Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“My first statement has to do with absolute rage.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Hold your water, Streak, before I get charged up again. Judy made me write out a list of all the things you did that angered me. It’s quite long.”

I looked out the window at Batist chopping meat on the wood table by the coulee. He had started a trash fire of leaves, and the smoke was blowing into my neighbor’s cane field. I could feel my scalp tightening as I waited for Bootsie to recite her written complaint, and I wanted to be outside, in the wind, in the autumnal smell of smoldering leaves, away from the words that would force me to look again at the ongoing insanity of my behavior.

Then, rather than wait for her to speak again and quietly accept criticism, I took the easier, softer way and tried to preempt it. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s the violence. Nobody should have to live around it. I drag it home with me like an animal on a chain,” I said.

“Judy made me look at something I didn’t want to see. I was often angry when you were protective of someone else. You beat up Gable because you thought he was treating me disrespectfully in public. Then I lectured you about your violent feelings toward Remeta.”

“You weren’t wrong,” I said.

“What?”

“I set Remeta up the other night. I was going to dust him and take him out of Alafair’s life.”

She was quiet a long time, staring into space, her cheeks spotted with color. Her mouth was parted slightly and I kept waiting for her to speak.

“Boots?” I said.

“You were actually going to kill him?”

“Yes.”

I could see the anger climbing into her face. “In front of our home, just blow him away?” she said.

“I couldn’t do it. So he’ll be back. We can count on it.”

I could hear the wall clock in the silence. Her face was covered with shadow and I couldn’t see her expression. I waited a moment longer, then rinsed out my glass and dried it and put it in the cupboard and went out on the front gallery. The screen opened behind me.

“He’s coming back?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“I wish you had killed him. That’s what I really feel. I wish Johnny Remeta was dead. If he comes around Alafair again, I’ll do it myself. Get either in or out of the game, Streak,” she said.

“Your sponsor would call that rigorous honesty,” I said.

She tried to hold the anger in her face, then mashed her foot on top of mine.

The bedroom was filled with shadows and the curtains twisted and popped in the wind when Bootsie sat on my thighs and lowered her hand, then raised herself and placed me inside her. A few minutes later her mouth opened silently and her eyes became unfocused, her hair hanging in her face, and she began to say something that broke and dissolved in her throat; then I felt myself joining her, my hands slipping off her breasts onto her back, and in my mind’s eye I saw a waterfall cascading over pink rocks and a marbled boulder tearing loose from its moorings, rolling heavily, faster and faster in the current, its weight pressing deeply into the soft pebbly bottom of the stream.

She kissed me and cupped her hand on my forehead as though she were checking to see if I had a fever, then pushed my hair up on my head.

“Alafair will be home soon. Let’s take her to dinner at the Patio. We can afford an extra night out, can’t we?” she said.

“Sure.”

I watched her as she put on her panties and bra; her back was firm with muscle, her skin as free of wrinkles as a young woman’s. She was reaching for her shirt on the chair when an odor like scorched hair and burning garbage struck her face.

“Good Lord, what is that?” she said.

I put on my khakis and the two of us went into the kitchen and looked through the window into the backyard. The sun had dropped below the horizon, but the light had not gone out of the sky, and the full moon hung like a sliver of partially melted ice above my neighbor’s cane. Batist flung a bucket filled with hog’s blood onto the trash fire, and a cloud of black smoke with fire inside it billowed up into the wind and drifted back against the house.

“What’s Batist doing? Has he lost his mind?” Bootsie said.

I rubbed the small of her back, my fingers touching the line of elastic across the top of her panties.