I WENT INTO Helen’s office. “I interviewed Otis Baylor’s daughter yesterday and just got an Academy Award nose-in-the-air performance from his wife,” I said.
“Slow it down, Pops,” she said, leaning back in her swivel chair.
“They’re lying,” I said, spreading my notes on Helen’s desk. “Look, both Otis and his daughter say they heard a single shot. Both use the same language. They say ‘It woke me up.’ When I mentioned multiple shots to the daughter, she even corrected me. I was bothered from the get-go by Baylor’s statement that he heard a single shot. That’s not what people say when they’re awakened by gunfire. All they know is that a frightening sound shook them out of their sleep. They don’t count shots.”
I saw Helen’s attention sharpen.
“Both Otis and Thelma described what they saw in the same sequence. Each of them began by mentioning a man floating in the water. There were four guys in or around the boat. But Otis and Thelma mention the kid who was floating in the water first. Why not the guy hemorrhaging blood out of his mouth? I think they had their story prepackaged.”
Helen rubbed at the back of her neck. Whenever she was pensive, her face always went through an androgynous transformation that was both lovely and mysterious to watch. I believed that several different people lived inside her, but I never told her that. Her lovers had included many men and women over the years, including Clete Purcel. Sometimes she looked at me in a way that made me feel sexually uncomfortable, as though one of the women who lived inside her had decided to stray.
“Have you heard any more from the Feds or NOPD?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Write up what you just told me and fax it to Baton Rouge. Tell them to clean up their own shit while you’re at it. I want this stuff out of our hair.”
“Why the change in attitude?”
“Have you looked at The Weather Channel?”
“No,” I said.
“That new hurricane, what’s-its-name, the one that was supposed to smack Texas?”
“Rita?”
“It’s not.”
IS THERE A DESIGN in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junkyard falling down a staircase? If it’s the latter, how do you deal with it?
If you have ever invested with regularity in the pari-mutuel arts, or shot craps in a game that made your hand sweat on the dice, or allowed yourself to believe you had the psychic power to intuit the next card out of the shoe at a blackjack table, you have probably crossed the wrong Rubicon on many occasions and are familiar with the following experience:
There is magic in your hands and your walk. The magenta sky above the track and the flamingos lifting out of a grassy pond in the center ground are indicators that your perfecta wheel cannot lose. Inside the casino, the dice are as hard-edged and solid as rubies in your palm, and you double your bets on the pass line each time you bounce the dice down the felt into the backboard. The plunging neckline of the young woman dealing out of the shoe at the blackjack table cannot compare in its allure to the thrill of receiving a low number on the fifth card of a five-card Johnny.
You know that you cannot lose, that it is God’s will that you not lose. Others draw close to you in the same way that candle moths surround an incandescent light burning inside a crystal container. They gasp in awe at both your recklessness and the vindication of your faith in yourself. They want to brush against you and absorb your power into their bodies.
Then things start to go south. Your horse is disqualified because the jockey has bumped another rider’s horse on the far turn. The dice turn to lumps of lead in your hand and come up treys, boxcars, and snake eyes. The young female dealer blackjacks on you and deals you every high card in the deck, busting you again and again, stifling a yawn, her cleavage hovering like a withdrawn invitation only inches from your face.
Welcome to “the dead zone.” It’s a special place that, unbeknown to himself, every degenerate gambler seeks. Check out the bar at the track after the seventh race. The people there are as happy as satiated hogs. They have lost the grocery money, the rent, the mortgage and car payment, even the vig they owe a Shylock. But they’re safe now because they have nothing else to lose. They also have the empirical evidence to prove once and for all time that the universe has conspired to cheat and injure them. Their personal failure is God’s, not theirs. The soul is packed in dry ice now, the battle over.
When I went into the coffee room at the department, several uniformed deputies were watching CNN. Their collective expression and posture reminded me of helicopter pilots I had seen many years ago in a predawn briefing room backdropped by the China Sea. Most of these pilots were warrant officers not over twenty years in age. But I could never forget the suppressed tension in their faces, the deliberate restraint in their voices, the self- imposed solipsism in their eyes that told you the dawn was indeed about to come up like thunder from China across the bay.
Hurricane Rita contained winds of 185 miles an hour and originally had been projected to make landfall somewhere around Matagorda Bay, northeast of Corpus Christi. Then its direction shifted farther to the east. Officials in Houston, fearing a repeat of Katrina in their own city, effected a massive evacuation, choking highways all the way to San Antonio and Dallas. Then the hurricane shifted direction again, this time almost certainly zeroing in on Beaumont and Port Arthur.
Texas was going to take the hit. Our exposure would be marginal, nothing more than minor wind damage, trees knocked down, a temporary power outage. We breathed a sigh of relief. Providence had given us a free pass.
Then the National Hurricane Center in Miami disabused us of our hubris. In fact, the forecast was unbelievable. Louisiana was about to get pounded full-force, with twenty-foot tidal surges and wind that would rip off roofs from Sabine Pass to the other side of the Atchafalaya River. More unbelievably, we were being told the storm would probably make landfall in Cameron Parish, just south of Lake Charles, the same place the eye of Audrey swept through in 1957. The tidal wave that preceded the ’57 storm curled over the courthouse and downtown area like a giant hammer and crushed it into rubble, killing close to five hundred people.
“Weren’t you around when Audrey hit?” a deputy asked as I stared up at the television screen.
“Yeah, I was,” I replied.
“On an oil rig?”
“On a seismograph barge,” I said.
“It was pretty bad, huh?”
“We got through it okay,” I said.
He was a crew-cut, martial-looking man, with too much starch in his uniform and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He removed the toothpick and dropped it in a waste can and focused his attention on the television screen. I could hear a wet sound in his throat when he swallowed.
No one wants to go to the same war twice. You pay your dues in order to enter the dead zone and you’re supposed to be safe. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.
Chapter 13
NEW IBERIA AND LAFAYETTE were now filled with evacuees fleeing Hurricane Rita as well as those who had fled Katrina. Firearm and ammunition sales were booming. The original sympathy for the evacuees from New Orleans was incurring a strange transformation. Right-wing talk shows abounded with callers viscerally enraged at the fact evacuees were receiving a onetime two-thousand-dollar payment to help them buy food and find lodging. The old southern nemesis was back, naked and raw and dripping-absolute hatred for the poorest of the poor.
AT SUNSET Friday evening the air was as gold as pollen, as though Indian summer were upon us. The
