fascinated by the mystery that hid in women’s eyes and the way they kept their secrets to themselves and dressed for one another rather than for men? Why should age stop him from being who he was? The seventh-inning stretch was just the seventh-inning stretch. The game wasn’t over until the last pitch in the bottom of the ninth. And sometimes the game went into extra innings.
He was almost home free in his thought processes, ready to get back on that old-time boogie-woogie, when he looked out at the bay and the flooded cypress trees strung with moss and a green rain cloud that had moved across the sun. Where had he seen all this before? Why did this seascape make his heart twist? Why couldn’t he accept loss and life on life’s terms? Why did he always have to seek surrogates for a girl who had not only been taken irrevocably from him but who was irreplaceable? Unfortunately, he knew the answer to his own question. When death stole the love of your life, no amount of revenge ever healed the hole in your heart. You lived with anger and physical yearnings that were insatiable, and you went about dismantling yourself on a daily basis, tendon and joint, for the rest of your days, all the time wearing the mask of a court jester.
He clicked on his radio and turned up the volume full-blast and kept it there until he saw the house on stilts that Varina Leboeuf had described to him. The house was constructed of weathered, unpainted cypress and had a peaked, synthetically coated fireproof roof that blended with the surroundings. She had set up a badminton net in the yard and was batting a shuttlecock back and forth with two little black girls dressed in pinafores that were threaded with ribbons.
He pulled onto the grass and got out of the Caddy. Varina was wearing shorts rolled high up on the thigh and a sleeveless blouse that exposed her bra straps. Her face was flushed and happy, her brown eyes electric, like light trapped inside a barrel of dark water. “Get a racket,” she said.
He removed his porkpie hat and seersucker coat and put them in the Caddy, conscious of his shirt pulling loose from his slacks and the way his love handles hung over his belt. “Is your father back from the hospital?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“He’ll be at Iberia Medical Center for at least two more days. The twins here have been keeping me company. Their grandmother used to work for my father. He’s their godfather.”
“Really?” Clete said.
“Yeah, really. Did you hear some bad stories about him?”
“If I did, I don’t remember them.”
She hit the shuttlecock at him, whizzing it past his head. “Come on, I bet you can really sock it,” she said.
But Clete was a hog on ice, slashing the racket into the net, tumbling over a lawn chair, batting the shuttlecock into a tree, almost stepping on one of the little girls. “I better quit,” he said.
“You did great,” Varina said. “Girls, let’s have our ice cream and cake, then y’all had better run along home. Mr. Clete and I have some business to take care of.”
“It’s somebody’s birthday?” Clete said.
“Tomorrow is. I’m going to take them to the zoo in the morning.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb y’all,” he said.
“No, you’re not disturbing anything. Come inside. Go wash your hands, girls. Let’s hurry up now.”
“I need to make a couple of calls,” he lied. “I’ll wait out here and have a cigarette.”
He watched Varina escort the two girls into the back of the house. Through the window, he could see them gathered around a cake and a carton of ice cream at the kitchen table. He lit a cigarette and smoked it in the wind, unable to dispel his sense of discomfort. Why did the children have to leave? They obviously dressed for the occasion. They could have played in the yard while Clete looked at a photograph Varina had said would be of interest to him.
The twins came out the back door and walked up the road holding hands. Varina waved him inside.
“Think it’s all right for those kids to walk home by themselves?” he asked.
“They don’t have far to go.” There was a smear of ice cream on her mouth. She wiped it away with her wrist. “I was watching you through the window. You looked wistful.”
“South Louisiana makes me think of Southeast Asia sometimes. I’m an odd guy, probably one of the few who dug it over there.”
“You were in Vietnam?”
“Two tours. I was in Thailand and the Philippines. Cambodia, too. But we weren’t supposed to talk about that. I’d go back to Vietnam if I had the chance.”
“What for?”
“I had a girl there. Her name was Maelee. I always wanted to find her family. I think they got sent to a reeducation camp by the VC. But I’m not sure.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was killed.”
“By who?”
“What difference does it make? We used snake and nape on their villes. The NVA buried people alive on the banks of the Perfume River. I helped dig up some of the bodies. When I was in Saigon, there was a place called the Stake where the public executions took place. The French could be nasty, too. The tiger cages and stuff like that. A lot of the Legionnaires were German war criminals. The whole country, north and south, was a moral insane asylum. The people got fucked by the Communists, then by us.”
There was no expression on her face. She opened the icebox door and took out a bottle of tequila and a Carta Blanca and a white bowl of lime wedges. She set the tequila and the Mexican beer and the bowl of limes on the table and took two shot glasses from a cabinet and set them next to the tequila. “I’m sorry to hear about the girl you lost,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute. Pour yourself a drink.”
“I’m not sure I want one.”
“ I’d like one. I’d like for you to join me. Did I say something wrong?”
“No.”
“Because you give me that impression.”
“Why’d you send the little girls home?”
“I told their mother they’d be home before dark. They only have to walk two hundred yards, but if I had thought they were in danger, I would have driven them to their house. I’ve known their family since I was a small child.”
Clete unscrewed the cap on the tequila and poured the two shot glasses full. The bottle felt cold and hard and full in his palm. “Can you show me that photo now?” he asked.
“I’ll be right back,” she replied.
He sat down at the table and salted a lime and took a hit off the tequila, then knocked back the whole shot and chased it with the Carta Blanca. The rush made him close his eyes and open his mouth, as though his body had just been lowered into warm water. Wow, he said to himself, and sucked on a salted lime. He heard the shower running in the back of the house.
He filled his shot glass again, until it brimmed, then sipped from the rim and gazed out the window at the long expanse of the bay, the brasslike color in the water fading to pewter, the sun no more than a spark on the horizon. Varina appeared in the doorway, wiping the back of her neck with a towel. She had changed into blue jeans and beaded moccasins and a cowboy shirt that glittered like a freshly sliced pomegranate. “Come in here,” she said.
“I poured you a shot,” he said. “Do you have another beer?”
“No, that one is for you. Here’s the photo I wanted to show you.”
The next room had no windows and was furnished with only a couch and a rollaway bed covered by a beige blanket with an Indian design. On the couch was a big brown teddy bear that she had propped up against the cushions, as though to surveil the room. Above the couch were two shelves filled with antique Indian dolls, stone grinding bowls, a tomahawk, a trade ax strung with dyed turkey feathers, and pottery whose discernible markings looked hundreds of years old. She pulled a scrapbook from under the rollaway and sat down on the mattress and began turning the stiffened pages in the book, never glancing up at him.
He sat down next to her. It was only then that she turned to the back pages of the scrapbook and removed an envelope filled with photos. “These pictures were taken with a camera Pierre and I both used,” she said. “I think he forgot about a couple of photos he took in a nightclub. I had them developed a couple of years back but never
