Dixie City Jam

'She's been in her room all afternoon. With the door shut. She says she's sick. I told you.' She propped one hand against a post and brushed dried fish scales off the planks into the water with her tennis shoe.

'Tell me the rest of it, Alf.'

Her eyes followed a cottonmouth moccasin that was swimming across the bayou into a flooded cane brake.

'She put an empty whiskey bottle in the garbage can out back,' she said. 'She wrapped it up in a paper bag so nobody would see it. Then the sister went and got her some beer.'

'What?'

'There's a sister up there. She went down to the four corners and bought Bootsie a six-pack of beer. Why didn't Bootsie just get it out of the bait shop if she wanted some beer?'

'Let's go find out.'

'I don't want to.'

'You want to go to Mulate's later?'

'No. I don't like the way Bootsie is. I don't like that sister, either. What's she doing here, Dave?'

I rubbed the top of her head and walked up the slope through the deep shade of the trees and the drone of the cicadas. There was no sound or movement in the front of the house, and the door to Bootsie's and my bedroom was closed. I went on through the hallway into the kitchen. Sister Marie Guilbeaux was rinsing glasses and two plates in the sink.

'Oh!' she said, her shoulders twitching suddenly when she heard me behind her. She turned, and her face colored. 'Oh, my heavens, you gave me a start.'

I continued to stare at her.

'Oh, this is embarrassing,' she said. 'I hope you understand what's, why I-'

'I'm afraid I don't.'

'Of course… you couldn't. I called earlier, but you weren't here.'

'I was at my office.'

'I tried there. You had already left.'

'No, I was there until a half hour ago.' I could see a half dozen empty beer cans in the yellow trash basket. 'No one called.'

'I did. A man, a dispatcher, took a message.'

'I see. Where's Bootsie, Sister?'

'Asleep. She's not feeling well.' Her face was filled with perplexity. 'I know this looks peculiar.'

'A little.'

'I teach part-time at an elementary school in Lafayette. We're having a program on safety. You were so courteous at the hospital and over the phone I thought you might be willing to visit our class.'

'I'm a little tied up right now.'

'Yes, Bootsie told me.'

'Can you tell me why you bought beer for my wife, Sister?'

Her face was pink. 'Mr. Robicheaux, I wandered into somebody's personal situation and I've obviously mishandled it.'

'Just tell me what's happened here, please.'

'Your wife was going to drive to the store for some beer. I didn't think she should be driving. I told her I'd go for her.'

'Why didn't you just get it from the bait shop? We own it.'

'She didn't want me to.'

'I see. Is there anything else I can help you with?'

'No… I apologize. I don't know what else to say. I'll go now. Please excuse my coming here.'

Then she was out the back door, walking fast toward her car, her green eyes shiny with embarrassment. I caught up with her just as she was opening her car door.

'Sister, there's something going on here you don't understand,' I said. 'My wife has a problem because of some events that occurred at our house. But when a person is drunk or has had too much to drink and wants you to give him more, you don't do it.'

'Then I guess I've learned a lesson today.'

'Come see us again.'

'That's kind of you.' My hand was resting on the windowsill. She placed hers lightly on top of mine and looked directly into my eyes. A shaft of sunlight fell through the tree on her reddish gold hair. I removed my hand from under hers and walked back into the house.

I opened the bedroom door and looked in on Bootsie. The blinds were drawn, and she was sleeping with her clothes on and her head under the pillow. While I fixed supper I tried to concentrate on Alafair's conversation from the table about something that Tripod had done, but my thoughts were like birds clattering about in a cage, and I found myself absently touching the top of my right hand.

You're imagining it, I thought. It was an innocent gesture. Some of them are just socially inept.

But my energies were too dissipated to worry about Sister Marie Guilbeaux. I knew that beyond our closed bedroom door, my wife had taken up residence in that special piece of geography where the snakes hang in fat loops from the trees and a tiger with electrified stripes lights your way to his lair.

It rained that night, and through the screen window I could smell the trees and an odor from the marsh like fish spawning. As I fell asleep, I wondered again about the Nazi submarine and Buchalter's obsession with it. When I was a child in Catholic school, we were taught that evil eventually consumes itself, like fire that must destroy its own source. Was the submarine an underwater mausoleum or historical shrine from which Buchalter and his kind believed they could renew and empower their demented and misanthropic vision? Did they hate the present-day world so much that they would seek the company of drowned men who had reveled in setting afire the seas, in machine-gunning clusters of oil-streaked merchant sailors who had bobbed like helpless corks in the swell?

It rained all night. The air in the bedroom was cool and damp, and in my sleep I thought I could smell salt in the wind. I dreamed of black-clad submariners, their white skin layered with deodorant, their unkempt beards like charcoal smeared on their faces. They guided a long, gleaming torpedo into a waiting tube, touching its hard sides like a farewell caress. The torpedo burst from beneath the bow, its propeller spinning, its steel skin rippling with moonlight just below the surface. The men in black dungarees stood motionless in the battery-lighted interior of their ship, their eyes lifted expectantly, their breasts aching with an unspoken and collective wish that made them wet their lips and nudge their groins against the cool, cylindrical side of another torpedo.

The explosion against the hull of the freighter on the horizon, the screech of girders and rent metal, the avalanche of salt water into the hold, the secondary explosion of boilers that blew the bridge into sticks and heated the hatches into searing iron rectangles that would scorch a human hand into a stump, even the final geysering descent beneath the waves and the grinding of the keel against the sand-it all filtered through the darkness outside the sub with the softness of an old Vienna waltz swelling and dissipating in the mist.

It must have been two or three in the morning when I felt the coldness in the room. In my sleep I reached for the bedspread at the foot of the bed and pulled it up over Bootsie and me. I thought wind was blowing through the house, when there should have been none, then I realized that my pillow was damp from the mist that was blowing through the window fan, which was turned off.

I sat up in bed. The doors to both the closet and the bathroom were open, and the night-light in the bathroom had either burned out or been turned off. From the back porch I could hear the screen door puffing open and falling back upon the jamb in the wind. I reached under the bed and picked up the.45.

I didn't have far to go before I knew he had been there. As I walked past the closet I felt water under my bare feet. I turned on every light in the house. The screen was slit on the back porch door, the deadbolt prized out of the jamb on the door to the kitchen.

'What is it, Dave?' Bootsie said, blinking her eyes against the light.

I stared at the floor area in front of the closet. There were two stenciled shoe prints on the boards, surrounded by a ring of water that had dripped off his coat. Then she saw what I was looking at.