“I told myself Penny had it coming. There wasn’t any point in my getting involved.”
“You left your prints at the scene. Wouldn’t it be better to explain your presence there than to flee?”
“I wasn’t thinking, Dave. His eyes were rolled in his head. His face was contorted in a death mask. It was horrible.”
“You saw the work of the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. I don’t think you rattle that easily.”
His hands were high on the bars, his head down. “It wasn’t my best day.”
“You had doubts about Jimmy Nightingale’s guilt?”
His gaze remained on the floor. His hair was uncut, hanging in his eyes.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” I said. “You didn’t want to let Nightingale off the hook?”
“He took her to the boat. He got her drunk. He was doing everything he could to get in her pants.”
“That doesn’t make him a rapist.”
“If Nightingale didn’t rape her, he knew Penny did.”
“Not if Nightingale was passed out.”
“Why not join his defense team?”
“I don’t have to be here,” I said.
Somebody slammed a gate. Somebody else dragged a baton across a row of bars. Another someone was yelling gibberish from a cell. Think hell is just in the next world? Visit your average county bag or rental prison.
“I’ve written about the Jeff Davis Eight,” Levon said. “Look in on Rowena, will you?”
“Sure.”
“Tell Nightingale this doesn’t change anything. He’s a liar and a fraud, and I’m going to prove it to the world. I hate that son of a bitch.”
On Friday night, Clete took Homer to a movie in New Iberia, then for ice cream. Homer carried the baseball glove Clete gave him on his belt, and never took off his baseball cap. On the way home, his face looked wizened in the dash light, as though it had been freeze-burned or his youth stolen. He was the most isolated and strange little boy Clete had ever known.
“They treating you all right at school?” Clete said.
“Not everybody, but most people do.”
“You worried about something?”
“When are they gonna take me back?”
“Who?”
“The people who run the foster program.”
“I’m not going to let them do that.”
The boy stared at nothing for a long time. “I’m glad my father was killed. And that makes me feel bad.”
Clete turned off Main into the motor court, bouncing Homer in the seat. “Your emotions get mixed up in a situation like that,” Clete said. “See, what you’re glad about is he can’t hurt you anymore.”
“I feel dirty.”
“Your father didn’t deserve to have a fine little boy like you.”
“I feel dirty all the time.”
“Why?”
“Because of what they did.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“The men who came to the trailer. His friends. I told him about it, but he didn’t care. He called me a liar.”
Clete pulled the Caddy under the oaks and cut the engine and lights. “Those things were not your fault. Your father was an evil man. So were his friends. If I catch up with the men who hurt you, they’ll never have a chance to hurt anyone again.”
“They’re gonna take me back. They won’t let you keep me. There’s got to be both a man and woman in the house.”
“Maybe Miss Carolyn and I will work something out.”
“I heard you talking to her on the phone. She’s moving in with her mother in Lake Charles. Don’t pretend.”
“I won’t, Homer. I promise.”
Homer walked ahead of him into the cottage and turned on the light. Clete heard a hiss from the shadows and stared into the darkness. A tug was droning up the bayou, its running lights on. “Who’s there?”
“Pookie. I got to talk,” a voice said.
Clete removed a penlight from his pocket and shone it into the darkness. “You trying to creep my cottage?”
“I got a flat. Down the street. I got to hide.”
Clete shone the light on Pookie’s clothes. “Did you wet your pants?”
“A guy was following me. Not a guy. The guy.”
“Make sense.”
“Maybe the guy who smoked that cop in St. Mary Parish. He’s out of Florida. Nobody knows what he looks like. He’s like a cleaner, except he doesn’t just clean. He wipes out everything in the environment. I saw JuJu. He said Maximo is missing, down by Morgan City.”
“You need to soak your brain in a bucket of Drano, Pookie. I can’t begin to follow the crap coming out of your mouth.”
“Somebody put the grab on Maximo. He takes his lady on a picnic, then she goes for a whiz, and when she comes back, Maximo has gone into thin air.”
“The lady is the haystack from outer space?”
“Show some sensitivity here.”
“Maximo is a sadist and a pervert. In case you haven’t heard, one of his kids disappeared. The mother thinks Maximo killed him. Did he and JuJu attack Carolyn Ardoin in her driveway?”
“You already said it, Purcel. If it was Maximo, she wouldn’t have a face.”
“Get out of here, Pookie.”
“Listen to me. This guy who was following me wears red tennis shoes and fruity shirts and queer-bait pants. He ain’t out to just cap me. He wants information. You know what that means. T’ink about what somebody done to Kevin Penny.”
“I can’t help you. Don’t come around here anymore.” Clete went up the stoop and opened the screen door.
“Don’t leave me like this, no,” Pookie said.
Clete shut the door and turned the bolt and clicked off the porch light. He looked through the window. Pookie’s arms were thrashing in rage and frustration, as though he were caught in a wind tunnel.
Clete couldn’t sleep that night. Forty years ago he had accepted insomnia as a way of life. For a long time the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape. Sometimes he made a pot of tea for her, then put it and a demitasse and saucer and napkin and tiny spoon on the windowsill, regardless of the terror in his wife’s face. One day the mamasan moved on, and his wife joined a Buddhist cult in Boulder, one in which the members were made to remove their clothes and humiliate themselves, and Clete was left with a sense of desertion and emptiness no amount of booze or redwings or weed could kill.
At three in the morning he sat up in the bed and looked at the moon. Homer was asleep on the couch, his cap and ball glove by his feet. He had read Clete’s situation correctly: Carolyn Ardoin was moving in with her mother. But that was a small part of the problem. Clete and domesticity didn’t flush. He had tried it in all its forms. The result was always a disaster. He had even seen a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had told him to get a vasectomy and never get drunk in Reno or Vegas, where he might accidentally stumble into a marriage chapel.
Clete looked at Homer in the moon glow. His skin was pale and his breath so shallow, his nostrils hardly quivered. Clete thought of the bodies of the people buried alive by the Vietcong along the banks of the Perfume River, the dirt clutched in their hands, the waxy look in their faces.
The world hasn’t treated you right, kid. But I don’t know what either one of us can do about it. If there’s a way, God help me find it.
In any given twenty-four-hour period, we received a steady flow of reports and complaints about house break-ins, car wrecks, noisy house parties, fights outside bars, domestic disputes, a backed-up septic tank, a water heater that wouldn’t light, the garbage that wasn’t picked up, a sofa dumped in the bayou, a Peeping Tom, an alligator in a swimming pool, another alligator taking a barbecued chicken off a grill, possums chewing through someone’s wiring, a live skunk that kids had put in the high school principal’s car, and sometimes the real deal — a homicide or a felonious assault or an armed robbery.