“As right as rain.”
“You don’t look it, no.”
“You’re an honest lady.”
“No, I ain’t. I just don’t want to have to clean up the flo’.”
“See, that’s honesty.”
She leaned in. “You ain’t driving, you?”
“What’s your name?”
“Babette Latiolais.”
“I wish there were a million like you, Miss Babette. Give me a Heineken for the road.”
I pushed a twenty to her with the heel of my hand and left the change on the bar, then went outside into the fog and rain and started walking home. The drawbridge at Burke Street was in the air, a tugboat working its way up the bayou, its running lights on. I waved at the man in the pilothouse. I saw him draw in on his pipe and wave back. I wanted to have a drink with him. I wanted to be on his boat and sail back into time and find a place where there were no clocks or calendars. I wanted to find the vortex that some say is the birth canal and others say is the conduit to eternity. I wanted to find the cowled figure that awaits us all and wrap myself in his cloak.
I remember reaching my front yard and starting my truck with the intention of driving to St. Martinville, the village where the ghost of Evangeline supposedly waited for her lover, Gabriel, under a spreading oak on the banks of Bayou Teche. My next memory is of headlights in my mirror and the grinding sounds of a vehicle on my bumper.
* * *
I WOKE IN my skivvies, on top of the sheets, the sun in my eyes. When I sat up, a wave of nausea drained through my body. My elbows hurt and my knuckles were scraped, and one fingernail was broken all the way to the cuticle. My clothes were on the floor. The sleeves of my windbreaker looked like they had been raked by barbed wire. I threw up in the bathroom, the backs of my legs shaking.
I got into the shower and turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, filling the room with steam, boiling the grease out of my pores, as though trying to scour an obscene presence from my skin. I touched a painful bump under the white patch in my hair and another bump on the back of my head. I shaved and brushed my teeth and gargled with antiseptic and tried to remember where I had gone and what I had done the previous night. My memory would go no deeper than the blinding glare in the rearview mirror, the smash of a bumper against the rear of my truck, and my head snapping back.
No, I remembered something else. A man’s face. His teeth were wide-set, his throat and cheeks patinaed with whiskers that were as stiff as emery-wheel filings.
I looked into the bathroom mirror. My face was bloodless and gaunt and dissolute, my eyes swollen, my hair a tangle of snakes. I scrubbed my face with cold water and looked again and saw an image that could be compared only with the severed head of a Mongol warrior.
I dressed in a long-sleeve red silk shirt and gray tie and gray slacks and oxblood loafers and got to the department at five to eight. I had never felt so sick. I filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee and burned my mouth on the first sip. Helen stopped me in the hallway before I could make it to my office, where I hoped to recover in solitude from my hangover. “Drink up, Pops. We’ve got a homicide.”
“Where?” I said.
“Just this side of the St. Martin line.”
“A shooting?”
“Mixed reports. The coroner is on his way. Dump the coffee.”
“I’ve got to use the men’s room.”
“You don’t have one at home?”
“I got a bug.”
Her eyes wandered over my face. “I’ll bring a cruiser around. Get your shit together.”
“Pardon?”
“You haven’t been fooling anyone.”
She walked away, her back stiff with anger.
* * *
HELEN DROVE UP the two-lane toward St. Martinville without speaking, the flasher rippling. I looked out the window at the cane fields flying by, the sun spangling through the canopy of oaks that arched over the highway. “Who’s at the scene?” I asked.