"Here comes Cecil now. Let him know what you've decided," I said.
The light was soft through the trees as I drove along the bayou road toward my house that evening. Sometimes during the summer the sky in southern Louisiana actually turns lavender, with strips of pink cloud in the west like flamingo wings painted above the horizon, and this evening the air was sweet with the smell of watermelons and strawberries in somebody's truck patch and the hydrangeas and night-blooming jasmine that completely covered my neighbor's wooden fence. Out on the bayou the bream were dimpling the water like raindrops.
Before I turned into my lane I passed a fire-engine-red MG convertible with a flat tire by the side of the road, then I saw Bubba Rocque's wife sitting on my front step with a silver thermos next to her thigh and a plastic cup in her fingers. She wore straw Mexican sandals, beige shorts, and a low-cut white blouse with blue and brown tropical birds on it, and she had pinned a yellow hibiscus in her dark hair. She smiled at me as I walked toward her with my coat over my shoulder. Once again I noticed that strange red cast in her brown eyes.
"I had a flat tire. Can you give me a ride back to my aunt's on West Main?" she asked.
"Sure. Or I can change it for you."
"There's no air in the spare, either." She drank from the cup. Her mouth was red and wet, and she smiled at me again.
"What are you doing down this way, Mrs. Rocque?"
"It's Claudette, Dave. My cousin lives down at the end of the road. I come over to New Iberia about once a month to see all my relatives."
"I see."
"Am I putting you out?"
"No. I'll be just a minute."
I didn't ask her in. I went inside to check on Alafair and told the baby-sitter to go ahead and serve supper, that I would be back shortly.
"Help a lady up. I'm a little twisted this evening," Claudette Rocque said, and reached her hand out to mine. She felt heavy when I pulled her erect. I could smell gin and cigarettes on her breath.
"I'm sorry about your wife," she said.
"Thank you."
"It's a terrible thing."
I held the truck door open for her and didn't answer.
She sat with her back at an angle to the far door, her legs slightly apart, and moved her eyes over my face.
Oh boy, I thought. I drove out of the shadows of the pecan trees, back onto the bayou road.
"You look uncomfortable," she said.
"Long day."
"Are you afraid of Bubba?"
"I don't think about him," I lied.
"I don't think you're afraid of very much."
"I respect your husband's potential. I apologise for not asking you in. The house is a mess."
"You don't get backed into a corner easily, do you?"
"Like I said, it's been a long day, Mrs. Rocque."
She made an exaggerated pout with her mouth.
"And you're not going to call a married lady by her first name. What a proper law officer you are. Do you want a gin rickey?"
"No, thanks."
"You're going to hurt my feelings. Has someone told you bad things about me?"
I watched a sparrow hawk glide on extended wings down the length of the bayou.
"Did someone tell you I was in St. Gabriel?" she said. Then she smiled and reached out and ticked the skin above my collar with her nail. "Or maybe they told you I wasn't all girl."
I could feel her eyes moving on the side of my face.
"I've made the officer uncomfortable. I think I even made him blush," she said.
"How about a little slack, Mrs. Rocque?"
"Will you have a drink with me, then?"
"What do you think the odds are of your having a flat tire by my front lane?"
Her round doll's eyes were bright as she looked at me over her raised drinking cup.
"He's such a detective," she said. "He's thinking so hard now, wondering what the bad lady is up to." She rubbed her back against the door and flattened her thighs against the truck seat. "Maybe the lady is interested in you. Are you interested in me?"
"I wouldn't go jerking Bubba around, Mrs. Rocque."
"Oh my, how direct."
"You live with him. You know the kind of man he is. If I was in your situation, I'd give some thought to what I was doing."
"You're being rude, Mr. Robicheaux."
"Read it like you want. Your husband has black lightning in his brain. Mess around with his pride, embarrass him socially, and I think you'll get to see that same kid who wheeled his crippled cousin into the coulee."
"I have some news for you, sir," she said. Her voice wasn't coy anymore, and the red tint in her brown eyes seemed to take on a brighter cast. "I did three years in a place where the bull dykes tell you not to come into the shower at night unless you want to lose your cherry. Bubba never did time. I don't think he could. I think he'd last about three days until they had to lock him in a box and put handles on it and carry it out in the middle of an empty field."
I drove onto the drawbridge. The tires thumped on the metal grid. I saw the bridge tender, a look at Claudette Rocque and me with a quizzical expression on his face.
"Another thought for you, sir," she said. "Bubba has a couple of sluts he keeps on tap in New Orleans. I'm not supposed to mention them. I'm just his cutie-pie Cajun girl that's supposed to clean his house and wash his sweat suits. I've got a big flash for you boys. Your jockstrap stinks."
In the cooling dusk I passed a row of weathered Negro shacks with sagging galleries, a bar and a barbecue joint under a spreading oak, an old brick grocery store with a lighted Dixie beer sign in the window.
"I'm going to drop you at the cab stand," I said. "Do you have money for cabfare?"
"Bubba and I own cabs. I don't ride in them."
"Then it's a good night for a walk."
"You're a shit," she said.
"You dealt it."
"Yeah, you got a point. I thought I could do something for you. Big mistake. You're one of those full-time good losers. You know what it takes to be a good loser? Practice." On East Main she pointed ahead in the dusk. "Drop me at that bar."
Then she finished the last of her thermos and casually dropped it out the truck window into the street. It sprang end over end on the concrete. A group of men smoking cigars and drinking canned beer in front of the bar turned and stared in our direction.
"I was going to offer you a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year deal to run Bubba's fish-packing house in Morgan City," she said. "Think about that on your way back to your worm sales."
I slowed the truck in front of the bar. The neon beer signs made the inside of the cab red. The men outside the bar entrance had stopped talking and were looking at us.
"Also, I don't want you to drive out of here thinking you've been in control of things tonight," she said, and got up on her knees, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me wetly on the cheek. "You just missed the best lay you'll ever have, pumpkin. Why don't you-try some pocket pool at your AA meetings? It really goes with your personality."
But I was too tired to care whether she had won the day or not. It was a night of black clouds rolling over the Gulf, of white electricity jumping across the vast, dark dome of sky above me, of the tiger starting to walk around in his cage. I could almost hear his thick, leathery paws scudding against the wire mesh, see his hot orange eyes in the darkness, smell his dung and the fetid odor of rotted meat on his breath.
I never had an explanation for these moments that would come upon me. A psychologist would probably call it depression. A nihilist might call it philosophical insight. But regardless, it seemed there was nothing for it except the acceptance of another sleepless night. Batist, Alafair, and I took the pickup truck to the drive-in movie in Lafayette, set out deck chairs on the oyster shells, and ate hot dogs and drank lemonade and watched a Walt Disney double feature, but I couldn't rid myself of the dark well I felt my soul descending into.