The Convict and Other Stories

Some people around the south Louisiana oil patch say my pontoon plane is just a rust-streaked, window-cracked, baling-wire special, fit only for a winehead pilot or one of those south-of-the-border guys who sniff too much of their own nose candy before they go into Colombia. But it can float like a goose in eight-foot seas, and it’s got an engine that can whip a lake into a dry mudflat. I can juice it and slip sideways on a layer of hot air and set down on a wet handkerchief when I want to. I crop-dusted all over Texas and skywrote in California, and for that reason flying out to offshore wells and doodlebug companies and skimming in on a bayou isn’t anything to me.

For example, take the day I dropped out of a hot, blue sky, gunned over the trees, and drifted like a paper kite onto Bayou Teche just outside of New Iberia, where I kept my two-story houseboat moored next to a bank thick with cypress. She wasn’t expecting me, at least not straight out of the sky, blowing water in my back draft all over the windows and the wash, entertaining the black people who were cane fishing in the trees. I guess I thought I’d catch her, see her pull on her blue jeans over her flat stomach, watch him try to mix a casual drink at my drain board and tell me he had another job for me in Belize.

But she was shelling crawfish and drinking Jax out of the bottle at the kitchen table instead. The far door was open, and the outline of her body seemed to shimmer in the brilliant shatter of light off the bayou.

How do you tell your wife that the guy who’s diddling her is a Nazi war criminal?

“Klaus Stroessner is what?” she said. Her curly blond hair was sunburned on the tips, and she didn’t wear a bra under her knit shirt. She had long legs like a dancer, and her arms were tan and smooth and her hands always quick and confident when she worked. Through her knit shirt I could see the small American flag tattooed above her heart.

“Here’s the picture from Life magazine. He’s not from Argentina. He was a guard in Dachau. That’s him standing next to the gallows.”

She studied the photograph, clicking her nails on the beer bottle. She folded her legs and rubbed the top of a bare foot.

“How do you know it’s him?” she said.

“He didn’t even change his name. And look at that arrogant profile. Even thirty-nine years couldn’t change that.”

“It’s a coincidence and you’re imagining things again. Klaus is a gentleman and he grew up on a ranch in the pampas. His mother still lives in Buenos Aires. He’s very attached to her.”

“I know that—”

“What do you know?”

“I know that—”

he pulls you on top of him in the Holiday Inn in Lafayette, buys you lobster at the Court of Two Sisters in New Orleans, rubs his hands over you in the surf in Biloxi while you drip with foam and moonlight and wreaths of laughter.

“I dropped those geologists off at Morgan City early. I thought we might—”

“What?” she said. Her eyes looked at the willow trees wilting in the heat on the far side of the bayou. Her eyes were blue and empty.

“Maybe go to—”

“What is it you want, Marcel?”

“Maybe go out to eat.”

“I’ll change clothes.”

She went into the bedroom and closed the door, and I leaned with my head on my arm against the icebox.

. . .

Klaus Stroessner swims a mile a day in his kidney-shaped, turquoise pool, and his skin has the smooth tautness and color of the inside of a clamshell. He glows with health. His gunmetal hair is oiled and combed straight back; the three pale dueling scars glisten dully on the top of his forehead; he smells of chlorine, cologne, imported soap, Bordeaux wine, the South American cuisine he eats, the countries he has occupied; he smells of my wife.

I’m a Louisiana coonass raised on boudin and couche-couche, rice and garfish balls. What does that mean? I’m short and thick-bodied, overweight from too much beer and crawfish; I’m restless and lonely whenever I leave the Bayou Teche country; I think slow; maybe I’m dumb.

I stood on the patio by his pool, the turquoise water winking at us in the morning sun, and watched him eating soft-boiled eggs in his seersucker suit. His expensive clothes crinkled with their freshness.

“I have friends who’ve seen you,” I said. “I’ve got the room-service bill she signed for you in Lafayette.”

“You drink too much at night, Marcel, then you have these fears and delusions in the morning. If you drink, take vitamins and aspirin before you sleep.” The Times-Picayune was folded to the stock-market section by his elbow, and he read while he spooned the eggs into his mouth.

/> “Do you know what diddling another man’s wife can get you around here? I could grease you and walk right out of it. Besides, you’re a Nazi war criminal.”

“Marcel, Marcel,” he said patiently, “sit down and have some coffee and stop talking this nonsense. Do you want to make another run for me to Belize?”

“You were only nineteen when that picture was taken, but it’s you and you’re in this country illegally and I’m going to expose you.”