her fist into a spot right between her assailant’s eyes.
The blow sent him crashing into the wall. She picked up a bread box and smashed it over his head, then opened the door to the pantry and pulled a Stillson pipe wrench loose from a washtub full of tools. The Stillson felt as heavy as a shot put, its serrated grips mounted on a long shaft. Her assailant was getting to his feet when she caught him across the buttocks. He screamed and arched his back in an inverted bow, as though it had been broken, one hand fluttering behind to protect himself from a second blow. Alice swung again, this time across his shoulders, and a third time high up on his arm, and a fourth time on the elbow, each blow thudding into bone.
He stumbled through her living room and jerked open the front door, his nose bleeding through his mask. She hit him again, this time across the spine, knocking him through the screen onto the gallery. She followed him outside, catching him in the rib cage, knocking him onto the sidewalk, beating him across the thighs and knees as he picked himself up and began running down the street, careening off balance, like a bagful of broken sticks trying to reassemble itself.
Her ears were roaring with sound, her lungs screaming for air, her heart swollen with adrenaline. The black kid with the box of chocolate candy was staring at her in disbelief.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“I done what you tole me. I quit my job. I ain’t give back the chocolate bars, either.”
She wanted to say something to him, but she couldn’t catch her breath or even remember what she had planned to say.
“Your cat just run out the door. I’ll go catch him.”
“No, he’ll come back.”
“You ain’t gonna hit nobody else wit’ that wrench, are you?”
The world was spinning around her, and she had to hold on to a tree limb so she would not fall down. Nor could she find breath enough or the right words to answer the boy’s question.
I went back to work at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department on a half-day schedule the morning after the thundershower, primarily because we needed the income. But in all honesty, I loved my job and the place where I worked. The department had been consolidated with the city police and had moved from the courthouse to a big brick colonial-style building behind the library, with a lovely view of a tree-shaded religious grotto and Bayou Teche and City Park on the far side of the water. It was a sunny, cool, rain-washed morning my first day back, and the sheriff, whose name was Helen Soileau, and some of my colleagues had placed flowers on my desk, and as I sat down in my swivel chair and looked at the glaze of sunlight on the bayou and the wind blowing hundreds of arrowpoints across the water’s surface, I felt that perhaps Indian summer would never end, that the world was a grand place after all, and that I should never let the shadows of the heart stain my life again.
Then Clete Purcel came in at ten A.M. and told me he had just gotten a phone call from Alice Werenhaus and that she had been attacked in her house by a masked intruder she believed was Waylon Grimes.
“How does she know it was Grimes?” I said.
“He scalded both of her legs with a teakettle and talked about stuffing her cat in the microwave. Know a lot of guys with an MO like that?” He was pacing up and down, breathing through his nose.
“What are you planning to do?” I asked.
“Guess.”
“Clete, something isn’t adding up here. One, there’s no explanation for your marker being found in a safe owned by Didi Giacano. Didi has been dead for almost twenty-five years. Where has the safe been all this time? His office was on South Rampart, but I thought it caught fire or something.”
“It did. Some PR or marketing guy restored it. He’s from around here. Pierre something. Look, that’s not the point. Alice Werenhaus was tortured by a degenerate who has already killed a child and done four or five contract hits I know of. Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly have been on the planet far too long.”
My office door was closed. Through the glass, I saw Helen Soileau smile and pass in the corridor. “I won’t be party to this,” I said.
“Who asked you to?”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I don’t know what to do. Grimes couldn’t get to my sister or niece, so he went after an old woman, an ex-nun, for Christ’s sakes, the same woman who stopped me from tearing him apart. You think Golightly or Grimes is going to be shaken up by NOPD? That’s like warning the devil about his overdue library books.”
“We were born in the wrong era, Cletus.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We don’t get to blow up their shit at the O.K. Corral.”
“That’s what you think,” he replied.
I wished I hadn’t heard that last remark.
3
I couldn’t sleep that night. Clete had gone off to New Orleans on his own, leaving me with the choice of either dropping the dime on him with my boss or NOPD or letting him founder in the chaos and trail of destruction that had come to be his logo across the entire state. I slipped on my khakis and sat on the back steps and drank a glass of milk in the dark. Tripod, our pet raccoon, was sleeping under a big live oak in a hutch we had recently rain-proofed. His buddy Snuggs, our unneutered warrior cat, lay on his side next to me, his thick white short-haired tail flopping up and down on the wood step. His ears were chewed, his neck thick and hard as a fire hydrant, his body rippling with sinew when he walked. He was fearless in a fight, took no prisoners, and would chase dogs out of the yard if he thought they were a threat to Tripod. It was no accident that he and Clete were great pals.
I’m not being completely honest here. Clete’s problems were not my only concern. I was off the morphine drip, and every cell in my body knew it. Withdrawal from booze and pharmaceuticals is a bit like white-knuckling your way through a rough flight in an electric storm. Unfortunately, there’s another element involved, a type of fear that doesn’t have a name. It’s deep down in the id and produces a sense of anxiety that causes hyperventilation and night sweats. You don’t get to leave your fear on the plane. Your skin becomes your prison, and you take it with you everyplace you go. You walk the floor. You hide your thoughts from others. You eat a half gallon of ice cream in one sitting. You crosshatch the tops of your teeth in your sleep. Every mistake or misdeed or sin in your life, no matter how many times you’ve owned up to it, re-creates itself and takes a fresh bite out of your heart the moment you wake.
That’s why mainline cons say everybody stacks time; it depends on where you stack it, but you stack it just the same.
When the house finally comes down on your head, you conclude that ice cream is a poor surrogate for that old-time full-throttle-and-fuck-it rock and roll, and there’s nothing like four fingers of Jack in a mug filled with shaved ice and a beer on the side or maybe a little weed or a few yellow jackets to really light up the basement.
For those who don’t want to run up their bar tab or put themselves at the mercies of a drug dealer, there’s another recourse. You can go on what is called a dry drunk. You can stoke your anger the moment you open your eyes in the morning and feed it through the day, in the same way that someone incrementally tosses sticks on a controlled fire. Your anger allows you to mentally type up your own menu, with many choices on it. You can become a moralist and a reformer and make the lives of other people miserable. You can scapegoat others and inflame street mobs or highjack religion and wage wars in the name of a holy cause. You can spit in the soup from morning to night and stay as high as a helium balloon in a windstorm without ever breaking a sweat. When a drunk tells you he doesn’t have a problem anymore because he has quit drinking, flee his presence as quickly as possible.
As I looked out at the reflection of moonlight on the bayou, I thought of Tee Jolie Melton and the music that no one heard except me. Had I become delusional? Maybe. But here’s the rub. I didn’t care. Long ago I had come to believe that the world is not a rational place and that only the most self-destructive of individuals convince themselves that it is. Those who change history are always rejected in their own era. As a revolutionary people, we Americans won an improbable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don’t put on a peaked hat and
