Two children of color were standing on the gallery. Both were barefoot and had blue eyes and light skin. The boy wore overalls that had only one strap, the girl a wash-faded dress that was as thin as Kleenex. A fog bank was puffing out of the willows onto the water.
“Want to buy some worms?” the boy said.
“I’m fishing for sacalait,” I said. I held up my bait bucket. “That’s why I have these shiners.”
The faces of both children seemed hollowed out and lifeless, like apparitions in the mist. The interior of the shack was dark. There was no glass in the windows, no outbuilding on the bank, no boat tied to a post or a tree trunk, no parked vehicle nearby.
“Where’re your folks?” I asked.
“Out yonder,” the girl said.
“Out yonder where?”
She pointed. “Where the fog is at. They gone after a gator.”
“The season is long over,” I replied. “Where do you keep your worms?”
“Behind the shack,” the boy said. “Come see. We got big fat night crawlers.”
The fog was wet on my neck, the breeze pushing the water under the shack’s gallery. “Aren’t y’all cold?”
“No, suh,” the boy said.
“Where do you live?”
“Right here,” he said.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ll take a look at those worms.”
I used the paddle to push my way through the canebrake until the bow of my boat slid onto the bank. The fog was gray and thicker now and contained a smell like carrion or offal thrown on a fire. Behind me, I heard a splash I normally would associate with a gator slapping its tail on the water or a huge gar rolling in the hyacinths. When I looked back at the shack, the children were gone.
I unzipped the .45 and took it from its case and put it in the right-hand pocket of my canvas coat. I put the drop in the left pocket and stepped onto the bank. The footprints of the children were clearly stenciled in the aggregate of mold and dirt and rainwater on the gallery. As soon as I stepped on it, my foot plunged through the boards as though they were rotted cork.
I went around to the rear of the shack. The back door hung by one hinge. The prints of small bare feet led from the front door out the back, then faded like cat whiskers on the ground. However, other prints were dramatically visible and freshly etched by someone wearing at least size-eleven shoes or boots with lug soles. They led up a broken levee into a clutch of willows and disappeared into a canal lined with cattails and blanketed with lichen as thick as paint. But I could see no muddy clouds in the water, no broken reeds, no imprints of a shoe or boot on top of the stenciled tracks of raccoons and possums and nutrias and deer that crisscrossed the mudbank.
I returned to the shack. The ground under my feet was badly eroded by the runoff from the levee. In a glistening pool I saw three small rough-surfaced tan balls that any kid raised on Bayou Teche would recognize. They were called slave marbles. In antebellum times, black children made them from the clay they dug from the bayou and baked in a tin oven. I picked the balls from the dirt and rolled them in my palm. I wondered how much time had passed since a child had touched them. I wondered what his life had been like, the travail and suffering that had probably been his only legacy.
Out in the fog I heard a clunking sound, like wood on wood. I dropped the slave marbles in my left coat pocket, took out my .45 and eased a copper-jacketed hollow-point into the chamber, then walked to the edge of the swamp. I heard the knocking of wood on wood again.
“Who’s out there?” I called. “Tell me who you are!”
My words were lost inside the thickness of the fog, the dripping of trees I could not see.
“I have no doubt that’s you, Gideon!” I called. “I wanted to believe you were a misguided guy trying to do a good deed or two! But only a coward would use children to front for him!”
I heard the labored sound of oars. This time I saw no galleon traveling through time. The bow of a wood boat appeared at the edge of the fog bank, a shadowy figure couched in the middle, the oars resting in the locks. The figure was wearing a hooded raincoat. The boat bumped against a cypress stump and drifted sideways. I held my .45 behind my back. “You’re Gideon?”
“Correct.” He turned his head and I saw his face. It made me swallow.
“What’d you do with those kids?” I said.
“They’re safe.”
“Are you using a voice box of some kind?”
“You’re a stupid man,” he said.
“Probably. Why’d you want to hurt Clete Purcel?”
“Mr. Purcel injures himself.”
“How about you row up on the bank and we talk about it?”
“I’m a revelator,” he said. “You should feel honored. We don’t give our time to everyone.”
I could feel the pulse beating in my right wrist, the cold steel frame in my hand. “Where are you from, Richetti?”
“Address me as Mr. Richetti or as Gideon.”
“Tell me where the children are, partner. I’d owe you a big solid on that.”
“You’re a simpleton, Mr. Robicheaux. You want the children out of the way so you can do as you will.”
I felt like he had stuck a dirty finger inside my brain. “Come a little closer. I can hardly hear you.”
“Idiot,” he said.
“You got that right. I should have capped your sorry ass as soon as I saw you.”
I gripped my .45 with both hands and began firing at the boat’s waterline. There were seven rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. I could see the flash leaping from the muzzle, hear the spent cartridges splashing in the shallows, hear a round go long and hit a tree trunk. I saw wood fly from his boat and float in the water. But Gideon Richetti showed no reaction, not even when a round went high and whanged off an oar lock.
The slide on the .45 locked open on the empty chamber. Richetti and his boat drifted into the mist. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my hearing. I could hear the sound of his oars thinning among the flooded trees. I could not believe what I had just done. I had fired into a fog bank that could have been occupied by hunters or other fishermen or even the children who wanted to sell me night crawlers.
I got into my boat, my hands shaking, and started the engine and drove into the fog. The aluminum hull screeched against the cypress knees protruding from the water, all of them as hard and shiny as wet stone. I saw no sign of Richetti and his boat. Nor did I see any channels in the lichen that floated between the trees.
I killed the engine and drifted in the silence. The water was black, the sun a smudge of egg yolk on the horizon. Inside that soiled piece of Eden, I saw the worst image I could possibly see under the circumstances. There was a patina of blood on a tupelo stump, and a strip of wash-faded cloth that was as thin as Kleenex.
The next day was Saturday. My first stop early that morning was Father Julian’s house outside Jeanerette. The sun was just above the trees when he opened the door. He made a pot of coffee while I told him everything that had happened the previous evening at Henderson Swamp. He sat down at the kitchen table, his face empty. He stared through the window at the graveyard. I felt my heart constricting.
“You think a stray bullet hit the little girl?” he said.
“I don’t know what to think.”
“But you feel you shouldn’t have fired at the boat?”
“I should have gotten in my boat and gone after him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I thought he’d get away in the fog.”
“That’s not convincing, Dave.”
“I thought this was my only chance,” I said.
“To do what?”
“To prove he was human.”
“Because you think that may not be the case?”
“Yes,” I said.
He wiped at his chin with his thumb. “I think you did the best you could.”
“What are you not saying?” I asked.
“I’m troubled about this hooded man who has shown up in your life and Clete’s.”
“You think he’s actually an evil spirit?”
“I prefer not to,” he replied.
“Prefer?”
“Superstition has its origins in fear. Ultimately, all our problems have their origins in fear.”
“I saw the guy’s face. It looked reptilian.”
“I think this man Richetti is linked with evil forces. But they’re human, not cartoon characters out of a fable.” He held his eyes on mine. But there was a quiver in his throat.
“Thanks for listening to me,” I said.
“Don’t let them undo you. For the love of God, don’t do that.”
“Who is ‘them’?” I said.
“Take your choice,” he replied.