into his house, his back straight, his arms dead at his sides, his eyes hidden from view.
I stared openmouthed after him, my weapon hanging loosely from my hand like an object of shame.
chapter fifteen
I had always wanted to believe that I had brought the violence in my life with me when I came back from Vietnam. But one of the most violent moments in my life, or at least the most indefensible, came at the end of my first marriage and not because I was a police officer or a war veteran.
My first wife was a beautiful, dark-haired girl from Martinique who loved thoroughbred horses and racetrack betting as much as I, but she also developed a love for clubhouse society and men who didn't daily mortgage their tomorrows with Beam straight up and a Jax draft on the side.
We were at an afternoon lawn party on Lake Pontchartrain. The sky was storm-streaked, the water out on the lake slate green and capping, the sailboats from the yacht club dipping hard in the swells. I remember standing at the drinks table, next to my wife, while a black waiter in a white butler's jacket was shaking a silver drink mixer. Then my wife's current lover, a geologist from Houston, was next to her, chatting with her, idly stroking the down on her forearm as though I were not there.
I could hear the palm fronds rattling overhead, a jazz combo playing on the terrace, the words of my wife and her lover disappearing like bubbles in the wind. He was an athlete and mountain climber and had the profile and rugged good looks of a gladiator. Then I remember a sound like Popsicle sticks breaking and a wave of red-black color erupting behind my eyes.
When they pulled me off him, he was strangling on his own tongue.
Later, I pretended that he had deserved it, and that my wife had deserved to be shamed and humiliated in front of her friends. But I was deceiving myself, as was my way in those days when I sincerely believed that I could experience no worse fate in this world than to be deprived of charcoal-filtered whiskey and the amber radiance with which it animated and filled my life. I had simply made my wife and her lover pay for events that had occurred many years earlier.
My father, whose name was Aldous, who was also called Big Al in the oil field, where he worked as a derrick man up on the monkey board, was a huge, dark, grinning Cajun with fists the size of cantaloupes. He loved to fight in bars, sometimes taking on three or four adversaries at once. Oil field roughnecks would break their hands on his head; bouncers would splinter chairs across his back; but no one ever hurt Big Al except my mother, who worked in a laundry with Negro women to support us while he was in the parish jail.
When he went back to Marsh Island for the muskrat season, a man named Mack, a bouree dealer from Morgan City who wore a fedora, zoot slacks, suspenders, French cuffs, and two-tone shoes, began to come by the house and take her for rides in his Ford coupe.
One day in late fall I came home early from school. There was no sound in the house. Then I walked past my parents' bedroom door. My mother was naked, on all fours, pointed toward the head of the bed, and Mack was about to mount her. He had a thin, white face, oiled black hair parted in the center, and a pencil mustache. He looked at me with the momentary interest that he might show a hangnail, then entered my mother.
I sat on a sawhorse in the barn until it was almost dusk. The air was raw, and leaves were blowing across the dirt yard. Then Mack was standing in the barn door, his silhouette etched with the sun's last red light, a bottle of beer in his left hand. I heard him tilt it up and drink from it.
'What you t'ink you seen?' he said.
I looked at my shoes.
'I ax you a question. Don't be pretend you ain't heard me,' he said.
'I didn't see anything.'
'You was where you didn't have no bidness. What we gonna do 'bout that?' He held out his right hand. I thought he was going to place it on my shoulder. Instead, he put the backs of his fingers under my nose. 'You smell that? Me and yo' mama been fuckin', boy. It ain't the first time, neither.'
My eyes were full of water, my face hot and small under his stare.
'You can tell yo' daddy 'bout this if you want, but you gotta tell on her, too.' He drank out of the beer bottle again and waited. 'What's you gonna do, you? Sit there and cry?'
'I'm not going to do anything.'
'That's good,' he said. ''Cause you do, I'm gonna be back.'
Then he was gone, out of the red light, and down the dirt lane to his car. The pecan and oak trees around the house were black-green and coated with dust; the dry coldness of the air felt like a windburn against the skin. I hid when my mother called me from the back porch. Behind the barn, I sat in the weeds and watched our two roosters peck a blind hen to death. They mounted her with their talons, their wings aflutter with triumph, and drove their beaks deep into her pinioned neck. I watched them do it for a long time, until my mother found me and took me back inside the kitchen and, while she fixed our supper, told me that Mack had helped her find a good job as a waitress at a beer garden in Morgan City.
The day after my trouble with Tommy Lonighan, I received a phone call from Clete Purcel at my office.
'I hear you pistol-whipped Tommy Bobalouba,' he said.
'Who told you that?'
'A couple of the Caluccis' lowlifes were talking about it in the Golden Star this morning.'
'Ah, the Caluccis again.'
'That's what I was trying to tell you, mon. They're going across tribal lines.'
'Who were these two guys?'
'Nickel-and-dime gumballs. Were you trying to sweat Tommy about that sub?'
'Yeah, but I didn't get anywhere.'
'Dave, maybe there's another way to get Buchalter out of the woodwork. What if you
'It's a thought.'
'By the way, congratulations on getting Lonighan's attention. Somebody should have mopped up the floor with that guy a long time ago… Why the silence?'
'I shouldn't have hit him.'
'Why not?'
'He's a tormented man. The guy's got a furnace in his head.'
'I'm weeping on my desk, Dave. Oh, that's great, mon. Tommy Lonighan, the tormented man…' He was laughing loudly now. 'Did you see the body of the guy Tommy drowned with the fire hose? It looked like the Michelin Man. Tommy shoved the nozzle down the guy's mouth. Tommy, the tormented man, oh Dave, that's beautiful…'
I went home early that evening, with plans to take Bootsie and Alafair to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge for crawfish. When the deputy who was on guard by the drive saw my truck approaching, he started his engine and headed back toward New Iberia. At the head of the drive, close by the house, was a two-door white Toyota that I didn't recognize.
I walked down to the end of the dock, where Alafair was skipping stones across the water into a cypress stump.
'Want to go eat some crawfish, Alf?' I said.
'I don't care,' she said. Her face was sullen. She whipped another stone across the bayou.
'What's wrong, little guy?'
'I told you I don't like 'little guy' anymore, Dave.'
'All right. Now, what's wrong, Alf?'
'Nothing. Bootsie says she's sick. That's all.'
''Says' she's sick?'
