immediate environment.
I snugged the stock of the shotgun against my shoulder and aimed at the silhouette. “I win, you lose. Throw your piece down. Make sure I hear it hit the ground,” I said.
But he chose otherwise. That was when I pulled the trigger. My shells were loaded with double-aught buckshot. My guess was he took most of the pattern in the face.
I ejected the empty casing and moved farther down the slope. Weingart was on his back, still alive, strangling on his own blood. I picked up his.25 auto and dropped it in my pocket.
“Robert?” I heard Kermit call. When there was no reply, he said, “Robbie, where are you? Are you hurt?”
I remained motionless by a slash pine and waited. My palms were sweating on the twelve-gauge. I thought I heard a siren coming down Main. The moon moved out from behind a cloud; a solitary band of cold light broke through the canopy and I saw Kermit standing three feet from an enormous live oak, one in whose heart the rusted mooring chains of a slave ship were encased in the wood.
“Last chance, Kermit,” I said.
He held both hands straight out by his sides, like a man surrendering himself for crucifixion. He was holding my.45 in his right hand. “Do it. I want you to,” he said.
“That’s a job for the state of Louisiana. Bend down slowly, your left hand on your head, and place my weapon on the ground.”
“Sure,” he said. But he made no move.
“You told Alafair this is your crucifixion year. Sorry, Kermit, but you just don’t make the cut.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. You couldn’t even get a job as the Good Thief.”
I thought I heard the back door of the house slam behind me. But I couldn’t look away from Kermit. I saw him spread his feet in a shooter’s position and fold his hands in front of him, and I knew my.45 was aimed directly at my face.
The blast from the shotgun knocked him through a camellia bush. I think he cried out, but I can’t be sure. My ears were ringing, the air tannic with the smell of burnt gunpowder. My shoulder ached and my face was swollen out of shape from the blows I had taken in the house, the skin electric to the touch. I ejected the empty casing from the shotgun and watched it roll smoking down the embankment. Then I heard feet running behind me as Clete yelled from the back steps, “Dave, look out, she had a piece in her purse!”
I started to turn around, my left hand working the pump on the twelve-gauge, but it was too late. Carolyn Blanchet had slowed to a brisk walk, slow enough to aim with one outstretched arm, her face twisted like a harridan’s. “You thought you could talk to me like that? Who do you think you are?” she said.
And she shot me in the back.
Strangely, I felt little pain. The blow was like a smack from a fist between the shoulder blades, just enough to knock the breath out of me, to buckle my knees for a second or two, to make the trees and the bayou lose shape, to make me drop the shotgun and stumble down the slope to the place I knew I was now going.
I could see the paddle wheeler in the fog, a gangway lowered in the shallows. Behind me, Clete was lumbering off balance down the incline, calling my name. Maybe he shot Carolyn Blanchet, but I couldn’t be sure. The sounds inside my head were impossible to separate. I saw Molly and Alafair saying good-bye to me, and Tripod and Snuggs walking back up the slope to the house. I saw a black medic from my platoon pressing a cellophane cigarette wrapper on a hole in my lung, saying,
I saw my father, Big Al, in his tin hard hat and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory, in the pillbox hat she was so proud of, both of them on the bow, smiling, coming toward me. I saw men from my platoon, their rent fatigues laundered, their wounds glowing with a white radiance, and I saw boys in sun-bleached butternut and tattered gray, and I saw Golden Glove boxers from the state finals of 1956 and black musicians from Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon. I saw grifters and martyred Maryknollers and strippers and saints and street people of every kind, and until that moment, I never realized how loving and beautiful human beings could be.
I heard the paddle wheel churn to life on the stern, showering the air with its spray. Then I saw Clete emerge from the fog on the bank, his face white from blood loss, his clothes streaked with water and dotted with mud. He stumbled up the gangway like an irascible drunk wrecking a party, wrapping his arms around me, locking his hands behind my back, pulling me back down toward the bank. His mouth was pressed against the side of my head, and I could hear the hoarseness of his voice an inch from my ear: “You can’t go, Streak. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”
And that’s the way it went in the year 2009, the two of us locked together on a gangplank on the banks of Bayou Teche, in New Iberia, Louisiana, praying for the pinkness of another dawn, like finding safe harbor inside a giant conch shell, the winds of youth and spring echoing eternally.
James Lee Burke
