“Who’s this Kovick guy?” Bertrand said to Clete. “Y’all just jerking my stick, right?” Chapter 11
A FTER SEVEN DAYS I was rotated back to New Iberia. I had almost forgotten Natalia Ramos, the companion of Father Jude LeBlanc. In fact, I had deliberately pushed her name out of my mind. I wanted no more of New Orleans and other people’s grief. I just wanted to be back on Bayou Teche with my family and Tripod, our raccoon, and our unneutered warrior cat, Snuggs. I wanted to wake in the morning to the smell of coffee and moldy pecan husks in the yard and camellia bushes dripping with dew and the fecund odor of fish spawning in the bayou. I wanted to wake to the great gold-green, sun-spangled promise of the South Louisiana in which I had grown up. I didn’t want to be part of the history taking place in our state.
“Phone’s ringing, Dave,” Alafair said from the kitchen.
“Would you answer it, please?”
Through the doorway I could see her frying eggs and ham slices in a heavy iron skillet, lifting it by its handle without a hot pad, her back to me. It was hard to believe she was the same little El Salvadoran Indian girl I had pulled from a submerged plane out on the salt many years ago. She clanged the skillet on the stove and picked up the phone, resting her rump against the drain board, giving me a look.
“Is Dave Robicheaux here? Wait a minute. I’ll check,” she said. She lowered the receiver, the mouthpiece uncovered. “Dave, are you here? If you are, a lady would like to speak to you.”
That’s what you get when your kid goes to Reed College and joins kickboxing clubs.
I took the receiver from her hand. “Hello?” I said.
“This is Natalia Ramos, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m here at the shelter, the one you told me to go to. Have you found out where Jude went? I can’t get no information from anybody at the shelter. I thought maybe you had lists of people who was picked up by the Coast Guard.”
“No, ma’am, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Jude’s in pain all the time from his cancer. He went down to the Lower Nine to give his people communion. He’d always been scared to give people communion at Mass.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Ramos, but you’re not making sense.”
“His hands tremble all the time. He thinks he’ll drop the chalice. He’d always let another priest give out Communion at Mass. But this time he was gonna say Mass and give people Communion.”
In the background I could hear voices echoing in a large area, perhaps inside a gymnasium or a National Guard armory. Alafair was setting my breakfast on the kitchen table, placing the plate and knife and fork and coffee cup and saucer carefully on the surface so as not to make any noise. Her hair was long and black on her shoulders, her figure lovely inside her jeans and pink blouse.
I didn’t know what to say to Natalia Ramos. “Where are you?” I asked.
“At the high school in Franklin.”
“I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
“Where’s Chula at?” she asked.
“Your brother?”
“Yeah, where’d you put him at?”
“In the Iberia Parish Prison, along with his fall partner.”
I thought her next statement would be an abrasive one. But I was wrong.
“Maybe he can get some help there. Jail is the only place Chula ever did all right. I’ll be waiting for you, Mr. Robicheaux.”
I placed the telephone receiver back in the cradle, already regretting that I had taken the call.
“Who was that?” Alafair said.
“A Central American prostitute and junkie who was shacked up with a Catholic priest.”
I sat down and began eating. I could feel Alafair behind me, like a shadow breaking against the light. She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Dave, you have the best heart of any man I’ve ever known,” she said.
I could feel the blood tingle in the back of my neck.
THE HIGH SCHOOL gymnasium in Franklin, down the bayou in St. Mary Parish, was lined with row upon row of army-surplus cots. Children were running everywhere, inside and outside, sailing Frisbees that a local merchant had brought from his store. I found Natalia washing clothes by hand in the lee of the building, her arms deep inside an aluminum tub, the tails of her denim shirt tied under her breasts. I asked her to tell me again of her last moments with Jude LeBlanc.
“He brought the boat to the church roof. He was up there chopping a hole with an ax to get everybody out. Then I heard a fight up there. I didn’t see him again.”