“To hurt Alafair?”
“The possibility crossed my mind.”
She let my tone pass. “I think we need to have an understanding-”
I interrupted her. “I’ll be up-front with you. I’m glad Clete busted up Rydel. I hope he stays in the hospital for a long time. If either Rydel or Bledsoe comes after my daughter, I’ll do much worse to him.”
“Finish your statement,” she said.
“I’ll kill either one of them or I’ll kill both of them.”
She folded her hands on her desk blotter. There was a wan look in her eyes, the kind people get when they know their best words are of no value. “A conversation like this will never occur in this office again. You’d better get back to work, Dave.”
I started to speak.
“Don’t tempt me,” she said.
Chapter 24
BERTRAND MELANCON HAD moved in with his grandmother in what was called the Loreauville “Quarters,” up Bayou Teche, nine miles from New Iberia. Tucked between sugarcane acreage and mist-shrouded horse farms, the Quarters was a neighborhood of nineteenth-century tenant cabins that looked like yellow boxcars with peaked tin roofs and small galleries nailed on to them as an afterthought. Some of them were deserted and boarded up with plywood, but his grandmother’s place was neat and clean and had fresh paint on it, and she kept tin cans planted with begonias and geraniums on the front gallery and on the windowsills.
Bertrand’s grandmother fixed good meals, but her talents were wasted on her grandson. He could not eat anything with cayenne or black pepper or gumbo filet in it. Once or twice, when he was spitting off the gallery, he had noticed a pink tinge in his saliva but had dismissed it. Then this morning he had gotten the dry heaves. When he looked into the toilet bowl, there was no question about what he saw there. Bertrand was fairly certain his insides were coming apart, like wet cardboard, one piece at a time.
He was also fairly certain he was going to die unless he did something to rid himself of the guilt that waited for him each dawn like a carrion bird perched on the foot of his bed. He couldn’t undo what he had done to the priest on the church house roof, and he couldn’t find the young black girl he and Eddy and Andre had raped in the Lower Nine. But somehow Fate had caused his path to intersect with Thelma Baylor’s, not once but twice, in New Orleans and now in New Iberia.
Making it up to Thelma Baylor and her family was the way out, he told himself. He had the power to make her family rich. Maybe they would never forgive him and still despise him, but they would be rich just the same and he would be free and the pain would go out of his stomach and he could start over again in California.
Fate was giving Bertrand a second chance. At least that was what he told himself. If his intuitions were not true, he knew he would die soon. That thought caused him a spasm of pain that made him grip his stomach muscles and close his eyes.
There was only one hitch in his desire to redeem himself: how was he supposed to do it?
He could write a letter of apology and tell the Baylors where to find the stones and leave it in their mailbox or under a door. But even as he started composing the sentences in his mind, he knew his prescription for his own redemption was too easy. He was going to have to look Thelma Baylor and her family in the face. That image, particularly when it came to looking the father in the face, made sweat break on his brow.
Why was everything so hard?
His first morning in the Loreauville Quarters he borrowed his grandmother’s car, a rusted-out hulk that oozed oil smoke from under the frame, and headed down the bayou toward New Iberia. The cane fields were wet and fog rolled off the bayou on the horse barns and spacious homes and oak-lined driveways of the people who were actually his neighbors, although they would never look upon him as such. He continued on down the state road into New Iberia and turned toward Jeanerette and the house where Thelma Baylor lived. He passed through both rural slums and immaculate acreage owned by the Louisiana State University agricultural school. He drove alongside rain ditches that were layered with trash and clumps of simple homes inside pecan trees. He passed a graveyard filled with crypts that reminded him of the cemeteries across from the New Orleans French Quarter.
But no matter what he looked at, he could not escape the fear that was like a cancerous tuber rooted in his chest. He tried every way possible to rationalize not confronting Thelma or her family directly. Wasn’t it enough simply to give them an amount of money that was probably beyond their wildest dreams? Wasn’t it enough that he was sorry, that his own health had been ruined, perhaps even his life made forfeit? How much was one guy supposed to suffer?
But besides his guilt over Thelma Baylor and the priest on the church roof and the young girl in the Lower Nine, he had another burden to carry. He had not only been slapped in Sidney Kovick’s flower store and had his pistol taken away from him by an unarmed man, he had proved himself a coward and had been treated as such, kicked between the buttocks, like a punk or a yard bitch, in view of passersby at the end of the alley.
He passed an eighteenth-century plantation home built of brick and saw a modest green house with a screened-in gallery ensconced inside shade trees. The numbers on the mailbox were the same as the ones he had gotten out of his grandmother’s directory. He drove to the drawbridge over the bayou, looking straight ahead in case anyone was watching. He rumbled across the bridge and turned his car around so he could have a full view of the Baylor house without anyone taking note of his interest. A light was on in the kitchen and steam was rising from the tin roof where the sunlight touched it. What if he just knocked on the door and announced who he was? If they wanted to shoot him, they could shoot him. If they wanted to have him busted, they could dial 911. What could be worse than watching his insides transformed into dissolving red clots in the toilet bowl?
He stayed parked for perhaps five minutes on the road’s shoulder, just on the other side of the bridge, blue oil smoke seeping through the floorboards. There was little traffic across the bridge this time of day. But when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw a white man who had an elongated, waxed head and indented face standing in front of a cafe, looking about innocuously, as a tourist might. When Bertrand glanced in the mirror a second time, the man was gone.
He shifted his grandmother’s car into gear and crawled across the bridge, turning back onto the state road that led past enormous plantation homes and the green one-story house of the girl he had raped and tormented. He slowed his car in the shadows across from the house and shifted the transmission into park. His head was spinning, either from his fear or the oil smoke rising through the floor. Then he had an idea. What if he wrote out the words he needed to say, and walked up to the door and knocked? In his mind, he saw Thelma Baylor and her father and mother answer his knock in unison, anxious for his apology, as though it were what they had waited for ever since the night she was taken into the hospital by paramedics.
Yeah, man, just read the statement and put the piece of paper in their hands and get in my grandmother’s lI’l car and rocket on down the road, he told himself.
He found a brown paper hand towel on the floor and a magazine on the seat. He flattened the hand towel on the magazine, propped the magazine on the steering wheel, and began to print with a ballpoint pen:
To Miss Thelma and the family of Miss Thelma,
I am sorrie for what I have did to her. I wasn’t alweys that kind of person. Or maybe I was. I am not sure. But I want to make it right even tho I know it is not going to ever be right with her or anybody who was hurt like she been hurt.
He paused, his heart beating, and looked at what he had written. For some reason, the words made him feel better than he had felt in a long time. Behind him, he heard the sound of tires rumbling over the drawbridge and automatically he looked in the rearview mirror. A truck had just crossed the bridge and turned down the bayou, in the opposite direction from Bertrand. But it was not the truck that got his attention. The white man with the long head and indented face had parked a gleaming blue Mercury under shade trees in front of a historical plantation house on the corner. The man was standing on the shoulder, the driver’s door open between him and Bertrand, his forearms propped on the car’s roof, evidently admiring the huge white facade and stone columns of the building.
Definitely a weird-looking motherfucker, Bertrand thought.
