Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

When he sat at the bar, which was deserted because of the bad weather, he removed his hat and set it crown-down on the stool next to him. He wiped his glasses with a paper napkin, then forgot they were dry and picked them up and wiped them again, his expression seemingly troubled by a concern or problem he couldn’t resolve. Later the bartender described the man as “handsome, with kind of a ducktail haircut … Likable, I guess, but I wouldn’t make him for no dishware man.”

The man ordered a diet soda and opened a vinyl folder wrapped with rubber bands and filled with invoices of some kind.

“You know a family named Grayson back in the quarters?” he said.

“Cain’t say I do,” the bartender replied.

The man looked down at his invoice folder, widening his eyes, as though bemused. “They live next door to the Dautrieve family,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. Go back up the road till you see some shotgun cabins. The Dautrieves are on the second row,” the bartender said.

“They won a bunch of dishware.”

“Who?”

“The Graysons.” The man held up a brochure with pictures of dishes and cups on it to make his point.

The bartender nodded vaguely. The man with the invoice folder stared into space, as though he saw meaning in the air, in the lightning that trembled in the trees along the bayou. He paid for his diet drink and thanked the bartender and drove up the road, in the opposite direction from the quarters.

It was still raining the next night when Little Face Dautrieve’s aunt left for her janitorial job at the hospital in New Iberia and Little Face changed her baby’s diapers, put a pacifier in his mouth, and lay him down in his crib. The cabin had been built in the last century, but it stayed warm and dry and snug in bad weather. When it rained Little Face liked to open the bedroom window partway and let the breeze blow across the baby’s crib and her bed.

In the middle of the night she thought she heard a truck engine outside and tires crunching on clamshells, then the sound disappeared in the thunder and she fell asleep again.

When she awoke he was standing over her, his formfitting T-shirt molded wetly against his torso. His body had a fecund odor, like water in the bottom of a coulee; a nickel-plated revolver, the handles wrapped with electrician’s tape, hung from his gloved right hand.

“I came in out of the rain,” he said.

“Yeah, you done that. There ain’t no rain in the house,” she replied, raising herself up on her hands, a wishbone breaking in her throat.

“You mind if I stay here? I mean, stay out of the rain?” he asked.

“You here, ain’t you?”

His palm opened and closed on the grips of the pistol, the edges of the tape sticking, popping on his skin. His face was pale, his mouth soft and red in the flashes of lightning outside. He wet his lips and cut his eyes at the window, where mist was drifting across the sill and dampening the baby’s mattress.

The man pushed the window tight and gazed down at the baby, who slept with his rump in the air. A pillow was stuffed into an empty space where one of the wood runners was missing. For some reason, perhaps because of the noise the window made, the baby woke and started to cry. The man pried the pillow loose and kneaded it in his left hand and turned toward Little Face.

“Why’d you get mixed up with a bunch of geeks? Why’d you run your mouth?” the man said. His black hair was combed back neatly on both sides, his skin glistening with water, his navel rising and falling above his jeans.

“Write out a list of the people ain’t geeks. I’ll start hanging ‘round wit’ them,” she replied.

“Make that baby be quiet.”

“You done woke him up. Babies gonna cry when they get woke up.”

“Just shut him up. I can’t think. Why don’t you have a man to take care of you?”

“I can have all the men I want. Trouble is, I ain’t met none I want, including present company.”

He looked at the baby again, then closed and opened his eyes. He took a breath of air through his mouth, holding it, as though he were about to speak. But no sound came out. He folded the pillow around the pistol and held both ends together with his left hand. The rims of his nostrils whitened, as though the temperature had dropped precipitously in the room.

“You make me mad. You’re too dumb to understand what’s happening. Get that look off your face,” he said.

“It’s my house. I ain’t axed you in it. Go back in the rain you don’t like it,” she said quietly.

Then she saw into his eyes and her throat went dry and became constricted like a piece of crimped pipe and she remembered the word “abyss” from a sermon at a church somewhere and she knew now what the word meant. She tried to hold her gaze evenly on his face and stop the sound that thundered in her ears, that made her own words distorted and unintelligible to her.

Her hands knotted the sheet on top of her stomach.