That same evening Clete had a caller he did not expect. When he opened the cottage door, he had to look down to see her face. She was holding a pot of soup with two hot pads. “I put too much in. It’s sloshing over the sides. Where can I put this down?” she said.
She went past him without waiting for him to answer. It was Julie Ardoin, the pilot who had flown him to the island southeast of the Chandeleurs. She set the pot heavily on the stove and turned around. “Dave said you were sick. So I took the liberty,” she said.
“Dave exaggerates. I had a nosebleed,” Clete said.
“Can I sit down?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry,” he said, pulling a chair out from the breakfast table.
“I’m not a ‘ma’am,’” she said.
“You want a drink or a beer?”
She looked around at the general disarray that characterized his room. She wore makeup and jeans and a short-sleeve embroidered shirt spotted with rain. Her hair was damp and shiny under the light. “I had another reason for coming here.”
“Yeah?” he replied.
“I know you and Dave had words on the island. He thinks the world of you. He’d do anything for you. I figured you ought to know that.”
“You came out in the rain to tell me that?”
“What, you think I’m minding y’all’s business or something?”
“No, I meant that’s a kind thing to do. Excuse the way the place looks. I was just cleaning up when you knocked.” He picked up the wastebasket and opened a cabinet under the sink and put it inside.
She glanced at his raincoat and hat on top of his bed. “You fixing to go out?”
“I’m moving my boat from East Cote Blanche Bay, but it can wait. What all did Dave tell you?”
“Just that you were sick and he was worried about you.”
“Out of nowhere he said that?”
“Not exactly. I asked him how you were getting along.”
“Yeah?”
“You want to try the soup?”
Clete sat down across from her. “I ate a little bit ago. Let me get you a Dr Pepper. I keep some iced down for Dave.”
“I need to get back home pretty soon. There’s something you did at the island that I thought was out of the ordinary.”
“Like what?”
“The hippie girl, Sybil. She made some sandwiches for y’all, but you forgot to take them. You went back for the sandwiches so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
“So that’s why I asked Dave how you were doing. Some people you ask about, some you don’t. Do I make you uncomfortable?”
“No,” he said. He coughed softly into his palm and lowered his hand beneath the tabletop.
“Because you look like it,” she said.
He searched the room for the right words. “I’m an awkward guy. I have a way of messing up things. I’ve got a bad track record with relationships.”
“You ought to check out mine. I got married the first time when I was sixteen. My husband played for Jerry Lee Lewis. Does that tell you something?”
“I’m over the hill. I break the springs in bathroom scales. My doc says there’s enough cholesterol in my system to clog a storm drain.”
“You look okay to me.”
“I really like the way you pilot a plane.”
“Give me a monkey and three bananas, and I’ll give you a pilot. Ever hear that one?” she said.
“I know better than that. I was in Force Recon. I learned to fly a slick, and I learned enough to keep a fixed-wing plane in the air if the pilot got hurt.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “You hang out with old guys?”
“You’re not old.”
“Tell my liver that.”
“I heard maybe you and Varina Leboeuf were an item.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“It’s a small town.”
“We’re talking about the past tense. Anything bad that came out of that is on me, not her. Your husband took his life, Miss Julie?”
“I’m not a ‘miss,’ either. And we’re not on the plantation. Why do you ask about my husband?”
“Because it’s rough when you lose somebody that way. Sometimes a person reaches out for anybody who’s available and doesn’t think things through. I’ve got a sheet longer than most perps’. I capped a federal informant. There are some government guys who’ve got it in for me because I fought on the leftist side in El Salvador.”
“Who cares?”
“The government does.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“Streak said you’re stand-up. That’s his ultimate compliment.”
“I hope you like the soup.”
“Hey, don’t go off,” he said.
“Take care of yourself. Watch out for your cholesterol and give me a call if you really dig that old-time rock and roll.”
She opened the door and went outside, splashing through a puddle, getting into her car. He followed her, the rain blowing in his face. “I need to return your pot. Where do you live?” he said.
She rolled down the window and grinned as though the issue were of no consequence, then drove away.
If she had wanted to set the hook, she had done a proper job of it, he thought.
Clete Purcel’s deeds for the rest of the night and the early hours of the following day were not of a rational kind. Even to him, his behavior was bizarre. It had nothing to do with Julie Ardoin’s visit to his cottage, or his addictions, or his abiding need to find approval in the eyes of his father. The concerns that had beset Clete for most of his life had disappeared, only to be replaced by the conviction that every tick of the second hand on his wristwatch was an irrevocable subtraction from his time on earth.
He knew that death could come in many ways, almost all of them bad. Those who said otherwise had never smelled the odor of a field mortuary in a tropical country when the gas-powered refrigeration failed. Nor had they lain on a litter next to a black marine trying to hold his entrails inside his abdomen with his fingers. They had never heard a grown man cry out for his mother in a battalion aid tent. Death squeezed the breath from your chest and the light from your eyes. It was not kind or merciful; it lived in bedsheets that stuck to the body and wastebaskets filled with bloody gauze and the hollow-eyed stare of emergency room personnel who went forty-eight hours without sleep during Hurricane Katrina. It invaded your dreams and mocked your sunrise and stood next to your reflection in the mirror. Sex and booze and dope brought you no respite. When you lived in proximity to death, even a midday slumber was filled with needles and shards of glass, and the smallest sounds made the side of your face twitch like a tightly wound rubber band.
Once you understood that the great shade was your constant companion, a change took place in your life that you did not share with others. Sometimes you quickened your step when you walked through woods in the late fall; at other times indistinct figures beckoned to you from the edge of your vision, their voices as soft as the rustling of leaves, asking you to pause in your journey and rest with them awhile. Just when you thought you were onto their tricks, you discovered the joke that death had played upon you. While you were trying to avoid the natural cycle of the seasons, you empowered evil men to perpetrate upon you the greatest theft of all, enticing you into a manufactured crusade, taking you from your loved ones, robbing you of choices that should have been yours, separating you without warning from the gold-green cathedral given to you as your birthright.
These were the kind of reflections that lived behind the calmness of Clete’s intelligent green eyes. And these
