Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“No, baby,” she said.

He released her hand and watched two calico kittens out the window. The kittens raced after each other in a flower bed, their fur a patchwork of color among the elephant ears.

“Why’d you bag out on me?” he said, his eyes still concentrated out the window.

“Bag out on you?”

“In the alley. When the perp told you to boogie, you hoofed it big-time.”

“I called 911. I got help.”

“You didn’t scream. That’s what women always do when they’re at risk. You didn’t do that, Cherry.”

“You think I was in on it?”

“You knew you were safe as long as you didn’t scream. It’s funny how fast people can add up the score when they’re scared.”

She stood motionless for a long moment, her mind back in the alley now, inside the vortex of rain. She saw herself running through the rain puddles that were rainbowed with engine oil, her windpipe constricted, her breasts bouncing shamelessly in her blouse, and she knew what he said was true, and that an even greater, uglier truth was about to surface in her mind, that she was glad it had happened to him and not her.

The house was hot, full of morning sun trapped between the glass and the freshly painted yellowed walls. The electric trains coursing down the tracks, emerging from tunnels, clicking across the switches, seemed to amplify in her head. She made herself look directly into Axel’s face. The jaws and chin line and brow looked like they had been disassembled and then rejoined and sealed together like the sunken and uneven pieces of an earthen pot.

He touched the point of a canine tooth and looked at the spittle on the ball of his finger, just the way he once did right before he hurt a man in a bar. She saw the network of red lines on his face transferred to hers and she wanted to weep.

“I’ll leave, Axel. I mean, if that’s what you want,” she said, and folded her arms suddenly across her chest, gripping her elbows as though she were cold.

He closed and opened his hand and watched the veins pump with blood in his forearm. Then he picked an apple out of a bowl of fruit and began peeling off the skin with a paring knife, watching it curl like a red and white wood shaving over his thumbnail.

“I’m gonna have a lot of money. I think I’m going to South America and start up a business. You can come,” he said.

“Sure, baby,” she said, and she realized she was trembling inside.

“So you go home and think about it. Get in touch with your inner self. Then come back tomorrow and let me know … You want to use the bathroom before you go? You look like maybe you’re gonna have an accident.”

Clete had sublet his apartment from a couple who wanted it back, evidently after the manager had called them in Florida and told them Clete sometimes parked the Cadillac in front with bail skips handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat while he showered and changed clothes or fixed lunch in the apartment. One of the skips yelled out the window for fifteen minutes, announcing to the whole neighborhood that he had to use the bathroom.

On Saturday afternoon Bootsie went to visit her sister in Lafayette and Alafair and I helped Clete move to a tan stucco cottage in a 1930s motor court down Bayou Teche. The motor court was hemmed in by live-oak and banana and palm trees, and toward evening working-class people cooked on barbecue grills outside the cottages. The sunlight off the bayou glowed through the tunnel of trees like the amber radiance of whiskey held up against firelight.

After we finished unloading Clete’s things from my truck, Clete and I tore up the packing cartons and stuffed them in a trash barrel while Alafair put away his kitchen utensils inside.

“I’m gonna get us some po’ boys,” he said.

“We’d better go,” I said.

“Y’all got to eat. Relax, big mon. Cletus is in charge,” he said, then got in his Cadillac and bounced out the drive onto East Main before I could argue.

Alafair walked out of the cottage and looked in both directions. She wore blue-jeans shorts that were rolled high up on her thighs, and a Clorox-stained lavender T-shirt that seemed to hang off the tips of her breasts. A man playing a guitar in front of the cottage next door let his gaze wander over the backs of her legs. I stared at him and he looked away.

“Where’s Clete?” she asked.

“He went for some food.”

She made a pout with her mouth and blew her breath out her nose. “I have a date, Dave.”

“With whom?”

“It’s somebody I go to school with. He doesn’t have two heads. He’s very safe. In fact, he’s gay. How’s that?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way, Alf.”