'So why are we buying a toy for Ruby Gravano's son?'
'I seldom take my own advice. Sound like anybody else you know, big mon?'
ON WEDNESDAY I DROVE a cruiser down the old bayou road toward Jeanerette and Lila Terrebonne's home. As I neared the enormous lawn and the oak-lined driveway, I saw the production crew at work on the set that had been constructed to look like the quarters on a corporation farm, and I kept driving south, toward Franklin and the place where my father and I had discovered a crucifixion.
Why?
Maybe because the past is never really dead, at least not as long as you deny its existence. Maybe because I knew that somehow the death of Cisco and Megan Flynn's father was about to come back into our lives.
The barn was still there, two hundred yards from the Teche, hemmed in by banana trees and blackberry bushes. The roof was cratered with a huge hole, the walls leaning in on themselves, the red paint nothing more than thin strips that hadn't yet been weathered away by wind and sun.
I walked through the blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn. The nail holes were sealed over with dust from the cane fields and water expansion in the wood, but I could still feel their edges with the tips of my fingers and, in my mind's eye, see the outline of the man whose tormented face and broken body and blood- creased brow greeted my father and me on that fiery dawn in 1956.
No grass grew around the area where Jack Flynn died. (But there was no sunlight there, I told myself, only green flies buzzing in the shade, and the earth was hardpan and probably poisoned by herbicides that had been spilled on the ground.) Wild rain trees, bursting with bloodred flowers, stood in the field, and the blackberries on the bushes were fat and moist with their own juices when I touched them. I wondered at the degree of innocence that allowed us to think of Golgotha as an incident trapped inside history. I wiped the sweat off my face with a handkerchief and unbuttoned my shirt and stepped out of the shade into the wind, but it brought no relief from the heat.
I drove back up the bayou to the Terrebonne home and turned into the brick drive and parked by the carriage house. Lila was ebullient, her milky green eyes free of any remorse or memory of pulling a gun in a bar and being handcuffed to a bed in Iberia General Hospital. But like all people who are driven by a self-centered fear, she talked constantly, controlling the environment around her with words, filling in any silent space that might allow someone to ask the wrong question.
Her father, Archer Terrebonne, was another matter. He had the same eyes as his daughter, and the same white-gold hair, but there was no lack of confidence in either his laconic speech or the way he folded his arms across his narrow chest while he held a glass of shaved ice and bourbon and sliced oranges. In fact, his money gave him the kind of confidence that overrode any unpleasant reflection he might see in a mirror or the eyes of others. When you dealt with Archer Terrebonne, you simply accepted the fact that his gaze was too direct and personal, his skin too pale for the season, his mouth too red, his presence too close, as though there were a chemical defect in his physiology that he wore as an ornament and imposed upon others.
We stood under an awning on the back terrace. The sunlight was blinding on the surface of the swimming pool. In the distance a black groundskeeper was using an air blower to scud leaves off the tennis courts.
'You won't come inside?' Archer said. He glanced at his watch, then looked at a bird in a tree. The ring finger of his left hand was missing, sawed off neatly at the palm, so that the empty space looked like a missing key on a piano.
'Thanks, anyway. I just wanted to see that Lila was all right.'
'Really? Well, that was good of you.'
I noticed his use of the past tense, as though my visit had already ended.
'There're no charges, but messing with guns in barrooms usually has another conclusion,' I said.
'We've already covered this territory with other people, sir,' he said.
'I don't think quite enough,' I said.
'Is that right?' he replied.
Our eyes locked on each other's.
'Dave's just being an old friend, Daddy,' Lila said.
'I'm sure he is. Let me walk you to your cruiser, Mr. Robicheaux.'
'
'You're not in that organization. So he doesn't need to worry, does he?'
I felt his hand cup me lightly on the arm. But I said goodbye to Lila and didn't resist. I walked with him around the shady side of the house, past a garden planted with mint and heart-shaped caladiums.
'Is there something you want to tell me, sir?' he asked. He took a swallow from his bourbon glass and I could feel the coldness of the ice on his breath.
'A female detective saved your daughter from a resisting arrest charge,' I said.
'Yes?'
'She thinks Lila has been sexually molested or violated in some way.'
His right eye twitched at the corner, as though an insect had momentarily flown into his vision.
'I'm sure y'all have many theories about human behavior that most of us wouldn't understand. We appreciate your good intentions. However, I see no need for you to come back,' he said.
'Don't count on it, sir.'
He wagged his finger back and forth, then walked casually toward the rear of the house, sipping his drink as though I had never been there.
THE SUN WAS WHITE in the sky and the brick drive was dappled with light as bright as gold foil. Through the cruiser's front window I saw Cisco Flynn walk toward me from a trailer, his palms raised for me to stop.
He leaned down on the window.
'Take a walk with me. I got to keep my eye on this next scene,' he said.
'Got to go, Cisco.'
'It's about Swede Boxleiter.'
I turned off the ignition and walked with him to a canvas awning that was suspended over a worktable and a half dozen chairs. Next to the awning was a trailer whose air-conditioning unit dripped with moisture like a block of ice.
'Swede's trying to straighten out. I think he's going to make it this time. But if he's ever a problem, give me a call,' Cisco said.
'He's a mainline recidivist, Cisco. Why are you hooked up with him?'
'When we were in the state home? I would have been anybody's chops if it hadn't been for Swede.'
'The Feds say he kills people.'
'The Feds say my sister is a Communist.'
The door to the trailer opened and a woman stepped out on the small porch. But before she could close the door behind her, a voice shouted out, 'Goddamnit, I didn't say you could leave. Now, you listen, hon. I don't know if the problem is because your brains are between your legs or because you think you've got a cute twat, but the next time I tell that pissant to rewrite a scene, you'd better not open your mouth. Now you get the fuck back to work and don't you ever contradict me in front of other people again.'
Even in the sunlight her face looked refrigerated, bloodless, the lines twisted out of shape with the humiliation that Billy Holtzner bathed her with. He shot an ugly look at Cisco and me, then slammed the door.
I turned to go.
'There's a lot of stress on a set, Dave. We're three million over budget already. That's other people's money we're talking about. They get mad about it,' Cisco said.
'I remember that first film you made. The one about the migrant farmworkers. It was sure a fine movie.'
'Yeah, a lot of college professors and 1960s leftovers dug it in a big way.'
'The guy in that trailer is a shithead.'
'Aren't we all?'
'Your old man wasn't.'
I got into the cruiser and drove through the corridor of trees to the bayou road. In the rearview mirror Cisco Flynn looked like a miniature man trapped inside an elongated box.
