with a nylon stocking crimped down on his head.
Marvin looked innocuously at a cloud, his eyebrows raised. 'Most of y'all got born 'cause your mama dint have money for an abortion. That's why you call other people 'motherfucker' all the time. It's 'cause y'all know everybody in town got in your mother's drawers. So anytime you insult other folks with a bad name like that, it's on your own self. I ain't trying to hurt your feelings. It's just a psychological fact.'
The tall man with rings in his eyebrows picked up his beer bottle from the oyster shells, tossed Marvin Oates's hat into the crowd, and smashed the bottle across Marvin's head. The crowd roared.
Marvin fell across his suitcase and took a kick in the ribs and another between his buttocks. He pushed himself up on the convertible's bumper, his coat powdered with white dust, his eyes closing, then opening, as though a piece of sharp metal was buried deep in his bowels.
He felt the back of his head and swallowed, then walked unsteadily on the shells and found his hat and knocked it clean of dust on his leg.
'You still ain't got the right to throw trash in old folks' yard,' he said.
The crowd surged forward, but Jimmy Dean Styles stepped between Marvin and his adversaries and leaned over and retrieved the tow strap of Marvin's suitcase from the dust and placed it in his hand.
'Don't come around here no more,' he said.
Marvin stared into Styles's eyes, as though looking for an answer to an ancient question about the nature of evil.
'Who are you?' Marvin asked.
'The man who know a nigger when he see one. You better hoof it, bro,' Styles replied.
Helen and I were on our way back from an inter-agency law enforcement meeting in Jeanerette when we passed the situation in progress in front of the Boom Boom Room. We pulled to the side of the road and told Marvin to get in the backseat of the cruiser, behind the steel-mesh screen.
He threw his suitcase on the seat and pulled the coned brim of his hat down on his brow as we roared away, looking back through the window like a Pony Express rider who had been saved by friends from Indians.
'You crazy, Marvin?' Helen said, glancing in the rearview mirror.
'What's the name of that guy, the one in charge back there?' Marvin asked.
'Jimmy Dean Styles. Why do you ask?' I said.
'I just feel sorry for them people, that's all.' He sprayed his mouth with an atomizer.
Helen and I dropped him off downtown, by the Shadows, his face freckled with the sunshine that fell through the oak limbs overhead.
'He seems to have people of color on the mind,' I said.
'He should,' Helen said.
'Pardon?'
'His mother took on all comers. I always heard Marvin's father was black,' she said.
That same afternoon Clete Purcel drove to the motor court on the bayou, where he used to live, and knocked on Joe Zeroski's cottage door.
'What'd you want, Purcel?' one of Joe's men said. He was bald and wore slacks and a strap undershirt. Pieces of his sandwich were hanging from his mouth while he ate. A television set blared in the background.
'Where's Joe?' Clete asked.
'He ain't here.'
Clete looked through oaks at the bayou, a tugboat passing, the sunlight breaking like glass on the water.
'You want to tell me what I already know, or you want to clean the dog food out of your mouth and answer my question?' he said.
Then Clete drove from the motor court, across the drawbridge, to a Catholic church on the other side of the bayou. He walked inside and saw Joe Zeroski seated in a pew, by a rack of burning candles, in an otherwise empty church. Clete went back outside and waited. Five minutes later Joe emerged in the sunlight, putting on his hat as he exited the vestibule. He stared at Clete.
'You following me?' Joe asked.
'I didn't know you went to church.'
'I burn a candle for my daughter. Why you here, Purcel?'
Joe wore a gray suit and a gray and red tie, and the wind blew his tie over his shoulder.
'The sheriffs department is looking at a guy by the name of Legion Guidry for Linda's murder. I thought you ought to know that,' Clete said.
'What, you owe me favors?'
'You were always straight up with me. So was Frankie Dogs. Who knows, maybe Frankie Dogs was on to the guy. Maybe that's why Frankie got clipped.'
Joe studied the trees along the bank of the bayou, popped a crick out of his neck, as though there were a thought behind his eyes he couldn't deal with.
'I had her cremated. There wasn't no way to fix her face for the funeral,' he said.
'Guidry has a long history of violence against females, Joe. You said it yourself, how many guys like this are running around in one small town?'
'Say this guy's name again.'
Late that evening Clete sat with me at the redwood table under the mimosa in my backyard and told me the story of his conversation with Joe Zeroski. When he finished, he took off his Marine Corps utility cap and refitted it on his head and looked at the purple light in the sky and the wind blowing across my neighbor's cane field, his green eyes red-rimmed with fatigue.
'I thought the drought was over. Two days of dry weather and it's the dust bowl again,' he said.
'You bothered about taking Zeroski over the hurdles?' I asked.
'Joe will probably eat his gun one day. But he never tried to jam anybody who wasn't in the life. I guess if I could feel sorry for a gumball, I do for him,' Clete said.
'We don't have any influence over these guys. Stop trying to orchestrate them, Clete.'
'I think I ought to call him up,' he said.
I squeezed Clete's bicep, hard, my fingers biting deep into the muscle. 'Once and for all and forever, leave Zeroski and especially Legion Guidry alone.' I tightened my grasp when Clete tried to pull away from me. 'Did you hear me? Legion Guidry comes from someplace the rest of us don't. That's a theological statement.'
'Sometimes I wish you didn't share all your thoughts, big mon.'
I awoke before sunrise on Tuesday and walked down the slope through the oaks and pecan trees to the bait shop. The fog was a bluish gray in the fjalse dawn, then the sun broke on the horizon and the fog turned the color of cotton candy and I could see snow egrets rising like confetti above the cypress trees in the swamp.
Batist and I scrubbed down the spool tables, popped opened the umbrellas above them, picked up beer cans and bait cups from the boat ramp, and used a boat hook to gather floating trash from the pilings under the dock. All of this was done under the supervision of Tripod, Alafair's fat, three-legged, silver-ringed pet coon. Then Batist took a break and poured a cup of coffee for himself from a drip pot on the gas burner and dropped a red quarter into the jukebox and played Guitar Slim's 'I Done Got Over It.' The haunting sounds of Slim's music reverberated across the water and into the trees like electronic echoes inside a stone pipe.
'Why'd you play that particular song?' I asked.
'The man talking about getting over it. You don't never get ahead of it. You just get over it. I t'ink he figured out what it was all about.'
'You think Tee Bobby Hulin murdered that white girl?' I asked.
Batist picked up Tripod from a shelf, where he was sniffing a glass jar filled with candy bars. Batist opened the screen and dropped him with a thump on the dock.
'That boy ain't no good, Dave. You don't believe I'm right, ax yourself who he hang around wit'. Jimmy Dean Styles say jump, Tee Bobby say 'How high?''
