“The paddle wheeler. I can hear the steam engines. I can hear the wheel churning in the water.”
This time I didn’t try to argue with him. “Clete, maybe there’s another way to think about this. Maybe we’re getting a second chance. Maybe we’re putting away some of the guys we didn’t get the last time out.”
He gazed into my face and smiled. “I’ve got a suggestion.”
“What?” I asked.
“Let’s just do it. High and hard and down the middle. Shake and bake, snake and nape, full throttle and fuck it. On three, here comes the worst shit storm in the history of Bayou Teche.”
AND THAT WAS the way we did it. We came through the French doors and across the patio in tandem. I shot a man who stood up behind a camellia bush, and I saw part of his jaw fly from his head in a bloody spray. I shot a second man who dropped his gun and limped gingerly away into the darkness, past the gazebo, press
ing his palm against his thigh, as though he might have sustained a football injury rather than a bullet wound from an AK-47. I saw muzzle flashes from among the camellia and azalea bushes and from behind a restored slave’s cabin and from someone firing from the corner of the carriage house. I even thought I saw a tracer round streak into the distance and die like a tiny spark behind a cane field, but I couldn’t be sure. I fired until the AK-47 was empty, then I stooped over the first man I had shot and pulled a cut-down pump shotgun from his hands and fished in his pockets for the extra shells. He was still alive, his eyes as bright as polished brown marbles, his tongue moving where his jaw should have been. I could not make out the words he was trying to say.
I did something then that some would consider bizarre. I broke my religious medal from its chain and pressed it in his hand. I don’t know if he had any idea what it was or if he cared, because I didn’t look at him again. Someone had gotten on board the pontoon plane and started up the engine. I ran toward Clete, on the far side of the gazebo, aiming the Beretta straight out in front of him with both hands, firing at the plane taxiing into the middle of the bayou, away from the overhang of the trees.
“Let them go,” I said. “There’s a guy behind the carriage house. I couldn’t get him.”
“If anybody got on that plane, it’s the Duprees,” he said.
“We’ll get them later,” I said.
“Screw that,” he said. He fired three more rounds, and I heard at least one of them hit the plane’s propeller. Then the bolt on his Beretta locked open on an empty chamber. He dropped the magazine from the frame and inserted the backup magazine and chambered a round.
“Let the plane go, Clete,” I said.
It wasn’t really a choice now. The pilot, whoever he or she was, had given it the gas. The plane lifted off the bayou briefly, sputtered once or twice, and set back down, the fog closing as it drifted around a bend with the incoming tide. Whoever was aboard was off the playing field, at least temporarily.
Clete’s face looked poached, his green eyes as big as Life Savers. I ejected a spent shell from the chamber of the twelve-gauge I had taken off the dying man and inserted three shells into the magazine, until I felt the spring come tight against my thumb. It was all going very fast now. I saw Gretchen and Alafair come out of the house. Gretchen was carrying Helen Soileau over her shoulder, and Alafair was pulling Tee Jolie Melton behind her. That was not all that was going on. Someone had started a fire inside the house, a small one certainly, with flames no bigger than the candles on a birthday cake burning in a darkened room, but it was a fire just the same.
“Who the hell did that?” Clete said.
“My bet is on Gretchen,” I said.
“Good for her,” he said.
“How about all the evidence in there? The computers, the paper files, the message machines, the cell phones?”
Clete’s attention had wandered. “On the other side of the coulee,” he said. “The door is open to the slave cabin. It wasn’t open a minute ago.”
I let my eyes sweep back and forth across the backyard. The wind had died, and there were no shadows moving on the grass. The man who had been behind the carriage house seemed to have disappeared. I could hear myself breathing in the silence, and steam was rising from my mouth. “I’ll check out the cabin,” I said. “A dead guy back there is wearing a coat that’ll fit you. Maybe we’re home free, partner.”
“These guys don’t give up that easily,” he replied, his teeth chattering. “We’re not finished with payback, either.”
“Get the coat. You’re going to come down with pneumonia.”
“Pull a coat off a dead guy with bullet holes in him?”
“Just do it. Don’t argue. For once in your life. I’ve never seen anything like it. You have a cinder block for a brain.”
“What’s wrong with that? It helps keep things simple,” he said.
“That’s what I mean. You’re hopeless.”
The moon was out from behind the clouds, and I could see the smile on his face. “Let’s see what’s going on inside Uncle Tom’s cabin,” he said.
We began walking across the lawn, past a stone birdbath and a Roman sundial and a dry goldfish pond scrolled with black mold. The water in the bayou had risen over the cypress knees and elephant ears and clumps of bamboo that grew along the banks. Leaves that were still yellow and red were floating on top of the water, and the caladiums someone had planted around the oaks reminded me of the ones I had seen through my window in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans.
Out in the fog, I could hear somebody grinding the electric starter on the pontoon plane. We walked down one side of a dry coulee and up the opposite slope, the leaves crackling under our shoes, the air filled with a bright, clean odor not unlike the smell of snow. The leaves had drifted in piles so thick and high they were over the tops of our shoes, and the sound of the leaves breaking made me think of squirrel hunting in the fall with my father, Big Aldous, when I was a young boy. I wondered where Big Aldous was. I wondered if he was with my mother and if they were both watching over me, the way I believe spirits sometimes do when they’re not ready to let go of the earth. My parents had died violent deaths while they were young, and they knew what it meant to have one’s life stolen, and for those reasons I had always thought they were with me in one fashion or another, trying to do the right thing from the Great Beyond.