“What I’m saying is I could use an assistant,” Clete said.
“Are you having hot flashes or something?” she asked, biting into a beignet.
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I have blood pressure issues.”
“You ought to take better care of yourself,” she said. “This junk we’re eating isn’t helping either your blood pressure or your cholesterol count.”
“I’ve got two offices, one here and one in New Iberia. That’s on Bayou Teche, about two hours west. How long are you going to be in town?”
“I’m not big on clocks and calendars.”
“You think you could work for a guy like me?”
“You married?”
“Not now. Why do you ask?”
“You act strange. I don’t think you’re on the make, but I can’t quite figure you.”
“What’s to figure?”
“You never asked my name. It’s Gretchen Horowitz.”
“Glad to meet you, Gretchen. Come work for me.”
“I never saw you at Little Yankee Stadium. It was somewhere else, wasn’t it?”
“Who cares?” he said.
“What did you do in the Crotch?”
“Tried to stay alive.”
“You kill any people while you were staying alive?”
“I did two combat tours in Vietnam. Who told you the Corps was called the Crotch?”
“I get around. I picked up some of my mother’s habits. Mostly the bad ones.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that now,” he said.
She gazed at him without replying. He realized her eyes were violet in the daylight as well as in the evening shadows, and they engendered feelings in him that he could not deal with.
“Thanks for the beignets. You don’t mind walking to your office, do you?” she said. “It’s across the square and about a block down, right? See you around, big boy. Keep it in your pants.”
She left five dollars under her plate for the waitress. After she was gone, he pressed his fingers against his temples and tried to put together what she had just said. How did she know where his office was, and how did she know the exact distance? Had she followed the Greyhound to Baton Rouge and popped Frankie Gee in the stall? Had his seed produced a psychopath? Even though a breeze was blowing off the river, the scent of her perfume seemed to hang on every surface she had touched.
THAT SAME NIGHT in New Iberia, the southern sky was filled with strange lights, flashes of electricity that would ignite inside a solitary black cloud and in seconds ripple across the entirety of the heavens without making a sound. Then a rain front moved across the marshlands and drenched the town and overflowed the gutters on East Main and covered our front yard with a gray and yellow net of dead leaves. At four in the morning, amid the booming of thunder, I thought I heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. I had been dreaming before I woke, and in the dream, large shells fired from an offshore battery were arching out of their trajectory, whistling just before they exploded inside a sodden rain forest.
I felt light-headed when I picked up the phone, part of me still inside the dream that was so real I could not shake it or think my way out of it. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.
At first I could hear only static. I looked at the caller ID, but the number was blocked. “Who is this?” I said.
“It’s Tee Jolie, Mr. Dave. Can you hear me okay? There’s a bad storm where I’m at.”
Through the window, I could see fog rolling off the bayou into the trees, pushing against the windows and doors. I sat down in a chair. “Where are you?” I said.
“A long ways from home. There’s a beautiful beach here. The sea is green. I wanted to tell you everyt’ing is all right. I scared you at the hospital in New Orleans. I wish I ain’t done that.”