'That's a V.C. head. My cousin brought it back. He was in the Phoenix Program,' Gable said.
'We've got all we need here,' Clete said to me.
'Have I offended you?' Gable asked.
'Not us. I wish you'd made it over there, Jim. It was your kind of place,' Clete said.
Clete and I both turned to go and almost collided into Gable's wife. She wore a white silk robe and silver slippers and supported herself on a cane with a rubber-stoppered tripod on it. Her rouged cheeks and lipstick made me think of cosmetics applied in a desperate fashion to a papier-mache doll. Her yellow hair was like wisps of corn silk. When she smoothed it back, lifting it coyly into place, her temples pulsed with tiny blue veins.
'Have you invited the gentlemen for a late supper?' she asked her husband.
'They're just here on business, Cora. They're leaving now,' Gable replied.
'I apologize for not coming out to welcome you. I didn't realize you were here,' she said.
'That's quite all right,' I said.
'You mustn't pay attention to Jim's war souvenirs. They were given to him or he purchased them. He's a gentle man by nature,' she said.
'Yes, ma'am,', I said.
She placed her hand in mine. It had no more weight or density than a bird's wing.
'We'd love to see you again, sir,' she said. Her fingers tightened on mine, her eyes more than earnest.
The sky was dark and streaked with rain when Clete and I went back outside. The air smelled of ozone and schooled-up fish out in the bay. Lightning leaped from the horizon to the top of the sky, and I looked out at the pale green color of the sugarcane blowing in the wind and at the crossroads in the distance where we had stopped at the general store next to the abandoned nightclub with the cabins in back, and I remembered when I had been there before.
'My mother ran off with a man named Mack when I was a little boy,' I said to Clete. 'She came back for me once and we stayed in one of those cabins behind the nightclub.'
'Let it go, Streak,' he said.
'My father was in jail. Mack dealt cards at that club. My mother was a waitress there.'
'That was a long time before she died, big mon. Don't hurt yourself like this.'
We had backed out almost to the front gate. I stopped the truck and walked to the front door in the rain and knocked loudly on the door.
Jim Gable opened it with a turkey drumstick wrapped in a paper napkin in his hand. He was grinning.
'You forgot something?' he said.
'You're from Lafourche Parish, Mr. Gable?'
'I grew up right down this road.'
'My mother's name was Mae Guillory. I think she was murdered somewhere close by. Zipper says it was around '66 or '67. Did you know a woman named Mae Guillory?'
His face transformed itself into the smiling, disingenuous countenance that all dishonest people know how to affect, the light in his eyes deliberately unfocused, the lips parted solicitously.
'Why, no, I don't think I ever knew anyone by that name. Mae? No, I'm sure of it,' he replied.
I got back into the truck and backed into the road and headed toward the crossroads.
Clete reached under the seat and removed his half pint bottle of whiskey and unscrewed the cap with one thumb, his eyes on the sugarcane and the rain ditches that swept past both sides of the truck. He took a sip from the bottle and put a Lucky Strike in his mouth.
'How about eighty-sixing the booze while we're driving?' I said.
'Gable knows something about your mother's death?' he said.
'Put it in the bank,' I said.
4
ON MONDAY I DROVE to the women's prison at St. Gabriel, ten miles south of Baton Rouge, and waited for a female guard to walk Letty Labiche from a lockdown unit to an interview room. While I waited a television crew and a male and female journalist from a Christian cable channel were packing up their equipment.
'You interviewed Letty?' I asked the woman.
'Oh, yes. Her story's a tragic one. But it's a beautiful one, too,' she replied. She was middle-aged, blond and attractive, her hard, compact body dressed in a pink suit.
'Beautiful?' I said.
'For a Christian, yes, it's a story of forgiveness and hope.' Her face lifted into mine, her blue eyes charged with meaning.
I looked at the floor and said nothing until she and the other journalist and their crew were gone.
When Letty came into the room with the female guard she was wearing prison denims and handcuffs. The guard was as broad as an ax handle, pink-complected, with chestnut hair, and arms like an Irish washerwoman. She turned the key in the handcuff locks and rubbed Letty's wrists.
'I got them a little tight. You gonna be okay here, hon?' she said.
'I'm fine, Thelma,' Letty said.
I could not tell the difference between Letty and her twin sister, except for a rose with green leaves tattooed on her neck. They had the same skin, the same smoke-colored, wavy, gold-streaked hair, even the same powerful, physical presence. She sat down with me at a wood table, her back straight, her hands folded in front of her.
'You're going to be on cable television, huh?' I said.
'Yes, it's pretty exciting,' she said.
But she caught the look in my eyes.
'You don't approve?' she said.
'Whatever works for you is the right thing to do, Letty.'
'I think they're good people. They been kind to me, Dave. Their show goes out to millions of homes.'
Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like a cold vapor around her heart when she awoke each morning, one day closer to the injection table at Angola. How much time was left? Six weeks? No, it was five weeks and four days now.
I remembered a film clip that showed Letty at a religious service in the prison chapel, rising from her knees in front of the cross, her clasped hands extended high above her head in a histrionic portrayal of prayer. It was almost embarrassing to watch. But I had learned long ago that unless you've had your own ticket punched in the Garden of Gethsemane, you shouldn't judge those whose fate it is to visit there.
'What can you tell me about a black woman named Little Face Dautrieve?' I asked.
'Tell you?'
'You know her, don't you?'
'The name's not real familiar,' she said.
'Why do you and Passion refuse to confide in me?' I said.
She looked at the tops of her big-boned hands. 'The information you're after won't help. Leave it alone,' she said.
One hand opened and closed nervously on the table-top. Her palm was gold, shiny with moisture, her nails trimmed close to the cuticle. I took her fingers in mine.
'You all right?' I asked.
'Sure.'
But she wasn't. I could see her pulse beating in her neck, the white discoloration on the rim of her nostrils. She swallowed dryly when she looked back into my face, her eyes working hard to retain the light that the reborn seemed to wear as their logo.
'No one has to be brave all the time. It's all right to be afraid,' I said.
