That night I listened to his CD down at the bait shop.
The rendition of his new composition, 'Jolie Blon's Bounce,' was the best Acadian rhythm and blues I had ever heard. But I had a feeling the larger world would never come to know the tormented musical talent of Tee Bobby Hulin.
The next morning the sheriff took me off the desk and sent me to New Orleans with Helen Soileau to pick up a prisoner. It was noon when we crossed the Mississippi and drove into the city. While she ate lunch, I went back across the river to Algiers and caught the end of a low-bottom AA meeting off an alley, next to a bar, in the back of a warehouse with painted-over windows.
But this was not an ordinary AA group.
The failed, the aberrant, the doubly addicted, and the totally brain-fried whose neurosis didn't even have a name found their way to the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting: strippers from the Quarter, psychotic street people, twenty-dollar hookers, peckerwood fundamentalists, leather-clad, born-again bikers, women who breast-fed their infants in a sea of cigarette smoke, a couple of cops who had done federal time, male prostitutes dying of AIDS, parolees with a lean, hungry look who sought only a signature on an attendance slip for their P.O.'s, methheads who drank from fire extinguishers in the joint, and Vietnam vets who wore their military tattoos and black- or olive-colored 1st Cav. and airborne T-shirts and still heard the thropping of helicopter blades in their sleep.
When it was my turn to speak, I began to do another Fifth Step, confessing my use of speed, the injury I had done Jimmy Dean Styles, the abiding anger and violence that seemed to afflict my life. But as I looked out into the smoke at the seamed and unshaved and rouged faces of the people sitting around the long table strewn with AA pamphlets, my words seemed twice-told and melodramatic, removed from the problems of people who counted themselves fortunate if they had food to eat that evening or a place to sleep that night.
I took a breath and started over again.
'An evil man did me physical injury. I think I know to at least a degree what a woman must feel like after she's been raped. For this deed and others he has committed, I believe this man does not deserve to live. These are serious and not idle thoughts that I have. In the meantime, I'm possessed of an enormous desire to drink,' I said.
The discussion leader was a gaunt-faced biker with sunglasses as dark as welders' goggles and long silver hair that looked freshly shampooed and blow-dried.
'I'd get a lot of gone between me and them kind of thoughts, Dave. In California I went down for twenty-five and did twelve flat because of a dude like that. When I got out, I married his wife. She wrecked my truck, give my P.O. the clap, and run off with my Harley. Tell me that dude wasn't laughing in his grave,' he said.
Everybody howled.
Except me and a street person at the far end of the table, a man with the glint of genuine madness in his eyes, his blond hair like melted and recooled tallow.
When the meeting broke up, he caught me at the door, his fingers biting into my upper arm, the vinegary stench of his body welling out of his yellow raincoat.
'Remember me?' he said.
'Sure,' I replied.
'Not from New Iberia. You remember me from 'Nam?'
'A guy has lots of memories from the war,' I said.
'I killed a child,' he said.
'Sir?'
'We got into a meat grinder. It was after you got hit. We burned the ville. I seen a little girl run out of a hooch. She come apart in the smoke.'
There were lines like pieces of white thread in the dirt around the corners of his eyes. His breath was odorless, his face inches from mine. He waited, as though I held a key that could unlock doors that were welded shut in his life.
'You want something to eat?' I asked.
'No.'
'Take a ride with me,' I said.
'Where?'
'I'm not sure,' I replied.
There was no place for him, really. He was trapped inside memories that no human being should have to bear, and he would do the time and carry the cross for those makers of foreign and military policy who long ago had written their memoirs and appeared on televised Sunday-morning book promotions and moved on in their careers.
I took him to a motel and put two nights' rent on my credit card and gave him thirty dollars from my wallet.
'There's a Wal-Mart down the street. Maybe you can get yourself a razor and some clothes and a couple of food items,' I said.
He was sitting on the bed in his motel room, staring at the motes of dust in a column of sunlight. I studied his face and his hair and eyes. I tried to remember the face of the medic who had cradled me in his arms as the AK- 47 rounds from the trees below whanged off the helicopter's frame.
'How'd you get to New Orleans?' I asked.
'Rode a freight.'
'The medic who saved my life was Italian. He was from Staten Island. You from Staten Island, troop?' I said.
'The trouble with killing somebody is it makes you forget who you used to be. I get places mixed up,' he said. He rubbed his face on his sleeve. 'You gonna pop that guy you was talking about in the meeting?'
Huey Lagneaux, also known as Baby Huey, had been hired as a bartender and bouncer at his uncle's club because of his massive size, the deep black tone of his skin, which gave him the ambience of a leviathan rising from oceanic depths, and the fact he only needed to lay one meaty arm over a troublemaker's shoulders in order to walk him quietly to the door.
But the uncle had also given him the job out of pity. Baby Huey had not been the same since he had been kidnapped by a collection of white men from New Orleans and prodded at gunpoint through a cemetery, down to the water's edge on Bayou Teche, and systematically tortured with a stun gun.
The club was on a back road out by Bayou Benoit, an area of deep-water bays, flooded cypress and willow and gum trees that under the rising moon was dented with what looked like rain rings from the night feeding of bream and largemouth bass. On Friday nights the club thundered with electronic sound, and the parking lot, layered from end to end with flattened beer cans, clattered like a tin roof under the hundreds of automobiles and pickup trucks driving across it. -
Tee Bobby Hulin was behind the microphone, up on the bandstand, in black slacks and a sequined purple shirt, his fingers splayed on the keys of an accordion whose case had the bright, wet shine of a freshly sliced pomegranate. The air was gray with cigarette smoke, heavy with the smell of body powder and sweat and perfume and okra gumbo. Baby Huey wiped down the bar and began rinsing a tin sink full of dirty glasses. When he looked up again, he saw a sheep-sheared white man in a tailored suit and a tropical shirt walking toward him, oblivious to the stares around him or even to the people who stepped out of his way before they were knocked aside.
'You know me?' the white man asked.
'Hard to forget, Mr. Zeroski,' Baby Huey answered. He bent over the sink and washed the dish soap from his hands and wrists.
'A white man named Legion Guidry just went to the service window. Then I lost him. I hear he's got a camp around here,' Joe said.
Baby Huey's face remained impassive, his gaze focused on the bandstand, the dancers out on the floor.
'You hear me?' Joe asked.
'I knew your daughter. She was nice to people. If I knew who killed her, I'd tell you. That night on the bayou,
