The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

“Who wants to get to the barn wearing a drip bag?”

In the distance, somewhere beyond the watery rim of the place where I had been born, I thought I heard horns echoing off canyon walls. Or maybe that was just my grandiose disguise for what we in AA call self-will run riot.

• • •

SMILEY HAD USED a pair of sterilized tweezers to remove the .25-caliber piece of lead that one of the bad people at the motel had parked in his side. He had also packed the wound with gauze and medicine he had stolen from a pharmacy. The blood had coagulated and no longer leaked through the bandage, but he could see the inflammation around the edges of the tape, and when he touched it, it was as tender as an infected boil.

There was a doctor in Houston and another in New Orleans, both addicts, with malevolent eyes and fingers that were dirty and invasive. Smiley had almost shot one of them for the way he looked at Smiley’s wee-wee. In fact, if Smiley made it out of this one, he might visit the good doctor again, this time with a can of Liquid-Plumr.

The pain pills he had stolen allowed him to sleep and to walk without a limp and, most important, to think clearly. What was there to think about? Getting the people who were responsible for his pain, who had sent Jaime O’Banion after him, who had caused the killing of the innocent colored women and who wanted to kill his friend the fat man named Clete Purcel.

The movie people were part of it. They had to be. O’Banion must have been paid with Jersey or Miami money, the same source used by the movie people.

Outside an Opelousas bar, Smiley had boosted a Ford-150 pickup that a pair of rednecks had left the key in. The dash panel was like a spaceship’s. He loved diving into it and smelling the leather and feeling the power of the engine and the deep-throated rumble of the exhaust. If Smiley straightened out a few people in the next day or so, he could be on his way to Mexico with about thirty thousand in cash that he kept in a backpack, leaving behind his weapons and all the hateful people he had worked for. He’d check into a hospital, maybe in Monterrey, and watch the evening sun turn into a blue melt over the hills while he ate a bucket of ice cream with a spoon that had a head the size of a silver dollar.

On Saturday morning he drove to the movie set outside Morgan City and was told that the film company was shutting down and holding a wrap party at City Park in New Iberia. Everyone was invited as a thank-you and tribute to the city. He checked into a motel on the four-lane south of town, then showered and dressed in a white suit with a glittering blue vest and suede boots and a plum-colored tie and a planter’s straw hat that rested on his ears, his pain in containment. There was only one problem. A flicker was going on behind his eyes, as though someone were clicking a light switch on and off inside his head.

At the park, children were playing on the swings and seesaws and the jungle gym, running through the picnic shelters and the tables loaded with food and drinks. Where did all the children come from? He saw flowers, too, or swirls of color inside the deep greenness of the grass where there should have been no flowers or swirls of color. It was the end of autumn or even the beginning of winter, wasn’t it? Some of the children looked Hispanic, with elongated eyes and badly cropped hair. He was sure he knew them from years ago. Some had died at the orphanage, one of them so small and emaciated that his body was removed in a pillowcase.

The earth seemed to be moving under his feet. He sat down at a picnic table under one of the shelters and waited for his dizziness to pass. It didn’t. A Cajun band was playing a song he had heard over and over since he came to Acadiana.

Jolie blonde, regardez donc t’as fait,

Tu m’as quitte pour t’en aller,

Pour t’en aller avec an autre, qui, que moi,

Quel expoir et quell avenir, mais moi, je vais avoir?

Even though he spoke Spanish, Smiley could not understand the Acadian dialect. But somehow he knew the song was about loss. The musicians were sunbrowned and lean, the kind of Cajun men for whom privation had been a way of life during the days of the oligarchy. They played most of their songs with joy, but not this one. The cast in their eyes was funereal. Smiley felt a spasm in his side as though a lance had pierced it.

Two little girls were staring at him. They were wearing pinafores and had flowers in their hair. Their eyes seemed unnaturally sunken. “You all right, mister?” one of them said.

“I have a tummyache,” he said. “My name is Smiley. What’s yours?”

“I’m Felicity,” one said. She had red hair and was covered with freckles. “This is Perpetua. Your face don’t have no color, Smiley.”

He slipped his hand into his coat pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “There’s an ice cream truck by the street. Can you get me a Buster Bar and whatever y’all want?”

They walked away, looking back at him strangely. What bothered him about the girls? Their dresses were clean, but their skin looked powdered with dust. He felt the ground shift again and wondered if he was losing his mind. The oaks shook, and leaves as thin as gold scrapings filtered through the limbs and bands of sunlight. He reached down and picked up a handful of leaves. They fell apart and sifted and then disappeared between his fingers. For a moment he thought he saw Wonder Woman at the edge of his vision, her gold lariat dripping from her belt, her magic bracelets and her star-spangled bosom bathed in cold sunshine.

He knew there was a term for the affliction he had. What was it? Peritonitis? A septic intrusion working its way through his entrails, boring a hole in his stomach. He felt his colon constrict; his eyes went out of focus.

Help me, he said to Wonder Woman.

But she was lost in the crowd, maybe gone from the park entirely. His heart sank at the thought of being alone. He saw the little girls coming toward him. The girl with the freckles was carrying a cold bag. She put it in his palm. “Your Buster Bar and change are in the bag.”

“Where are yours?”

“We don’t need any. We’re here to take you home.”

“Home?” he said.

“We’re dead, Smiley,” the other girl said. “We’ve been that way a long time.”

He rose from the table, backing away from them. Then he turned and plunged into the crowd, past the platform where the Cajun band was playing “Allons à Lafayette.”

He continued walking through the trees to the other side of the park, deep into a clump of oaks where there were no tables or picnic shelters and the grass was uncut and strung with paper cups and napkins and plates blown from the recreational areas. It was cold in the shade. Or was he losing blood, causing his body temperature to drop? He saw a Subaru convertible parked farther down the slope, the top and windows up, the shadows of the trees black on the windows. He saw a black woman moving around in the back seat, as though trying to position herself on her knees and not finding adequate space.