“Don’t tell me that,” she said, turning her back to me, her hands on her hips. The muscles in her upper arms looked like rolls of quarters.
“Helen-”
“Don’t say any more. Just leave. Now. Not later. Right now,” she said.
At quitting time, I drove to Clete’s cottage. The air was damp, the sky plum-colored, and stacks of raked leaves were burning and blowing apart in the wind on the far side of the bayou, the ash glowing like fireflies. I didn’t want to accept that winter was upon us and soon frost would speckle the trees and the cane fields that were already being turned into stubble. I was bothered even more by the fact that dwelling too much on the cycle of the seasons could turn one’s heart into a lump of ice.
Clete was barefoot and wearing unpressed slacks and a strap undershirt and was watching the news on television in his favorite deep-cushioned chair. He poured from a pint bottle of brandy into a jelly glass and added three inches of eggnog from a carton. There was a wastebasket by his foot. A roll of toilet paper was tucked between his thigh and the arm of the chair. “Get yourself a Diet Doc,” he said, barely looking at me.
“I don’t want a Diet Doc.”
“Rough day?”
“Not particularly. What’s with the toilet paper?”
“I get the sense Helen is back on the job.”
“Helen’s not the problem. Magelli called. He says you busted up Lamont Woolsey.”
“Woolsey dimed me?”
“No, the neighbors saw you kick his face in.”
“Things got a little out of control. Magelli say anything about Ozone Eddy Mouton and a broad named Connie?”
“He said Eddy and a female employee were kidnapped.”
“It gets worse. On the five o’clock news, there was a story about a pair of bodies found in the trunk of a burned car in St. Bernard Parish. One victim was male, one female. No ID yet. I screwed up real bad on this one, Streak.”
“Maybe it’s somebody else.”
“A hit like that? Even the Giacanos didn’t kill like that. It’s Woolsey.” Clete coughed and wadded up a handful of toilet paper and pressed it to his mouth. Then he compressed the paper tightly in his hand and lowered it into the wastebasket and took a drink of eggnog and brandy from the jelly glass. I sat down on the bed and pulled the wastebasket toward me. “You coughing up blood?” I said.
“No, I had a nosebleed.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Woolsey went down hard. He got off a couple of good shots. I’m fine.”
“I’m taking you to Iberia General.”
“No, you’re not. Whatever is in my chest is going to stay in my chest. Listen to me, Dave. At a certain point in your life, you accept the consequences of your choices, and you play the hand out. I’m not going to have anybody cutting on me or sticking tubes down my throat or injecting radium into my bloodstream. If I catch the bus with an eggnog and Hennessy in my hand, that’s the way it flushes.”
“Hospitals are bad, and eggnog and booze are good. Do you know how dumb that sounds?”
“That’s the only way I know how to think.”
“It’s not funny.”
He got up from his chair and took a long-sleeve scarlet silk shirt off a hanger and put it on, then sat on the side of his bed and began pulling on his socks.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Taking you and Molly and Alafair to dinner. Enjoy the day, Dave. It’s all we’ve got.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”
“We’re running out of time, big mon. I’m talking about with the Duprees and Woolsey and this phony preacher and Varina and whoever the hell else they’re mixed up with. Look at what they did to Ozone Eddy and his broad. They hate our guts. Gretchen tore Pierre Dupree apart with a blackjack. You and I have been rubbing shit in their faces from the jump. It’s a matter of time before they get even. How about those locks of hair the old man keeps in his study?”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Cletus.”
“You’re not hearing me. Helen doesn’t listen. She thinks like an administrator. Administrators don’t believe in conspiracies. If they did, they’d have to resign their jobs. That’s the problem. In the meantime, we’re waiting for Bed-Check Charlie to come through our wire and park one in our ear, if not worse.”
“What are you suggesting?”
He didn’t answer right away. He poured more brandy into his glass, swirling it, watching the eggnog turn brown before he drank it. “Burn them out.”
“You and I? Like the White League?”
“They’re going to kill us, Dave.”
“No, they won’t.”
“They almost got us in the shootout on the bayou. I dream about it every second or third night. You know what’s worst about the dream? We were supposed to die there. That paddle wheeler was real. Both of us were supposed to be on it, and that son of a bitch is still out there, waiting for us in the fog. But this time they’re going to take everybody. You, me, Alafair, Molly, and Gretchen, all of us. That’s what I see in the dream.”
I could feel a cold wind on the back of my neck. I turned around to see if the door was open, but it wasn’t.
“You okay?” Clete said.
No, I wasn’t okay. And neither was he. And I had no way to set things right. Also, at that moment I had no way of knowing that Gretchen and Alafair and, in her sad way, Tee Jolie would write the fifth act in our Elizabethan tale on the banks of Bayou Teche.
Gretchen had rented a cottage in the little tree-shaded town of Broussard, located on the old two-lane highway midway between New Iberia and Lafayette. On Wednesday morning she looked out her front window at a scene she had trouble assimilating. Across the street, Pierre Dupree was walking a child through the side door of a Catholic church. The child could not have been over eight or nine years and wore metal braces on both of his legs. Gretchen took a cup of coffee out on her gallery and sat down on the steps and watched the church. A few minutes later, Dupree came back outside with the little boy and escorted him to a playground and placed him on a swing and began pushing him back and forth. Dupree seemed to take no notice of anyone around him or the fact that he was being watched.
Ten minutes passed, and Dupree strapped the little boy in the front seat of his Humvee. Gretchen set down her coffee cup and walked out onto the swale and leaned on one arm against the live oak that shaded the front of her cottage. Still Dupree did not notice her. He pulled out on the street and drove toward the only traffic signal in town. Then she saw his face reflected in the outside mirror as his brake lights went on. He made a U-turn in the filling station at the intersection and drove back toward her, turning in to her driveway, the shadows of the live oak bouncing on his windshield. He opened the door and got out. “I didn’t realize that was you,” he said.
“Who else do I look like?” she asked, her arm still propped against the tree trunk.
“If you don’t want to talk to me, Miss Gretchen, I understand. But I want you to know I hold no grudge against you.”
“Why is it I don’t believe that?”
“I guess I’m a mighty poor salesman.”
The little boy was looking out the passenger window at her, his head barely above the windowsill. She winked at him.
“This is Gus. He’s my little pal in Big Brothers,” Pierre said.
“Been at it long?” Gretchen said.
“Just of recent. I was enrolling Gus in the Catholic school here. I’m endowing a scholarship fund.”
She nodded and tucked her shirt into her jeans with her thumbs. “How you doin’, Gus?” she said.
