I walked through the litter and cigarette smoke and out the back door to the canvas-shaded brick patio where Clete often ate his lunch. He had planted palms and banana trees on the edge of the bricks, and had set up a huge electric fan by a spool table and sway-backed straw chair that served as his dining area. He was hunched over a crab burger, reading the Times-Picayune, the wind flapping the canvas over his head, when he heard me behind him.
"What's the gen, noble mon?" he said.
"You heard about Raphael Chalons's death?" I said.
"Yeah, tragic loss."
"I saw him just before he died. He asked me to stop his son."
"From doing what?"
"He didn't get a chance to say."
Clete set down his food and wiped his mouth. He gazed out at the whiteness of the sun on the bayou. "You're saying Val Chalons is a serial killer, maybe?"
"You tell me."
"He's a punk who thinks he can wipe his ass on other people. He made you out a perve and that's why I -"
"What?"
"Called up Jericho Johnny Wineburger after I'd been toking on some substances I should have left alone."
"That's the second reason I'm here. I saw him last night at Henderson Swamp."
Clete twisted in his chair, the straw weave creaking under his weight. "You saw Wineburger? Here?"
"I told him he wasn't going to do business in Iberia Parish. He told me to go screw myself."
"Dave, I called this guy back. I said I shouldn't have bothered him, that I was wired, that we didn't need his help, that Chalons is not worthy of his talents. We had an understanding."
"I didn't get that impression."
"Look, here's how it went down. Originally I told Johnny we didn't need Val Chalons as a factor in our lives right now. Don't look at me like that. Johnny owes twenty grand to a couple of shylocks. The vig is a point and a half a week. If he doesn't get his act together, he's going to lose his saloon. I told him the shylocks owe me a favor and I could get them to give him two free months on the vig if he could get the principal together. But I called him back when I was sober and told him it was hands-off on Chalons. I told him the deal with the shylocks was still solid – no vig for two months. But he doesn't hurt Chalons. That was absolutely clear."
"Maybe his pride won't let him take a free ride."
"Wineburger? That's like a toilet bowl worrying about bad breath."
"Then what is he doing here?" I said.
"With a guy like that -" Clete blew air up into his face and gave me a blank look. "Don't let me roll any more Mexican imports, will you?"
A thunderstorm pounded through town that afternoon, then disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. When I got home from work, the lawn was scattered with wet leaves and the birdhouse Molly had nailed in the fork of a live oak had split across the nail holes and cracked apart on the ground, spilling all the birdseed in a yellow pile. I gathered up the broken pieces, dropped them in the garbage can, and found the listing for Andre Bergeron in the Jeanerette section of our local telephone directory.
"This is Dave Robicheaux," I said when he picked up the receiver. "I'd like to buy one of your birdhouses."
"You called at the right time. I got a sale on. One for twenty-five dol'ars or two for forty-nine ninety-five."
"I think I'll stick with one."
"Installation is free."
"Don't worry about it. Just drop it off at Molly's office and I'll send you a check."
"No, suh, I give door-to-door complete service. That's what you got to do to make a bidness a success today. Me and Tee Bleu got to go to the Wal-Mart. You gonna be home?"
Twenty minutes later he was at the house, balancing on a stepladder while he wired the birdhouse to an oak limb. His son. Tee Bleu, was throwing pecans into the bayou. I wrote a check for Andre on the back steps.
"Miss Molly at home?" he said.
"No, she's at the grocery store. What's up?"
"Nothing. I just heard some people talking at the agency. Stuff they didn't have no right to say."
His eyes fixed on me, then he began to look innocuously around the yard, his whole head turning from spot to spot, as though it were attached to a metal rod.
"Spit it out," I said.
"A couple of ladies was saying they ain't bringing their children to the agency no mo' 'cause of what happened."
"You talking about the child molestation charge filed against me?"
"Mr. Val behind that, suh. It ain't right. No, suh. Ain't right."
"You know much about Mr. Val?"
"Know as much as I need to."
"You're a mysterious man, Andre." I tore the check out of my checkbook and handed it to him.
His half-moon eyebrows could have been snipped out of black felt and pasted on his forehead. He studied his little boy playing down by the bayou, and shook his shirt on his chest to cool his skin. Through the trees we could see a dredge barge passing on the bayou, its hull low in the water, its decks loaded with piles of mud.
"When I was a li'l boy about that size, I seen a gator come out of the bayou after a baby. Baby was in diapers, toddling along on the edge of the water. His mama was hanging wash up by the trees, probably t'inking about the worthless man who put that baby in her belly. Gator got the baby by his li'l leg and started dragging him toward the water. Wasn't nothing nobody could do about it. That gator was long as your truck and two feet 'cross the head. The mother and the old folks was running 'round screaming, hitting at it wit' buckets and crab nets and cane poles, but that gator just kept on moving down to the water, wit' the baby hanging out its mouth, just like they was hitting on it with pieces of string."
"Then Mr. Raphael run down from the big house wit' a butcher knife and cut the gator's t'roat. He drove the baby to Charity Hospital in Lafayette and saved his life. People couldn't talk about nothing else for a year except how Mr. Raphael save that po' child's life."
Andre stopped his story and looked down the slope at his son. The late sun was a burnt orange through the trees, and blue jays were clattering in the canopy.
"I'm not sure I get the point, Andre," I said.
"People loved Mr. Raphael. But they ain't knowed him. Not like I knowed him. Not like I know Mr. Val. My li'l boy growing up in different times from the ones I growed up in. I'm real happy for that. That's the only point I was making, Mr. Dave. I got birdseed out in my car. You want me to fill up your birdhouse?"
"I have some in the shed. Thanks, anyway," I said.
On his way out, he helped Molly carry in her groceries from her car, his face jolly and full of cheer as he set the bags down heavily, one after another, on the kitchen table.
After he was gone, I went inside and helped her put away the groceries. "Andre told me some ladies at your agency won't bring their children there anymore," I said.
"He shouldn't have done that," she said.
"Man's just reporting what he heard."
"I know who I married. That's all I care about."
"You're a pretty good gal to hang out with," I said.
I poured a glass of iced tea for both of us and sat down at the kitchen table to drink it. She leaned over me and hugged me under the neck and kissed me behind the ear.
"What was that for?" I said.
"I felt like it," she replied.
That night I dreamed of two brown pelicans sailing low and flat over an inland bay in late autumn, the pouches under their beaks plump with fish. In the dream they continued north in their flight, across miles of sawgrass stiff with frost and bays that looked like hammered copper. They passed over a cluster of shrimp boats tied up at the docks in a coastal town, then followed a winding bayou into the heart of the Teche country. The pelicans turned in a wide circle over a swamp thick with gum trees and cypress snags, and sailed right across the home where Jimmie and I grew up. Through the eyes of the birds I saw the purple rust on the tin roof of the house and the cypress boards that had turned the color of scorched iron from the dust and smoke of stubble fires in the cane fields. I saw my mother and father in the backyard, hoeing out their Victory garden during World War II. I saw Jimmie and me in tattered overalls, building a wood fire under the big iron pot in which we cooked hog cracklings after first frost.