They started toward New Orleans, but the engine grated and the temperature indicator hovered near the red. A mile outside Salt Harvest they pulled into Placide’s Mobile Service; junked cars resting on a cracked cement apron, old-fashioned globe-top pumps,, a rickety, unpainted shack with corroded vending machines and lawn chairs out front. Placide, a frizzy-haired, chubby man chewing an unlit cigar, gazed up at the sky to receive instructions before allowing he would have a look at the van after he finished a rush job. Miserable, they waited. The radio news made no mention of the killings, and the only newspaper they could find was a gossip rag whose headlines trumpeted Teen’s Pimples Found to be Strange Code.
‘Somebody must have seen them by now!’ Donnell kicked at a chair in frustration. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
‘The police aren’t very efficient,’ she said. ‘And Sealey didn’t even check us in. They may not know there was anyone else.’
‘What about Marie?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stared off across the road at a white wooden house by the bayou. A tireless truck in the front yard; shade trees; children scampering in and out of the sunbeams which penetrated the branches. The scene had an archaic air, as if the backing of a gentle past were showing through the threadbare tapestry of the present.
‘Don’t you care?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you worried about being caught?’
‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly, remembering the yellow dimness and blood-smeared floors of the restaurant. ‘I…’
‘What?’
‘You just don’t seem bothered by what happened.’
‘Bothered? Guilty, you mean?’ He thought it over. ‘The cop bothers me, but when Sealey pulled the trigger’ - he laughed - ‘oh, he was a happy man. He’d been waiting for this chance a long time. You should have seen his face. All that frustrated desire and obsession blowing up into heaven.’ He limped a little way across the apron.
‘It was Sealey’s crime. Richmond’s maybe. But it’s got no moral claim on me.’
Around five o’clock a sorrowful Placide delivered his report: a slow leak in the oil pan. Ten or fifteen more miles and the engine would seize up. ‘I give you fifty dollars, me,’ he said. Jocundra gave him a doubtful look, and he crossed himself.
They accepted his offer of a ride into town, and he let them off at the Crawfish Cafe where, he said, they could learn the bus schedules. A sign above the door depicted a green lobsterlike creature wearing a bib, and inside the lighting was hellishly bright, the booths packed with senior citizens - tonight, Sunday, being the occasion of the cafe’s Golden Ager All-U-Can-Eat Frog Legs and Gumbo Creole Special $2.99. The smell of grease was filmy in Jocundra’s nostrils. The waitress told them that a bus left around midnight for Silver Meadow (‘Now you be careful! The shrimp fleet’s in, and that’s one wild town at night.’) and there they could catch a Greyhound for New Orleans where she had a sister, Minette by name, who favored Jocundra some though she wasn’t near as tall, and oh how she worried about the poor woman living with her madman husband and his brothers on Beaubien Street like a saint among wolves… Try the shrimp salad. You can’t go wrong with shrimp this time of year.
The senior citizens, every liver spot and blotch evident under the bright lights, lifted silvery spoons full of dripping red gumbo to their lips, and the sight brought back the memory of Magnusson’s death. Jocundra’s stomach did a queasy roll. An old man blinked at her and slipped a piece of frog into his mouth, leaving the fork inserted. The tinkle of silverware was a sharp, dangerous sound at the edge of a silence hollowed around her, and she ate without speaking.
‘Do you want to go back?’ Donnell asked. ‘I can’t, but if you think it’s better for you there, I won’t stop you.’
‘I don’t see how I can,’ she said, thinking that she would have to go back to before Shadows, before the project began.
He toyed with a french fry, drawing circles in the grease on his plate. ‘I need a more isolated place than New Orleans,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose it in public like Richmond.’
‘You’re nothing like Richmond.’ Jocundra was too exhausted to be wholeheartedly reassuring.
‘Sure I am. According to Edman, and it seems to me he’s at least partially right, Richmond’s life was the enactment of a myth he created for himself.’ The waitress refilled Jocundra’s coffee, and he waited until she finished. ‘He had to kill someone to satisfy the myth, and by God he did. And there’s something I have to do as well.’
She looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Magnusson told me I had something special to do, and ever since I’ve felt a compulsion to do it. I have no idea what it is, but the compulsion is growing stronger and I’m convinced it’s not a good deed.’
White gleams of the overheads slashed diagonally across the lenses of his sunglasses. For the first time she was somewhat afraid of him.
‘A quiet place,’ he said. ‘One without too many innocent bystanders.’
More senior citizens crammed into the cafe. They huddled at the front waiting for a seat, and the waitress became hostile as Donnell and Jocundra lingered over their empty plates. Jocundra wedged Magnusson’s ledger into her purse; they tipped the waitress generously, leaving the overnight bag in her keeping, and walked out into the town.
The main street of Salt Harvest was lined with two-story buildings of dark painted brick, vintage 1930, their walls covered by weathered illustrations of defunct brands of sewing machines and pouch tobacco, now home to Cadieux Drugs, Beutel Hardware, and the Creole Theater, whose ticket taker - isolate in her hotly lit booth - looked like one of those frowsy, bewigged dummies passing for gypsy women that you find inside fortune-telling machines, the yellowed paint of their skin peeling away, their hands making mechanical passes over a dusty crystal ball. The neons spelled out mysterious red and blue and green words - HRIMP, SUNOC, OOD - and these seemed the source of all the heat and humidity. Cars were parked diagonally along the street, most dinged and patched; with bondo, windshields polka-dotted by NRA and SW Louisiana Ragin’ Cajun decals. Half of the streetlights hummed and fizzled, the other half were shattered. Dusk was thickening to night, and heat lightning flashed in the southern sky.
Groups of people were moving purposefully toward the edge of town, and so as not to appear conspicuous, they fell in at the rear of three gabbling old ladies who were cooling themselves with fans bearing pictures of Christ Arisen. Behind them came a clutch of laughing teenage girls. Before they had gone a hundred yards, Donnell’s legs began to cramp, but he preferred to continue rather than go contrary to the crowd now following them. Their pace slowed, and a family bustled past: mom, kids, dad, dressed in their Sunday finery and having the prim, contented look of the well-insured. Some drunken farmers passed them, too, and one - a middle-aged man whose T-shirt read When Farm-boys Do it They Fertilize ‘Er - said ‘Howdy’ to Jocundra and offered her a swig from his paper sack. He whispered in his buddy’s ear. Sodden laughter. The crowd swept around them, chattering, in a holiday mood, and Jocundra and Donnell walked in their midst, tense, heads down, hoping to go unnoticed but noticeable by their secretive manner: Jews among Nazis.
The night deepened, gurgling and croaking from the bayou grew louder as they cleared the city limits, and they heard a distorted amplified voice saying, ‘CHILDREN, CHILDREN, CHIL…’ The speaker squealed. A brown circus tent was pitched in a pasture beside the bayou, ringed by parked cars and strung with colored bulbs; a banner above the entrance proclaimed What Jesus Promised, Papa Salvatino Delivers. The speaker crackled, and the voice blatted out again: a cheery, sleazy voice, the voice of a carnival barker informing of forbidden delights.