Wrong time of day, wrong place, wrong tune, wrong century, kid, Clete thought, then tried to remember when he had been this depressed. He couldn’t.
He felt someone touch him on the shoulder. He turned and looked into the hawklike glare that constituted Count Carbona’s gaze. “Good earth,” the Count said.
“What are you saying?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t. Are you talking about the name of a book?”
The Count continued to stare into Clete’s face. “I’m no code breaker, Co
unt,” Clete said.
The Count pressed a book of paper matches into Clete’s palm. The cover had a satin-black finish with words embossed in silver letters.
“This joint is in Terrebonne Parish?” Clete said. “That’s what you’re telling me? Caruso left this in your store?”
The Count’s cheeks creased with the beginnings of a smile.
CLETE WAITED IN his office until sunset, then drove deep into Terrebonne Parish, south of Larose, almost to Lake Felicity, down where the wetlands of Louisiana dissolve into a dim gray-green line that becomes the Gulf of Mexico. The sun was an orange melt in the west, veiled with smoke from a sugar refinery or a grass fire, the moss in the dead cypress trees lifting in the breeze. The nightclub and barbecue joint advertised on the book of matches was located in a clearing at the end of a dirt road, right at the edge of a saltwater bay, the trees strung with multicolored Japanese lanterns. Clete thought he could hear the sounds of an accordion and fiddle and rub-board drifting out of a screened pavilion behind the nightclub.
He had put on his powder-blue sport coat and gray slacks and had shined his oxblood loafers and bought a new fedora with a small feather in the band. Before he got out of the Caddy, he gargled with a small amount of Listerine and spat it out the window. He also took off his shoulder holster and put it under the seat, along with his heavy spring-loaded leather-wrapped blackjack shaped like a darning sock. When he entered the nightclub, the refrigeration was set so low, the air felt like ice water.
He sat at the bar and laid out his cigarettes and his Zippo lighter in front of him and ordered a Bud and gazed out the back window at the last spark of sun on the bay and at the band inside the screened pavilion. He salted his beer and drank it slowly, enjoying each moment of it in his mouth, letting its coldness slide down his throat, lighting places inside him that only the addicted know about. He didn’t have long to wait before he knew she was in the room. How or why he knew she was there, he couldn’t explain. He felt her presence before he saw her in the bar mirror. He smelled her perfume before he turned on the stool and watched her drop a series of coins in the jukebox. He saw her midriff and exposed navel and the baby fat on her hips and resented its exposure to other men in a way that was completely irrational. He looked at the fullness of her breasts and the tightness of her jeans and the thickness of her reddish-blond Dutch-boy haircut and felt protectiveness rather than erotic attraction. He felt as though someone else had slipped into his skin and was thinking thoughts that were not his.
He ordered another Bud longneck and two fingers of Jack. The girl sat down at the bar, three stools from him, and idly tapped a quarter on the bar’s apron, as though she had not made up her mind. Clete looked at the mirror and tossed back his Jack, a great emptiness if not a balloon of fear swelling in his chest. The Jack went down like gasoline on a flame. He began opening and closing his Zippo, his heart racing, an unlit cigarette between his fingers.
She tilted her head forward and massaged the back of her neck, her fingers kneading deep into the muscle. Then she turned and gazed at the side of his face. “You eyeballing me in the mirror, boss?” she said.
“Me?” he said. When she didn’t reply, he asked, “You talking to me?”
“Is someone else sitting on your stool?”
“You had some tats removed from your arms, maybe. I guess I noticed that. I know what that can be like.”
“I never had tats. Would you put a needle in your arm that an AIDS patient has used?”
“So where’d you get the scars?”
“I was in an accident. My mother’s diaphragm slipped, and I was born. Is that your come-on line?”
“I’m over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down.”
“I get what you’re saying: Old guys are rarely interested in getting in a girl’s pants. That would be strange, wouldn’t it?”
“Where’d you learn to talk like that?”
“At the convent.” The bartender brought her a drink in an oversize glass without her having ordered one. She used both hands to pick it up and drink. She took a cherry out of it and broke it between her teeth.
“Why not order your next one in a bathtub and put a straw in it?” Clete said.
“Not a bad idea,” she said. Her cheeks had taken on a deeper color, and her mouth was glossy and red with lipstick. “I’ve seen you around.”
“I doubt it. I’m a traveling man, mostly.”
“You’re a salesman?”
“Something like that.”