“Tell you what, I’m outta here. Keep a good thought. Buy yourself a condo in Crazy Town. I also take back my apology for calling you asshole and fuckball.”
He spun off the stool and walked away in the crowd. My left hand was on the cup. I felt its coldness seeping into my fingers. For a drunk, a moment like this produces the same sensation as coitus interruptus. I raised the cup, then put it down again. I had never wanted to drink so badly in my life, even when I was on the grog full-time and would wake with a thirst so great I would have committed a serious crime to quench it.
I got off the stool and worked my way through the crowd onto the porch and then into the parking lot. In the distance I could see the lights of the sugar mill, the smoke from the stacks an electrified white against a black sky. I wanted to be on a cane wagon in the year 1945, safe with my parents, far removed from the metabolic addiction that had been my undoing since I was sixteen. I heard someone walk on the gravel behind me.
“You have trouble with that guy, Dave?” Sean said.
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“You don’t look right.”
“I’m off my feed. I’m okay.”
“You want me to drive you home?”
“I think Bella Delahoussaye is in danger.”
“The lady in the band?”
“I think she may be a target of the guy who killed Lucinda Arceneaux.”
“Oh, man,” he said. “Bring your truck around. I’ll tell my friends.”
It’s funny how a simple kid like Sean McClain can make you proud to be an American.
• • •
IT BEGAN TO rain as we rolled into the black district of St. Martinville. The streets were wet and shiny, the streetlamps oily inside the mist. Up ahead I could see yellow pools of lightning in the clouds high above the town square.
“I got to ask you something,” Sean said. “Hit me upside the head, if you want.”
“What is it?”
“Was you drinking back there at the club?”
“I took a swig out of a drink I didn’t order.”
He stared through the wipers on the windshield. A streetlight cast shadows that looked like rainwater on his face.
“You don’t believe me?” I said.
“It’s kind of like saying you didn’t know what the food was on your plate.” He looked at me to see how I would take it, then looked away.
“You carrying?” I asked.
“On my ankle. I didn’t mean no offense.”
“I know that, Sean. You’re a good guy.”
Yes, he was, and I wished I had not brought him along. Think back on your life. How many major decisions did you actually make? Or better put, how many decisions did you make that at the time seemed inconsequential but down the track had enormous influence on either you or others?
I pulled to the curb in front of Bella’s cottage. A solitary lamp shone behind a window curtain. Her roof gutters were clogged with pine needles and Spanish moss and spilling over on the walls and windows. I heard Sean unstrap the Velcro holster on his ankle.
“Stick it in the back of your belt,” I said.
“Think I’m a hothead?”
I cut the engine. “In the right circumstances, everyone’s a hothead.”