“Only one what? I don’t know what you mean. You mean sexually? What are you talking about?”
“You’ll figure it out. But when you do, remember I just spoke of you in the past tense. That will never change. Good-bye, Kermit,” she said.
As she sat back in the seat and the cab pulled away, she could see the wind riffling the leaves on the trees along the bayou. The reflection of the lights from the drawbridge on the leaves and the electric glitter they created made her think of thousands of green butterflies fluttering inside a dark bowl.
ON SUNDAY MORNING I woke before dawn. I’d had a peculiar dream, one that was actually about a dream. Many years ago on a Christmas Eve, in a Southeast Asian country, I had been asleep on top of a poncho liner, under a parked six-by. Somewhere out there beyond the elephant grass and the rice paddies and the hills that had been chemically defoliated or burned by napalm, Bedcheck Charlie was prowling through the darkness in black pajamas and a conical straw hat and sandals fashioned from the rubber strips he had sawed out of a truck tire. In his hands was the blooker he had taken off the body of a dead United States soldier who had been in my platoon. The launch tube was painted with gold and black tiger stripes. Every hour or so during the night, Bedcheck Charlie lobbed a round in our direction. Often it exploded in the paddy, sending up a geyser of water and mud and metal fragments that rained back down harmlessly. Or if it landed in the elephant grass, it blew a mixed smell of burned explosive and torn sod and root systems into the breeze, a combination that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Once, Bedcheck Charlie got lucky and nailed the shit barrels in a latrine. But Bedcheck Charlie was a tactician, not a strategist. When he was on the job, you crosshatched your molars and slept with a frown, as though a fly were walking across your brow, waiting for the next plunking sound of a grenade leaving the launch tube. At dawn, you started the new day as though you had spent the night humping a sixty-pound pack.
Except on this particular Christmas Eve, for whatever reason, Bedcheck Charlie gave it a rest. I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed it was Christmas in New Iberia. I dreamed I was a child and in my bed, and through the window I could see the pecan and oak trees in the yard and the frost on our grass and, through the branches of the trees, the Star of Bethlehem burning brightly against an ink-black sky. It was a wonderful dream, and I wanted to hold on to it and wake to a Christmas morning that was shining with dew and filled with all the joy of the season.
Except when I awoke under the six-by, I was not looking at the Star of Bethlehem. On the far side of the rice paddy, a pistol or trip flare had popped high in the air and was floating down to the earth, trailing strings of smoke, its phosphorescent glow swinging back and forth, illuminating the landscape with the trembling white-and-black severity of a filmstrip that has gone off track inside the projector. Then three other flares popped in succession right after the first one. On the slope of a low hill that had traded hands a half-dozen times, a piece of worthless defoliated real estate the marines later named Luke the Gook’s Slop Chute, thirteen grunts returning from an a
mbush had been caught in a burned-out area where the tree trunks looked like skeletal fingers protruding from the ash. The column froze, and each man in it tried to transform himself into a stick. But their disguise was to no avail. VC sappers were in the elephant grass, and their automatic-weapons fire turned the column into a bloody mist.
Now, on a Sunday morning in the spring of 2009, I woke from a dream about a dream in a small sugarcane town on Bayou Teche, the slope behind the house white with ground fog, the overhang of the trees dripping on the tin roof. Freud said our dreams are manifestations of our hopes and fears. Did my dream represent a desire to return to the childlike innocence of the Cajun world in which I was born? Or did it indicate a warning from the unconscious, a telegram from the id telling me to beware of someone whose behavior I had been too casual about?
I looked through the window and saw a large man coming around the side of the house, his suit streaked with moisture from our camellia bushes, his eyes as cavernous as inkwells, his jaw crooked with indignation.
Molly was still sound asleep, the sheet molded by her hip. I slipped on my khakis and loafers and unlocked the back door and went outside. The man in the suit stood deep in the shadow of the house, opening and closing his fists, oblivious to the moisture leaking from the rain gutter on his head and shoulders. “You want to tell me what you’re doing in my yard at six on Sunday morning?” I said.
“I need some information, and I need it now. And I don’t want any mouth off you about it, either,” he said.
“How about putting your transmission into neutral, Layton?”
“Where’s Clete Purcel?”
“How would I know?”
“You’re his buddy. You’re the one who recommended him to me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Don’t lie.”
“You’re not going to talk to me like that.”
“I’m not, huh? You got some damn nerve. I’m an inch from flattening you on your butt.”
I propped my hands on my hips and looked at Tripod’s hutch and at the trees in the fog and at an empty rowboat floating down the bayou, its bow turning slowly in the current. “You’re a more intelligent man than this. Regardless, it’s time for you to go.”
For just a second, he seemed to take heed of my words. “I can’t find my wife. She didn’t come home last night. But I found this in her dresser.” He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket. “It’s Clete Purcel’s. There’s a phone number on the back. The phone number belongs to the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. How did Purcel’s business card get in my wife’s dresser drawer?”
“I don’t know.”
He threw the card at my chest. “I’ll tell you how. While I was paying him to follow her around, he was sleeping with her. That pile of offal was in the sack with my wife.”
“You’re dead wrong. Now get out of here.”
“I’ve got the goods on your friend, Robicheaux, and maybe you, too. I’ve got sources inside your department. They say Purcel is being investigated for the killing of that black pimp. The word is maybe you’re not above suspicion, either. Maybe the two of y’all capped the pimp together because he was about to send Purcel to Angola.”
I heard the bedroom window slide open. “What’s the trouble, Dave?” Molly said.
“It’s Layton Blanchet. He’s about to leave. Right, Layton?” I said.
“This doesn’t concern you. Close the window,” he said to Molly. He faced me, his feet spread slightly, his height and breadth and the corded tension in his body not to be taken lightly. “Where is Purcel? I’m not going to ask you again.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Molly’s face leave the window, then I heard the window close and the shade go down on it.
“I’m going inside now. I’ll call either a cab or a cruiser for you. Tell me which you prefer,” I said.