'Why do you ask?' I said.
'I thought maybe you'd gone to a bar. I thought maybe I'd caused you to do that,' she replied.
'You would never do that, Alf. It's not in your nature.'
She rested her arm across Tex's withers and looked down the slope at the bait shop.
'I think going away to school isn't a good idea,' she said.
'Why not?'
'We can't afford it,' she replied.
'Sure we can,' I lied.
She inserted a booted foot in the left stirrup and swung up in the saddle. She looked down at me, then tousled my hair with her fingers.
'You're a cute guy for a dad,' she said.
I popped Tex on the flank so that he spooked sideways. But Alafair, as always, was not to be outdone by the manipulations of others. She kicked her heels into Tex's ribs and bolted through the yard, ducking under branches, thundering across the wooden bridge over our coulee and out into our neighbor's sugarcane field, her Indian-black hair flying in the wind, her jeans and cactus-embroidered shirt stitched to her hard, young body. I told myself I would not allow Legion Guidry and the evil he represented to hold any more claim on my life. In the damp, sun- spangled enclosure among the trees, I was convinced no force on earth could cause me to break my resolution.
Later, at the office, Wally walked down the corridor from the dispatcher's cage and opened my door and leaned inside.
'That soldier, the nutjob, the one who claimed he knew you in Vietnam?' he said.
'What about him?' I asked.
'He's hanging around New Iberia High. They've got summer-school classes in session now. One of the teachers called and says they want him out of there.'
'What'd he do?'
'She said he's got all his junk piled up on the sidewalk and he tries to make conversation with the kids when they walk by.'
'I think he's harmless,' I said.
'Could be,' Wally replied. His hair was a coppery-reddish color, his sideburns neatly defined. His eyes were bright with an unspoken statement.
'What is it?' I asked.
“You
'No.'
'If you had, you might have seen a note I put in there late yesterday. We got a complaint he was bothering a couple of hookers over on Railroad. On the same corner where Linda Zeroski used to work.'
'Thanks, Wally,' I said.
'Any time. Wish I could be a detective. You guys got all the smarts and stay on top of everything while us grunts clean the toilets. You think I could sharpen up my smarts if I went to night school?' he said.
I checked out a cruiser and drove to the high school. I saw the ex-soldier sitting in a shady spot on his rolled- up tent, his back propped against a fence, watching the traffic roar by. His face was clean-shaved, his hair washed and cut, and he wore a pair of new jeans and an oversize T-shirt emblazoned front and back with an American flag.
I pulled the cruiser to the curb.
'How about coffee and a doughnut, Doc?' I said.
He squinted up at a palm tree, then watched a helicopter thropping across the sky. 'I don't mind,' he said.
We packed his duffel bag, his rolled-up tent, and a plastic clothes basket filled with cook gear, magazines, and canned goods into the backseat of the cruiser, then drove to the center of town and crossed the train tracks to a doughnut shop.
'Wait here. I'll get it to go,' I said.
'You don't want to go inside?' he asked, his face vaguely hurt.
'It's a nice day. Let's eat it in the park,' I replied.
I went inside the store and bought pastry and two paper cups of hot coffee, then drove across the drawbridge into City Park and stopped by one of the tin-roofed picnic shelters next to Bayou Teche.
He sat at the plank table, his coffee and a doughnut on a napkin in front of him, gazing through the live oaks at the children swimming in the public pool.
'You ever been in trouble?' I asked.
'I been in jail.'
'What for?' I asked.
'For whatever they wanted to make up.'
'You're looking copacetic, Doc.'
'I went to the Catholic men's shelter in Lafayette. They give me new clothes and a haircut. They're nice people.'
'What were you doing over on Railroad Avenue yesterday?'
His face colored. He bit a large piece out of his doughnut and drank from his coffee and fixed his attention on the gardens in the backyard of the Shadows, across the bayou.
'You don't have a girlfriend on Railroad, do you?' I said, and smiled at him.
'The woman didn't have no cigarettes. So I went in the store and bought some for her.'
'Yeah?' I said.
'She took the cigarettes, then I asked her why she didn't change her life.'
I kept my eyes averted, my expression flat. 'I see. What happened then?' I said.
'She and the other broad laughed at me. They laughed for a long time, real loud.'
'The report says you threw a rock at them.'
'I kicked a rock. It hit their pimp's car. Take me back where you found me. Or put me in that shit bucket you call a jail. You want a lesson, Loot? Everybody does time. It just depends on where you do it. I do my fucking time wherever I am.' He pointed a stiffened index finger into the side of his head. 'I got stuff in here worse than anything you motherfuckers could ever do to me.'
'I believe you,' I said.
In seconds his face had gone from pity to rage. Then, just as quickly, he seemed to disconnect from his own rhetoric and fix his attention on a butterfly that had just come to rest on a camellia leaf, its pink and gray wings gathered together, its purchase on the leaf tenuous and unsteady.
When the breeze came up, the butterfly fell to the ground, among red ants that had nested below the camellia bush. The ex-soldier, who in my encounters with him had given me three different Italian names, got down on all fours and lifted the butterfly up on a twig and walked it down to the bayou, protecting it from the wind with his cupped hand. He stooped and set it inside a hollow cypress on a mound of moss.
I cleaned up our trash and wedged three fingers inside his paper cup and placed it inside the cardboard box containing the rest of our doughnuts. After I dropped him off on Main, I drove out to the crime lab by the airport and asked one of our forensic chemists to lift the latents on the cup and run them through AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
'We got any kind of priority?' he said.
'Tell them it's part of a homicide investigation,' I replied.
That afternoon Clete Purcel picked up Barbara Shanahan after work, and the two of them drove to a western store, located on the south end of town among strip malls and huge discount outlets whose parking lots were blown with trash. Clete sat in his convertible and listened to the radio while Barbara went inside and bought a western shirt and a silver belt buckle as a birthday gift for her uncle. While the clerk processed her credit card, she felt a sense of uneasiness that she could not explain, a tiny twitch in her back, a puff of fouled air
