Clete glances at the streetlight on the corner, his eyelashes fluttering. “See, people don’t give me nicknames, particularly when they’re racial,” he says. “Right now you’re standing up to your bottom lip in pig shit. In the next minute, one of two things will happen. You’ll either give up the Melancon brothers or you’ll be on your way to Central Lockup. If you want to be on the bottom floor when the hurricane hits, I’ll t
ry to arrange that.”
“Eddy and Bertrand already evacuated. I’m just here to see ’bout my nephew. I’m telling the troot’, man.” Rochon presses his palm against his sternum, his face earnest.
“See, you’re doing something else that bothers me. George W. Bush spreads his hand on his chest when he wants to show people he’s sincere. You think you’re George W. Bush? You think you’re the president of the United States?”
Rochon is confused, his eyes darting back and forth. “Why you leanin’ on me like this? ’Cause of something Eddy and Bertrand done?”
“No, because you skipped your court appearance and burned Nig and Wee Willie for your bond. You also smell bad. Willie and Nig don’t like people who don’t shower or brush their teeth and who smell bad. They got to spray the chairs every time you come in their office. Now you’ve disrespected them on top of it.”
“Man, you been drinkin’ the wrong stuff.”
Clete’s hands feel dry and stiff at his sides. He opens and closes his palms and wets his lips. He can feel a dangerous level of anger building inside him, one that has little to do with Andre Rochon.
“Get on your cell and tell Eddy and Bertrand to pull the rag out of their ass and get over here,” he says.
“I ain’t got their number.”
“Really? Well, let’s see what you do got.”
Clete throws him against the side of the truck and shakes him down. When Rochon tries to turn his head and speak, Clete smashes his face into the paneling, so hard he dents it.
“Shit,” Rochon says, blood leaking from his nose across his upper lip. “I ain’t did nothing to deserve this.”
“What do you have in the truck?”
“Nothing. And you ain’t got no warrant to go in there, nohow.”
“I work for a bond service. I don’t need warrants. I can cross state lines, kick your door in, and rip your house apart. I can arrest and hold you anywhere I want, for as long as I want. Know why that is, Andre? When someone goes your bail, you become his property. And if this country respects anything, it’s the ownership of property.”
“I ain’t holding, man. Do what you want. I ain’t did nothing here. When this is over, I’m filing charges.”
Clete opens the driver’s door and shines his penlight under the front seats and into the back of the truck. The homemade plank floor in back is bare except for a coil of polyethylene rope that rests on a spare tire. A stuffed pink bear with white pads sewn on its paws is wedged between the floor and the truck’s metal side.
Clete clicks off the light, then clicks it on again. The images of the rope and the stuffed animal trigger a memory of a newspaper story, one that he read several weeks ago. Did it concern an abduction? In the Ninth Ward? He’s almost sure the story was in the Times-Picayune but he can’t remember the details.
“Who belongs to the stuffed bear?” he says.
“My niece.”
“What’s the rope for?”
“I was putting up wash lines for my auntie. What’s wit’ you, man?”
Behind him Clete hears an automobile with a gutted muffler turn the corner. “I’m taking you to Central Lockup. Get that grin off your face.”
Then Clete hears the car with the blown-out muffler accelerating, a hubcap detaching itself from one wheel, bouncing up onto a sidewalk. He turns just as the grillwork of a 1970s gas-guzzler explodes the open door of the panel truck off its hinges and drives it into Clete’s face and body. For just a moment he sees two black men in the front seat of the gas-guzzler, then he is propelled backward into the street, his skin and hair speckled with broken glass. He lands so hard on the asphalt his breath is vacuumed out of his chest in one long, uncontrollable wheezing rush that leaves him powerless and gasping. The gas-guzzler mashes over his porkpie hat and fishtails around a corner at the end of the block. As Clete tries to shove the door off his chest, Andre Rochon fires up his panel truck and roars away in the opposite direction, his red taillights braking once at the intersection before disappearing into the darkness.
Jimmy Flannigan and Clete’s other friends from the bar pick him up and clean the glass off his clothes and touch him all over like he’s a piece of bruised fruit, amazed that their friend is still alive. Someone even calls 911 and discovers that every cop and emergency vehicle in Orleans Parish is already overloaded with obligations far beyond their capacity. Clete stands dazed and chagrined in the middle of the street, unable to accept the fact he just got taken down by three dirtbags who couldn’t clean bubble gum off their shoes without a diagram.
He tells his friends to go back inside the bar, then opens the door to the cottage. Inside, a boy not more than seventeen is sitting on the floor, watching a cartoon on a television set, a paper bag packed with clothes resting by his foot. The volume on the television is deafening. “Turn that off,” Clete says.
The boy does as he is told. He wears the stylized baggy pants and oversized T-shirt of a gangbanger, but his clothes look fresh from the box and his body is so thin it could be made of sticks.
“Where are your folks?” Clete asks.
“My auntie already lined up at the ’Dome to get us cots. My Uncle Andre is taking me there in a li’l bit,” the boy replies. “Everybody suppose to bring food for five days. That’s what they say.”