She looked back at the bar, straightening her shoulders slightly, her breasts stiffening against her shirt. Clete studied the clearness of her complexion and her pug nose and the pools of color in her cheeks and the redness of her mouth and the cuteness of her profile. She removed a strand of hair from her eyebrow and looked him in the face. “Something wrong?” she said.
“Did you have dinner yet?”
“No, I was supposed to eat with my uncle.”
“Let’s have another round and I’ll buy you supper at Possum’s.”
“Dutch treat,” she said.
“No, it’s going on my expense tab, and I’m sending it to the world-class asshole.”
“Who is he?”
He upended his shot glass and winked at her. When she sipped from her vodka Collins, her mouth looked cold and hard and lovely. She fished a cherry out of the ice and held it by the stem and placed it behind her teeth. When she bit into it, the juice ran over her lip. She caught it on one knuckle, smiling. She wiped her hand on a paper napkin. “I’m a mess,” she said.
“You look good to me.”
“Ready to rock, big guy?” she said. She bit down on the corner of her lip, her eyes fixed on his.
CHAPTER
9
I WOKE BEFORE SUNUP the following day and fed Tripod and Snuggs on the back steps, then fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and sat down on the steps and ate breakfast with them. The dawn was a grayish-blue, the fog so thick on the bayou that I couldn’t see the oaks on the far bank, the house and yard quiet except for the ticking of moisture out of the trees. It was one of those moments in the twenty-four-hour cycle of the day when you know that the past is still with you, if you’ll only take the time to listen to the voices inside the mist or watch the shapes that are sometimes printed on a patch of green-black shade between the live oaks.
I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream inside the mind of God. Perhaps it’s only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent? Buried in the mudflat down Bayou Teche from me were the remains of a Confederate gunboat. I knew this to be a fact because in the year 1942 my father pulled a huge rusted spike from one of its beams and gave it to me, along with sixteen balls of grapeshot he found inside the cavity of a rotted oak not thirty yards away. On the street in front of my present home, twenty thousand Yankee soldiers marched down the Old Spanish Trail in pursuit of General Alfred Mouton and his boys in butternut, their haversacks stuffed with loot, their wounds from a dozen firefights still green, their lust for reven
ge unsated. As I sat on the steps with Snuggs and Tripod, I wondered if those soldiers of long ago were still out there, beckoning to us, daring us to witness their mortality, daring us to acknowledge that it would soon be ours.
I have had visions of them that I do not try to explain to others. Sometimes I thought I heard cries and shouts and the sounds of musket fire in the mist, because the Union soldiers who marched through Acadiana were turned loose upon the civilian populace as a lesson in terror. The rape of Negro women became commonplace. Northerners have never understood the nature of the crimes that were committed in their names, no more than neocolonials can understand the enmity their government creates in theirs. The pastoral solemnity of a Civil War graveyard doesn’t come close to suggesting the reality of war or the crucible of pain in which a soldier lives and dies.
But in spite of the bloody ground on which our town was built, and out of which oak trees and bamboo and banks of flowers along the bayou grew, it remained for me a magical place in the predawn hours, touched only cosmetically by the Industrial Age, the drawbridge clanking erect in the fog, its great cogged wheels bleeding rust, a two-story quarter boat that resembled a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler being pushed down to the Gulf, the fog billowing whitely around it, the air sprinkled with the smell of Confederate jasmine.
I heard the screen door open behind me. I turned and looked up into Alafair’s face. She was still wearing her nightgown, but she had washed her face and combed her hair. I had not spoken to her since my confrontation the previous day with Kermit Abelard on the lawn of his house. “Got a minute?” she said.
I made room for her beside me. Both Tripod and Snuggs looked up from their bowls, then resumed eating. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” I asked.
“I’ve made a couple of decisions. I don’t know how you’ll feel about them,” she said.
The tenor of her voice was of a kind I never took lightly. Alafair made mistakes, particularly of the heart. She could be emotional and impetuous, but once she made up her mind about a matter of principle, she stayed the course, no matter how much she got hurt.
“I didn’t go to the Abelard house because of your relationship with Kermit,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. One way or another we’re at a juncture, Dave. Until I work my way through a couple of things, I think it’s better I move out.”
“This is your home, Alafair. It’s been your home since I pulled you out of a submerged plane.”
There was no question I was using emotional blackmail against her, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t believe that either the Abelard family or my own ineptitude had brought us to this point. Also, there are times when loss is not acceptable under any circumstances.
“This has less to do with you and Molly than it does me,” she said. “I know you want what’s good for me, but no amount of reasoning has any influence on you. Yesterday Kermit and I went out in the boat to talk about my novel. His agent is flying in today. Kermit has already sent him a couple of chapters. The agent thinks he can sell my novel as a work in progress. Kermit’s agent is with William Morris. I should be delighted. But I have a serious problem. Know what it is? I think maybe I shouldn’t let Kermit’s agent represent me. Why? Because maybe you’re right and I shouldn’t be around the Abelards or Robert Weingart. Maybe I’m taking advantage of my relationship with Kermit to get an introduction to a publisher in New York. Or maybe the opposite is true. Maybe I’m about to throw it all away to satisfy my father’s obsession about people who he thinks have too much money and power.”
“Listen, forget Weingart and the Abelards. Yesterday there was a man fishing in a pirogue out in the cypress trees in front of the Abelard house. Do you know who that man was?”
“Somebody Robert is trying to help.”
“His name is Vidor Perkins. He did time with Weingart in Huntsville Pen. He’s the same guy who told me I had an emergency call at the bait shop on Henderson levee.”
“Are you sure?”