Paz pushed a legal pad and a ballpoint across to her. She didn’t touch them.
“No, I need a bound notebook, not a spiral, nothing I can tear pages out of.”
“Because…?”
“I’ll lie. I’ll write down the truth and then I’ll tear it out. It has to be bound so you can tell if any pages are missing.”
“Uh-huh. Okay, bound notebooks. Like in grade school? Black with those little white dots?”
A blazing smile that made her look eight. “Yes, perfect. I think I’ll need…say, four.”
“You got ‘em. You wouldn’t want to give me a little teaser now about some of these crimes?”
“No. I have to write it. In that kind of notebook.”
A sinking sensation in his gut. A nut, it was clear, and she’d probably work an insanity plea behind it, and all the beautiful evidence he’d collected would be moot. Was she in fact crazy? Paz knew he’d seen something for a second there in the hotel room that wasn’t crazy at all, that icicle woman, but that meant zero in a court of law. Paz didn’t think at all about what had seemed to happen a few moments ago, and except for the drying sweat on his back, he would have believed that it hadn’t happened at all. Some kind of attack, low blood sugar or stress or something, nothing to worry about, nothing compared with this loony getting away with it. In any case, not his business anymore. Paz felt like he’d wasted his whole day.
The little town of Pony-aux-Bois lies in the Forest of Vaux, on the shores of the river Mance, which flows a few miles south into the Moselle at Metz. The town is of great antiquity. The church, Saint-Martin-de-Tours, dates from the ninth century, and in late summer when the water is low, the people will point out to you the piling of a Roman bridge, pale angular shadows under the golden water. It is a peaceful and lovely place, much favored by the wealthy men of Metz for the construction of summer cottages and shooting lodges. One such was Georges Hippolyte de Berville, a merchant of that city and a trader in coal and oil. In 1851 he had built for himself and his family a comfortable cottage of local stone, overlooking the river. The family consisted of three sons, Alphonse, Jean-Pierre, and Gerard, and his wife, Sophie Catherine. They were all loving and healthy, for which they all gave thanks to God, for they were very devout, especially Sophie Catherine. After the cottage at Pony was finished, they used to spend the whole summer on the river, where they occupied themselves with such country pastimes as angling for tench and bream and shooting pigeons and woodcock. In this gentle place upon a summer’s morning in the year 1856, Sophie gave birth to a child, whom they would name Marie-Ange Bernardine, for Sophie was much devoted to the Queen of the Angels, and it was August 20, the feast day of Bernard of Clairvaux.
— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
Two
Just plunge in. Just plunge in, in my daddy’s voice, just plunge in, sugar pie, ain’t nothin in that river meaner’n you. I must have been four, the river was the Coelee in Caluga County, Florida, tea dark, with the Spanish moss and the live oak and palmetto overhanging. He was teaching me how to swim. So I plunge in and really I have no idea, I am a reader not a writer, I should have started with praise as Augustine did but of course I forgot and what vainglory comparing myself but perhaps God sees us all the same, He loves us though we are all beneath contempt the greatest saints and me. Augustine begins with I recall only the famous line You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Of course, we don’t really know that, do we St. A? We think we want other stuff, more easily available and so when we remember to pray at all we pray as you did for so long?God make me good but not yet.
If I had not been so wicked, the possession of devout and God-fearing parents, together with the favor of God’s grace, would have been enough to make me good.I laughed out loud the first time I read that, in a priory library where laughter was not encouraged, and then I was sad because I would have liked so much to have had parents like that or to have been as little wicked as Teresa of Avila, and I could have started my confessions with that line as she did her Life. And I find it interesting how I am not in fact plunging in but filling the page with buzz to avoid it, my genuine and not chastely imagined wickedness. Now, for real.
I was born to Joseph R. and Ellen May (Billie) Boone Garigeau in Wayland, Florida. Billie was seventeen at the time, and my father, called Ti Joe by everyone, was twenty-two and a Cajun from Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. I think neither of them feared God very much, and their devotion, though strong, was not to Him. Momma was devoted to Ti Joe, at about the same level as Teresa was devoted to Jesus (or so I later imagined), and Daddy was devoted to two propositions, first that owning and driving a Kenworth truck was the only life for a man worth having, and two, that being a good husband and daddy did not in any way preclude him from getting as much pussy as he possibly could. Oh, now it seems I can write what I decline to say. Bastard. Prick. Cunt. Fuck. An exhibition of hypocrisy now I must be prissy mouthed although I have known nuns who could strip the paint off a Buick. Or maybe this is a dispensation, in the service of absolute honesty.
We lived in a double-wide at the Karefree Trailer Park close by the Coelee River, about eight miles out of Wayland on Route 217 in Caluga County. It was a nice place as those kinds of places go, four neat lines of mobile homes, a playground, a ball field, some red picnic tables by a muddy beach on the river, a wobbly dock, and a small convenience store. While he saved for that Kenworth, Daddy drove a rig for an outfit in Panama City, and he’d be gone different lengths of time during which life entered a kind of limbo, us sitting around waiting for the second coming like the early apostles although without the Holy Spirit to keep us company. He was a handsome devil though, my daddy, and Momma thought she was lucky to get him, although she was no kind of dog herself, a towheaded skinny girl with long pale legs. She was a local person, a Caluga County belle, he was maybe a hair shorter than she was in his stocking feet, which you practically never got to see because he always had the cowboy boots on with the two-and-a-half-inch heels raising him as close to heaven as he was ever likely to get. That’s my Granny Boone talking, not me, I have to believe in the infinite mercy of God. After death, not now.
I say Granny Boone, that’s got to conjure up a picture of a bent crone in a faded flowered dress, maybe with a corncob pipe clenched in her toothless jaws, but Maureen Boone was about thirty-eight or so when I was born and not bent or faded at all. I guess Granny Boone was about the only what you could call a citizen among the whole Boone clan, being a bookkeeper for the Coelee River Lumber Company and a high school graduate, with two years of college, where all the other ones were what I guess they used to call white trash. Or trailer trash too, and as a matter of fact I guess Granny was the only Boone in the county who lived in a regular house, an old Florida frame house with deep verandas, painted white, with the gray pine boards showing through where the sun had faded it off.
What I got from Gran was the written word. That’s whatshe was devoted to. She taught me how to read, one of my earliest memories. Sitting on her lap on my daddy’s lounger chair, with the TV for once silent, we’re in our trailer and Momma is off with her high school friends, the prom queens a little bleached, the football stars just starting to go soft around the gut, and Daddy’s on the road with a load, and her quiet voice in my ear reading I can’t remember what it was Goodnight Moon or Are You My Mother? Poky Little Puppy. One of those. I must have been three or four. And watching her bookkeeper’s finger moving across the familiar black shapes that meant BOX, or whatever the word was, I suddenly realized I could make its sound in my head without Gran having to say it, and that meant that I could turn on the story in my head, just like when you turned on the TV. Andthat meant, I soon came to realize, that I could read anything, any book in Granny’s house, any book in the tiny town library in Wayland.
Probably it is a fabrication that this happened, I am backfilling to make a story, as perhaps St. Augustine made up the famous story of his conversion in the courtyard, the child’s voice calling take up and read and he took up and read the verse that allowed the Holy Spirit to enter his heart, but so it is with memory. Who knows whatreally happened and really, who cares? It’s what we make of it now that counts, and the truth is by the power of the Holy Spirit burnt into our bodies, so even now I can recapture the elation, the quivering joy I felt when I discovered what reading was, the second most important spiritual event of my life.
I kept it secret from Momma and Daddy, because I was I am trying to think honestly here. Because I was
