“You’re being accused of rape and sodomy, and you’re worried about a movie deal?”
“I thought Levon and I could make a grand film. He’s a bit negative on Hollywood. I thought a down-home touch might be the key.”
“A down-home touch?”
“Outsiders don’t understand us. Why do we have to depend on Hollywood to make movies about us?”
His presumption and naïveté would probably get him laughed out of Los Angeles or New York, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. “Thanks for your time, Jimmy. You’re not planning to take a trip anywhere, are you?”
“No, I’m at your disposal. I can’t believe this is happening.”
I thought about the beating death of T. J. Dartez. “I know the feeling.”
* * *
ALAFAIR PULLED IN to the driveway late that afternoon. As I looked at her, I had to wonder again at the arbitrary nature of fate and how the most influential events in our lives are usually unexpected and unplanned. On a clear day out at Southwest Pass, I had heard a sputtering sound just before the twin-engine plane came in low on the water, a long black column of smoke stringing behind it. The pilot was gunning the engines, probably trying to reach Pecan Island, where he could pancake in the salt grass. But he’d hit the water and flipped, and the waves had washed over the fuselage, and the plane had gone down in the murk like a deflating yellow balloon.
I still have nightmares in which I swim down to the wreck, my air tank almost empty, while clouds of sand rise from the plane’s wings and the bat wings of stingrays flutter by me and a little girl struggles to find an air bubble inside the cabin. My second wife, Annie, and I took her to a hospital and named her Alafair for my mother and began raising her in the Cajun culture in which I had grown up. She forgot her own language and the death squad that attacked her village and became an honor student and went to Reed College. The next stop was number one in her class at Stanford Law.
But as with all parents, when I looked at Alafair, I saw the child and not the adult, as though she were incapable of growing older. I had a footlocker in the attic where I kept her Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, her Orca the Whale T-shirt, her Donald Duck hat with the quacking bill that we bought at Disneyland, and her pink tennis shoes embossed with “Left” and “Right” on the appropriate toes.
The leaves were floating from the trees and blowing on the street when
I went to greet her. She was tall and lithe and had long Indian-black hair and brown eyes and an IQ that wasn’t measurable. Only two people in one million have it.
I carried her things into her bedroom, which I dusted and cleaned every week and kept closed and never let anyone use, not even Clete. After she put her things away, we went to the cemetery and placed flowers in a vase on Molly’s grave. I never talked about Molly’s death unless I had to, not even at the grave. I don’t believe that acceptance of mortality is a situation you resolve by talking with others. The same with personal grief and mourning or loss of any kind. I remember the words of a black ex-junkie musician friend of mine who got clean in a lockdown unit where he beat his head to pulp against a steel wall: “You deal wit’ your own snakes or you don’t, man. Sometimes you’re the only cat in the cathedral. Ain’t nobody else can do it for you.”
When we got home, I knew Alafair had read my thoughts.
“You bottle up your feelings, Dave,” she said. “I think that’s why you got drunk again.”
“Give it a rest, Alf.”
“You kept feeding your anger toward T. J. Dartez. What do they say at meetings? You get drunk at somebody?”
“Something like that.”
I started taking food out of the icebox. She had just gone to the heart of the matter. Every time I tried to remember what had happened after I’d seen the headlights in my rearview mirror, I reached the same conclusion, and it is the same conclusion every alcoholic reaches after he comes off a bender, sick and trembling and terrified: I had done something my conscious mind refused to accept.
“I haven’t quite told you everything,” I said. “I went after a guy by the name of Kevin Penny. He’s a violent man and a three-time loser who was going to hurt his kid.”
“What’d you do?”
“It involved a swimming lesson in the toilet bowl.”
Her eyes roved over my face. “What if he takes it out on his kid?”
“I called social services. They’re going to make home calls, and so is Clete.”
“Why do you have it in for this guy in particular?”
“I don’t know. He bothers me. I came within a few seconds of drowning him. I wanted to do it.”
I poured a glass of milk and drank it. She watched me silently. “He isn’t filing charges?” she asked.
“I had a bandana on my face.”
“Did somebody set you up on the Dartez deal?”