his side, turning toward me, his mouth forming a large round O, his breath wheezing out of his throat.
“Clete!” I said. I said it again: “Clete!”
I was on my feet, and the world was tilting sideways, and I could hear a sound like a train whistle screaming inside a tunnel.
Gretchen took the Walther from Clete’s hand and set the safety on it and gave it to Alafair. She put Clete’s arm over her shoulder. “Sit down on the edge of the coulee,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “Give me the gun.”
“What for?” Alafair said.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“No,” Gretchen said.
“Then you do it.”
“What?” Gretchen said.
“Smoke him,” he said. “Do it now. Don’t think about it. He should have died a long time ago. Don’t give this guy a chance to come back.” Clete was holding on to the side of the cabin like a long-distance runner catching his breath.
“I can’t do it,” Gretchen said.
“Listen to me. A guy like this re-creates his evil over and over again. And nobody cares. He put thousands of people in gas ovens. He sent children to Josef Mengele’s medical labs. You’re not snuffing a man. You’re killing a bug.”
“I don’t care what he did. I’m not going to do these things anymore, Clete. Not unless I have to. I’m through with this forever,” she said.
Dupree was sitting up, brushing broken leaves and grains of black dirt off his hands. “Could I have a lock of your hair as a souvenir?” he said to Gretchen. “You wouldn’t mind, would you? Ask Daddy if he would mind. You two are wonderful at melodrama. The little half-kike telling Daddy she’s going to be a good little girl now.”
Clete removed the plastic bottle from the pocket of his trousers and eased himself down on one knee, the leaves crackling under him, his face draining with the effort. The left side of his shirt was soaked with blood above the place where it tucked into his belt. He steadied himself, unscrewing the small cap on the bottle with his thumb, the bottle concealed below his thigh. “How many did you kill in that camp?” he asked.
“The people who died in the camps were killed by the Reich. A soldier only carries out orders. A good soldier serves his prince. An unfortunate soldier is one who doesn’t have a good prince.”
“I got it,” Clete said. “You’re a victim yourself.”
“Not really. But I’m not a villain, either. Your government killed more than one hundred thousand civilians in Iraq. How can you think of yourself as my moral superior?”
“You’ve got a point there. I’m not superior to anybody or anything. That’s why I’m the guy who’s going to give you what you deserve and make sure you never hurt anyone again.”
I realized what Clete was holding in his hand. “Clete, rethink this. He’s not worth it,” I said.
“You got to do something for kicks,” he replied.
Clete pushed Alexis Dupree on his back and pinned him in the leaves with one hand. Dupree’s face was filled with shock and disbelief as he realized what was about to happen.
“Auf Wiedersehen,” Clete said. He forced the spout on the bottle past Dupree’s lips and over his teeth and pushed it deep into his mouth until the liquid Drano was pouring smoothly and without obstruction down his throat.
The consequence was immediate. A terrible odor not unlike the smell from an incinerator at a rendering plant rose from Dupree’s mouth. He made a gurgling sound like an air hose bubbling underwater. His legs stiffened and his feet thrashed wildly in the leaves, and his face contorted and seemed to age a century in seconds. Then a dry click came from his throat, as though someone had flicked off a light switch, and it was over.
Clete got to his feet, off balance, and let the bottle drop from his hand. He stared up the incline at the plantation house. “That fire is spreading. Maybe we should do something about that,” he said.
I had no idea what he meant. I picked up the bottle and walked deeper into the trees and scooped out a hole in the dirt with my foot and dropped the bottle into it and covered it over, my heart sick at the burden I knew Clete would carry for the rest of his life. The pontoon plane streaked past me, lifting out of the fog, banking above a sugarcane field where the stubble burned in long red lines and the smoke hung like dirty gray rags on the fields. As I walked back up the slope, I realized Clete had not gone directly to the house but to a loamy spot next to a clump of wild blackberry bushes on the bayou’s edge and was dragging a heavily laden tarp from a hole, the dirt sliding off the plastic as he worked it up the slope. Two road flares were stuck in his back pockets. He fitted his hands through the grips of two five-gallon gas containers and tried to pick them up. One of them fell hard on the ground and stayed there.
“Help me,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“It’s not over.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“You think I went too far with the old man?”
“What do I know?” I said, avoiding his eyes.
“He had it coming. You know he did. He was evil. The real deal. You know it.”
“Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. I did not let him see my face when I spoke.
“What kind of answer is that?” he said. “Come on, Dave, talk to me.”
I turned and headed up to the house by myself. I could hear him laboring up the incline, dragging one of the fuel containers behind him like a mythological figure pushing a great stone up a hill.
34
Even as I outdistanced him to the house, I knew I was selling Clete Purcel short. You should never keep score in your life or anyone else’s. And you never measure yourself or anyone else by one deed, whether it’s for good or bad. It had taken me a long time to learn that lesson, so why was I forgetting it now? What Clete had done was wrong, but what he had done was also understandable. What if our situation had turned around on us again? What if Alexis Dupree had been given another chance to get his hands on Gretchen Horowitz and Alafair?
For those who would judge Clete harshly, I’d have to ask them if they ever served tea to the ghost of a mamasan they killed. I’d also ask them how they would like to live with the knowledge that they had rolled a fragmentation grenade into a spider hole where her children tried to hide with their mother. Those were not hypothetical questions for Clete. They were the memories that waited for him every night he lay down to sleep.
I was on the lawn and could see the carriage house and the driveway and the towering oak trees in the front yard. I turned around and looked at Clete, still lumbering after me, the gas container swinging from his arm. “What’s going on, gyrene?” I said.
He set the container down, his chest rising and falling inside his shirt. I walked back to him and removed my coat and pulled it over his shoulders. In the background I could see Alafair and Gretchen down by the coulee, helping Helen Soileau and Tee Jolie to their feet.
“It’s not over,” Clete said.
“You’re right. It never is,” I replied.
“You don’t look too good.”
“I’m okay. It’s just a flesh wound.”
“No, there’s no exit wound. Alafair was wrong, Dave. You’ve got a big leak in you. Sit down in the gazebo. I’ll be back.”
“You know better than that,” I said.
But the adrenaline of the last fifteen minutes was ebbing, and my confidence was fading. The yard and plantation house and windmill palms and azalea and camellia bushes bursting with flowers were going in and out of focus, like someone playing with a zoom lens on a camera.
