Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"Hank's in a union for stagehands in the movie business, Davy. Maybe we going out to Hollywood and start a new life there," she said.

The loudspeakers in the trees were playing "One O'clock Jump," and through the windows in the bar I could see couples jitterbugging, spinning, flinging each other back and forth. Hank tipped his bottle of Jax beer to his lips and took a light sip, his eyes focused on nothing. But when a blond woman in a flowered dress and purple hat walked across his gaze, I saw his eyes touch on her body like a feather, then go empty again.

"But maybe you gonna have to stay with your aunt just a little while," my mother said. "Then I'm gonna send for you. You gonna ride the Sunset Limited to Hollywood, you."

My mother went inside the bowling alley to use the rest room. The trees were glowing with the white flood lamps mounted on the branches, the air roaring with the music of Benny Goodman's orchestra. The blond woman in the flowered dress and purple hat walked to our table, a small glass of beer in one hand. The butt of her cigarette was thick with lipstick.

"How's the war hero?" she said.

He took another sip from his bottle of Jax and picked up a package of Lucky Strikes from the table and removed a cigarette gingerly by the tip and placed it in his mouth, never looking at the woman.

"My phone number's the same as it was last week. I hope nothing's been hard in your life," she said.

"Maybe I'll call you sometime," he replied.

"No need to call. You can come whenever you want," she said. When she grinned there was a red smear on her teeth.

"I'll keep it in mind," he said.

She winked and walked away, the cleft in her buttocks visible through the thinness of her dress. Hank opened a penknife and began cleaning his nails.

"You got something to say?" he asked me.

"No, sir."

"That woman there is a whore. You know what a whore is, Davy?"

"No." There was a glaze of starch on his khaki thigh. I could smell an odor like heat and soap and sweat that came from inside his shirt.

"It means she's not fit to sit down with your mother," he said. "So I don't want you talking about what you just heard. If you do, you'd best be gone when I come over."

Three days later my aunt and I s

tood on the platform at the train station and watched my mother and Hank climb aboard the Sunset Limited. They disappeared through the vestibule, then she came back and hugged me one more time.

"Davy, it ain't gonna be long. They got the ocean out there and movie stars and palm trees everywhere. You gonna love it, you," she said. Then Hank pulled her hand, and the two of them went into the observation car, their faces opaque now, like people totally removed from anything recognizable in their lives. Behind my mother's head I could see mural paintings of mesas and flaming sunsets.

But she didn't send for me, nor did she write or call. Three months later a priest telephoned collect from Indio, California, and asked my father if he could wire money for my mother's bus ticket back to New Iberia.

For years I dreamed of moonscape and skeletal trees along a railroad bed where white wolves with red mouths lived among the branches. When the Sunset Limited screamed down the track, the wolves did not run. They ate their young. I never discussed the dream with anyone.

* * *

TWENTY-SIX

A PSYCHOLOGIST WOULD PROBABLY agree that unless a person is a sociopath, stuffed guilt can fill him with a level of neurotic anxiety that is like waiting for a headsman in a cloth hood to appear at the prison door.

I didn't know if Alex Guidry was a sociopath or not, but on Monday Helen and I began tightening a couple of dials on his head.

We parked the cruiser at the entrance to his home and watched him walk from his bunkerlike brick house to the garage and open the garage door, simultaneously looking in our direction. He drove down the long shell drive to the parish road and slowed by the cruiser, rolling down his window on its electric motor. But Helen and I continued talking to each other as though he were not there. Then we made a U-turn and followed him to the finance company his wife's family owned in town, his eyes watching us in the rearview mirror.

Decades back the wife's father had made his way through the plantation quarters every Saturday morning, collecting the half-dollar payments on burial policies that people of color would give up food, even prostitute themselves, in order to maintain. The caskets they were buried in were made out of plywood and cardboard and crepe paper, wrapped in dyed cheesecloth and draped with huge satin bows. The plots were in Jim Crow cemeteries and the headstones had all the dignity of Hallmark cards. But as gaudy and cheap and sad as it all was, the spaded hole in the ground and the plastic flowers and the satin ribbons that decorated the piled dirt did not mark the entrance to the next world but the only level of accomplishment the dead could achieve in this one.

The Negro burial insurance business had passed into history and the plantation quarters were deserted, but the same people came with regularity to the finance company owned by the wife's family and signed papers they could not read and made incremental loan payments for years without ever reducing the principal. A pawnshop stood next door, also owned by the wife's family. Unlike most businesspeople, Guidry and his inlaws prospered most during economic recession.

We parked behind his car and watched him pause on the sidewalk and stare at us, then go inside.

A moment later a brown Honda, driven by a tall man in a gray suit, pulled to the curb, on the wrong side of the street, and parked bumper to bumper in front of Guidry's car. The driver, who was a DEA agent named Minos Dautrieve, got out and met us on the sidewalk in front of the finance company's glass doors. His crew-cut blond hair was flecked with white threads now, but he still had the same tall, angular good looks that sports photographers had loved when he played forward for LSU and was nicknamed "Dr. Dunkenstein" after he sailed through the air and slammed the ball so hard through the rim he shattered the backboard like hard candy.