Jimmy paused in the way people do when they want you to agree with them. I stared at the incoming tide, the orange pontoon plane rocking in the chop, baitfish skittering across the surface as they tried to evade a predator below.
“I got ahold of some satchel charges,” he said. “They were old, maybe Korean War–issue. I didn’t know if they’d detonate. I was twenty-two years old. Another geologist and I flew over the Indians’ village. He took the stick, and I pulled the cord on the satchels and threw them out the window. I thought maybe they’d land in the trees and scare the hell out of everybody. I mean, the plane was banking, I wasn’t thinking clearly, that’s all I wanted to do, scare them. That’s what I was thinking when I got in the plane. Just scare them. I told that to the other geologist. That kid they shot with the blow dart almost died, for Christ’s sake.”
I reeled in my line and laid my rod across the gunwale. Just off Marsh Island, a sailboat was tacking hard in the wind, waves bursting on the prow. My father used to trap on Marsh Island. He was killed in a blowout on a derrick. Sometimes I would see him standing in the surf, giving me the thumbs-up sign, his hard hat cocked on his forehead.
“You’re not going to say anything?” Jimmy asked.
“No.”
“What, you think I’m geology’s answer to Charlie Manson?”
“No.”
“Get off it, Dave. What are you trying to do to me?”
“What happened to the Indians?”
“The army went in and cleaned it up.”
“Cleaned it up?”
“Took care of the injured or whatever.”
“Did you go to the village?”
“I had a deadline. We were down eight thousand feet. We should have hit a pay sand at five thousand. Our investors were shitting their pants.”
“Answer my question.”
“The village was on fire. You could see it glowing all night. In the morning there was a black column of smoke across the jungle for two miles. It smelled like garbage burning. Any white person who went down there would have been killed or tied to a tree, and had the skin stripped off him.”
I unscrewed my thermos and filled the cap with café au lait and drank from it. “I’m sorry I don’t have another cup. There’re some cold drinks in the ice.”
“A cold drink? Where’s your soul?”
“You’ve made your statement, Jimmy. My advice is to get rid of the past and get on the square.”
“I am on the square. That’s why I’m running for Senate. I want to do good things for other people. There’re people who say I can be president. Look at Clinton and Obama. They came out of nowhere.”
“You’re in with Bobby Earl,” I said. “When he’s no longer useful, you’ll throw him out with the coffee grounds. Here’s a reminder for you. Mussolini was hanged upside down in a filling station by the same people who elected him.”
“I’m going to be a dictator?”
I shifted my position on the cushion and flung my line, baited with shrimp, in a high arc over the water. I kept my back to Jimmy Nightingale until I felt the boat wobble as he stepped onto his plane. Then I pulled my anchor and started my twin outboards and headed toward home, eager to see Alafair and Clete and all the others who represent what is good in the human race.
* * *
IN MY OPINION, one of the great follies in the world is to put yourself inside the head of dysfunctional people. The mistake we usually make is to assume there is a rationale for their behavior. In most cases, there is none. Long ago, I came to regard the Mob in New Orleans as I would an infected gland. Most of them had the technical skill of hod carriers. They were brutal, stupid to the core, and had the visceral instincts of medieval peasants armed with pitchforks. Their sexual appetites were a hooker’s nightmare. The portrayal of them as family men was a j
oke. They preyed on the weak, corrupted unions, appropriated mom-and-pop stores, and created object lessons with chain saws and meat hooks. The reinvention of this bunch as Elizabethan men of honor probably would have made Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe sick.
Tony Nine Ball not only came to New Iberia, his chauffeured Chrysler caught up with Alafair on the paved running track in City Park. He rolled down his tinted window. “How you do, Miss Alafair? I’m Tony Nemo, an associate of your father’s.”
She thought she was looking at a malignant octopod stuffed into a tailored suit. She sped up and passed the picnic tables and swing sets under the live oaks and circled by the baseball diamond while the Chrysler paced her.
“I just want to explain something,” Tony said out the window. “I got the backing for the picture. But I got to tie it down. Hey! How about listening, here? You deaf?”
She stopped and breathed slowly. “Say it.”