“Hang tight, Dave,” Clete said.
He went through the kitchen entrance of the house, the gasoline sloshing inside the plastic container, the road flares sticking out of his back pocket, my coat draped on his shoulders. I followed him and was immediately struck by the density of the heat stored in the house. The fire Gretchen started in the dining room had spread along the carpet and climbed up two of the walls and was flattening against the ceiling. Smoke was climbing in a dirty plume through a hole that probably was once a conduit for the exhaust funnel on a gas-fed space heater.
“Clete?” I called out.
There was no answer.
“Clete! Where are you? It’s a match factory in here.”
I saw a door hanging open in the hallway. The gasoline container was sitting next to the doorjamb. Downstairs I could hear metal clanging and pipes rattling and bouncing on concrete. I went down the stairs, holding on to the handrail. A solitary light was burning behind a central heating unit, and I could see shadows moving on the wall, but I couldn’t see Clete. “What are you doing?” I said.
“They hung her up and beat the shit out of her,” he said.
Varina Leboeuf lay on the floor, surrounded by broken plaster and pieces of water pipe Clete had torn out of the ceiling. Manacles from separate sets of handcuffs were locked on her wrists. When she looked up at me, I could hardly recognize her face.
“She says Pierre told the gumballs to do it,” Clete said.
In spite of his wounds, he picked Varina up on his shoulder and labored up the stairs with her as though she were a sack of feed. “I’m going to finish up here. Take her outside,” he said.
“Time to dee-dee, Cletus.”
“Not yet,” he replied.
I managed to get Varina Leboeuf out on the lawn while Clete went to work inside. I couldn’t tell if she knew what was going on. I believed she was wicked and she used people and discarded them when they were no longer of value to her. I believed she was heartless and mean-spirited and narcissistic and understood no emotions other than her own pain or the pleasure she experienced during moments of self-gratification. I also felt I couldn’t judge her. In her own mind, she thought of herself as normal and believed her misdeeds were somehow necessary. The worst irony of all was that in many ways, her perspective wasn’t totally dissimilar to Tee Jolie’s. They were for sale in different ways, but just the same, they were for sale.
I left her on the lawn and went back inside. Clete had traversed the entire first floor of the home and returned to the kitchen, where the gas container was resting upside down in the sink. He removed the road flares from his back pockets and stared at me, waiting to see what his beat partner from the old First District in New Orleans was going to say. The color had left his face, from either blood loss or exhaustion. I could feel the heat through the dining room wall.
“I checked the old man’s study,” he said. “The place is vacuumed. We’ll never prove any of the things we’ve learned about these people. It’s the right thing to do, Streak. Some of those guys might still be out there.”
He waited for me to reply.
“Streak?” he said.
“Do it,” I said.
He pulled the plastic cap off a flare and inverted the cap and struck the tip of the flare against the striker. When the flare burst alight, he walked into the hallway with it and tossed it into the living room. Either because of the preheated condition of the house or the influx of cold oxygen from outside, the moment of ignition produced a stunning effect. The rooms abruptly filled with the rosy coloration of a sunset during the summer solstice. The glow intensified and seemed to gather in the water-stiffened wallpaper, the oak floors, the walnut balustrades, the antique furniture, and the bookshelves lined with leather-bound collectibles. We backed out the kitchen door into the coldness of the night as the entire house lit up in a strange and sequential fashion, as though someone were running from room to room, clicking on a series of lamps with red shades.
I heard no glass break, no explosion of a gas main, no violent sounds of studs and joists and nails wrenching apart in the heat. Instead, Croix du Sud Plantation was slowly collapsing and devolving back into itself, whispering its own story on the wind, sparks stringing off the roof, the only earthly reminder of the slaves and convicts who had built and maintained it disappearing with it inside the smoke.
Clete and I walked toward the coulee to rejoin Alafair and Helen and Gretchen. Our wounds were severe, but we would survive them. We were out of step and out of sync with the world and with ourselves, and knowing this, we held on to each other like two men in a gale, the fire burning so brightly behind us that the backs of our necks glowed with the heat.
Epilogue
In the spring Molly and Alafair and I returned to our old haunts in Key West, and three days later, Clete Purcel joined us at the motel on the foot of the island. Key West is a fine place to visit, and it reminds me in many ways of old New Orleans, with its gingerbread houses and palm trees and genteel sense of decay and neon-scrolled pretense at vice that in reality is an illusion. At one time it was the real thing. Like South Louisiana, it originated as a displaced piece of the Spanish and French colonial world that floated across the Caribbean and affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States.
Its culture was antithetical to the Enlightenment. Its residents were pirates and slavers and mulatto and Hispanic whores and American adventurers who hoped to create personal fiefdoms in the West Indies and Nicaragua. Its veneer of Christianity disguised a pagan world that provided a home to people who could never live in a society that was Anglo-Saxon in origin and governed by the descendants of Puritans. License and lucre constituted its ethos. Those who didn’t like it could take up sweet-potato farming in Georgia.
Almost year-round, the air was warm and smelled of salt and rain and tropical flowers from all over the world. The winter was not really winter at all, and therein may lie Key West’s greatest charm. If one does not have to brood upon the coming of winter and the shortening of the days and the fading of the light, then perhaps one does not have to brood upon the coming of death. When the season is gentle and unthreatening and seems to renew itself daily, we come to believe that spring and the long days of summer may be eternal after all. When we see the light trapped high in the sky on a summer evening, is it possible we are looking through an aperture at our future rather than at a seasonal phenomenon? Is it possible that the big party is just beginning?
We scuba-dived off Seven Mile Reef and trolled for marlin and, in the evening, cooked redfish wrapped in tinfoil on a hibachi on the beach in front of our motel down at the southernmost point on the island. The waves were black at night and strung with foam when they capped on the sandbars, and toward dawn, when the stars went out of the sky, the sun would rise without warning in an explosion of light on the eastern rim of the world, and the water outside our motel window would be flat and calm and turquoise and blue, dimpled with rain rings, and sometimes a flying fish would be sailing through the air as though determined to begin a new evolutionary cycle.
It was grand to be there on the watery edge of my country, amid its colonial past and its ties to the tropical world of John James Audubon and Jean Lafitte and missionaries who had knelt in the sand in the belief that they had found paradise. I wanted to forget the violence of the past and the faces of the men we had slain. I wanted to forget the dissembling and prevarications that constituted the official world in which I made my living, and most of all, I wanted to forget the lies that I had told others about the events on the bayou.
They were lies of omission. The larger truth about the oil blowout on the Gulf of Mexico was not one that many people were interested in. Corporate villains are loathsome. Almost all of them avoid media exposure because they come across as corrupt, arrogant, and tone-deaf. We stare at their testimony before a congressional committee and ask ourselves how this or that gnome of a man was allowed to do so much damage to the rest of us. None of these men can function without sanction. Nations, like individuals, give up an addiction or a vice when they’re ready and not until then. In the meantime, you can join Candide in his garden or drive yourself crazy proselytizing those who have no interest in your crusade, such as the street people in Mallory Square. These may not be the happiest alternatives in the world, but they’re the only ones that I’ve been able to come up with.
Helen Soileau returned to her job, and after fighting with insomnia and nightmares for two months, she began
