these guys are, where they live?"
He was sitting in the chair in front of my desk now, looking out the window, his eyes downturned at the corners.
"Did you hear me?" I said.
"You know how come one of them had a raincoat on?" he said.
"He didn't want the splatter on his clothes."
"You know why they left my daddy alive?"
I didn't reply. His gaze was still focused out the window. His hands looked like black starfish on his thighs.
"Long as Mout's alive, I'll probably be staying at his house," he said. "Mout' don't mean no more to them than a piece of nutria meat tied in a crab trap."
"You didn't answer my
question."
"Them two men who killed the white boys out in the Basin? They ain't did that in St. Mary Parish without permission. Not to no white boys, they didn't. And it sure didn't have nothing to do with any black girl they raped in New Iberia."
"What are you saying?"
"Them boys was killed 'cause of something they done right there in St. Mary."
"So you think the same guys are trying to do you, and you're going to find them by causing some trouble over in St. Mary Parish? Sounds like a bad plan, Breeze."
His eyes fastened on mine for the first time, his anger unmasked. "I ain't said that. I was telling you how it work round here. Blind hog can find an ear of corn if you t'row it on the ground. But you tell white folks grief comes down from the man wit' the money, they ain't gonna hear that. You done wit' me now, suh?"
LATE THAT SAME AFTERNOON, an elderly priest named Father James Mulcahy called me from St. Peter's Church in town. He used to have a parish made up of poor and black people in the Irish Channel, and had even known Clete Purcel when Clete was a boy, but he had been transferred by the Orleans diocese to New Iberia, where he did little more than say Mass and occasionally hear confessions.
"There's a lady here. I thought she came for reconciliation. But I'm not even sure she's Catholic," he said.
"I don't understand, Father."
"She seems confused, I think in need of counseling. I've done all I can for her."
"You want me to talk to her?"
"I suspect so. She won't leave."
"Who is she?"
"Her name is Lila Terrebonne. She says she lives in Jeanerette."
Helen Soileau got in a cruiser with me and we drove to St. Peter's. The late sun shone through the stained glass and suffused the interior of the church with a peculiar gold-and-blue light. Lila Terrebonne sat in a pew by the confessional boxes, immobile, her hands in her lap, her eyes as unseeing as a blind person's. An enormous replication of Christ on the cross hung on the adjacent wall.
At the vestibule door Father Mulcahy placed his hand on my arm. He was a frail man, his bones as weightless as a bird's inside his skin.
"This lady carries a deep injury. The nature of her problem is complex, but be assured it's of the kind that destroys people," he said.
"She's an alcoholic, Father. Is that what we're talking about here?" Helen said.