After the college kids drove away, Clete walked into the park. Then his eyes focused on a picnic bench on the far side of the recreation building. Jamie Sue was sitting next to her brother-in-law, Ridley Wellstone. She was also sitting next to a stroller, watching a diapered little boy play in the grass. She set the boy on her lap and combed his hair with her fingernails.
Clete tried to assimilate what he was looking at. The Scotch he had drunk wasn’t helping his thought processes. The light seemed to splinter into needles inside the trees; he opened his mouth to clear a popping sound in his ears. Then he realized both Wellstone and Jamie Sue were staring at him as though he were an aberration rather than the other way around.
“What are you doing here?” Wellstone said. His aluminum crutches were propped beside him.
“Following the asshole you put on my tail,” Clete said. He looked at Jamie Sue and the little boy. “You have a kid?”
“Yes, I do. Why do you ask?”
“Why do I ask?”
“You don’t look well,” she said. “Do you want to sit down?”
“That’s not a good idea,” Ridley
Wellstone said.
The popping sound in Clete’s ears seemed to be gaining in intensity, like the thropping of helicopter blades. How dumb can one guy be? he asked himself.
“We made restitution for your fishing gear. Now get out of here,” Wellstone said.
People at the other picnic tables were staring, and Clete’s face felt tight and small in the wind. Again he thought he heard mechanical sounds from a distant war and smelled an odor like moldy clothes on his body and diesel fuel and mosquito repellent and mud that stank of stagnant water. For just a second he thought he felt the squish of trench foot inside his boot and saw the flicker of conical straw hats moving through elephant grass.
He walked away from Jamie Sue’s picnic table, slightly off balance, his mouth dry, his forehead breaking a sweat. He passed Lyle Hobbs, who was still watching the teenage girls turning somersaults in the shade. Clete went into the restroom and washed his face for a long time. He dried his skin with a paper towel and looked in the metal reflector that served as a mirror. His face made him think of a pumpkin beaded with drops of water. Outside, he heard the music from an ice-cream truck. He thought of children playing in Audubon Park when he was a child in New Orleans. For a moment his heart was a kettle drum.
Lyle Hobbs walked into the restroom and relieved himself in a urinal. He was wearing shades, breathing through his mouth as he urinated, shaking himself off with one hand. He zipped his fly, then wet his comb under the lavatory faucet and began combing his hair. He never glanced at Clete.
“I catch you tailing me again, it’s going to play out a whole lot different,” Clete said.
Hobbs flicked the water off his comb and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Mr. Wellstone came to town for his therapy. Nobody is tailing you, nobody is interested in you, Mr. Purcel. I cain’t abide a self-righteous man, particularly one that didn’t have a problem of conscience with putting his dick in another man’s wife. You’d better count your blessings you’re dealing with me and not Quince. Quince is mightily attached to the Wellstone family. Believe me when I say Quince is not a man you want mad at you.”
“I saw you watching those young girls, you piece of shit.”
Hobbs leaned toward the metal reflector, tilting up his nose, sucking in his lips. He plucked a hair from one nostril and dropped it in the basin. “Stay out of trouble,” he said.
Hobbs walked out into the sunlight, his hair wet on his collar. Clete followed him, remaining in the shade, his heart still hammering. Hobbs was watching the teenage girls, who were now sitting on the grass under the maple trees, their knees pulled up in front of them. He bought a Popsicle from the ice-cream truck, opened his car door, and stood behind it, eating the Popsicle while he watched a girl not over fourteen climbing up on the jungle gym, her shirt sliding up on her hips.
Clete could see the outline of Hobbs’s phallus against his trousers.
Walk away, Clete told himself. You can’t change what’s happening here.
Screw that, another voice said.
“You need to take your johnson somewhere else, Lyle,” he said.
Hobbs turned, the Popsicle half in his mouth. He bit into it, clearly savoring the melt in the back of his jaws, his eyes lighting with a thought. “Sally Dee said you blew your career and marriage with booze and weed and ten-dollar street cooze. He said he felt sorry for you, Mr. Purcel. He said your wife was a muff diver, and that’s why you were a gash hound and your colleagues at NOPD gave you a bad rap. That’s why he gave you a job at his casino.”
Hobbs’s eyes remained fixed on the girl playing on the jungle gym, but Clete saw the indentation, the tug of a suppressed grin, at the corner of his mouth.
“I have a feeling there’s paper on you somewhere,” Clete said.
Hobbs dropped the empty Popsicle stick over the top of the car door into the gutter. He tilted his head inquisitively.
“Defective guys like you have outstanding warrants — a skipped bond, failed court appearances, a PV of a kind that only idiots commit,” Clete said. “But what that means is I’m going to take you in and split the skip fee with whoever is looking for you. Lean against the vehicle and assume the position.”
“Go blow yourself, Mr. Purcel,” Hobbs said.
“I can’t tell you how happy that makes me, Lyle.”