Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“You got your nose bent out of shape?” Rowena said. “Just throw the food to the hogs?”

“Chacun à son goût,” I said.

Then I walked out of the dining room and past the revelers at the bar, including Clete, and out the door and into the night. The street was empty, the great looming structure called the Shadows illuminated by floodlights in the yard, a tribute to all the suffering passed down to us by the antebellum era. What a joke, I thought.

But my cynicism gave me no release from the fire and the insatiable need burning inside me.

CLETE CALLED ME at the office in the morning. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

“Forget it. I had my head on sideways,” I said.

“You didn’t go home and get wasted, did you?”

“Worry about yourself,” I said.

“I’ll see you for lunch.”

“I’ve got too much desk work.”

“I’ll come by tonight. It’s about that prick.”

“Which prick?”

“That prick Nightingale, who else? I’ve got to pick up a bail skip in Jennings. I’ll see you about nine.”

At five-fifteen P.M., I threw my tackle box and rod and reel into the back of my truck, hooked up my boat and trailer, and drove to the Henderson levee, outside Breaux Bridge. Henderson Swamp is part of the vast network of bayous and bays and rivers that constitute the Atchafalaya Basin, the flooded woods a golden green at sunset and so swollen with silence that you wonder if this piece of primordial creation was saved by a divine hand to remind us of what the earth was like when our ancestors grew feet and crawled out of the sea.

The cypress trees were in early leaf, as delicate as green lace, ruffling in the breeze, the water high and black and undisturbed, chained with lily pads, t

he bream and goggle-eye perch rolling under the pads like pillows of air floating to the surface.

I cut my outboard and let my boat glide silently into a cove lit by a molten red sun, then flipped my plug in an arching loop just beyond a clutch of flooded willows. The western sky was streaked with clouds as pink as flamingo wings. In the distance I heard the Southern Pacific blowing down the line.

But if I had come here for solace, my journey was in vain. The loss of my wife, my inability to accept the suddenness of the accident, the words of a paramedic telling me she was gone and they had done everything they could, his mouth moving like that of someone in a film with no sound track, I carried all these things wherever I went, my blood and mind fouled, the ground shifting, the realization at sunrise that her death was not a dream and she was gone forever, unfairly taken, her dignity and courage and spiritual resolve extinguished by a fool rounding a curve in a pickup truck, the accelerator mashed to the floor.

These thoughts robbed the light from my eyes, the birdsong from the trees, the sound of children playing in a park. Instead of the glory of the sunset, I saw beer cans and Styrofoam cups undulating in the shallows, a rubber tire submerged among the willows, a blanket of debris caught in the cattails, as viscous as dried paint skimmed off the top of a paint bucket.

I retrieved my lure and started the engine and drove back to the levee, the bow scraping on the concrete ramp like fingernails on a blackboard. I stopped into a bait shop and ate a sandwich on the gallery and watched the last of the sun slip beyond the trees. Several men were drinking beer at a spool table next to me. I believed I knew one of them, but I couldn’t say for sure. They invited me to join them. I could not get my mind off Molly, her warmth and steadfastness as a companion, her ability to deal with the sorrow and suffering of the world and not be undone by it.

“Everything cool, buddy?” a man said.

“Sure. I look like my gyroscope is busted?” I replied.

“Have a brew.”

“I have to be on my way.”

“I should, too,” he said. “My old lady is going to throw my supper in the backyard. Is yours like that?”

* * *

THE SUN WAS only an ember when I drove down the levee. A few minutes later, I was on the two-lane highway outside Breaux Bridge, the sky dark with rainclouds, when a pickup truck got on the back of my trailer and the driver clicked on his high beams, flooding the inside of my truck with light. I tried to see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror, but his headlights were blinding. I touched my brake pedal to no avail. I had broken the clamp-on emergency flasher I’d carried in my truck only two days earlier. There were ditches on either side of the road and no shoulder where I could pull off. My eyes were watering from the glare in the mirror.

Like anyone who has been harassed on the road by a tailgater, I felt my anger begin to rise, slowly at first, then build into an emotional straitjacket, and I began to have thoughts I did not associate with who I was. I pressed the brake again, this time hard. But he didn’t back off. His headlights were so close they were beneath the level of my trailer. I accelerated. He dropped back a few feet in the mirror, and I saw a pipe bumper welded on the front of his vehicle. Then he came at me again. As I neared the convenience store at the intersection, he roared through the blinking red light and shot me the finger.

The truck was pale blue, one side gnarled with dents, one taillight broken. I saw the driver for only seconds. His hair was black, his face unshaved; he looked like thousands of Cajun men.

I drove home, my wrists throbbing. Clete was sitting on the steps, tossing acorns at nothing, a fedora slanted on his brow.