out of the south, the surface of the bayou wrinkling like old skin. I went to an AA meeting upstairs at the Methodist church on Main, but I couldn’t shake my conviction that Bledsoe or one of his associates was about to make a move on us.
Bledsoe was the trigger, but the sense of angst I was experiencing had been a problem in my life long before I met him. Psychologists believe there is a form of long-term anxiety that is caused by turmoil in the natal home: the parents fighting, the child being shaken or dropped, someone constantly bursting through the door in a drunken rage. I can’t say where it comes from. For me it was not unlike seeing a mortar round fall short of your position, followed by a second round that goes long. In that moment you know with absolute certainty you’re registered and the next round is coming down the stack. The feeling you experience is like someone stripping off your skin.
The truth is, I wanted to drink. Maybe not a lot, just a couple of shots with a beer back, I told myself, just enough to turn down the butane on the burner. Or I wanted to load up my cut-down twelve-gauge pump or my AR-15 and kick it on up to some serious E-major rock ’n’ roll.
At dusk I looked out the front window just as a cruiser with a black uniformed female deputy behind the wheel pulled into the driveway. Catin Segura got out and gazed at the trees in the yard and the gold and red clusters of four-o’clock flowers opening in the shadows. “You have such a nice place here,” she said.
“It is,” I said.
“I was just going off shift and I thought I should mention something to you. I was patrolling the Loreauville Quarters and I saw Otis Baylor talking to a family on their gallery. The address was next door to the house rented by the owner of the hit-and-run tag I ran, Elizabeth Crochet. When I cruised the Quarters again, about ten minutes later, he was knocking on another door, one street over.
“I asked him if I could help him with anything. He said no, he was an insurance man and was just checking on a couple of clients. I told him I was the same sheriff’s deputy who had investigated the hit-and-run in front of his house. I told him I thought he was there for other reasons.”
“What did he say?”
“‘Thanks for your offer of help.’ Then he got in his car and drove away. What’s he after, Dave?”
“A guy named Bertrand Melancon.”
I used my cell phone in the yard to call the Baylor home. When Otis answered, I hung up. Molly and Alafair were going to the movies. I waited until they left, then I drove down Old Jeanerette Road and pulled into Otis’s driveway. He walked out on the front steps, a napkin tucked inside the top of his shirt.
“Was that you who called about fifteen minutes ago?” he asked.
“Why would you think that?”
“Because you can’t leave us alone.”
“No, that’s not the problem at all, Mr. Baylor. The problem is the fact you were in the Loreauville Quarters. You knew who was driving the hit-and-run vehicle and you used your insurance connections to run the tag number and get the address of the owner. You were in the Loreauville Quarters looking for Bertrand Melancon. Except he wasn’t there, so you started questioning his neighbors.”
“If you know all this, why bother telling me about it?”
“I wouldn’t be clever, Mr. Baylor. What I don’t understand is your motivation. Melancon has done irreparable damage to your daughter and family, but evidently he’s tried to make amends. You still want to cancel the guy’s ticket?”
“What do you mean, ‘amends’?”
“I talked with Melancon. He said he tried to make it up to y’all. I don’t think he was lying. He knows he’ll probably end up as a contribution to landfill.”
I don’t think I have ever seen a man look as dumbfounded as Otis Baylor did in that moment. He stared at me for a long time. “Mr. Robicheaux, please don’t be vague or misleading.”
“What I’ve said to you is an accurate statement. For what it’s worth, I think Melancon is sorry for what he did. I think he also knows it’s a matter of time before he catches the bus. If he’s lucky, somebody won’t use a blowtorch on him first. That’s not an exaggeration. Andre Rochon probably suffered the pains of the damned before he died.”
“My God in heaven,” he said in dismay, his face white.
“What have you done, sir?”
He shook his head, his eyes filming.
“Talk to me, Mr. Baylor. This is the time to do it.”
“I haven’t done anything,” he said. “Please excuse me. We have to finish dinner. I have to help my wife with the dishes. I have to help my daughter with some of her schoolwork. Please excuse me, sir.”
He went inside the house and I heard him snap the door bolt in place. But I didn’t leave the yard. I stood a long time in the shadows, inside the sounds of birds gathering in the treetops and some kids in a pirogue out on the bayou. The wind rattled the shutters on his windows and sent leaves feathering off the eaves. The blinds were drawn, the window frames etched by yellow light from inside. Under other circumstances, the house might have been a picture of familial warmth against the coming of the night. But not a sound came from the house and my guess was that nothing aside from misery lived inside those walls.
SUNDAY MORNING I convinced Molly and Alafair to go with me to a camp I had rented on the levee by Henderson Swamp. It was a fine place, built of pine, partially set on pilings, the screen gallery facing a bay that was dotted with cypress trees and willow islands. The wind was down, the sac-a-lait had been biting, and I wanted to get out of town and away from concerns about Ronald Bledsoe, at least for a day. We hitched up the boat and trailer, packed food and cold drinks in the cooler, and stretched bungee cords across the rods and life preservers in the bottom of the boat. I glanced at the sky in the south and went back into the house for our raincoats. Alafair followed me inside.
“Dave, we don’t have to do this,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Run away from this guy.”
“The perps all go down. Just wait them out and they go down.”
“How long was Hitler killing people? Twelve years?” she said.
When we reached the swamp, the bays were dented with raindrops. The early-morning fishermen who had gone out for crappie, or what are called “sac-a-lait” in south Louisiana, were already coming back in. We drove along the top of the levee, past the boat-rental and bait shops and the restaurants that offer swamp tours in French and English. Then we entered a long stretch of verdant waterside terrain that was unmarked by litter or development or even weekend fish camps of the kind I had rented.
Alafair and I put the boat in the water and used the electric motor to fish along a chain of willow islands between the levee and the bay. We tried shiners and then jigs, both without success. The wind had come up and the water was cloudy and too high, the time of day wrong as well. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to be with Alafair and Molly, away from town, away from the job, away from avarice and deceit and people scamming people and profiting from the desperation and hardship of their fellow Americans.
The change of the season was already in the air. The leaves of the cypress had turned gold and I could smell gas on the breeze. The flooded woods along the shore were dark, the lily pads that had bloomed with yellow flowers in the summer now curling into brown husks along the edges. I could smell schools of fish under the water, like the seminal odor of birth, but I could see nothing below the darkness on the surface, as though part of a life cycle were being removed from my own life.
Up on the levee a skinned pickup truck loaded with a family bounced down the road toward a boat ramp. Then a kid on a motorbike went by, followed by a black Humvee with tinted windows rolled halfway up.
A solitary turkey buzzard turned slowly overhead, as though in anticipation of a death that had not yet occurred. Then it tilted against the sky and glided farther out on the bay, perhaps seeking carrion in another place, or perhaps indicating respite, I didn’t know which. I did not like to dwell on the biblical allocation of threescore and ten. But at a certain age, consciousness of mortality is not an elective study.
“You worry too much about Molly and me,” Alafair said out of nowhere.
“Think so?” I said, our boat drifting unanchored in the wind now.
“What happens, happens. We’re not afraid. Why should you be?”
Because I live inside you, I thought. Because if you die, so do I.
