Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“If I did, I don’t remember them.”

She hit the shuttlecock at him, whizzing it past his head. “Come on, I bet you can really sock it,” she said.

But Clete was a hog on ice, slashing the racket into the net, tumbling over a lawn chair, batting the shuttlecock into a tree, almost stepping on one of the little girls. “I better quit,” he said.

“You did great,” Varina said. “Girls, let’s have our ice cream and cake, then y’all had better run along home. Mr. Clete and I have some business to take care of.”

“It’s somebody’s birthday?” Clete said.

“Tomorrow is. I’m going to take them to the zoo in the morning.”

“I didn’t mean to disturb y’all,” he said.

“No, you’re not disturbing anything. Come inside. Go wash your hands, girls. Let’s hurry up now.”

“I need to make a couple of calls,” he lied. “I’ll wait out here and have a cigarette.”

He watched Varina escort the two girls into the back of the house. Through the window, he could see them gathered around a cake and a carton of ice cream at the kitchen table. He lit a cigarette and smoked it in the wind, unable to dispel his sense of discomfort. Why did the children have to leave? They obviously dressed for the occasion. They could have played in the yard while Clete looked at a photograph Varina had said would be of interest to him.

The twins came out the back door and walked up the road holding hands. Varina waved him inside.

“Think it’s all right for those kids to walk home by themselves?” he asked.

“They don’t have far to go.” There was a smear of ice cream on her mouth. She wiped it away with her wrist. “I was watching you through the window. You looked wistful.”

“South Louisiana makes me think of Southeast Asia sometimes. I’m an odd guy, probably one of the few who dug it over there.”

“You were in Vietnam?”

“Two tours. I was in Thailand and the Philippines. Cambodia, too. But we weren’t supposed to talk about that. I’d go back to Vietnam if I had the chance.”

“What for?”

“I had a girl there. Her name was Maelee. I always wanted to find her family. I think they got sent to a reeducation camp by the VC. But I’m not sure.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was killed.”

“By who?”

“What difference does it make? We used

snake and nape on their villes. The NVA buried people alive on the banks of the Perfume River. I helped dig up some of the bodies. When I was in Saigon, there was a place called the Stake where the public executions took place. The French could be nasty, too. The tiger cages and stuff like that. A lot of the Legionnaires were German war criminals. The whole country, north and south, was a moral insane asylum. The people got fucked by the Communists, then by us.”

There was no expression on her face. She opened the icebox door and took out a bottle of tequila and a Carta Blanca and a white bowl of lime wedges. She set the tequila and the Mexican beer and the bowl of limes on the table and took two shot glasses from a cabinet and set them next to the tequila. “I’m sorry to hear about the girl you lost,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute. Pour yourself a drink.”

“I’m not sure I want one.”

“I’d like one. I’d like for you to join me. Did I say something wrong?”

“No.”

“Because you give me that impression.”

“Why’d you send the little girls home?”

“I told their mother they’d be home before dark. They only have to walk two hundred yards, but if I had thought they were in danger, I would have driven them to their house. I’ve known their family since I was a small child.”