“My name’s Alafair. If you don’t want to call me that, why didn’t you give me another name?”
“Take the truck. I can get a ride with Clete,” I said.
She raised her chin and tapped her foot and put her hands on her hips and looked at the barbecue smoke drifting in the trees. “It’s not that big a deal,” she said.
I shook my head and walked out to the street and waited for Clete. He turned into the motor court, cut his engine, then walked back to the entrance and looked up East Main.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’d swear somebody was watching me with binoculars from the Winn-Dixie parking lot,” he said.
“Who?”
“You got me. I circled around to get a look and he’d taken off.”
“Have you messed with Ritter or this guy Jennings again?” I said.
“I figure Jennings already got his. I’ll catch up with Ritter down the road.”
We walked back to the cottage, but he kept glancing over his shoulder.
“Alafair, take the truck on home, would you?” I said.
“Just stop telling me what to do, please,” she said.
Clete raised his eyebrows and glanced upward at the mockingbirds in the trees as though he’d suddenly developed an interest in ornithology.
“Y’all want to eat on that table by the water?” he said, and lifted a sack of po’ boys and a six-pack of Dr Pepper out of the Cadillac, an unlit Lucky Strike hanging from his mouth. He waited until Alafair was out of earshot, put the cigarette behind his ear, and said, “Tell me, Streak, if I quit the juice and start going to meetings, can I enjoy the kind of serenity you do?”
While we ate at a table among a cluster of pine trees, a tall, sinewy man in a small red Japanese station wagon drove farther south of town, crossed a drawbridge, then followed the road back up the Teche to a grassy slope directly opposite the motor court.
He pulled his car down the slope and parked by a canebrake and walked down to the water’s edge with a fishing rod and a bait bucket and a folding canvas chair that he flopped open and sat upon.
An elderly black man who had caught no fish was walking up the slope to the road. He glanced into the tall man’s face, then looked away quickly, hiding the shock he hoped had not registered in his own face.
The tall man seemed disconcerted, vaguely irritated or angry that someone had looked at him. He gazed at his bobber floating among the lily pads, his back to the black man, and said, as though speaking to the bayou, “You have any luck?”
“Not a bit. Water too high,” the black man said.
The tall man nodded and said nothing more, and the black man gained the road and walked toward the distant outline of the house where he lived.
It was dusk now. Across the bayou, Clete Purcel lighted a chemically treated candle that repelled mosquitoes. The fisherman sitting on the canvas stool watched through a pair of opera glasses from the edge of the canebrake as our faces glowed like pieces of yellow parchment in the candlelight.
He went back to his station wagon and opened the front and back doors on the driver’s side, creating a kind of blind that shielded him from view. He removed a rifle wrapped in a blanket from the floor and carried it down to the bayou and lay it in the grass at his feet.
It was all about breathing and heartbeat, locking down on the target, remembering the weapon is your friend, an extension of angles and lines whose intersection your mind created. That’s what his father had said.
He began to feel the old excitement pumping inside him and he had to refrain from beating his fists together. It was too good, a trio of faces bent around a candle flame, an alcove of shadow surrounding their heads. It wasn’t just a hit now, but the perfect challenge, to drill a clean shot into the target, snip all his wires, and leave the people around him intact, with stunned, disbelieving looks on their faces and a sudden jellylike presence on the skin they were afraid to touch.
The beauty of it was they’d never hear the shot. While people ran in circles and screamed and crawled under tables and hid behind parked cars, he would recover his brass and get back in his station wagon and drive away. People talking on trash TV about using politics and sex for power and control? Forget it.
The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. What a joke. A drunk and a pile of whale sperm with a P.I. license. He bit down softly on his lower lip in anticipation of the moments to come.
Then, for just a second, he saw Jimmy Burgoyne’s brains exploding in that gig gone bad on the Atchafalaya and he had to squeeze his eyes shut until the image disappeared from his mind.
It was starting to sprinkle. The bayou was suddenly dotted with rain rings and the bream started popping the surface among the hyacinths. He opened his eyes as though awakening from sleep and took a deep breath and resolved to order more flowers for Jimmy’s grave, to send another card to the family, to continue making those incremental gestures that tempor
arily lifted the guilt for Jimmy’s death from his soul.