be exorcised from an individual in the same way demons were cast out by medieval clerics. No, that was my own resentful thinking at work. Molly believed too much in others. At least, she probably believed too much in me.
We said little at supper and even less as we washed the dishes and put them away. As the light went out of the sky and the trees filled with thousands of birds, we found ways to occupy ourselves with chores that did not involve the other. Just before ten o’clock, when I usually watched the news, I heard her moving about in the kitchen, opening the icebox, setting down a plate on the table.
“Dave?” she said.
I got up from my soft chair in the living room and went to the kitchen door. She had on her nightgown and I could see the spray of freckles on her shoulders. “What’s up?” I said.
“I fixed you a piece of pie and some milk.”
“Are you having any?”
“I’m pretty tired. I think I’m just going to bed.”
“I see,” I said.
“The heat seems to affect me more than it used to.”
“It’s been a hot one.”
“Good night,” she said.
“Yeah, good night,” I replied.
I lay on the couch and watched the local news until ten-thirty, then I stared at CNN for the amount of time it took me to fall asleep, in my clothes, a floor fan blowing in my face, my wife on the other side of the bedroom wall.
SOME PEOPLE IN A.A. say coincidence is your Higher Power acting anonymously. I’m not sure about that, but on Thursday morning, after I had already left for work, Tripod began to tremble and to cough and rasp deep in his throat, as though he had swallowed a hair-ball. Molly took him to a veterinary clinic, one that also boarded and groomed animals. While she was waiting for the veterinarian, a blade-faced, well-dressed man with an athletic build, six and a half feet tall, entered the room with a French poodle on a leash. The poodle’s fur was dyed pink. Molly had put Tripod in a cardboard box lined with newspaper and a vinyl garbage bag, and had fold-tucked the flaps on the top over Tripod’s head and placed the box by her foot. But Tripod had wedged his head between the flaps and had just started a survey of the room when the poodle’s scent struck his nostrils.
Lonnie Marceaux was filling out a form on a clipboard at the intake window, the poodle’s leash lying on the floor. The poodle turned toward Tripod’s box and made a soft growling sound, like the purr of a distant motorboat. Tripod jerked his head down through the flaps and skittered around in the box, coughing violently, his weight flopping sideways on the stump of his missing hind foot.
“Sir! Sir! Would you take control of your animal? He’s frightening my coon,” Molly said.
“Sasha is harmless, believe me,” Lonnie said.
“The coon doesn’t know that. I’m not sure I do, either,” she replied.
He nodded as though he understood the urgency of her request but kept writing. In the meantime, Tripod’s paws skittered and scratched inside the cardboard and his incontinence kicked into major download.
“Sir, you’re causing problems you can’t guess at. There’s a tether post for your pet in the other room,” Molly said.
“Sorry, I don’t quite understand.”
“This is a very old and sick raccoon. Your dog is terrifying him. Now, try to act with a little decency.”
“Please accept my apologies,” Lonnie said, bending over to pick up the poodle’s leash. Then he sat down three chairs away from Molly and Tripod and began reading a magazine, impervious to Molly’s stare.
Molly gathered Tripod’s box in her arms and rose from her chair just as the receptionist slid back the glass on the intake window. “Mr. Marceaux, did you want your poodle shampooed and clipped?” she asked.
“Give her the works. She’s going to a show this weekend,” he said, looking at the receptionist over the top of his magazine.
“You’re Lonnie Marceaux, the district attorney?” Molly said.
“I am,” he replied pleasantly.
“I must be the dumbest woman on the planet,” she said, and started toward the other waiting room.
“Are we back to my poodle again?”
Just then, the bottom broke out of the box and Tripod plummeted to the floor, landing on his back with a sickening thump.
Molly squatted down and picked him up, his bladder emptying down her forearms. “Poor Tripod,” she said.
“Madam, I’m not responsible for your diffi-” Lonnie began.
“Shut up,” she said. “I took my husband to task for punching you in the mouth. Now I wish he’d knocked your teeth down your throat. I’ve known some self-important idiots in public office, but you’re pathetic.”
“You’re Mrs. Robicheaux?”
“Duh.”
MOLLY CALLED MY OFFICE as soon as she returned home with Tripod.
“He was poisoned?” I said.
“The vet’s not sure, but that’s what he thinks,” she replied. “Tripod probably vomited most of it back up. The vet wants to see him again in two days, but most of the poison is probably out of his system.”
“What’s Tripod doing right now?”
“Sleeping on a blanket in front of the floor fan.”
“Run that stuff about Lonnie Marceaux by me again.”
“Who cares about a jerk like that? Come home for lunch,” she said.
“What did you say to him?”
“It’s not important. Why waste time talking about it? I’ll see you at lunch. Keep your powder dry.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Guess.”
MOLLY DIDN’T GO ABOUT THINGS HALFWAY. What some might refer to as a conjugal expression of amends was, in the case of Molly Boyle, like being subsumed by an Elizabethan sonnet devoted to celebration of Eros and the ethereal interludes he offered from all the dross of everyday life. Her skin, which was fine-grained and smooth and taut from years of farmwork in Central America, took on a flush that was like the cool burn of the sun out on the Gulf in late autumn. The pillow was imprinted with the smell of her hair, the sheets damp from the sweat on her thighs and back. When I closed my eyes, I thought of breakers sliding across a beach into clumps of bougainvillea and a coral cove where schooled-up kingfish flitted next to a patch of floating hot blue, and I thought of a great hard-bodied fish curling out of a wave and plunging into a rain ring. She came under me, her womb actually scalding, then got on top of me and did it again, her breath drawing slowly in and out as though a piece of ice were evaporating on her tongue.
We took a shower together and dressed, and I checked on Tripod again and smoothed his fur with a brush that was used for no other purpose. “Who did this to you, old partner?” I said.
I went into the backyard and checked Tripod’s bowls. There was clean water in one bowl and a half-eaten strip of a sardine in the other. Most of the time, if he was not in the house, he stayed on his chain and wasn’t allowed to roam because of his age and his propensity for getting into trouble. There seemed little chance that he had eaten either tainted or poisoned food by accident.
Through the bamboo border on the side yard, I saw Miss Ellen Deschamps sprinkling her rose garden in the shade. Miss Ellen was our one-woman, or rather one-lady, neighborhood crime watch program. Parish sheriffs, zoning boards, and city mayors could come and go, but Miss Ellen’s standards did not change with the political season. She served high tea on her upstairs balcony at exactly 3 p.m. every weekday and had her black yardman deliver handwritten invitations to her guests. Any resident on East Main who did not properly attend to the upkeep of his home and lawn and flower beds would receive a polite note from Miss Ellen. If that failed, she put on formal dress, including white gloves, and marched to the home of the offending party and invited him out on his own porch, in full view of the street, to have an extended conversation about the importance of setting a good example
