Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

* * *

RATHER THAN TAKE overtime pay, I took Wednesday off and went fishing in my boat just north of Marsh Island. The wind was up, and a hard chop was slapping the hull, and few boats were out. I didn’t mind being alone. Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death. I put the statement in the third person for a reason. I don’t believe I ever achieved these things with any appreciable degree of success. But there are moments when we understand that the earth and the sky and the presences that may lie behind them are always with us.

The coastline was a heartbreaking green inside the mist. Flying fish broke from the bay’s surfac

e and sailed above the water like pink-gilded, winged creatures, in defiance of evolutionary probability. The salt spray breaking on my bow was cold and fresh and smelled of resilience and the mysterious powers the earth contains. My boat seemed to float on a cushion of air rising from the same primeval soup that gave birth to the first living creatures.

I saw a burnt-orange pontoon plane come in low out of a pale yellow sun, the pilot seated in an open cockpit. The plane swooped by, then circled and set down in the chop, blowing water in a huge cloud. The pilot cut the prop and let his plane drift toward me. He pulled up his goggles with his thumb, smearing grease below his eye, like the World War I aviator he obviously wanted to be. He threw me a rope. “Hope I didn’t chase off your catch,” Jimmy Nightingale said.

“Lose your way home?” I said.

“Sheriff Soileau told me where you’d be. Can I come aboard?” He jumped onto the bow without waiting for me to answer. “This is the life. You got any coffee or sandwiches?” I pointed to my cooler. He pulled off the lid. “Man, I love fried chicken,” he said.

“Fang it down.”

He sat on a cushion behind the console and bit into a drumstick. “I’m out here to make a confession.”

“I watched you pitch a number of times, Jimmy. You had a nasty habit.”

“Like what?”

“Spitting on baseballs.”

“Think I’d throw you a slider?”

I didn’t answer. He began talking about marlin fishing, Washington politics, benchmark oil prices, everything except what was on his mind. Then he said, “Maybe I did get it on with her. But it was consensual. I had more to drink than I was willing to admit. We were both out of it. I also happened to have a bowl of Afghan skunk on hand. She probably didn’t tell you about that.”

“You’re talking about you and Rowena Broussard?”

“Who else?”

“We’ve gone from denial of rape, to denial of any physical contact at all, to consensual. It’s hard to keep up with you, Jimmy.”

“It’s the truth.”

“You confess but you don’t confess.”

“You’re right. That’s not what’s on my mind.” He stared at the water, the tide slapping against the hull. “You saw some bad things in Vietnam?”

“Can’t remember. It’s odd.”

“Be honest.”

“Nope. I’m a total blank on it,” I said.

“I did something I’d like to stick in an envelope and mail to Mars.”

I didn’t want to be the repository for all the evil in the world. Like Clete, I had too many videos of my own. They may not have been of my making, but nonetheless I had to carry them. I was determined not to add Jimmy Nightingale’s burden to my own.

“Take your bullshit somewhere else,” I said.

He tossed a chicken bone over his shoulder into the water and wiped his hands on his trousers. “You’re going to hear it whether you like it or not. It was in South America. We were drilling in jungle that was so thick the wind couldn’t blow through it. The temperature was one hundred degrees at ten P.M. and the humidity ninety percent. We all felt like we had ants crawling inside our clothes.

“The Indians claimed the land was theirs and hung bones in the trees as a warning. When that didn’t work, they started shooting arrows at us. We built a wooden shell around the derrick. It turned into an oven, maybe one hundred twenty degrees. The floor men were fainting or puking in a bucket. We poured water on everybody every half hour. One guy got hit with the tongs. Then a kid took a blow dart in the neck. It had poison on it.”

“I know where you’re going,” I said, raising my hand. “Don’t say any more.”

He ignored me. “The crew was going to quit. The alternative was to bring in the army. That meant we’d have them on the payroll. For all I knew, it was the army who stirred up the Indians. What was I supposed to do? Everything was coming apart. There was no reasoning with the Indians. They filed their teeth and mutilated their bodies. The head greaseball said they killed their own children. I had to do something. My father said a leader has to take charge. ‘You save lives when you take charge.’ That’s what he always said.”