The sheriff lived in a rambling pale yellow house with steel-gray trim and a wide gallery up on Bayou Teche. The sky was rain-washed and blue when I pulled into his drive and he was raking leaves out of his coulee, stacking them in a black pile for burning.
'The cross-dressers told you Legion Guidry talks to demons?' he said, his palms propped on the upended handle of his rake.
'Yeah, I guess that sums it up,' I replied.
'You drove out here on a Saturday to tell me this?'
'It's not an everyday event.'
'Dave, you're a toe-curlin' delight. I never know when you're going to drop one on me a sane person couldn't think up in a lifetime. Let me call my mother-in-law out here. She's in Eckankar. She teleports herself to Venus through a third eye in her head to check the records on her former lives. I'm not making this up.' His eyes were starting to brim with water. 'Where you going?'
A moment of contrasts.
That same afternoon a gumbo cook-off was in progress at City Park. The manicured and sloping lawns along the bayou were dark green in the shade, scattered with azalea bloom, the sky strung with strips of pink cloud. Three shrimp boats festooned with flags blew their horns near the drawbridge. The shouts of children and the twang of a diving board resonated from the park's swimming pool like a collective announcement that this was indeed the first day of a verdant and joyous summer.
In the midst of the live oaks, the gaiety of the crowd, the smell of boudin and boiling shrimp and okra and pecan pie and keg beer swilled from paper cups, Tee Bobby Hulin mounted a knocked-together stage with his band, plugged the jack of his electric guitar into the sound system, and went into a re-created version of 'Jolie Blon' I had never heard before.
It was like Charlie Barnet's 1939 recording of 'Cherokee,' a perfect moment in music that probably had no specific origin or plan, a deep rumbling of saxophones, a building percussion in the background, a melody and countermelody that were like a tongue-and-groove frame around the whole piece, and inside it all an innovative artist who took long rides on a score created extemporaneously in his own head without ever violating the musical intricacies at work around him.
Tee Bobby looked like a man back from the dead. Or maybe he was high again on meth or skag and had bought a temporary reprieve from the hunger that ate at his system twenty-four hours a day, but I couldn't say. He wore shades and a purple fedora and a long-sleeved black shirt with garters on the arms and beige suede boots and lavender slacks flared and sewn with flowers at the bottom. After the first piece, he did two more numbers, conventional rock 'n' roll pieces that he took no rides on and showed little interest in. Then he slipped off his guitar and went to the beer stand.
'What was that first piece you did?' I said behind him.
He turned around, lowering a beer cup from his mouth. '
'It's great.'
He nodded, his shades mirroring the crowd around us, the thick overhang of the live oaks.
'Jimmy Dean say he might take a demo out to L.A. for me. Souped-up zydeco's hot in some clubs out there,' he said.
'Jimmy Dean is a parasite. He couldn't shine your shoes.'
'Least he ain't dumped me at a homeless shelter in the middle of the night.'
'Have a good life,' I said.
'Try to make me feel bad all you want. You don't bother me no more. I passed the lie detector,' he said.
He faced the bandstand and upended his beer cup, the foam rilling down the sides of his mouth, the corner of his eye like a prosthetic implant. His self-satisfaction and stupidity made me want to hit him.
I started back through the crowd to find Bootsie and Alafair and bumped against the father of Amanda Boudreau. His body was hard, his feet planted solidly, his gaze unblinking behind his wire-rim glasses. His wife's arm was tucked inside his, the two of them like an island of grief that no one saw.
'Excuse me. I wasn't watching where I was going,' I said.
'That was Bobby Hulin you were talking to, wasn't it?' Mrs. Boudreau said.
'Yes, ma'am. That's correct,' I said.
'He's here, playing at a concert, and the man who supposedly represents our daughter chats with him by the beer stand. I can't quite express my feelings. You'll have to forgive me,' she said, and pulled her arm from her husband's and walked quickly toward the rim of the park, pulling a handkerchief from her purse.
'You got a daughter, Mr. Robicheaux?' her husband asked.
'Yes, sir. Her name's Alafair,' I replied.
He fixed his glasses up on his nose with his thumb. 'You have to pardon my wife. She's not doing too good. I probably don't make it any easier for her, either. I hope your daughter has a wonderful life. I truly do, sir.'
And he walked away, limping like a man whose gout gave him no peace.
That night I had drunk dreams and woke at two in the morning, wired, my mouth dry, my ears filled with sounds that had no origin. I could not remember the images in the dreams, only the nameless feeling they left me with.
Like being slapped awake when no one else was in the room.
Like stepping unexpectedly off a ledge one hundred feet below the Gulfs surface and plummeting into a chasm filled with coldness and rough-skinned finned creatures whose faces flared at you out of the silt.
I went to the kitchen and sat in the dark, the luminous numbers of my watch glowing on my wrist. A bottle of vanilla extract sat on the windowsill in the moonlight, the curtains blowing around it. In the distance I heard a train and I thought of the old Southern Pacific, its lounge car lit, the passengers sipping highballs at the bar as the locomotive pulled them safely across the dark land to an improbable country of blue mountains and palm trees and pink sunrises where no one ever died.
I wanted to get in my truck and bang down corrugated roads, grind gears, thunder across plank bridges. I wanted to drive deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp, past the confines of reason, into the past, into a world of lost dialects, gator hunters, busthead whiskey, moss harvesters, Jax beer, trotline runners, moonshiners, muskrat trappers, cockfights, bloodred boudin, a jigger of Jim Beam lowered into a frosted schooner of draft, outlaw shrimpers, dirty rice black from the pot, hogmeat cooked in rum, Pearl and Regal and Grand Prize and Lone Star iced down in washtubs, crawfish boiled with cob corn and artichokes, all of it on the tree-flooded, alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time.
All you had to do was release yourself from the prison of restraint, just snip loose the stitches that sewed your skin to the hairshirt of normalcy.
I
I sat for five minutes in the false dawn, my hand trembling on the floor stick, my upper lip beaded with sweat. Then I drove back down the highway, fifteen miles under the speed limit, cars whizzing by me, their horns blowing, all the way back to New Iberia and the apartment where Clete Purcel was now living, wondering how in the name of a merciful God I could have a Sunday morning hangover without touching a drop of alcohol.
I sat at the counter in his small kitchen while Clete fixed coffee and stirred a skillet filled almost to the brim with a half-dozen eggs, strips of bacon, chunks of sausage and yellow cheese, and a sprinkling of chopped scallions to disguise enough cholesterol to clog a sewer main. He wore clacks and his Marine Corps utility cap and a pair of boxer undershorts, printed with fire engines, that hung on his hips like women's bloomers.
