blinked and swallowed and made a muted noise like she had a toothache.
'Please drive me out on the highway and drop me wherever people break furniture and throw bottles through glass windows,' she said.
'How about home, instead?' I asked.
'Dave, you are a total drag.'
'Better appreciate who your friends are, ma'am,' Helen said.
'Do I know you?' Lila said.
'Yeah, I had the honor of cleaning up your-'
'Helen, let's get Miss Lila home and head back for the office.'
'Oh, by all means. Yes, indeedy,' Helen said.
WE DROVE SOUTH ALONG Bayou Teche toward Jeanerette, where Lila lived in a plantation home whose bricks had been dug from clay pits and baked in a kiln by slaves in the year 1791. During the Depression her grandfather, a U.S. senator, used dollar-a-day labor to move the home brick by brick on flatboats up the bayou from its original site on the Chitimacha Indian Reservation. Today, it was surrounded by a fourteen-acre lawn, live oak and palm trees, a sky-blue swimming pool, tennis courts, gazebos hung with orange passion vine, two stucco guest cottages, a flagstone patio and fountain, and gardens that bloomed with Mexicali roses.
But we were about to witness a bizarre spectacle when we turned onto the property and drove through the tunnel of oaks toward the front portico, the kind of rare event that leaves you sickened and ashamed for your fellow human beings. A movie set consisting of paintless shacks and a general store with a wide gallery set up on cinder blocks, put together from weathered cypress and rusted tin roofs and Jax beer and Hadacol signs to look like the quarters on a 1940s corporation farm, had been constructed on the lawn, a dirt road laid out and sprinkled with hoses in front of the galleries. Perhaps two dozen people milled around on the set, unorganized, mostly at loose ends, their bodies shiny with sweat. Sitting in the shade of a live oak tree by a table stacked with catered food was the director, Billy Holtzner, and next to him, cool and relaxed in yellow slacks and white silk shirt, was his friend and business partner, Cisco Flynn.
'Have you ever seen three monkeys try to fuck a football? I'd like to eighty-six the whole bunch but my father has a yen for a certain item. It tends to come in pink panties,' Lila said from the back seat.
'We'll drop you at the porch, Lila. As far as I'm concerned, your car broke down and we gave you a lift home,' I said.
'Oh, stop it. Both of you get down and have something to eat,' she said. Her face had cleared in the way a storm can blow out of a sky and leave it empty of clouds and full of carrion birds. I saw her tongue touch her bottom lip.
'Do you need assistance getting inside?' Helen said.
'Assistance? That's a lovely word. No, right here will do just fine. My, hasn't this all been pleasant?' Lila said, and got out and sent a black gardener into the house for a shaker of martinis.
Helen started to shift into reverse, then stopped, dumbfounded, at what we realized was taking place under the live oak tree.
Billy Holtzner had summoned all his people around him. He wore khaki shorts with flap pockets and Roman sandals with lavender socks and a crisp print shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his flaccid arms.
Except for the grizzled line of beard that grew along his jawline and chin, his body seemed to have no hair, as though it had been shaved with a woman's razor. His workmen and actors and grips and writers and camera people and female assistants stood with wide grins on their faces, some hiding their fear, others rising on the balls of their feet to get a better look, while he singled out one individual, then another, saying, 'Have you been a good boy? We've been hearing certain rumors again. Come on now, don't be shy. You know where you have to put it.'
Then a grown man, someone who probably had a wife or girlfriend or children or who had fought in a war or who at one time had believed his life was worthy of respect and love, inserted his nose between Billy Holtzner's index and ring fingers and let him twist it back and forth.
'That wasn't so bad, was it? Oh, oh, I see somebody trying to sneak off there. Oh,
'These guys are out of a special basement, aren't they?' Helen said.
Cisco Flynn walked toward the cruiser, his face good-natured, his eyes earnest with explanation.
'Have a good life, Cisco,' I said out the window, then to Helen, 'Hit it.'
'You don't got to me tell me, boss man,' she replied, her head looking back over her shoulder as she steered, the dark green shadows of oak leaves cascading over the windshield.
FOUR
THAT NIGHT THE MOON WAS yellow above the swamp. I walked down to the dock to help Batist, the black man who worked for me, fold up the Cinzano umbrellas on our spool tables and close up the bait shop. There was a rain ring around the moon, and I pulled back the awning that covered the dock, then went inside just as the phone rang on the counter.
'Mout' called me. His son wants to come in,' the voice said.
'Stay out of police business, Megan.'
'Do I frighten you? Is that the problem here?'
'No, I suspect the problem is use.'
'Try this: he's fifteen miles out in the Atchafalaya Basin and snakebit. That's not metaphor. He stuck his arm in a nest of them. Why don't you deliver a message through Mout' and tell him just to go fuck himself?'
After I hung up I nicked off the outside flood lamps. Under the moon's yellow light the dead trees in the swamp looked like twists of paper and wax that could burst into flame with the touch of a single match.
AT DAWN THE WIND was out of the south, moist and warm and checkered with rain, when I headed the cabin cruiser across a long, flat bay bordered on both sides by flooded cypress trees that turned to green lace when the wind bent their branches. Cranes rose out of the trees against a pink sky, and to the south storm clouds were piled over the Gulf and the air smelled like salt water and brass drying in the sun. Megan stood next to the wheel, a thermos cup full of coffee in her hand. Her straw hat, which had a round dome and a purple band on it, was crushed over her eyes. To get my attention, she clasped my wrist with her thumb and forefinger.
'The inlet past that oil platform. There's a rag tied in a bush,' she said.
'I can see it, Megan,' I replied. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face jerk toward me.
'I shouldn't speak or I shouldn't touch? Which is it?' she said.
I eased back the throttle and let the boat rise on its wake and drift into a cove that was overgrown by a leafy canopy and threaded with air vines and dimpled in the shallows with cypress knees. The bow scraped, then snugged tight on a sandspit.
'In answer to your question, I was out at your brother's movie set yesterday. I've decided to stay away from the world of the Big Score. No offense meant,' I said.
'I've always wondered what bank guards think all day. Just standing there, eight hours, staring at nothing. I think you've pulled it off, you know, gotten inside their heads.'
I picked up the first-aid kit and dropped off the bow and walked through the shallows toward a beached houseboat that had rotted into the soft texture of moldy cardboard.
I heard her splash into the water behind me.
'Gee, I hope I can be a swinging dick in the next life,' she said.
THE HOUSEBOAT FLOOR WAS tilted on top of the crushed and rusted oil drums on which it had once floated. Cool Breeze sat in the corner, dressed in clothes off a wash line, the wound in his cut face stitched with thread and needle, his left arm swollen like a black balloon full of water.
I heard Megan's camera start clicking behind me.
