I could tell from the sunlight on the oak trees outside that it was late afternoon. The wisteria and blooming myrtle on the hospital lawn moved in the breeze. The drawbridge was up over Bayou Teche, and the two-deck pleasure boat was going through, its paddle wheel streaming water and light.
My mouth was dry, and the inside of my lip felt as though it were filled with wire.
"I had to put stitches in your scalp and six in your mouth. Don't eat any peanut brittle for a while," he said, and smiled.
"Where's Annie?" I asked thickly.
"I sent her for a cup of coffee. She'll be back in a minute. The colored man's outside, too. He's a big fellow, isn't he? How far did he carry you?"
I had to wet the row of stiches inside my lip before I could talk again.
"About five hundred yards, up to the four-corners. How bad am I down below, Doc?"
"You're not ruptured, if that's what you mean. Keep it in your pajamas a couple of nights and you'll be all right. Where'd you get those scars around your thighs?"
"In the service."
"I thought I recognised the handiwork. It looks like some of it is still in there."
"I set off metal detectors at the airport sometimes."
"Well, we're going to keep you with us tonight, but you can go home in the morning. You want to talk with the sheriff now, or later?"
I hadn't seen the other man, who was sitting in a leather chair in the corner. He wore a brown departmental uniform, held his lacquered campaign hat on his knee, and leaned forward deferentially. He used to own a dry-cleaning business in town before someone talked him into running for sheriff. The rural cops had changed a lot in the last twenty years. When I was a boy the sheriff wore a blue suit with a vest and a big railroad watch and chain and carried a heavy revolver in his coat pocket. He was not bothered by the bordellos on Railroad Avenue and the slot machines all over Iberia Parish, nor was he greatly troubled when white kids went nigger-knocking on Saturday nights. He'd tip his John B. Stetson hat to a white lady on Main, and talk to an elderly Negro woman as though she were a post. This one was president of the Downtown Merchants Association.
"You know who they were, Dave?" he said. He had the soft, downturned lines in his face of most Acadian men in their late middle age. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red veins.
"A white guy named Eddie Keats. He owns some bars in Lafayette and New Orleans. The other guy is black. His name's Toot." I swallowed from the water glass on the table. "Maybe he's a Haitian. You know anybody like that around here?"
"No."
"You know Eddie Keats?"
"No. But we can cut a warrant for him."
"It won't do any good. I never saw his face. I couldn't make him in a lineup."
"I don't understand. How do you know it was this guy Keats?"
"He was messing around my house yesterday. Call the DEA agent in Lafayette. He's got a sheet on him. The guy works for Bubba Rocque sometimes."
"Oh boy."
"Look, you can pick up Keats on suspicion. He's supposed to be a low-level hit man. Roust him in his automobile, and maybe you'll turn something. Some weed, a concealed weapon, hot credit cards. These fuckers always have spaghetti hanging off the place somewhere." I drank from the water again and laid my head back on the pillow. My scrotum, with the ice bag under it, felt as big as a bowling ball.
"I don't know about that. That's Lafayette Parish. It's a little like going on a fishing trip in somebody else's pond." He looked at me quietly, as though I should understand.
"You want him back here again?" I said. "Because unless you send him a hard telegram, he will be."
He was silent a moment, then he wrote in a pad and put the pad and pencil back in his shirt pocket and buttoned it.
"Well, I'll give the DEA and the Lafayette sheriff's office a call," he said. "We'll see what happens."
Then he asked some more questions, most of which were the formless and irrelevant afterthoughts of a well-meaning amateur who did not want to seem unsympathetic. I didn't reply when he said good-bye.
But what did I expect? I couldn't be sure myself that the white man was Eddie Keats. New Orleans was full of people with the same Italian-Irish background that produced the accent you would normally associate with Brooklyn. I had admitted I couldn't make him in a lineup and I didn't know anything about the black man except that his name was Toot and he slept in a grave. What is an ex-dry cleaner who dresses like a Fritos delivery man supposed to do with that one? I asked myself.
But maybe there was a darker strain at work inside me that I didn't want to recognise. I knew how local cops would have dealt with Eddie Keats and his kind twenty years ago.
A couple of truly vicious coonass plainclothes (they usually wore J. C. Higgins suits that looked like clothes on a duck) would have gone to his bar, thrown his framed liquor license in the toilet, broken out all his car windows with a baton, then pointed a revolver between his eyes and snapped the hammer on an empty chamber.
No, I didn't like them then; I didn't like them now. But it was a temptation.
Batist came in smelling of wine and fish, with some flowers I suspected he had taken from a hall vase and put in a Coca-Cola bottle. When I told him that the black man named Toot was possibly a tonton macoute from Haiti who practiced black magic, Batist got him confused with the loup-garou, the bayou equivalent of the lamia or werewolf, and was convinced that we should see a traiteur in order to find this loup-garou and fill his mouth and nostrils with dirt from a witch's grave. He saw my eyes light on the pint wine bottle, with the paper bag twisted around its neck, that protruded from the back pocket of his overalls, and he shifted sideways in the chair to block my vision, but the bottle clanked loudly against the chair's arm. His face was transfused with guilt.
"Hey, podna, since when did you have to hide things from me?" I said.
"I shouldn't drink, me, when I got to look after Miss Annie and that little girl."
"I trust you, Batist."
His eyes averted mine and his big hands were awkward in his lap. Even though I had known him since I was a child, he was still uncomfortable when I, a white man, spoke to him in a personal way.
"Where's Alafair now?" I said.
"Wit' my wife and girl. She all right, you ain't got to worry, no. You know she talk French, her? We fixing po'-boys, I say pain, she know that mean 'bread,' yeah. I say sauce piquante, she know that mean 'hot sauce.' How come she know that, Dave?"
"The Spanish language has a lot of words like ours."
"Oh," he said, and was thoughtful a moment. Then, "How come that?"
Annie came through the door and saved me from an impossible discussion. Batist was absolutely obsessive about understanding any information that was foreign to his world, but as a rule he would have to hack and hew it into pieces until it would assimilate into that strange Afro-Creole-Acadian frame of reference that was as natural to him as wearing a dime on a string around his ankle to ward off the gris-gris, an evil spell cast by a traiteur, or conjuror.
Annie stayed with me through the evening while the light softened on the trees outside and the shadows deepened on the lawn, the western sky turned russet and orange like a chemical flame, and high school kids strolled down the sidewalks to the American Legion baseball game in the park. Through the open window I could smell barbecue fifes and water sprinklers, magnolia blossoms and night-blooming jasmine. Then the sky darkened, and the rain clouds in the south pulsated with white streaks of lightning like networks of veins.