gutters on the house with leaves, washing the dust and black lint from the sugar mills out of the trees, sometimes filling the air with a smell that has the bright clarity of rubbing alcohol. These things are natural and good, I would tell myself, but sometimes the ticking of the rain on a windowsill or in an aluminum pet bowl can take on a senseless, metronomic beat like a windup clock that has no hands and that serves no purpose except to tell you your time is running out.
I have never liked sleep. It has always been my enemy. Long before I went to Vietnam, I had nightmares about a man named Mack. He was a professional bourre and blackjack dealer in the gambling clubs and brothels of St. Landry Parish. He seduced my mother when she was drunk and blackmailed her and made her his mistress while my father was working on a drill rig offshore or fur-trapping on Marsh Island. Mack drowned my cats and held his fingers to my nose after he was with my mother. I hated him more than any man I had ever met, and in Vietnam I sometimes saw his face superimposed on those of the Asian men I killed.
Mack lived in my head for many years and dissipated in importance only after I began to assemble a new collection of specters and demons-the shadowy figures who came out of the trees and used our 105 duds to booby- trap a night trail, the suspended corpse of a suicide dancing with maggots that Clete and I cut down from a rafter, the discovery of a child inside a refrigerator that had been abandoned in a field not far from a playground, a black man strapped in a heavy oak chair, his face and nappy hair bejeweled with sweat just before the hood was dropped over his face.
It’s my belief that images like these cannot be exorcised from one’s memory. They travel with you wherever you go and wait for their moment to come aborning again. If you are rested and the day is sunny and cool and filled with the fragrances of spring, the images will probably remain dormant and seem to have little application in your life. If you are fatigued or irritable or depressed or down with the flu, you’ll probably be presented with a ticket to your unconscious, and the journey will not be a pleasant one. One thing you can count on: Sleep is a flip of the coin, and you are powerless inside its clutches unless you’re willing to drink or drug yourself into oblivion.
It was 11:07 P.M., and I was reading under the lamp in the living room. The kitchen was dark and I could see the message light on the machine blinking on and off, like a hot drop of blood that glowed and died and then glowed again. Molly and Alafair were awake, and I could have gotten up and retrieved the message without disturbing anyone, but I didn’t want to, in the same way you sometimes hesitate to answer the door when the knock is more forceful than it should be, the face of your visitor obscured by shadows.
“Did you drop your pills in the bathroom sink?” Molly said behind my chair.
“Maybe. I don’t remember,” I replied.
“Over half of them are gone. They have morphine in them, Dave.”
“I know that. That’s why I try not to use them.”
“But you’ve been taking them?”
“I was taking them two or three times a week. Maybe not even that much. I haven’t felt a need for them in the last few days.”
She sat down across from me, the capped plastic bottle in her hand. She held her eyes on mine. “Can you go without them altogether?”
“Yeah, toss them out. I should have done that already.” But my words sounded both hollow and foolish, like those of a man standing in a breadline and pretending he doesn’t need to be there.
“It’s late. Let’s go to sleep,” she said.
I closed my book and looked at the title. It was a novel about British soldiers in the Great War, written by an eloquent man who had been gassed and wounded and had seen his best friends mowed down by Maxim guns, but I could remember hardly anything in it, as though my eyes had moved across fifty pages and registered almost nothing. “Maybe you and Alafair should visit your aunt in Galveston,” I said. “Just for a few days.”
“We’re not going anywhere.”
I stood up and pulled the tiny chain on the reading lamp. Through the doorway, I could see the reflection of the red light in the window glass above the sink. The driveway was completely black, and in the window glass, the red light was like a beacon on a dark sea. “Tee Jolie is out there somewhere,” I said.
“She’s dead, Dave.”
“I don’t believe that. She brought me the iPod in the recovery unit in New Orleans. I talked to her on the phone. She’s alive.”
“I can’t have this kind of conversation with you anymore,” Molly said.
She went back in the bedroom and closed the door. I sat for a long time in the dark, the message machine blinking in sync with my heart, daring me to push the play button. Maybe with a touch of the finger, I could be back on the full-tilt boogie, free of worry and moral complications, delighting in the violence I could visit upon my enemies, getting back on the grog at the same time, surrendering myself each day to the incremental alcoholic death that preempted my fear of the grave.
The rain seemed to rekindle its energies, thudding as hard as hail on the roof. I walked into the kitchen and stood at the counter and pressed the play button with my thumb.
“Hi, Mr. Dave,” the voice said. “I hope you don’t mind me bothering you again, but I’m real scared. There ain’t nobody here except a nurse and a doctor that comes sometimes ’cause of a problem I got. I need to get off this island, but I ain’t sure where it is. The people that owns it has got a big boat. One of the men here said we was sout’east of the chandelier. That don’t make no sense. Mr. Dave, the man I’m wit’ is a good man, but I ain’t sure about nothing no more. I don’t know where Blue is at. They say she’s all right, that she went out to Hollywood ’cause her voice is good as mine is and she’s gonna do fine out there. The medicine they been giving me makes me kind of crazy. I ain’t sure what to believe.”
On the machine I heard a door slam in the background and another voice speaking, one I didn’t recognize. Then the recording ended.
The Chandeleur Islands, I thought. The barrier islands that formed the most eastern extreme of Louisiana’s landmass. That had to be it. I woke Molly and asked her to come into the kitchen. She was half asleep, her cheek printed by the pillow. “I thought I heard a woman’s voice,” she said.
“You did. Listen to this.”
I replayed Tee Jolie’s message. When it was over, Molly sat down by the breakfast table and stared at me. She was wearing a pink nightgown and fluffy slippers. She seemed dazed, as though she couldn’t extract herself from a dream.
“You’re not going to say anything?” I asked.
“Don’t get anywhere near this.”
“She’s asking for help.”
“It’s a setup.”
“You’re wrong. Tee Jolie would never do anything like that.”
“When will you stop?”
“Stop what?”
“Believing people who know your weakness and use it against you.”
“Mind telling me what this great weakness is?”
“You’re willing to love people who are corrupt to the core. You turn them into something they’re not, and we pay the price for it.”
I took a carton of milk out of the icebox and walked down to the picnic table in the backyard and sat down with my back to the house and drank the carton half empty. I could hear Tripod’s chain tinkling as he dragged it down the wire stretched between two live oaks. I reached down and picked him up and set him on my lap. He rubbed his head against my chest and flipped over on his back, waiting for me to scratch his stomach, his thick tail swishing back and forth. A tug passed on the bayou, its green and red running lights on, its wake slapping against the cypress roots. I longed to pour a half pint of whiskey into the milk carton and chugalug it in one long swallow, until I pushed all light out of my eyes and sound from my ears and thoughts from my mind. At that moment I would have swallowed broken glass for a drink. I knew I would not fall asleep before dawn.
At 6:13 A.M., just as I finally nodded off, the phone rang. It was Clete Purcel. “Gretchen’s back from Miami,” he said.
“So what?” I said.
“She says she found her mother.”
“Keep her away from Molly and Alafair and me.”
