“Probably,” Clete said.
“What are you gonna do with that blackjack?” Frankie said, rising to his feet.
“It’s part of my anger-management program. I hit things instead of people. When that doesn’t work, I start hitting people,” Clete said. “Let’s see how it goes.”
He smashed a lamp in half and the glass out of a picture frame on the wall and the glass in a window overlooking the side yard. He went into the kitchen and turned the drying rack upside down and broke the dishes across the edge of the counter and began feeding a box of sterling silverware into the garbage grinder.
With the grinder still roaring and clanking, he grabbed Frankie by the necktie and dragged him to the sink. “One of your skanks told me your nose is too long,” he said. “Let’s see if we can bob off an inch or two.”
“Who pissed in your brain, man?”
“When’d you peel Didi Gee’s safe?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a couple of months ago.”
“Where?”
“In Didi Gee’s old office.”
“Who hired the shooter to cap Golightly and Grimes?”
“How would I know?”
“You’re lying.”
“Yeah, but let me finish.”
“You think that’s cute?” Clete swung Frankie in a circle by his tie and threw him over a chair and against the wall, then whipped the blackjack across the tendon behind one knee. Frankie fell to the floor as though genuflecting, his eyes watering, his bottom lip trembling. “Don’t do this to me, man,” he said.
“Get up!”
“What for?”
“So I don’t start stomping you into marmalade.”
When Frankie didn’t move, Clete pulled him erect by his shirtfront and swung him into the bedroom, knocking his head against the doorjamb and a bedpost. “Pack your suitcase,” he said. “You’re taking the first bus to either Los Angeles or New York, you choose.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“What do you care? You get to live.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Because you’re stupid.”
“You’re trying to save my life? You beat me up so you can save my life?”
“Yeah, the world can’t afford to lose a person of your brilliance. You’ve got three minutes.”
Frankie lifted a suitcase from a shelf in the closet and opened it on the bed and began pulling clothes off the hangers and laying them inside the case. “I got a piece in my sock drawer. I’m gonna take it with me.”
“No, you’re not,” Clete said. He moved between the dresser and Frankie and opened the top dresser drawer and reached inside and lifted out a black semi-automatic pistol. “Where you’d get a German Luger?”
“At a gun show.”
“You’re not a collector, and guys like you don’t buy registered firearms.”
“It was a gift. A guy owed me. So I took it. It’s mine. You don’t have any right to it. Look at the Nazi stamps on it. It was used by the German navy. It’s worth at least two thousand bucks.”
“When you get situated in your new rathole, drop me a card and I’ll mail it to you.”
Frankie looked emptily into space, like a child whose alternatives had run out. “You’re really taking me to the bus station? ’Cause I heard a story about a guy you took out by the lake, a guy nobody saw again.”
“I’m doing you a favor, Frankie. Don’t blow it.” Clete dropped the Luger’s magazine from the frame and pulled back the slide to clear the chamber. He stuck the Luger in his belt. “Time to catch the Dog.”
“How about the airport?”
“The person who put the hit on you has probably broken into your credit cards. So I’m paying for your ticket out of my own pocket. That means you’re riding the Dog.”
“Bix had a new scam going. It was bringing in a lot of cash. But I don’t know what it was. I’m being honest here.”
“The day you’re honest is the day the plaster will fall from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Clete said.
“Why you got to run me down, man?”
Clete thought about it. “You’ve got a point,” he replied. “Come on, Frankie. Let’s see if we can’t get you on an express to L.A. You might even dig it out there. Here, wipe your nose.”
6
Have you ever been told, either by friends or by a therapist, that you’re obsessive? If the answer is yes, I suspect that you, like most people of goodwill, had to accept one of two alternatives. You humbled yourself and ate your feelings and tried to change your emotional outlook, or you realized with a sinking of the heart that you were on your own and the problem you saw was not imaginary and others did not want to hear or talk about it or be reminded of it in any fashion, even though the house was burning down.
My obsession was Tee Jolie Melton. I could no longer be sure she had visited me in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, but I had no doubt her message to me was real, transmitted perhaps in ways that are not quite definable. Many years back I gave up all claim to a rational view of the world and even avoided people who believed that the laws of physics and causality have any application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.
There were only three leads in the disappearance of Tee Jolie, and all were tenuous: I had seen a group photo in her scrapbook taken at a zydeco club, with Bix Golightly in the background; at the recovery unit, she had indicated she feared for her life because of knowledge she had about the oil-well blowout in the Gulf; the boat that abducted her sister may have been a Chris-Craft, with a thick-bodied fish painted on the bow.
I had left out one other element in the story: She was unmarried and pregnant, and the undivorced father of her child had asked if she wanted an abortion.
Where do you start?
Answer: Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive-money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire. Let’s face it, it’s hard to sell the virtues of poverty to people who have nothing to eat. In Louisiana, which has the highest rate of illiteracy in the union and the highest percentage of children born to single mothers, few people worry about the downside of casinos, drive-through daiquiri windows, tobacco depots, and environmental degradation washing away the southern rim of the state.
Oil and natural gas, for good or bad, comprise our lifeblood. When I was a boy, my home state, in terms of its environment, was an Edenic paradise. It’s not one any longer, no matter what you are told. When a group of lawyers at Tulane University tried to file a class action suit on behalf of the black residents whose rural slums were used as dumping grounds for petrochemical waste, the governor, on television, threatened to have the lawyers’ tax status investigated. The same governor was an advocate for the construction of a giant industrial waste incinerator in Morgan City. His approval ratings remained at record highs for the entirety of his administration.
In Louisiana, refined or extracted oil is everywhere, sometimes in barrels buried in the 1920s. Working-class people display bumper stickers that read GLOBAL WARMING IS BULLSHIT. Former vice president Al Gore is mocked and denigrated with regularity for his warnings about arctic melt.
Last spring, when the wind was out of the south, I could stand in our front yard and smell oil. It was not buried in the ground, either. It was pouring in thick columns, like curds of smoke, from a blown casing five thousand feet below the Gulf’s surface.
This particular blowout has been referred to again and again as a “spill.” A spill has nothing to do with the
