“Get in the truck.”
“Did you know Kermit Abelard was gay?”
“No. And I don’t know that now.”
“Weingart is a cell-house bitch. Those two guys are getting it on. Don’t pretend they’re not.”
“Stay away from Weingart, Clete. A guy like that is looking for a bullet. Anything short of it will have no effect.”
“You want Weingart around Alafair? You want his fop of a boyfriend around her? What’s wrong with you?”
“Just shut up.”
“The hell I will.”
I ate two aspirin from a box I kept on the dashboard of my truck, started the engine, and hoped that a great hard gray rain would sweep across the wetlands. I hoped that window-breaking hail would pound down on my truck, clattering like tack hammers on the roof, filling the cab with such a din that I could not hear Clete talking all the way back to New Iberia. I wished somehow the sulfurous smell of the storm and the swirling clouds of rain and the bolts of lightning spiking into the horizon would cleanse me of the angst I felt about my daughter and her exposure to a tangle of vipers thriving on the watery southern rim of St. Mary Parish.
CHAPTER
4
THE STORM KNOCKED out the power on Main Street, so Alafair and Molly and I ate supper in the light of candles at our kitchen table while the rain beat down on the tin roof of our home and flooded the yard and danced on the surface of Bayou Teche. We had brought Snuggs and Tripod inside, and the two of them were eating out of their bowls on the floor. Tripod was old and sick and losing his eyesight, and I did not like to contemplate the choices we might have to make in the near future. As though she had read my mind, Molly got up from the table and wrapped him in a towel and placed him inside the cutaway cardboard box, lined with a soft blanket, where he slept whenever the weather turned bad.
She patted him on top of the head. “You still cold, little Pod?” she said. He lifted up his pointy face and stared at her, his nose twitching. She squatted down and continued to stroke his head. “You poor little guy.”
When I first met Molly, she had been a nun, although she had not taken vows. She had been working with a relief organization that constructed homes for the poor and helped empower fisherpeople and victims of natural calamities. But she and her fellow nuns were of a different stripe than their antecedents, and they didn’t confine themselves to the type of charitable activities that are usually considered laudatory but of no threat or consequence to corporate-scale enterprises. Molly and her friends began to organize the sugarcane workers. The workers who joined the union discovered they had twenty-four hours to get out of their company-owned houses. And that was just for openers.
Where did this happen?
You got it. In the medieval fiefdom of the Abelard family, St. Mary Parish.
Molly sat back down at the table and resumed eating, her thoughts hidden, the candlelight carving her features, flickering on her red hair and the strange brown luminosity of her eyes.
“I’m going to take him to the vet tomorrow,” I said. “I think he might have distemper.”
“I’ll take him,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let him get wet this afternoon. I was late getting home, and his chain was wrapped around the tree. Where were you?”
We had gotten to the subject I didn’t want to broach. “Clete and I took a ride to the Abelard home, down in St. Mary.”
I heard Alafair stop eating. “Why would you want to go to the Abelard house, Dave?” she asked.
“A pimp by the name of Herman Stanga claims to be working for the St. Jude Project. Kermit Abelard says that’s not so. His friend Robert Weingart claims he never heard of Herman Stanga. I think Weingart is a liar and a full-time mainline wiseass. Clete is hanging by a thread over the fire. He may go to prison because of Stanga, Alafair.”
“Go to prison for what?”
“Stanga spat on him, and Clete did something he shouldn’t have.”
“So it’s Kermit’s fault?”
“I think Kermit is deliberately naive. He chooses not to see evil in men who are genuinely wicked. He told me he had talked to you about his contacts with Stanga.”
“Kermit has a good heart. Maybe you’d find that out if you gave him a chance,” she said.
The rain had slackened, and the light on the bayou was a dense green, the wake from a passing tugboat swelling over the banks into the roots of the cypress and oak trees. Our windows were open, and the air was cool and fresh, and I could smell the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou and the wet trees and the soaked ground, and I didn’t want to talk about Herman Stanga and the Abelard family. No, that’s not true. I did not want to hear my daughter speak as an advocate for the Abelards.
“I warned Kermit not to drag you into his association with Herman Stanga,” I said.
“You did what?”