WE PASSED ALICE Plantation and entered a tunnel of magnificent live oaks that arched over the road, then passed another Greek-columned antebellum home and clanked across the drawbridge and passed a community of trailers leaking rust into the ground and entered the village of Jeanerette, Louisiana, where approximately one-third of the population eked out an existence below the poverty line.
“How’d you like living over here, Varina?” Clete said.
“I hated it,” she replied.
“Where do you want out?”
“Every place is closed,” she said. “At eight o’clock the whole town turns into a mausoleum. A 747 could crash on it and nobody would notice.”
“We don’t have time to take you to the Yellow Bowl,” he said.
“I’ll go with you to Pierre’s and borrow one of his cars.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “Tell me something—does Pierre have a basement in that dump?”
“There’s a dank hole down there. It has water in it most of the time. Why?”
“No reason,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. A guy who owned it in the nineteenth century was a business partner of the guy who created Angola pen. Some
thing like two thousand convicts died when this guy rented them out as slave labor. It’s the kind of history that makes you proud to be an American.”
“Yes, I know all about that,” she said. “But I’m a bit tired of feeling guilty about things I didn’t do. Maybe people make their own beds.”
“I wish I had that kind of clarity,” he said. “It must be great.”
I could see the color climbing in the back of Varina’s neck. As though she could read my thoughts, she turned and looked at me. “Are you just going to sit there?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Would you be gentleman enough to tell your fat fuck of a friend to shut up?”
I don’t know if the word “entitlement” would apply to Varina’s behavior, or “arrogance” and “narcissism.” She possessed the same surreal mentality common among higher-class women in southern society of years ago. The self-centeredness and disconnection from reality were so egregious that it often made you wonder if you had the problem, not the spoiled bunch who believed the sun rose and set upon their anointed brows. But Varina did not come from that class of people. Her father had been from the red-clay country of North Louisiana and knew the world of sweat and cotton poison and trysts with black girls taken from the field into a barn. Maybe these contradictions were the source of the mystery that lived in her eyes and hovered around her mouth. Most men wish to be beguiled. And nobody was better at it than Varina. No matter how all this played out, I believed she would remain glamorous and seductive, beautiful and unknowable, to the very end.
When I didn’t answer her question, she looked back at the road, then out the side window. Once again, she seemed wan and distant, and I wondered if her statement about people making their own beds was intended to apply to herself rather than to others.
We drove through the far end of town, the lawns stiff with frost, the houses dark, the moon shining on a backdrop of post-harvest sugarcane fields that were frozen and spiked with stubble and splintered cane. Clete depressed his turn indicator as we approached Croix du Sud. As we turned in to the driveway and passed through the open gates, I could see the blinking red reflection of the left rear light dancing on the stone pillars at the entrance and the deep green waxy leaves of the camellia bushes planted along the driveway, perhaps like a warning of things to come.
The house was dark except for the light on the porch.
“Pull around back,” Varina said.
“Why?” Clete said.
“Pierre leaves a key above the door. I’m going to take one of his cars.”
I felt my cell phone throb against my thigh. I opened it and looked at the caller ID. Clete drove past the carriage house and stopped at the edge of the concrete parking pad, the headlights burrowing through the darkness onto the bayou’s surface, where a single-engine pontoon plane was moored inside the fog. The call was from Catin Segura, the female deputy Jesse Leboeuf had beaten and raped. “I lied to you, Dave,” she said.
CLETE GOT OUT of the Caddy, letting the blanket slip off his shoulders onto the edge of the seat.
“Lied about what?” I said into the phone.
“I told you Jesse Leboeuf said something when he was dying in my bathtub,” Catin replied. “I told you I didn’t know what he said because I don’t talk French.”
“You mean you do speak French?”
“No, not at all. But I wrote down what the words sounded like.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”