“Do you have bleeding gums?” she asked.
“Yeah, sometimes. I never brushed enough.”
“What are you hiding?”
“You’re worse than Dave. Look, the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever. Now you’re one of us. That means you’re forever, too.”
“No, I’m not one of you. I killed people for money, Clete.”
He leaned forward on the desk, pointing his finger. “You did what you did because men molested and raped you as a child. You’re my baby girl, and anyone who says you’re not a wonderful young woman is going to have his voice box ripped out. Are we clear on this? Don’t let me hear you running yourself down again. You’re one of the best people I ever knew.”
She felt a lump in her throat that was so large, she couldn’t swallow.
FROM THIS POINT on in my narrative, I cannot be entirely sure of any of the events that transpired. It started to rain hard Thursday night, the kind of winter rain that in Louisiana is always followed by a cold front, one that descends out of the north as hard as a fist and limns the tops of the unharvested cane with frost and flanges the edges of the bayou with ice. It was the kind of weather I looked forward to as a boy, when my father and I hunted ducks down at Pecan Island, rising out of the reeds together, our shotguns against our shoulders, knocking down mallards and Canadian geese whose V formations were stenciled against the clouds as far as the eye could see. But those days were gone, and when Molly and I went to sleep at ten P.M. that Thursday, my dreams took me to places that seemed to have nothing to do with southern Louisiana and the barking of retrievers and the sounds the geese made when they plunged through the sheet of ice that surrounded our duck blind.
In the dream I saw a long stretch of clear green water in the Dry Tortugas, the pink and gray mass of old Fort Jefferson in the background, and down below a horseshoe-shaped coral reef that formed a bowl in which a cloud of hot blue water floated like ink poured from a bottle. The reef was strung with gossamer fans, and inside them I could see lobsters hiding in the rocks and the shadows of lemon sharks moving across the whiteness of the sand.
Then the water began to recede from the cusp of beach that surrounded the fort, exposing the ragged and crumbling foundation under it, the water dropping steadily as though someone had pulled a plug from a drain hole in the bottom of the ocean. The boat I was standing on descended with the water level until the keel settled on the seabed. I had expected to see coral-encrusted cannons and spent torpedoes and the wrecks of ancient ships and an undulating landscape that had the softly molded contours of a sand sculpture. I was mistaken. I was surrounded by a desert, and in the distance I could see the curvature of the earth dipping off the horizon into a hard blue sky unmarked by either clouds or birds. The sand was salted with volcanic grit and dotted with big lumps of basaltic rock and glimmering pools of a viscous green liquid that could have been chemical waste. There was no sign of life of any kind, not even the lobsters and the lemon sharks I had seen moments earlier inside the coral horseshoe. The only human edifice in sight was Fort Jefferson, the place where Dr. Samuel Mudd was imprisoned for his role in the assassination of President Lincoln. The flag that flew above it had frayed into sun-faded strips of red and white and blue cheesecloth.
I sat up in bed and was glad to hear the rain hitting the trees and our tin roof and running through the gutters into our flower beds and out into the yard. I hoped the rain would pour down during the entirety of the night and flood our property and clog the storm sewers and overflow the curbs and wash in waves through the streets and down the slope of the Teche until the oaks and cypresses and canebrakes along the banks seemed to quiver inside the current. I wanted to see the rain wash clean all the surfaces of the earth, as it did in Noah’s time. I wanted to believe that morning would bring a pink sunrise and the hanging of the archer’s bow in the sky and the appearance of a solitary dove flying toward a ship’s bow with a green branch in its beak. I wanted to believe that biblical events of aeons ago would happen again. In short, I wanted to believe in things that were impossible.
I was on the way to the bathroom when the phone rang. I picked it up in the kitchen. Through the window, I could see a heavy coat of white fog on the bayou’s surface, and I could see Tripod and Snuggs inside the hutch, rain sluicing off the tarp I had stretched over the top.
“Guess who this is, Mr. Dave,” the voice said.
“I don’t know if I’m up to this, Tee Jolie,” I replied.
“I done somet’ing wrong?”
“We went to the island southeast of the Chandeleurs. Nobody was home.”
“What you mean? Where you t’ink I’m at now?”
“I have no idea.”
“I can see the palm trees and the water t’rew the window.”
“You sound pretty stoned, kiddo.”
“You make me feel bad. I cain’t he’p what they give me.”
“Who gives you?”
“The doctor and the nurse. I almost bled out. You heard from Blue?”
“No, I haven’t. Blue died of an overdose. Her body was frozen in a block of ice and dumped overboard south of St. Mary Parish. I saw her body on the coroner’s table. The last thing she did was put a note in her mouth telling us that you were still alive. You have to stop lying to yourself, Tee Jolie.”
“Blue don’t use drugs. At least not no more. I seen her on a video. She was waving at me on a boat. Out on the ocean in California.”
“Where is Pierre Dupree?”
“I ain’t sure. I sleep most of the time. I wish I was back home. I miss St. Martinville.”
“You have to find out where you are and tell me.”
“I done tole you. I can see the walls outside and the palm trees and the waves smashing on the beach.”
“You’re in a place that looks like a fort? That’s made out of stucco?”