earlier, climbed out of the backseat in her shorts and spiked heels, raking a long, paint-curling scratch down the side of the Cadillac.
Max got out of the car and struck the woman full across the mouth with the flat of his hand. He hit her so hard that a barrette flew from her lacquered red hair. Then he slapped her across the ear. She pressed her palms into her face and began to weep.
None of them saw us until we had walked to within five feet of their car.
'Better ease up, Max. People might start to think you abuse women,' Clete said.
'What are
'Art didn't let you know we were out here?' Clete said. 'That's why you didn't invite us in?'
'You blindsided me the other night, Purcel. It's not over between us. You better haul your fat ass out of here,' Max said.
'Y'all know a dude by the name of Will Buchalter? Streak here'd really like to talk to him,' Clete said.
'No, I don't know him. Now get out of here-' He stopped and raised his finger in the face of the woman with the dyed red hair. 'And
He clamped his hand on the back of her neck, squeezed, and twisted her toward the car while tears ran from her eyes.
The shovel lay propped among some rosebushes against the brick wall. It had a long, work-worn wood handle with a wide, round-backed blade. Max Calucci did not see me pick it up. Nor did he see me swing it with both hands, from deep behind me, as I would a baseball bat, until he heard the blade ripping through the air. By then it was too late. The metal whanged off his elbow and thudded into his rib cage, bending him double, and I saw his mouth drop open and a level of pain leap into his eyes that he could not quite find words to express.
Then I reversed the shovel in my hands and swung the blade up into his face, as you would butt-stroke an adversary with a pugil stick. I saw him tumble backwards on the grass, his knees drawn up in front of him, his face bloodless with shock, his mouth a scarlet circle of disbelief. I heard feet running down the drive, Bobo Calucci blowing the car horn with both hands in desperation, then Clete was standing in front of me, pressing me back with his palms, his armpits drenched with perspiration, the strap of his nylon shoulder holster biting into one nipple.
'For Christ's sakes, back off, Dave, you're gonna kill the guy,' he was saying. 'You hear me? Let it slide, Streak. He's not the guy we care about.'
Then his big hands dropped to the handle of the shovel and twisted it from my grasp, his Irish pie-plate face two inches from mine, his eyes filled with pity and an undisguised and fearful love.
chapter eight
That night, as I lay next to Bootsie in our bed, I did not tell her about the incident with the Calucci brothers. Even though I had been in Alcoholics Anonymous a number of years, and to one degree or another had been through the twelve steps of recovery and had tried to incorporate them into my life, I had never achieved a great degree of self-knowledge, other than the fact that I was a drunk; nor had I ever been able to explain my behavior and the way I thought, or didn't think, to normal people.
I always wanted to believe that those moments of rage, which affected me almost like an alcoholic blackout, were due to a legitimate cause, that I or someone close to me had been seriously wronged, that the object of my anger and adrenaline had not swum coincidentally into my ken.
But I had known too many cops who thought the same way. Somehow there was always an available justification for the Taser dart, the jet of Mace straight into the eyes, the steel baton whipped across the shinbones or the backs of the thighs.
The temptation is to blame the job, the stressed-out adversarial daily routine that can begin like a rupturing peptic ulcer, the judges and parole boards who recycle psychopaths back on the street faster than you can shut their files. But sometimes in an honest moment an unpleasant conclusion works its way through all the rhetoric of the self-apologist, namely, that you are drawn to this world in the same way that some people are fascinated by the protean shape and texture of fire, to the extent that they need to slide their hands through its caress.
I remember an old-time gunbull at Angola who had spent forty-seven years of his life shepherding convicts under a double-barreled twelve-gauge out on the Mississippi levee. During that time he had killed four men and wounded a half dozen others. His liver had been eaten away with cirrhosis; the right side of his chest was caved in from the surgical removal of a cancerous lung. To my knowledge, he had no relatives with whom he kept contact, no women in his life except a prostitute in Opelousas. I asked him how he had come to be a career gunbull.
He thought about it a moment, then dipped the end of his cigar in his whiskey glass and put it in his mouth.
'It was me or them, I reckon,' he said.
'Beg your pardon?'
'I figured the kind of man I was, one way or another I was gonna be jailing. Better to do it up there on the horse than down there with a bunch of niggers chopping in the cane.'
I didn't tell Bootsie about the Caluccis, nor did I say anything to her about the smell of bourbon that she brought to bed with her that night. I fell asleep with my hand on her back. At about one in the morning I felt her weight leave the mattress. I heard her walk barefooted into the kitchen, open a cabinet without turning on the light, then clink a bottle against a glass. A moment later she was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth.
She seldom drank and had little physical tolerance for alcohol. The following morning she stayed in the shower for almost fifteen minutes, then ate an aspirin with her coffee and talked brightly at the breakfast table for a long time, until finally her face became wan and she put her forehead down on her palm.
I walked around behind her chair and rubbed her neck and shoulders.
'Sometimes it's hard to accept this, Boots, but there's no reason to feel shame when we're overcome by superior physical force,' I said. 'No more than a person should be ashamed of contracting the flu or being undone by the attack of a wild animal.'
'I keep smelling his odor and feeling his tongue in my mouth,' she said. 'I feel somehow that I allowed him to do it.'
'It's what all victims feel. We open our doors to the wrong person, then we think that somehow our expression of trust means we're weak and complicit. You didn't do anything wrong, Boots. You mustn't think that way anymore.'
But that kind of advice, under those kinds of circumstances, is similar to telling a person who has been stricken with a cerebral disease to rise from his sickbed and walk.
I turned off the grits on the stove, washed and put away our coffee cups and saucers, and took Bootsie to a restaurant on the Vermilion River in Lafayette for brunch. When I went to the men's room, she called the waiter back to the table and ordered a vodka collins. After we had eaten, we walked out on the deck that overlooked the water and watched some kids waterskiing. The sun was white and straight up in the sky, the air laced with the smell of diesel smoke from the trucks passing over the concrete bridge. Down below in the muddy current, a dead snow egret floated among an island of twigs and torn camellia leaves. The egret's wing had been broken, and above one eye was the coppery glint of an embedded BB in the feathers.
'Oh,' Bootsie said, and let out her breath. Then she turned away from the deck railing and said, 'Maybe we should go now, Dave. I'm going to listen to you and stay out of the sun. I've been terribly careless about it, I know. It's wrong to make other people worry about you, isn't it? I am not going to allow myself to be a careless person anymore, I promise.'
Her eyes were as bright and intent as if she were putting together a syllogism that in one way or another would solve a particular problem for all time. She walked back through the restaurant and out the front without waiting for me.
