“I promised Boots I wouldn’t repeat my old behavior. I’m usually pretty good about keeping my word, Jim, but I’m just human. Also, I want you to understand the nature of our relationship and to form an idea of what will probably happen whenever we meet. So, in that spirit—” I said, and balled up my fist inside my cloth glove and leaned across the table and hooked him in the eye and knocked him into a stack of canned vegetables.
32
Wednesday Evening Alafair was eating at an outdoor table at the McDonald’s on East Main when a red car pulled into the parking lot and a young man wearing a freshly pressed white shirt and starched khakis and sunglasses and a straw hat got out and walked toward her.
He stood in front of her, the fingers of one hand touching the tabletop, his face expressionless behind his sunglasses.
“Can I sit down?” he asked.
“You shouldn’t be here, Johnny. People are looking for you,” she replied.
“That’s nothing new.” He glanced over his shoulder at a Cherokee filled with high school kids in the parking lot. They were listening to white rap music that beat like a fist on the walls of the restaurant. He sat down at the table. “Take a ride with me.”
“Dave says you beat up a black woman in the Loreauville Quarters. For no reason,” she said.
“I’m sorry about that. I got strange stuff that goes off in my head sometime. I told the woman that. That’s the way it flushes sometime.”
The rap music from the Cherokee increased in intensity. He turned irritably and glared at the kids inside the vehicle. One of them threw a box of trash out on the pavement. Alafair looked at Remeta’s hands. For some reason they weren’t like those of an artist any longer. They were knobbed with bone and they curled spasmodically into fists, as though he wanted to crush something inside them. He turned back to her and stared at her expression.
“You got something on your mind?” he asked.
“Your arms are sunburned,” she said.
“I was out on Lake Fausse Pointe. It’s full of herons and cranes and flooded cypress. It’s beautiful.”
“I have to go now.”
“No,” he said, and placed his hand across her wrist. He leaned toward her, his mouth parting to speak, but the kids in the Cherokee had turned up their stereo even louder and he looked at them again over his s
houlder. A pop can flew out of the Cherokee’s window and clattered across the pavement.
“Wait here a minute,” Remeta said, and got up from the table.
He walked to the Cherokee and picked up all the Styrofoam cups and hamburger containers and dirty napkins that had been thrown on the pavement and stood with them at the driver’s window.
“Turn off the radio,” he said.
The high school kid behind the wheel stopped talking to the others in the vehicle and looked dumbly at Remeta, then began turning down the dial on the stereo until the sound bled away into silence.
“You guys are seriously pissing me off,” Remeta said, pushing the trash through the window. “The next time I see you throwing garbage on the ground, I’m going to kick the shit out of you. And if I hear that rap music again, I’m going to tear your stereo out of the dashboard and shove it up your ass. Now get out of here.”
The driver started the Cherokee, grinding the starter, and bounced out onto the street, while his passengers looked back white-faced at Remeta.
He sat back down at the table, his eyes following the Cherokee down the street.
“That was mean,” she said.
“They deserve worse.”
“I’m going to the library now.”
“I’ll drive you there. We can meet later.”
“No.”
“I had to shoot that guy. The one in the fire in New Orleans. He was sent to kill me.”
“Don’t tell me about it. It’s disgusting.”