against her thigh. But all his movements seemed heavy-handed, clumsy, his knees constantly hitting her, making her flinch.
'I jog and lift weights. I've cut down my beer intake to eleven or twelve cans a day. But I keep tubbing up,' he said.
'I think you're a sweet man,' she said.
He knew it should have been a compliment. In fact, he was convinced she was sincere. But he knew there were other words that women used in certain moments, words that were intimate, naked in their expression of vulnerability and love and surrender, words they used rarely in an entire lifetime and that marked a contract with a man that no wedding ceremony ever provided. But these were not the words he heard.
'I think you're a fine woman who's had a bad night. I think maybe the wrong guy shouldn't take advantage of the situation,' he said.
She brushed at his hair with her hand, in almost a maternal way, then mounted him and cupped his sex in her palm and placed it inside her. There was a spray of strawberry freckles on her shoulders and arms and the tops of her breasts. He put her nipples in his mouth and ran his hands down her hips and over her rump, and then turned her sideways in the bed and reentered her, this time on top, and he saw her mouth open and her eyes close and felt her ringers dig tightly into his back.
When she came, her face grew small and pale, then he felt a long, sustained shudder commence inside her womb and a tightening in her thighs and a cry burst from her throat that was strangely more like need and unsatiated desire than it was satisfaction. But he could not sort out his thoughts from the nature of his own desire and the incredible loveliness of her face, the smallness of her mouth that in the dark looked like a purple flower, the caress and grace of her thighs, and the heat of her womb, the orgasm that broke inside him and rushed out of his body in a way he had never experienced before, like a burst of white light that had nothing to do with the self or the fear and hunger and sometimes rage that characterized his life.
He sat up on the side of the bed and kissed her hands and her forehead and traced her features with his fingers. Her arms lay by her sides now, the sheet pulled to her navel, her head turned toward him in a melancholy fashion.
'You doin' all right?' he said.
'You were fine, Clete.'
But the answer did not fit the question he had asked, and he searched her eyes and found no explanation for the strange sense of disquiet he felt.
'Dave and I were always the odd pieces at NOPD. He got fired and I had to run for a plane to Guatemala. Both of us learned too late not to fight with the bastards,' he said.
She covered his hand with hers. But her eyes were focused beyond him, over his shoulder, and she was not listening to his words now.
'Clete, a shadow just went across the screen,' she said.
He pulled on his pants and walked shirtless and barefoot out on the veranda. He smelled cigarette smoke, then heard footsteps leave the stairs down below and head across a grassy area toward a side street that led to the drawbridge. But the person was not running, as though he had no fear of apprehension or sense of shame at being discovered in a voyeuristic act.
The lamps above the side street were haloed with humidity. He heard an automobile or truck engine fire up, then fade between the buildings as the driver turned into the Friday-night traffic crossing the drawbridge. A burning cigarette glowed in the grass next to the sidewalk. Clete picked it up gingerly with the balls of his fingers and looked at it. It was unfiltered, still wet on the unlit end with the smoker's saliva. He tossed it in a sewer grate, then wiped his fingers on his pants.
On his way upstairs Clete saw a Bible on the top step, barely visible in the shadows, a rose stem inserted under the cover.
'Did you see him?' Barbara said when he came back through the door of her apartment. 'No,' he replied.
He put on his shirt and tucked it in his trousers, then stuffed his socks into his coat pocket and slipped on his shoes without tying them.
'What are you doing?' Barbara said. 'That kid with the mush-mouth accent, Marvin something or other? Where does he live?' he asked.
The next day, Saturday, Clete parked his car in my drive and walked across the road and down the boat ramp, where I had propped a ladder against one of the dock pilings and was painting termicide and tar on some of the wood that had started to rot. He sat down heavily in a moored outboard, in the dock's shade, and told me of the previous evening.
'You slapped Marvin Oates around?' I said.
'Yeah, I guess that's fair to say,' he replied. He pulled on his nose and looked into space. 'He told me he left the Bible earlier in the evening.'
'I think you got the wrong guy. Marvin doesn't smoke.'
'There was a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard of his car,' Clete said.
'Unfiltered cigarettes?'
'No.'
'You got the wrong guy, Clete. In more ways than one.'
'Meaning?'
'Bad things seem to happen to people who hurt Marvin Oates.'
'Why did I have all those weird feelings when I saw that milk truck passing by the convent?' he asked.
'Maybe you're like me. You wonder about where you've been and who you are now and what you'll eventually become. It has something to do with mortality.'
'My old man could be a decent guy. He'd take me to ball games and out fishing for green trout. Then he'd get drunk and tell me the best part of me ran down my mother's leg.'
'Time to cut loose from it, Cletus.'
'You think Barbara and I could have a serious go at it? I mean, marriage, lads, stuff like that?'
He lifted his head and looked up at me from his seat on the boat, the water chucking against the aluminum hull in the silence, one of his eyes watery from a shaft of sunlight that fell through the slats in the dock
Later that afternoon Alafair, Bootsie, and I went to Mass. After I took them back home I drove to Iberia General and asked at the reception desk for the room number of Sonny Bilotti. I bought a magazine in the gift shop and walked down the corridor to a double-occupancy room. Bilotti was in the room by himself, propped up against pillows, his jaws wired shut, his eyes raccooned, his lips black with stitches. The windowsill was lined with bouquets of carnations, roses, and hollyhocks, but they obviously did little to cheer the man in the bed, who had probably taken one of the worst beatings I had ever seen.
'Your friend already check out?' I asked.
He didn't answer, his eyes following me across the room as I pulled a chair up to his bedside.
'Here's an
Before he could speak, I heard someone behind me. I turned and saw Zerelda Calucci standing in the doorway, wearing white jeans, cowboy boots, and a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt cut off at the armpits.
'Shit,' she said.
'This is official business, so please get out of here,' I said.
'I have a bone to pick with Clete Purcel. Where is he?' she said.
'I don't think you're hearing me. You need to move yourself out of this immediate environment,' I said.
She leaned against the doorjamb, her arms folded, chewing gum, her black hair hanging almost to her breasts. 'Then hook me up, darlin'. I get wet just thinking about it,' she said.
'You were a rumdum in the First District. You used to hang in Joe Burton's piano bar on Canal,' Sonny Bilotti interjected himself, compressing his words flatly, his head motionless against the pillows.
'That's me, partner,' I said. 'The word is you shanked a guy from the Aryan Brotherhood in Marion. You've got to be stand-up to 'front the A.B., Sonny. Don't let a sack of shit like Legion Guidry get away with what he did.
