“A human icicle?” I said.
“She has dirty eyes.”
“You think she hit the ball in your face deliberately?”
“That’s what I felt like after I talked with her. She’s a controller. She also seems to have an obsession with oil companies. What’s the story on that?”
“Jimmy has a degree in geology. He worked in South America awhile. The Nightingales have their fingers in lots of pies.”
She sat down in a white-painted wooden chair near Tripod’s hutch. The sky was blue and as shiny as silk. Leaves from the live oaks were tumbling on her hair and skin. I couldn’t believe she was the little girl I’d pulled from the cabin of a submerged plane.
“She left me with a disturbing sensation,” Alafair said. “One I couldn’t shake driving home.”
“Like what?”
“Evil.”
“You think she’s going to call you?”
“Probably. She seems interested in the treatment I’m doing on Levon Broussard’s Civil War novel.”
“Maybe that’s a project you should drop, Alf.”
“Because of her?”
“Because it’s going to drag you into contact with Levon and his wife. I think Rowena Broussard is a sick person.”
“You don’t believe she was raped?”
“She’s an unhappy person who has a tendency to work out her problems on the backs of other people.”
“That’s two thirds of Hollywood,” she said.
“Did you talk to Levon about the treatment?”
“On the phone. He said it was fine with him, but he thought it was a waste of time.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s really good. The battle scenes at Shiloh, the Yankee occupation, the story of the slave girl and her white father who founded Angola Prison.”
“Why hasn’t someone adapted it?”
“Confederates are the new Nazis. Have you seen the raccoon again?”
“Not yet. He’ll be back,” I said.
“Are you okay, Dave?”
“You bet.”
“Shit,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Don’t use that kind of language, Alf.”
She put down her coffee mug and stood up and hugged me and pressed her face into my shoulder. I felt the wetness in her eyes.
“What’s this about?” I said.
She wiped her eyes on my shirt.
“Answer me, Alafair.”
“I hate what they’re doing to you,” she said. “I’d like to shoot every motherfucking one of them.”
“Don’t use that language in our home.”
She hit me, again and again, her fists bouncing on my chest.
The social worker in Jennings was named Carolyn Ardoin. She was a matronly white-haired woman with lovely skin and a blush on her cheeks and soft hands. When Clete’s cell phone woke him up at 8:05 on Monday morning, he was surprised by how happy he felt to receive her call. He had met her only once, in her office, to talk about Kevin Penny’s eleven-year-old boy. Their conversation had been all business, with little time to speak of anything other than the child’s safety. But her perfume and her manner and the freshness of her clothes lingered with him.
“I hope I didn’t call too early, Mr. Purcel,” she said.
“No, ma’am, I was just about to head to the office.”
“I’m probably not supposed to make this call, but you’re such a nice man, and I know you want to be apprised of Homer’s situation.” She paused as though reluctant to continue. “We’re reinstating him with Mr. Penny today.”
“At the trailer?”
“Yes, a little earlier than I expected. But if not now, we would be taking him there later, and the circumstances wouldn’t be any different.”
“What time today?”
“At noon sharp.”
“This troubles me, Miss Carolyn. Mightily.” Why had he used such a strange word?
“Mr. Purcel?”
“Yes?”
The time seemed to drag like a chain down a stairs. “I’m terribly perturbed about this placement,” she said finally.
“I’m going to drop by the trailer.”
“I know you’re a good man. But don’t be confrontational with him. You know whom he’ll punish.”
“I’ll call you later,” he said. “I promise everything will be all right.”
“No, it won’t. But you’re kind to say that. You’re a good man, sir.”
He felt a blooming sensation in his chest that he couldn’t explain.
Clete drove to Lafayette and made a purchase at a sporting goods store, then got on I-10 to Jennings. Homer Penny had no memory of his mother, a meth addict and an attractive black prostitute whom her husband, Kevin, pimped out to middle-class white men from Lake Charles and Lafayette, including a well-known physician. Homer seldom spoke and always looked uncertain or frightened, as though standing in a canoe or pirogue, about to topple into a bayou filled with snakes. He had big ears and blue eyes and pale gold skin with big brown freckles like human camouflage. Clete could never get him to smile.
Clete pulled up in front of the trailer at 11:45. The dirt bike was gone. At noon a man in a state car came up the track, bouncing in the potholes, the passenger’s head barely visible above the dashboard. The passenger wore horn-rimmed glasses and a hand-folded paper hat, and had big ears and a tiny nose and a thin face and slits for eyes and made Clete think of a baby seabird peeping out of a nest. The driver parked and got out. He wore a dark blue coat that had dandruff on the shoulders. “You Mr. Purcel?”
Clete climbed out of the Caddy, a shopping bag in his hand. “I am.”
“I’m Herb Smith. With the state. Miss Carolyn said you’d be here. Looks locked up.”
“It is.”
Smith twisted his wrist to read his watch. “Three minutes to noon.” He squeezed his eyes shut and clicked them open again, like the eyelids on a mechanical doll.
“What?” Clete said.
“Some days I hope certain people don’t show up.”
“I brought something for Homer,” Clete said. He opened the sack so Smith could see inside. “You mind?”
“No, sir, go right ahead.”
Clete removed an Astros baseball cap and a softball and two gloves. “How about it, pal?” he asked the boy.
“I never played,” the boy said, his gaze askance.
“We’re going to change that. You get over there, and I’ll start lobbing them to you. Then you fireball them back.”
The boy couldn’t catch with a wheelbarrow. He tripped and fell down when he ran after the ball. He couldn’t throw thirty feet.
“Tell you what,” Clete said. He went back to the Caddy. “I got you a bat. I’ll pitch ’em, you hit ’em.”
Homer missed the first two pitches, clipped the third, and hit the fourth squarely, ripping it across the grass. The welfare man from the state volunteered as catcher. It was 12:26.
“Do I have to stay here, Mr. Clete?” the boy said.
“For a time. Mr. Smith and Miss Carolyn and I will be looking in on you.”
The boy swung the bat at nothing. At 12:37 they heard the whine of a dirt bike. The boy’s face drained. Clete saw Smith mouth the words “Son of a bitch.”
Kevin Penny cut the gas feed and coasted up to the Caddy. He had a backpack. He pulled on the neck of his T-shirt and wiped his nose with it. “The big three. Or call it the two and a half.”
“I need your signature and I’ll be gone,” Smith said.
“What day of the month does the check come?” Penny said.
“Pardon?”
“It’s supposed to be in the agreement. The amount and the date of delivery.”
“I think you’ll find everything in order,” Smith said.
“Oh, hell yes,” Penny said. He unslung his pack and walked past his son to the porch, grinding the Astros cap into the boy’s scalp. Penny sat on the top step and opened a can of Bud and began tearing apart a rotisserie chicken from his pack and eating it with his hands. “Don’t let me stop you.”