“Don’t talk like that, Dave.”
“I’m going to nail him. One way or another, I’m going to tack him to the side of the barn.”
She lay back down, the back of her head cupped by the pillow, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then she said something I never believed I would hear her say. “I want to buy a pistol.”
IN THE MORNING, while I was still off the clock, I drove down to the south end of Lafourche Parish and parked in front of the crossroads bar where Bo Diddley Wiggins and I had gone to pick up Clete after Clete had shot at a man fleeing down a canal in an outboard boat. The bartender was alone in the bar, in a strap undershirt, sitting in front of a fan, trying to read a newspaper in the half-light. I opened my badge holder on the bar and asked him about the two men who had been there when I had come to collect Clete. There was a pad of body hair on the bartender’s shoulders and his eyebrows were laced with scar tissue, pinching his eyes at the corners so that they looked Asian rather than occidental.
“You know the guys who brought my friend in here?”
“They work for Mr. Wiggins. They drink beer here sometimes,” he said.
“I knew that when I came in. I need to know where they are now.”
“On Sunday, it’s hard to say.”
“I’m investigating a double torture-homicide. Would you like to answer my questions at the parish jail?”
He folded his newspaper over on itself and pushed it away. “There’s a fuel dock four miles down the road. You might find one of them there.”
“Thank you,” I said, scooping my badge holder off the bar.
“Hey!” he said when I was almost out the door.
“Yes?” I said.
“I drive thirty-four miles on bad roads to get to this job. I make six bucks an hour and tips. FEMA says in another mont ’ I may get a trailer. How far you drive to work? Your house got a roof on it?”
I drove south to a fuel dock that was located at the junction of a brackish bay and a freshwater canal an oil company had cut into living marsh. Disintegrating pools of diesel oil floated on the water. A rusted barge lay half submerged in the sawgrass. I could see a man in khaki clothes moving about in a small office that had been built on the end of the dock. He was watching an airboat roaring across the bay and he did not hear me walk up behind him.
“Whoa, you scared me!” he said when he turned around. Then he recognized me and reintroduced himself. He said his name was tolliver and that he was originally from Arkansas and had worked for Bo Wiggins for thirteen years.
“Your friend had a snootful, didn’t he?” he said. “Did he get home okay?”
“Did you see him shoot at somebody, Mr. Tolliver?”
“No, I heard a couple of distant pops, the way a shotgun sounds in the wind. A guy was taking off in an outboard and I thought this guy Purcel maybe was a robbery victim. That’s the only reason I got involved.”
He was a pleasant-looking man, his stomach and love handles protruding over his belt. His forearms were big and brown and on the tops they were covered with reddish hair. He smiled a lot. In fact, he was too pleasant and smiled much more than he should have.
“You don’t know who the man in the boat was?”
“No, sir.”
“How long have you been working on this dock?”
“A couple of years, maybe.”
“A lot of strangers come through here?”
“I just fuel up Mr. Wiggins’s boats. I don’t pay much mind to what-all goes on around here, I mean, folks fishing and that sort of thing.”
“You ever hear of a guy named Ronald Bledsoe?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“He’s a strange-looking guy. His head and face look like the end of a dildo.”
He coughed out a laugh and looked sideways onto the bay. He removed a pair of yellow-tinted aviator glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, even though the sun had gone behind clouds and the marshland surrounding us had dropped into shadow. He spread his arms on the dock railing behind him and kept shaking his head, as though mulling over a question, although I had not asked one.
“Can you look at me, Mr. Tolliver?”
“I’m telling you all I can, Mr. Robicheaux. I don’t know any more.”
I kept my eyes fixed on his face until he had to look at me. “Ronald Bledsoe is an unforgettable person, Mr. Tolliver. I also think he’s a man of great cruelty. If you shake his hand, you’ll feel a piece of black electricity go right up your arm. Tell me again you don’t know this man.”
“I’m not familiar with the gentleman. No, sir,” he said, shaking his head. But I saw the tic under his left eye, just like a bee had walked across the skin.
I took a business card from my wallet and handed it to him. “You look like a man of some wisdom. Be forewarned, Mr. Tolliver. Ronald Bledsoe is an evil man. Serve his cause and he’ll consume you.”
Tolliver tried to keep his face blank, but when he swallowed he looked like he had a walnut in his throat.
THAT EVENING I dug out an old.22 ruger semiautomatic from my trunk and took Molly to the police firing range and showed her how to thumb-load the individual cartridges into the magazine and how to chamber a round. Then I taught her the use of the safety and how to dump the magazine from the gun butt and to pull back the slide to ensure a round was not still in the chamber. I did these things methodically and without joy. I did them with both reservation and a sense of depression.
The sky was mauve-colored, the trees along the state road dark with shadows and pulsing with birds. It felt strange watching Molly take a shooting position, her arms extended, one eye closed, the foam-rubber ear guards clamped on her head. It was hard to accept the fact that my wife, a former nun and a member of Pax Christi, was popping away at a paper target with a human silhouette printed on it. When she fired the last round in the magazine, the slide locked open and a tiny tongue of smoke rose from the empty chamber.
“You look unhappy,” she said.
“It’s been a long day, that’s all.”
“Are you disappointed in me?”
“No,” I said.
“You believe we’re giving power away to Ronald Bledsoe, don’t you?”
“No,” I said.
“You’re good at lots of things, Dave, but lying isn’t one of them.”
I took the ruger from her hand and dropped it in the canvas rucksack in which I kept all my shooting equipment. I put my arm over her shoulders and we walked to where my truck was parked in the trees. Hundreds of birds were throbbing in the shadows, and in the west the sun had become a red pool tucked inside a bank of rain clouds. I had the same heavy feeling in my chest that I experienced as a child when my parents set about destroying their home and family. The feeling is related to what psychiatrists call a “world destruction fantasy.” I lived with it in my dreams before I went to Vietnam and long after I returned. I addressed it with both Jim Beam and VA dope, and when they didn’t work, I addressed it with the heart-pounding adrenaline that comes with the recoil of a pistol in your palm and the smell of gunpowder in your nostrils and the whirring sound that a tumbling round makes when it flies past your ear.
I felt that something irreplaceable was about to go out of my life, but I could not tell you why. Was it just the pull of the earth that you feel at a certain age? There are times when the scrape of a shovel pushed deep into dirt can become a sliver of glass in the ear. Was I more afraid of death than I was willing to admit? Or was Ronald Bledsoe causing my family to remake itself in his image?
When we got home, Molly oiled and cleaned the ruger and did not return it to me.
AT 9:17 MONDAY MORNING my desk phone rang. “Mr. Robicheaux?” a familiar voice said.
“What do you want, Bertrand?” I replied.
“I come here for some help. I cain’t take it no more.”
