“I can’t understand what you’re saying. Don’t hang up. Please. Are you saying you found my husband’s wallet?”
“I found him. He was inside some cardboard boxes behind the center. He looks like somebody beat him up. I thought maybe he wandered in from the highway.”
“How bad is he hurt?”
“The way people get hurt in a fight.”
“Can you put him on the phone?”
“He’s sleeping now. It got pretty cold last night. His teeth were clicking. I covered him up on a cot.”
“What are his injuries? Please tell me. My husband doesn’t get in fights. How bad is it?”
“There was a pint of wine in the pocket of his jacket. It was broken. I don’t think it cut him. Lady, this neighborhood is mostly colored. Ask yourself why he was down here, because I don’t know. He’s no stew-bum. That’s why I called. I think somebody put the boots to him and dumped him here.”
She followed his directions to a rural neighborhood on the two-lane highway to Galveston, a neighborhood with dirt streets and shotgun and paintless frame houses that had peaked tin roofs and neat yards and coffee cans planted with flowers on the galleries. It reminded her of the sugarcane and rice-mill towns of southern Louisiana, trapped between the softly focused culture of the agrarian South and the petrochemical industries that chained the Gulf Coast. She pulled up to a clapboard church set among cedar and pine trees and parked in back by a rain ditch. The man named Albert helped her put Hershel in her car. Albert was dressed in an off-color, ill-fitting suit and unshined dress shoes with white socks; his hair looked like paint poured on a rock.
“You’re a minister?” she asked.
“No, just a drunk trying to get well. Fine car,” he said.
“I want to make a donation to your church,” she said.
“You can if you want. You don’t have to. Can I tell you something, lady?”
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t cry. He’s gonna be all right.”
“No, he’s not. But you’ve been very kind.” She opened her purse and took out a fifty-dollar bill. “Take this. Don’t argue.”
“Ma’am, if you’re in some kind of trouble, maybe you should call the police. I don’t like to see you drive out of here crying like that. You could have an accident. Let me call the cops for you. They’ll know what to do.”
Chapter
26
CHRISTMAS MORNING I received a person-to-person call at the motor court outside Morgan City. I heard the operator tell the caller to deposit two dollars in coins. “Weldon?” Linda Gail’s voice said.
“What’s happened?” I said, fearing the worst.
She told me everything she knew about the beating Hershel had taken, then had to deposit more coins. My stomach felt sick. I looked across the room at Rosita. I knew the target was not Hershel; it was us, and our choices were starting to run out.
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“I don’t know. I’ve put him to bed,” Linda Gail said. “Our doctor says he may have had a psychotic break.”
“It was Hubert Slakely who beat him?”
“That’s the name Hershel gave me. I called the police. Somebody is supposed to call me back.”
“Where’s Roy?”
“I don’t know. I left a message at his office.”
“Did you call his house?”
“No.”