'You got an honest-to-God witness can hold them over the fire?' he said, his eyes lingering on mine.
'She never knew their names. She didn't see their faces well, either.'
The moment went out of his eyes. 'This world's briers and brambles, ain't it?' he said.
'You a churchgoin' man, Mr. Cale?'
'Not no more.'
'Why not get square and start over? People won't be hard on you.'
'They killed Mae Guillory? I always thought she just run off,' he said, an unexpected note of sadness in his voice.
I didn't reply. His eyes were hooded, his down-turned nose like the ragged beak of a bird. He pressed the bottle neck down on the frets of the guitar and drew his steel picks across the strings. But his concentration was elsewhere, and his picks made a discordant sound like a fist striking piano keys.
'I had a wife and a little boy once. Owned a house and a truck and had money left over at the end of the month. That's all gone now,' he said.
'Mae Guillory was my mother, Mr. Cale. Neither she nor I will rest until the bill's paid.'
He set his guitar in the swing and placed his hat crown-down next to it and pulled the bottle neck and steel picks off his fingers and dropped them tinkling inside the hat.
'The old woman and me is going to eat some lima bean soup. You can stay if you want. But we're done talking on this particular subject,' he said.
'Those cops are still out there, aren't they?' I said.
'Good-bye, sir. Before you judge me, you might be thankful you got what you got,' he said, and went inside the darkness of the cabin and let the screen slam behind him.
Members in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous maintain that alcohol is but the symptom of the disease. It sounds self-serving. It's not.
That night I sat at the counter in the bait shop and watched Clete Purcel use only one thumb to unscrew the cap from a pint bottle of whiskey, then pour two inches into a glass mug and crack open a Dixie for a chaser. He was talking about fishing, or a vacation in Hawaii, or his time in the corps, I don't remember. The beer bottle was dark green, running with moisture, the whiskey in the mug brownish gold, like autumn light trapped inside a hardwood forest.
The air outside was humid and thick with winged insects, and strings of smoke rose from the flood lamps. I opened a can of Dr Pepper but didn't drink it. My hand was crimped tightly around the can, my head buzzing with a sound like a downed wire in a rain puddle.
Clete tilted the glass mug to his mouth and drank the whiskey out of the bottom, then chased it with the beer and wiped his mouth on his palm. His eyes settled on mine, then went away from me and came back.
'Your head's back in that story the black hooker told you,' he said.
'My mother said her name was Mae Robicheaux,' I said.
'What?'
'Before she died, she said her name was Robicheaux. She took back her married name.'
'I'm going to use your own argument against you, Dave. The sonsofbitches who killed your mother are pure evil. Don't let them keep hurting you.'
'I'm going to find out who they are and hunt them down and kill them.'
He screwed the cap back on his whiskey bottle and wrapped the botde in a paper bag, then drank from his beer and rose from the counter stool and worked the whiskey bottle into his side pocket.
'What are you doing?' I asked.
'Going back to the motel. Leaving you with your family. Taking my booze out of here.'
'That's not the problem.'
'It's not the main one, but you'd like it to be. See you tomorrow, Streak,' he said.
He put on his porkpie hat and went out the door, then I heard his Cadillac start up and roll heavily down the dirt road.
I chained up the rental boats for the night and was turning off the lights when Clete's Cadillac came back down the road and parked at the cement boat ramp. He met me at the end of the dock with a tinfoil container of microwave popcorn in his hand.
'I hate watching TV in a motel room by myself,' he said, and laid his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me up the slope to the house.
Early the next morning I put all the crime scene photos from the Vachel Carmouche homicide in an envelope and drove out to his deserted house on Bayou Teche. I pushed open the back door and once more entered the heated smell of the house. Purple martins, probably from the chimney, were flying blindly against the walls and windows, splattering their droppings on the floors and counters. I swatted them away from my face with a newspaper and closed off the kitchen to isolate the birds in the rest of the house.
Why was I even there? I asked myself. I had no idea what I was looking for.
I squatted down and touched a brownish flake of blood on the linoleum with my ballpoint pen. It crumbled into tiny particles, and I wiped my pen with a piece of Kleenex, then put my pen away and blotted the perspiration off my forehead with my sleeve.
All I wanted to do was get back outside in the wind, under the shade of a tree, out of the smell that Vachel Carmouche seemed to have bled into the woodwork when he died. Maybe I had to stop thinking of Passion and Letty Labiche as victims. I tried to tell myself that sometimes it took more courage to step away from the grief of another than to participate in it.
I felt a puff of cool air rise from the floor and I looked down through a crack in the linoleum, through a rotted plank, at a pool of water under the house with purple martins fluttering their wings in it. Then I realized the birds inside the house had not come from the chimney. But it wasn't the birds that caught my attention. One of the cinder-block pilings was orange with rust that had leaked from a crossbeam onto the stone.
I went back outside and lay flat on my stomach and crawled under the house. Three feet beyond the rear wall, wedged between the crossbeam and the cinder-block piling, was a one-handed weed sickle. I pried it loose and crawled back into the sunlight. The short wood handle was intact, but the half-moon blade had rusted into lace.
I slipped the sickle handle-first into a Ziploc bag and knocked on Passion's door.
'This is the instrument that slung blood on the ceiling and walls. Letty hit him with the mattock and you used this,' I said when Passion came to the door. 'It look like a piece of junk to me,' she said. 'I came out here because I feel an obligation to your sister. But I don't have time for any more of y'all's bullshit. I'm going to bust Little Face Dautrieve as a material witness and make her life miserable. She'll stay in jail until she tells me what happened and in the meantime Social Services will take her baby. Is that how you want it to play out?'
'You seen the paper today?' she asked. 'No.'
'The Supreme Court won't hear any more of Letty's appeals. Unless Belmont Pugh commute her sentence, she's gonna die. You want to know what happened? I'm gonna tell you. Then you can carry it down to your office and do whatever you want to wit' it.'
Her face was wan, her eyes unfocused inside the gloom of the house, as though she didn't recognize the words she had just spoken. But suddenly I felt my victory was about to become ashes in my mouth. She studied my face through the screen, then pushed open the door and waited for me to come inside.
Eight YEARS ago Passion and Letty looked out their side window in dismay at the return of their neighbor, Vachel Carmouche. In their minds he had been assigned to their past, to a world of dreams and aberrant memories that dissipated with time and had no application in their adult lives. Now they watched him blow his gallery clean of birds' nests with a pressure hose while crushing the tiny eggs under his rubber boots; they watched him pry the plywood covering from his windows, hoe out a vegetable patch, and drink lemonade in the shade, a small sip at a time, like a man who was stintful even with his own pleasure, his starched and pressed gray work clothes and gray cloth cap unstained by sweat, as though the rigidity that characterized his life allowed him to control the secretion in his glands.
They left the house and went grocery shopping, hoping somehow he would be gone when they returned and a
