They ate their young. I never discussed the dream with anyone.
TWENTY-SIX
A PSYCHOLOGIST WOULD PROBABLY agree that unless a person is a sociopath, stuffed guilt can fill him with a level of neurotic anxiety that is like waiting for a headsman in a cloth hood to appear at the prison door.
I didn't know if Alex Guidry was a sociopath or not, but on Monday Helen and I began tightening a couple of dials on his head.
We parked the cruiser at the entrance to his home and watched him walk from his bunkerlike brick house to the garage and open the garage door, simultaneously looking in our direction. He drove down the long shell drive to the parish road and slowed by the cruiser, rolling down his window on its electric motor. But Helen and I continued talking to each other as though he were not there. Then we made a U-turn and followed him to the finance company his wife's family owned in town, his eyes watching us in the rearview mirror.
Decades back the wife's father had made his way through the plantation quarters every Saturday morning, collecting the half-dollar payments on burial policies that people of color would give up food, even prostitute themselves, in order to maintain. The caskets they were buried in were made out of plywood and cardboard and crepe paper, wrapped in dyed cheesecloth and draped with huge satin bows. The plots were in Jim Crow cemeteries and the headstones had all the dignity of Hallmark cards. But as gaudy and cheap and sad as it all was, the spaded hole in the ground and the plastic flowers and the satin ribbons that decorated the piled dirt did not mark the entrance to the next world but the only level of accomplishment the dead could achieve in this one.
The Negro burial insurance business had passed into history and the plantation quarters were deserted, but the same people came with regularity to the finance company owned by the wife's family and signed papers they could not read and made incremental loan payments for years without ever reducing the principal. A pawnshop stood next door, also owned by the wife's family. Unlike most businesspeople, Guidry and his inlaws prospered most during economic recession.
We parked behind his car and watched him pause on the sidewalk and stare at us, then go inside.
A moment later a brown Honda, driven by a tall man in a gray suit, pulled to the curb, on the wrong side of the street, and parked bumper to bumper in front of Guidry's car. The driver, who was a DEA agent named Minos Dautrieve, got out and met us on the sidewalk in front of the finance company's glass doors. His crew-cut blond hair was flecked with white threads now, but he still had the same tall, angular good looks that sports photographers had loved when he played forward for LSU and was nicknamed 'Dr. Dunkenstein' after he sailed through the air and slammed the ball so hard through the rim he shattered the backboard like hard candy.
'How's the fishing?' he said.
'They've got your name on every fin,' I said.
'I'll probably come out this evening. How you doin', Helen?'
'Just fine. Lovely day, isn't it?' she replied.
'Do we have our friend's attention?' he asked, his back to the glass doors.
'Yep,' I said.
He took a notebook out of his pocket and studied the first page of it.
'Well, I have to pick up a couple of things for my wife, then meet her and her mother in Lafayette. We'll see you-all,' he said. He put the notebook back in his pocket, then walked to the front doors of the finance company, cupped his hands around his eyes to shield them from the sun, and peered through the tinted glass.
After he had driven away, Alex Guidry came out on the sidewalk.
'What are you people doing?' he said.
'You're an ex-cop. Guess,' Helen said.
'That man's a federal agent of some kind,' Guidry said.
'The guy who just left? He's an ex-jock. He was ail-American honorable mention at LSU. That's a fact,' I said.
'What is this?' he said.
'You're in the shithouse, Mr. Guidry. That's what it is,' Helen said.
'This is harassment and I won't put up with it,' he said.
'You're naive, sir. You're the subject of a murder investigation. You're also tied in with Harpo Scruggs. Scruggs has asked for immunity. You know where that leaves his friends? I'd get a parachute,' I said.
'Fuck you,' he said, and went back inside.
But his shirtsleeve caught on the door handle. When he pulled at it he ripped the cloth and hit a matronly white woman between the shoulder blades with his elbow.
TWO HOURS LATER GUIDRY called the office.
'Scruggs is getting immunity for what?' he asked.
'I didn't say he was 'getting' anything.'
I could hear him breathing against the receiver.
'First guy in line doesn't do the Big Sleep,' I said.
'Same answer. Do your worst. At least I didn't flush my career down the bowl because I couldn't keep a bottle out of my mouth,' he said.
'Ida Broussard was carrying your baby when you killed her, Mr. Guidry.'
He slammed down the phone.
THREE DAYS LATER, IN the cool of the evening, Lila Terrebonne and Geraldine Holtzner came down the dirt road in Clete Purcel's chartreuse Cadillac, the top down, and pulled into the drive. Alafair and I were raking leaves and burning them on the edge of the road. The leaves were damp and black, and the smoke from the fire twisted upward into the trees in thick yellow curds and smelled like marijuana burning in a wet field. Both Lila and Geraldine seemed delighted with the pink-gray loveliness of the evening, with our activity in the yard, with themselves, with the universe.
'What are you guys up to?' I said.
'We're going to a meeting. You want to tag along?' Geraldine said from behind the wheel.
'It's a thought. What are you doing with Clete's car?' I said.
'Mine broke down. He lent me his,' Geraldine said. 'I went back to Narcotics Anonymous, in case you're wondering. But I go to AA sometimes, too.'
Lila was smiling, a wistful, unfocused beam in her eye. 'Hop in, good-looking,' she said.
'Did y'all make a stop before you got here?' I asked.
'Dave, I bet you urinated on radiators in elementary school,' Lila said.
'I might see y'all up there later. Y'all be careful about Clete's tires. The air is starting to show through,' I said.
'This is a lovely car. You drive it and suddenly it's 1965. What a wonderful time that was, just before everything started to change,' she said.
'Who could argue, Lila?' I said.
Unless you were black or spent ' 65 in Vietnam, I thought as they drove away.
THE AA MEETING THAT evening was held in the upstairs rooms of an old brick church out on West Main. The Confederates had used the church for a hospital while they tried to hold back the Federals on the Teche south of town; then, after the town had been occupied and looted and the courthouse torched, the Federals inverted half the pews and filled them with hay for their horses. But most of the people in the upper rooms this evening cared little about the history of the building. The subject of the meeting was the Fifth Step of AA recovery, which amounts to owning up, or confessing, to one's past.
There are moments in Fifth Step meetings that cause the listeners to drop their eyes to the floor, to lose all expression in their faces, to clench their hands in their laps and wince inwardly at the knowledge that the barroom they had entered long ago had only one exit, and it opened on moral insanity.
