Didn't want to wake you but when I get back from town can you help me find a horny middle-aged guy with a white streak in his head who knows how to put a Kansas girl on rock 'n' roll?
Love,
A.
PS. Let's picnic in the park this evening and take Alafair to the baseball game. I'm sorry about last night. You'll always be my special guy, Dave.
It was a generous and kind note. I should have been content with it. But it disturbed me as much as it reassured me, because I wondered if Annie, like most people who live with alcoholics, was not partly motivated by fear that my unpredictable mood might lead all of us back into the nightmarish world that AA had saved me from.
Regardless, I knew that the problems that had been caused us by the plane crash at Southwest Pass would not go away. And having grown up in a rural Cajun world that was virtually devoid of books, I had learned most of my lessons for dealing with problems from hunting and fishing and competitive sports. No book could have taught me what I had learned from my father in the marsh, and as a boxer in high school I had discovered that it was as important to swallow your blood and hide your injury as it was to hurt your opponent.
But maybe the most important lesson I had learned about addressing complexity was from an elderly Negro janitor who had once pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs in the old Negro leagues. He used to watch our games in the afternoon, and one day when I'd been shotgunned off the mound and was walking off the field toward the shower, he walked along beside me and said, "Sliders and screwballs is cute, and spitters shows 'em you can be nasty. But if you want to make that batter's pecker shrivel up, you throw a forkball at his head."
Maybe it was time to float one by the batter's head, I thought.
Bubba Rocque had bought a ruined antebellum home on the Vermilion River outside of Lafayette and had spent a quarter-million dollars rebuilding it. It was a massive plantation house, white and gleaming in the sun, the three-story Doric columns so thick that two men could not place their arms around them and touch hands. The front gallery was made of Italian marble; the second-story veranda ran completely around the building and was railed with ironwork from Seville and hung with boxes of petunias and geraniums. The brick carriage house had been expanded to a three-car garage; the stone wells were decorated with ornamental brass pulleys and buckets and planted with trumpet and passion vine; the desiccated wood outbuildings had been replaced with a clay tennis court.
The lawn was blue-green and glistening in the water sprinklers, dotted with oak, mimosa, and lime and orange trees, and the long gravel lane that led to the front door was bordered by a white fence entwined with yellow roses. A Cadillac convertible and a new cream-colored Oldsmobile were parked in front, and a fire-engine red collector's MG stuck out of the carriage house. Through the willows on the riverbank I could see a cigarette boat moored bow and stern to the dock, a tarp pulled down snugly on the cockpit.
It was hard to believe that this scene clipped out of Southern Living belonged to Bubba Rocque, the kid who used to train for a fight by soaking his hands in diluted muriatic acid and running five miles each morning with army boots on. An elderly Negro servant opened the door but didn't invite me in. Instead, he closed the door partly in my face and walked into the back of the house. Almost five minutes later I heard Bubba lean over the veranda and call down to me, "Go on in, Dave. I'll be right down. Sorry for our crummy manners. I was in the shower."
I let myself in and stood in the middle of the front hall under a huge chandelier and waited for him to come down the winding staircase that curled back into the second floor. The interior of the house was strange. The floors were blond oak, the mantelpiece carved mahogany, the furnishings French antiques. Obviously an expensive interior decorator had tried to recreate the Creole antebellum period. But somebody else had been at work, too. The cedar baseboards and ceiling boards had been painted with ivy vines; garish oil paintings of swampy sunsets, the kind you buy from sidewalk artists in New Orleans's Pirates Alley, hung over the couch and mantel; an aquarium filled with paddle wheels and plastic castles, even a rubber octopus stoppered to one side, sat in one window, green air bubbles popping from a clown's mouth.
Bubba came down the stairs on the balls of his feet. He wore white slacks and a canary-yellow golf shirt, sandals without socks and a gold neck chain, a gold wristwatch with a diamond-and-ruby face, and his spiked butch hair was bleached on the tips by the sun and his skin was tanned almost olive. He was still built like a fighter-his hips narrow, his stomach as flat as a boiler plate, the shoulders an ax-handle wide, the arms longer than they should be, the knuckles as pronounced as ball bearings. But it was the wide-set, gray-blue eyes above the gap-toothed mouth that leaped at you more than anything else. They didn't focus, adjust, stray, or blink; they locked on your face and they stayed there. He smiled readily, in fact constantly, but you could only guess at whatever emotion the eyes contained.
"What's happening, Dave?" he said. "I'm glad you caught me when you did. I got to go down to New Orleans this afternoon. Come on out on the patio and have a drink. What do you think of my place?"
"It's impressive."
"It's more place than I need. I got a small house on Lake Pontchartrain and a winter house in Bimini. That's more my style. But the wife likes it here, and you're right, it impresses the hell out of people. You remember when you and me and your brother used to set pins in the bowling alley and the colored kids tried to run us off because we were taking their jobs?"
"My brother and I got fired. But I don't think they could have run you off with a shotgun, Bubba."
"Hey, those were hard times, podna. Come out here, I got to show you something."
He led me through some French doors onto a flagstone patio by a screen-enclosed pool. Overhead the sun shone through the spreading branches of an oak and glinted on the turquoise water. On the far side of the pool was a screened breezeway, with a peaked, shingled roof, that contained a universal gym, dumbbells, and a body and timing bag.
He grinned, went into a prizefighter's crouch, and feinted at me.
"You want to slip on the sixteen-ounce pillows and waltz around a little bit?" he said.
"You almost put out my lights the last time I went up against you."
"The hell I did. I got you in the corner and was knocking the sweat out of your hair all over the timekeeper and I still couldn't put you down. You want a highball? Clarence, bring us some shrimp and boudin. Sit down."
"I've got a problem you might be able to help me with."
"Sure. What are you drinking?" He took a pitcher of martinis out of a small icebox behind the wet bar.
"Nothing."
"That's right, I heard you were fighting the hooch for a while. Here, I got some tea. Clarence, bring those goddamn shrimp." He shook his head and poured himself a drink in a chilled martini glass. "He's half senile. Believe it or not, he used to work on the oyster boat with my old man. You remember my old man? He got killed two years ago on the SP tracks. I ain't kidding you. They say he took a nap right on the tracks with a wine bottle on his chest. Well, he always told me he wanted to be a travelling man, poor old bastard."
"A Haitian named Toot and maybe a guy by the name of Eddie Keats came to see me. They left a few stitches in my mouth and head. A bartender in Smiling Jack's on Bourbon told me he sicked them on me by calling one of your clubs."