“Watch this,” the man said. He sprang onto a picnic bench and caught a limb with both hands, grinning from ear to ear, his exposed stomach fish-belly white, splayed with black hair. He dropped to the ground with a thump. He wiped his hands on the front of his windbreaker, his smile still in place. His eyes were green and recessed, playful as marbles. “I’m ronald,” he said to Alafair.
“How do you do?” she said.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.
“She didn’t give it. We need to finish our regimen, here, Mr. Bledsoe. I’ll chat you up some other time,” Clete said.
“You’re all out of breath, there. I’ve got cold drinks in my cooler. I have some po’boy sandwiches as well.” his eyes shifted to Alafair, lighting with curiosity or perhaps a proprietary sense that he knew and had claim on her. “Are you Mr. Purcel’s daughter?”
“No, I’m not.”
Clete placed both of his hands against a tree trunk, breathing through his nose, his heart rate starting to drop, his head spinning. “I don’t know how else to say this to you, podjo, but you seriously need to dee-dee. That means beat feet down the road. No insult intended.”
“You from South Ca’lina?” Bledsoe asked, ignoring Clete, stiffening an index finger playfully at Alafair.
She looked at her watch and rubbed the glass clean with her wrist. She tapped on it with a fingernail, as though the second hand were stuck. In the silence the man named Bledsoe shifted his weight, his shoe crunching a pecan husk.
“I knew a girl ’Cross the line in Savannah, looked just like you,” he said. “She was part Indian and had the same kind of coloring. She had long legs and wore an ankle bracelet, the kind with little charms all over it. You could hear her jingling when she walked. I always got a kick out of her.”
“Go on without me for a minute,” Clete said to Alafair.
“Dave and Molly are expecting us, Clete,” she replied, squeezing his upper arm. “Let’s go.”
He put his car keys in her hand. “Bring the Caddy around. I blew my circuits. I’ll be all right in a minute.” He winked. “Believe me, I’m copacetic here.”
The keys felt heavy and hard inside her palm, foreign and reductive somehow, as though their presentation to her had relegated her to the level of an object, one that required protection. The sun came out and she saw motes of desiccated leaves swimming in the shafts of light that fell through the tree overhead. The air was damp and stained with the septic odor of a public restroom a few feet away. She wiped a cloud of mosquitoes out of her face and felt a surge of anger like a bubble rising in her chest. A fox squirrel clattered across a limb above her head and involuntarily she looked up at it. When she lowered her gaze, the man named Ronald Bledsoe was staring at her, intrigued, his eyes roving over her features and the broken lines of sweat trickling into her sports bra.
“I’m going to get my friend’s car and come back for him,” she said. “If you bother my friend or me in this park again, I’ll have you arrested.”
“I wouldn’t offend you for the world,” Bledsoe said, placing his hand on his heart. “But you still haven’t told me your name, little darlin’.”
She walked back to the parking area by the concrete boat ramp and started up Clete’s Caddy, the exhaust pipe coughing a cloud of oil smoke into the air. As she drove back toward the clump of oak trees, she saw Clete talking heatedly to Bledsoe, like a third-base coach angry at an umpire, his arms pumped. All the while, Bledsoe continued to look back at Clete without speaking, nodding occasionally, his mouth forming a smile that made her think of earthworms constricting on a hand-rolled piece of pie dough. She drove out onto the grass and stopped the car a few feet from them. The top of the Caddy was down and leaves drifted out of the trees onto the leather seats. “Time to boogie, Cletus,” she said.
“You got it,” he said, pulling open the passenger door, looking back over his shoulder, his face as hot as a slap.
Alafair turned the convertible around and headed out of the park. She looked in the rearview mirror. “What’d that guy say?” she said.
“Nothing. He’s just one of those guys who’s a couple of quarts down.”
But wheels were turning in Clete’s head all the way back to the house, his sweat drying in a glaze on his skin. She pulled the Caddy to the curb in front of the house and got out. “Tell me what he said, Clete.”
“The guy’s a meltdown. Just stay away from him.” He slid behind the wheel and rubbed his palms along its surface and clicked the radio on and off.
“Stop acting like a dope and tell me what he said.”
Clete blew out his breath and lifted his eyes up to hers. “How about I take y’all to dinner tonight?” he replied.
DOWN THE STREET, Clete got stuck behind a tourist bus in front of an antebellum home called the Shadows. He turned out of the traffic at the red light and headed down St. Peter’s Street toward his motor court, punching in my number on his cell.
“Dave?”
“Hey, Clete.”
“We ran into this character Ronald Bledsoe in the park,” he said. “He was coming on wise to Alafair.”
“In what way?” I asked.
“Innuendos mostly. But…”
“But what?
“The guy gives me the chills. His eyes were all over Alafair’s body. The guy’s a sadist. You can smell it on him. Can Alafair hear you now?”
“She’s not here.”
“What do you mean? I just dropped her off.”
I put down the phone and looked out the front door and through the side window. “She’s not here, Clete. What did this guy say?”
“I sent her to get the car. He watched her walk away, then he said, ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher. That’s what country people say back in South Ca’lina.’”
“I’ll call you back,” I said.
I knocked the garbage can into an oak tree getting out of the driveway.
ALAFAIR HAD JOGGED back down East Main and crossed the drawbridge at Burke Street, taking long strides, breathing evenly, the bottoms of her running shoes ringing on the bridge’s steel grid. The sun was well above the trees now, the bayou’s surface bladed with mirrorlike reflections that made her eyes water. Up ahead, inside the park, she saw the man who called himself Ronald Bledsoe standing under a picnic shelter, gazing across the bayou in the direction of her house.
She jogged down the asphalt path, then slowed to a walk, studying the ground as she did, Bledsoe’s silhouetted image hovering on the edge of her vision. Dave would have told her not to confront a defective man, not to empower those whose destructive energies always turned against them if you left them alone. But Clete had treated her as he would a child and then had tried to conceal information from her, as though she were incapable of dealing with the world. And Bledsoe had violated her with his eyes and his language and the lascivious curl of his mouth, and had gotten away with it.
She walked down to the bayou’s edge, perhaps thirty feet from the picnic shelter. She tossed a stick into the current. The wind wrinkled the water’s surface and carried with it the smell of charcoal starter flaring on a grill.
“I knew you’d be back,” Bledsoe said from the edge of her vision.
“Is that right?” she replied.
He was sitting on the picnic table now, one foot resting on a bench, his smile like a slit upturned at the corners. “Know how I knew that?”
“No, but why don’t you tell me?” she said.
“’Cause you don’t let people push you around.”
“Really?”
“You have sharp edges. That means people cain’t get over on you. That means you don’t let an older man
