"Dave, you remember Claudette, from New Iberia?" Bubba said.
"I'm sorry, I'm a little vague on people from home sometimes," I said. "I lived in New Orleans for fourteen years or so."
"I bet you remember her mother, Hattie Fontenot."
"Oh yes, I think I do," I said, my eyes flat.
"I bet you lost your cherry in one of her cribs on Railroad Avenue," Bubba said.
"I'm not always big on boyhood memories," I said.
"You and your brother had a paper route on Railroad Avenue. Are you going to tell me y'all never got paid in rade?"
"I guess I just don't remember."
"She had two colored joints on the corner," he said. "We used to go nigger-knocking down there, then get laid for two dollars."
"Bubba just likes to talk rough sometimes. It doesn't bother me. You don't have to be embarrassed," she said.
"I'm not."
"I'm not ashamed of my mother. She had a lot of good qualities. She didn't use profane language in polite company, unlike some people I know." She had a heavy Cajun accent, and her brown eyes had a strange red cast in them. They were as round as a doll's.
"Bubba, will you make me a gin rickey?" she said.
"Your thermos is in the icebox."
"So? I'd like one in a glass, please."
"She can drink gin rickeys all day and not get loaded." Bubba said. "I think she's got hollow buns."
"I don't think Dave is used to our kind of talk," she said.
"He's married too, isn't he?"
"Bubba…"
"What?"
"Would you please get me a drink?"
"All right," he said, taking the thermos and a chilled glass out of the icebox. "I wonder what I pay Clarence for. I damn near have to show him a diagram just to get him to dust."
He poured from the thermos into his wife's glass, then put it in front of her. He continued to look at her with an exasperated expression on his face.
"Look, I don't want to get on your case all the time, but how about not filing your nails at the table?" he said. "I can do without nail filings in my food."
She wiped the powdered filings off the glass top with a Kleenex, then continued filing her nails over the shoe box.
"Well, I have to go. It was nice meeting you," I said.
"Yeah, I got to pack and get on the road, too. Walk him out to his truck, Claudette. I'm going to make some calls when I get to New Orleans. I find out somebody's been causing you problems, I'll cancel their act. That's a promise. By the way, that bartender better be out of town."
He looked at me a moment, balancing on the balls of his feet, then cocked his fists and jerked his shoulders at an angle as quickly as a rubber band snapping.
"Hey!" he said, grinned and winked, then walked back out the patio toward the circular staircase. His back was triangular, his butt flat, his thighs as thick as telephone posts.
His wife walked with me out to my pickup truck. The wind blew across the lawn and flattened the spray from the sprinklers into a rainbow mist among the trees. Gray clouds were building in the south, and the air was close and hot. Upstairs, Bubba had turned on a 1950s Little Richard record full blast.
"You really don't remember me?" she said.
"No, I'm sorry."
"I dated your brother, Jimmie, in New Orleans about ten years ago. One night we went out to visit you at your fish camp. You were really plastered and you kept saying that the freight train wouldn't let you sleep. So when it went by, you ran outside and shot it with a flare pistol."
I suddenly realised that Bubba's wife wasn't so uncomplicated after all.
"I'm afraid I was ninety-proof-a lot of the time back then," I said.
"I thought it was funny."
I tried to be polite, but like most dry alcoholics I didn't want to talk about my drinking days with people who saw humor in them.
"Well, so long. I hope to see you again," I said.
"Do you think Bubba's crazy?"
"I don't know."
"His second wife left him two years ago. He burned all her clothes in the incinerator out back. He's not crazy, though. He just wants people to think he is because it scares them."
"That could be."
"He's not a bad man. I know all the stuff they say about him, but not many people know the hard time he had growing up."
"A lot of us had a hard time, Mrs. Rocque."
"You don't like him, do you?"
"I guess I just don't know your husband well, and I'd better go."
"You get embarrassed too easy."
"Mrs. Rocque, I wish you good luck because I think you're going to need it."
"I heard him offer you a job. You should take it. The people that work for him make a lot of money."
"Yes, they do, and there's a big cost to lots of other people."
"He doesn't make them do anything they don't already want to."
"Your mother ran brothels, but she wasn't a white-slaver and she didn't sell dope. The most polite thing I can say about Bubba is that he's a genuine sonofabitch. I don't even think he'd mind."
"I like you. Come have dinner with us sometime," she said. "I'm home a lot."
I drove back down the pea-gravel lane and headed toward New Iberia and the picnic in the park with Annie and Alafair. The sun was bright on the tin roofs of the barns set back in the sugarcane fields. The few moss-hung oaks along the road made deep pools of shadow on the road's surface. I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.
I had gotten to him when I mentioned Immigration busting two of his mules. Which made me wonder even more what role Immigration played in all of this. They had obviously stonewalled Minos Dautrieve at the DEA, and I believed they were behind the disappearance of Johnny Dartez's body after it was recovered from the plane crash by the Coast Guard. So if I was any kind of cop at all, why hadn't I dealt with Immigration head-on? They probably would have thrown me out of their office, but I also knew how to annoy bureaucrats, call their supervisors in Washington collect, and file freedom-of-information forms on them until their paint started to crack. So why hadn't I done it, I asked myself. And in answering my own question, I began to have a realisation about presumption and denial in myself.
5
ANNIE AND ALAFAIR were wrapping fried chicken in wax paper and fixing lemonade in a thermos when I got back home. I sat at the kitchen table with a glass of iced tea and mint leaves and looked out the window at the blue jays swooping over the mimosa tree in the backyard. The ducks in my pond were shaking water off their backs and waddling onto the bank in the shade created by the cattails.
"I feel foolish about something," I said.
"We'll take care of that tonight," she said, and smiled.
"Something else."
"Oh."
"Years ago when I was a patrolman there was a notorious street character in the Quarter named Dock Stratton. The welfare officer would give him a meal-and-lodging ticket at one of their contract hotels, and he'd check into the place, then throw all the furniture out the window-tables, chairs, dresser drawers, lamps, mattresses, everything he could squeeze through the window, it would all come crashing down on the sidewalk. Then he'd run downstairs before anybody could call the heat and haul everything to the secondhand store. But no matter what this guy did, we never busted him. I was new and didn't understand. The other guys told me it was because Dock was a barfer. If he got a finger loose in the back of the car, he'd stick it down his throat and puke all over the seats. He'd do it in a lineup, in a holding cell, in a courtroom. He was always cocked and ready to fire. This guy was so bad a guard at the jail threatened to quit rather than take him on the chain to morning court. So Dock was allowed to drive welfare workers and skid-row hotel managers crazy for years, and when rookies like me asked why, we got treated to a good story.