“The writer? I know who he is. Is he living here’bouts now?”
“He was in Huntsville the same time you were. You never buddied around with him?” she said.
“I spent most of my free time at Huntsville in the chapel or the library.”
“Who’s the little girl?” Helen asked.
“Her mother cleans for me. They’re from right up the road, where all those trailers are at.”
Helen went over to the swing. “Is your mommy home?” she said to the little girl.
“She’s at work.”
“Why’d she leave you here?”
“Mr. Vidor took me to buy clothes.”
“Is somebody else at home right now?”
“My auntie.”
“I want you to wait out front for us. We need to talk with Mr. Vidor. We’ll drive you home in a few minutes. You’re not to come back here again unless your mother is with you.”
“Ma’am, you cain’t tell that little girl what to do,” Perkins said.
Helen lifted one finger toward Perkins, then looked back at the child. “You haven’t done anything wrong. But you should be with your family and not in the home of a man you don’t know well. You understand that?”
Perkins bit on a thumbnail, his grin gone. He stuffed a huge pile of blackened leaves and moldy pecan husks into the barrel, curls of smoke rising into his face. His conked hair was oily with sweat or grease or both, and the strawberry birthmark that bled like a tail out of his hairline seemed to have darkened in the shade.
Helen waited until the little girl had left the yard. “Here are the rules,” she said. “You don’t get near any children in this parish. If you try to harass a member of my department, if you look cross-eyed at somebody on the street, if you spit on a sidewalk, if you throw a gum wrapper out a car window, I’m going to turn your life into an exquisite agony.”
He leaned on his rake, the sweat on his ridged stomach running into the waistband of his underwear. “No, you won’t,” he said. “Check my jacket. On my last jolt, I went out max time. I did twenty-seven months chopping cotton under the gun, just so I wouldn’t have some twerp of a PO telling me what I could and couldn’t do. You got no say in my life, Sheriff, ’cause I ain’t broke no laws, and I don’t plan to, either. Empty wagons always make the loudest rattle.”
Helen brushed at her nose, the smoke starting to get to her. “You have anything you want to say to Mr. Perkins?” she asked me.
“You called Clete Purcel by name at Henderson Swamp. How’d you know who he was?” I said.
“He’s got his big cheeks spread on a stool at Clementine’s every time I go in there. He’s usually drunk,” Perkins said.
“When you see Robert Weingart—” I began.
“I don’t see him,” he said.
“Tell Weingart that for a mainline con, he’s made a major mistake,” I said.
Perkins laughed under his breath and bent to his work, dropping a rake-load of leaves and wet pine needles into the fire. Then he said something into the smoke.
“What’d you say?” Helen said, stepping toward him.
Perkins walked out of the smoke, blowing out his breath as though thinking of the right words to use. “I said maybe y’all ain’t so damn smart. Maybe y’all are gonna wish you had me for a friend.”
“Want to take the collard greens out of your mouth?” I said.
“I’m saying maybe I’m not the worst huckleberry in the patch. I’m saying there’s some out yonder that is a lot worse than me,” he replied. “They’re homegrown, too, not brought from somewhere else.” He peeled a stick of gum and rolled it in a ball and placed it behind his teeth, savoring the taste, his eyes filling with mirth as he stared Helen directly in the face. He began chewing, barely able to repress his amusement at Helen, his lips purple in the shade.
“You want to tell me why I interest you so?” she said.
“You put me in mind of a woman I knew in Longview. She could pick up a hog and throw it over a fence. She had a butch haircut that looked like the head of a toothbrush. It felt just like bristles when you ran your hand acrost it. I was sweet on her for a long time.”