We drove back through the long corridor of dead cypress trees, the fireflies lighting in the dark, and rented a VCR and a Walt Disney movie at the video store in New Iberia. Later, Batist came by the house with some fresh boudin, and we heated it in the oven and made lemonade with cracked ice and mint leaves in the glasses and watched the movie in the living room under the wood-bladed fan. When I got up to fill the lemonade pitcher again, I looked at the flicker of the screen on Robin's and Alafair's and Batist's faces and felt a strange sense of family belonging that I hadn't felt since Annie's death.
I went home for lunch the next day and was eating a ham-and-onion sandwich at the kitchen table when the phone rang. It was a beautiful, sunny day, the sky a clear blue above the trees, and through the back window I could see Alafair playing with one of my calico cats in the backyard. She wore her left and right pink tennis shoes, a pair of denim pedal pushers, and the yellow Donald Duck T-shirt that Annie had bought for her, and she swung a piece of kite twine back and forth in front of the cat's churning paws. I chewed on the ham and bread in my mouth and placed the telephone receiver idly against my ear. I could hear the dull whirring of a long-distance connection, like wind blowing in a conch shell.
"Is this Robicheaux?"
"Yes. Who's this?"
"The cop, right?" His voice sounded as if it were strained through wet sand.
"That's right. You want to tell me who this is?"
"It's Victor Romero. I got a lot of people on my case, and I'm hearing a lot of stuff I don't like to hear. Most of it's got your name in it."
The piece of sandwich felt stiff and dead in my jaw. I pushed my plate away and felt myself sit up straight in my chair.
"You still there?" he said. I heard a peculiar thump, then a hissing sound in the background.
"Yes."
"Everybody wants to cut a slice out of my ass, like I'm responsible for every crime in Louisiana. They got the word on the street that maybe I'm going away for thirty years. They're talking that maybe I killed some people in a plane, that maybe they'll turn me over to the locals and get me fried in Angola. So everybody in New Orleans hears the feds got a big hard-on for me, that don't nobody touch me because I'm like the stink on shit and they better not get it on their hands, either. You listening to me?"
"Yes."
"So I told them I'd deal. They want these big fuckers, and I get some slack. I tell them I'll come in for three. No more than three, that's it. Except what do I hear? This cat Robicheaux is a hardtail and he don't play. So you're fucking me, man."
I could feel my heart beating, feel the blood in the back of my neck and in my temples.
"Do you want to meet somewhere and talk?" I said.
"You must be out of your goddamn mind."
Then I heard the thump again, followed by the hissing sound.
"I want you to talk to those cocksuckers at the DEA," he said. "I want you to tell them no charges because you thought somebody shot at you. You get the fuck off my back. I get that message from the right guy, and maybe I deliver something you want."
"I don't think you've got anything to bargain with, Romero. I think you're a nickel-and-dime mule that everybody's tired of. Why don't you write all this bullshit on a postcard and I'll read it when I don't have anything else to do."
"Yeah?"
I didn't answer. He was quiet a moment, then he spoke again.
"You want to know who set up the whack on your wife?"
I was breathing deeply now, and wires were trembling inside my chest. I swallowed and kept my voice as flat as possible.
"All I hear from you is noise. You got something to trade, get it out of your mouth or stop bothering me," I said.
"You think I'm talking noise, huh? Try this, motherfucker. You had a fan in your bedroom window. You had a telephone in your hall, except somebody tore it out of the wall for you. And while they did your old lady, you were hiding outside in the dark."
I felt my hand slide up and down my flexed thigh. I had to wet my lips before I could speak again. I should have been silent, said nothing, but the control was now gone.
"I'll find you," I said hoarsely.
"Find me and you find nothing. I got all this from the boon. You want the rest of the story, you come up with a deal that don't leave me in the barrel. You got a guilty conscience, man, and I ain't taking your fall."
"Listen-"
"No, I talk, you listen. You get together with that bunch of farts at the Federal Building and decide what you want to do. You come up with the right numbers-and I'm talking three years max, in a minimum-security joint-then you run an ad in the Times-Picayune that says, 'Victor, your situation is approved.' I see that ad, maybe a lawyer's gonna call up the DEA and see about a meet."
"Eddie Keats tried to dust you. They're going to take you out just like they did the Haitian. You're running out of ratholes."
"Kiss my ass. I ate bugs and lizards for thirty-eight days and came back with eleven gook ears on a stick. I'm buying the paper Sunday morning. After that, forget it. Clean up your own shit."
Before he hung up I thought I heard a streetcar bell clang.
The rest of the afternoon I tried to recreate his voice in my mind. Had I heard it once before, in a rumble of thunder, on my front porch? I couldn't be sure. But the thought that I had held a conversation about plea-bargaining with one of Annie's murderers worked and twisted in my brain like an obscene finger.
Sometime after midnight, I woke with a thick, numb feeling in my head, the kind you have after you've been out in a cold wind a long time by yourself. I sat quietly on the edge of the couch, my bare feet resting in a square of moonlight on the floor, and opened and closed my hands as though I were seeing them for the first time. Then I unlocked Annie's and my bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark.
The bloody sheets and bedspread had been carried off in a vinyl evidence bag, but the mattress and the wooden bedstead were filled with holes that I could fit my fingers into as though I were probing the wounds in Our Lord's hands. The brown patterns all over the bedstead and the flowered wallpaper could have been slung there by a paintbrush. I rubbed my hand across the wall and felt the stiff, torn edges of the paper where the buckshot and deer slugs had torn through the wood. The moon shone through the pecan tree outside and made an oval of light in my lap. I felt as solitary as if I had been sitting in the bottom of a dry, cool well, with strips of silver cloud floating by against a dark sky.
I thought about my father and wished he were there with me. He couldn't read or write and never once traveled outside the state of Louisiana, but his heart possessed an intuitive understanding about our lives, our Cajun vision of the world, that no philosophy book could convey. He drank too much and he'd fistfight two or three men in a bar at the same time, with the enthusiasm of a boy hitting baseballs, but inside he had a gentle heart, a strong sense of right and wrong, and a tragic sense about the cruelty and violence that the world sometimes imposes upon the innocent.
He told me a story once about a killing that he'd seen as a young man. In my father's mind, the victim's death was emblematic of all the unjust and brutal behavior that people are capable of in groups, although in reality the victim was not an innocent man. It was the winter of 1935, and a criminal who had robbed banks with John Dillinger and Homer Van Meter had been flushed out of Margaret's whorehouse in Opelousas, a brothel that had been operating since the War Between the States. Cops chased him all the way to Iberia Parish, and when his car slid into a ditch, he struck out across a frozen field of sugarcane stubble. My father and a Negro were pulling stumps with a mule and trace chains and burning them in big heaps when the robber ran past them toward the old barn by our windmill. My father said he wore a white shirt with cufflinks and a bow tie, with no coat, and he gripped a straw boater in his hand as though it were his last possession on earth.