“Along with his skanks and his lowlife hangers-on.”
“Good for you.”
“But it’s Levon who disappoints me,” she said.
“You have to leave people to their own destiny, Alf.”
We were in the kitchen. She hadn’t noticed Mon Tee Coon sitting on the counter. “When did this happen?”
“I fed him in the house a couple of times. Now he pops right in, just like Tripod.”
Snuggs, our short-haired, thick-necked white cat, walked across the floor and joined Mon Tee Coon on the counter with a thump. Snuggs’s body rippled with muscle when he walked, his tail springing back and forth. His badges of honor were his chewed ears and the pink scars embedded in his fur.
Alafair picked up Snuggs and cradled him in her arms. She looked down into his face. “Want to be a screenwriter? That’s what I thought. You wouldn’t touch Hollywood with your bare seat.”
“You told Tony Nemo or Levon you were through?” I asked.
“Both of them.”
“Nemo said something to you?”
“It’s not important.”
“Yes, it is.”
“He said I’m lucky I’m beautiful because my books stink.”
She focused her attention on Snuggs and jiggled his tail.
“What else did he say?”
“Nothing. He’s a fat idiot.”
“Tell me, Alafair.”
“He said, ‘I bet you give good head.’?”
I gazed out the window at the bayou, the shadows and spangled reflections of the sun that were like gold coins in the branches, the smoke from a barbecue pit in the park, the children playing among the camellia bushes.
“I need to pick up some milk at the store,” I said. “Were y’all filming at Albania Plantation today?”
“Why?”
“I just wondered. Is all the gang still there?”
“Leave it alone, Dave.”
“There’s an open can of sardines in the icebox,” I said. “Why don’t you treat these guys to a fine meal?”
* * *
JEANERETTE WAS A fifteen-minute ride back into the antebellum era, if that’s what you wanted to look for. Albania Plantation was a magnificent place. The live oaks surrounding it were so large that the main house stayed in shadow throughout the brightest and hottest of days. Some of the original slave quarters, constructed of logs, were still standing. I parked my truck and walked around the side of the house. The backyard sloped down to the bayou. The film crew had turned the yard into the setting of a French cotillion when the year was 1862 and the Yankees had been whipped at both First and Second Manassas and the Lost Cause was not lost at all.
The trees were strung with paper lanterns. The actresses wore hoop dresses, and the actors wore the tailored steel-gray uniforms of the Army of Northern Virginia, many with silk sashes, and the band played the songs of Stephen Foster. The dying sun seemed to conspire with an Islamic moon and light the sky like a scene from One Thousand and One Nights. The food and punch on the tables were real. Imaginary or not, the evening had become a tribute to a moment in history that would not come aborning again. The people on the lawn seemed delighted with their departure from the twenty-first century.
Tony Nemo was eating from a plastic bucket of potato salad at a picnic table behind the cameras and lights. He was talking to two women in their twenties, both with tats that covered the entire shoulder and trailed away like snakes down the arm. Their midriffs were exposed, their jeans form-fitting, although the denim looked soaked in black grease.
Even before I went to Vietnam, there was a disorder in my head that I never understood. The catalyst, I suspect, lay in the unconscious. For me, the trigger always had to do with degradation of the body and the spirit, cruelty to animals or children, sexual assault, a man beating a woman, betrayal, lies that stole the faith of another.