“You’re a funny guy. I don’t mean like strange. You’re just a different kind of guy.”
Once again Clete felt his old enemy come back. As a boy, he’d hated delivering milk off his father’s truck to the back doors of the rich in the Garden District. He’d hated the welfare store where the clothes he was given were generic and ill-fitting; he’d hated the cops who’d hauled his parents out of the house when they were drunk and fighting; he’d hated his father for beating him with a razor strop and making him kneel all night on grains of rice; he’d hated a nun who’d told him he was unwashed, and a priest who’d shut the confessional window in his face when he was twelve years old. These moments should have disappeared long ago, but every time Clete looked into the eyes of a normal person, the dead coals he had carried for decades burst alight, giving life to every dark memory in his unconscious, telling him once again he was worthless in the sight of God and man.
“I don’t like to talk much about myself,” he said. “Not because I’m humble. On my best day, I never got more than a C-minus. That includes time in the Crotch.”
“I checked you out. You have the Navy Cross.”
“I got it while I was running in the wrong direction. How about we ditch yesterday’s box score?”
He tilted the pitcher to fill her glass, but she covered it with her hand.
“Sometimes I get the blues,” she said. “That’s when I know I shouldn’t drink too much. If I do, I really get the blues. I like Emmylou Harris’s line: ‘I got the rhythm, and I don’t need the blues.’ ”
“You’re talking about your husband?”
“He was a West Point graduate. He could have been an academic, but he went to Ranger school. He loved the army. He was killed by friendly fire.”
“I’m sorry.”
He stole a look at her eyes. She was looking at the bar. A man was telling a dirty joke to two women, both of them disheveled, grinning. “You know what I’m saying, don’t you?” she asked.
“I’m not too smart about these things. I’m old, too.”
“So is the earth. Is your guy going to show?”
Clete glanced at his watch, the same one he’d owned since the Corps. The hands had a soft green luminosity. “Probably not.”
“I’ll buy you a fish sandwich and a cup of coffee at McDonald’s,” she said.
“I don’t want to leave Homer alone too long.”
“Sure,” she said.
“Another thing. I was involved with this lady. I’m not now, but it wasn’t long ago, and she’s a nice lady.”
“The social worker?” she said.
“Yeah.”
She nodded.
“You’re beautiful, Miss Sherry. You got guts, too. I mean, working with some of those assholes in your department.”
“I got you. Lay off the personal inventory.”
“I don’t want to walk out of here feeling bad,” he said. Had he just said that? Why did he never have the words that accurately described his feelings? “I didn’t mean—”
“I’ve got to pee,” she said.
When she returned from the women’s room, she filled her glass with beer and drank it. “I’d better get going.”
“How about that fish sandwich?” he said.
She followed him to McDonald’s in her car. They ate in a booth. Heat lightning flared in the clouds and died somewhere over the Gulf. She said little. He wondered about the images she had seen through the telescopic sight on a sniper’s rifle, images she had created with the slow squeeze of a trigger.
“You go somewhere in your own head sometimes?” she said.
“On occasion.”
“You know what they say.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Don’t go into a bad neighborhood by yourself.”
“It’s the only neighborhood I have,” he replied.
She finished her sandwich and wiped her mouth. There was lipstick on the paper napkin when she crumpled it in her hand.
“There’s a lady who stays over with Homer when I go out of town,” he said.
“It’s your call,” she said.
He cupped his cell phone. “I’ll be outside.”
The motel was halfway to Opelousas on the four-lane. There was a piney woods behind it and a fountain in front that glittered with pink and blue lights. She followed him there and went into the lobby by his side.
During the night he dreamed of a ville burning, the sparks spinning into the sky. Then the dream changed and he heard the 105s coming in short on his position, a whistling sound like truck tires on a wet highway. When he woke, the ceiling was shaking with thunder. He went into the bathroom in his skivvies and opened the window. The only sound he heard was the wind in the pines, their needles orange with drought and blight.
When he went back to bed, he took his snub-nose out of its holster and slipped it under his pillow for reasons he didn’t understand. Audie Murphy did it. And probably thousands of other guys who never told anybody about it. Why not Clete Purcel? He lay awake most of the night, trying to provide himself explanations that had eluded him all his life.
On a Saturday morning, Alafair came back early from filming outside St. Martinville. She went into the kitchen and took one of my diet Dr Peppers out of the icebox and drank it from the can.
“Something happen with the Hollywood crowd?” I said.
“They’re midlevel pond scum. Neither good nor bad. Just run-of-the-mill scum.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Levon Broussard.”
“What’s wrong with Levon?”
“He’s a closet elitist. Rather than work with conventional film people, he signed on with a bunch of simian throwbacks who hide behind sunglasses and are afraid to talk at the table because they sound like they have throat cancer and a vocabulary of fewer than a dozen words. In the meantime, he pretends.”
“Pretends what?”
“That he’s on a mission. He insists on hiring only union people. The food has to be of a certain organic quality. The actors should be included in our script meetings. The black actors have to be given more lines. I think this is all a cover-up for what’s really in his head.”
“What’s in his head?”
“Guilt. Hatred of the truth about his ancestors.”
“You knew this, Alf,” I said.
“I didn’t know Levon would show up every morning unshaven with booze on his breath and crazy changes in the script.”
“Maybe it’s time to cut loose from these guys,” I said.
“I don’t want to lose my work.”
“Then don’t worry about it.”
“Levon claims he didn’t kill Kevin Penny. I think he’s capable of it. I also think he’s capable of doing Jimmy Nightingale harm.”
“You’re suggesting Levon might want to kill him?”
“Levon says Nightingale airdropped explosives on an Indian village in South America and killed women and children. That’s not true, is it?”
“I’m afraid it is, Alf. Jimmy told me about it.”
She couldn’t hide the look on her face. At age five she had survived an army massacre of her Salvadoran village. The soldiers had used machetes to hack open the bodies of pregnant Indian women.
“Why doesn’t the media say something about it?” she said.
“If people don’t care about eight poor women murdered in Jefferson Davis Parish, why would they care about some oilmen bombing Indians in Latin America?”
“Maybe Nightingale deserves a bullet in the face,” she said.
“I think he’s remorseful.”
“After the fact,” she said. “What a piece of shit.”
“Have another diet Doc with me,” I said.
“At least I had one laugh this morning.”
“At what?” I said, glad that we were through with the subject of Jimmy Nightingale and Tony Nemo and Levon Broussard.