“That’s right, there wasn’t.”
“Then what were you hiding from me?”
“I don’t remember that happening, Clete,” I said.
He rotated his head as though his collar was too tight, his eyes uplifted at the sky and the electricity playing in the clouds. “I had a dream last night. There was a big clock on my nightstand, one of those windup jobs. The cover on the face was gone. Then some guy came in the room. I tried to see who he was, but all I could see were his eyes looking at me out of a hood. I kept saying to him, ‘Who are you?,’ but he wouldn’t answer. I tried to get my piece off the dresser, but something was holding me down on the bed, like somebody was sitting on my chest. He walked over to the nightstand and picked up the clock and broke off the hands. Then he put the clock back down and walked out of the room. I still never saw who he was.”
“It was just a dream,” I said, trying to keep my face empty, trying to forget the room I had rented in Natchez with a clock that had no cover and no hands.
“Dave, we need to get rid of this Abelard gig. It stank from the jump. Nobody is interested in those dead girls except us. I say we smoke the guys who tried to hurt us and let somebody else add up the score. If we bend the rules, screw it. The guy who clicks off your switch is always the one you never see coming. I don’t want to buy it like that.”
“We’re going to be okay,” I said. “We always come through things, don’t we?”
“It’s waiting for us. Out there. I can feel it.” He waved his hand at the air as though swatting away insects. “It’s like a red laser dot crawling all over us.”
“You never rattled. Not in the Channel or the Desire. Not even in Nam or El Sal.”
“You don’t get it. I’m not talking about me. It’s you. I can see it in your eyes when you think nobody is looking. You see it coming. Stop jerking me around.”
I hooked my arm around his neck. “Let’s go back inside and check out these guys,” I said. “Maybe give them something to remember.”
“What’d you see on the bayou, Dave?”
I didn’t reply and squeezed his neck as though we were two boys in a wrestling match. Then we went inside, Clete behind me, his mouth small and downturned at the corners, his behemoth physique about to split the seams of his clothes.
THE DINERS FILLED their plates and sat at big round tables in a banquet room, at the head of which was a podium and a microphone. Clete and I sat on folding chairs against the back wall. No one seemed to take particular notice of us. Clete kept leaning forward, his hands on his knees, studying the room, the diners, the men who drifted out to the bar and returned with a highball or a dessert for a wife or girlfriend. When the general was introduced and walked to the podium, the entire room rose and applauded. He was tall and wore a gray suit with stripes in it, and was erect in his carriage for a man his age. His clean features and the white strands in his hair gave him the genteel appearance of Wordsworth’s happy warrior, but there was a visceral Jacksonian edge about him, physical incongruities that suggested a humble background not altogether consistent with his dress and manner. His ears were too large for his head, and there were lumps of cartilage under his jaw. His hands were square and rough-looking, his wrists ridged with bone where they protruded from his white cuffs. His facial skin creased superficially with his smile, exposing his teeth, which looked tiny and sharp-edged in his mouth. But it was the martial light in his eyes that you remembered most. It was like that of a choleric man who kept his wounds green and treasured his anger and drew on it the way one turns up the heat register when necessary.
Clete watched him, biting on a hangnail, spitting it off the end of his tongue. “I saw that dude at Da Nang,” he said.
“What did you think of him?”
“I don’t remember,” he replied. “He was standing under an awning. We were standing in the rain. Yeah, I remember that. The rain falling on all those steel pots while he was talking to us.”
The general had a prepared speech in his hands. But before beginning it, he paused and stared into the crowd, his face brightening. “I know when I’m among the right kind of people,” he said. “I was walking through the parking lot a few minutes ago, and I saw a bumper sticker I must share with you. It said, ‘Earth First! We’ll drill the rest of the planets later!’”
The audience roared with laughter.
But Clete was not listening to the general’s joke and the audience’s appreciation of it. He was peering at a table in the corner where Timothy Abelard was sitting in a wheelchair, his grandson, Kermit, seated on one side of him and his caretaker, Jewel, on the other. Also at the table was a dark-skinned man who had a thin nose and wore a pencil mustache and whose lacquered black hair resembled a cap. The other man at the table had his back to us, and I could not see his face. His hair was boxed on the back of his neck, and his right shoulder seemed to hang lower than his left, as though he were uncomfortable in his chair or experiencing lower-back pain, trying to shift the pressure off his spine.
“I thought you said Kermit Abelard was the liberal in the family,” Clete said to me.
“Kermit is a sunshine patriot.”
“A what?”
“Read Thomas Paine.”
“I don’t need to. He treated Alafair dirty. He’s a four-flusher and a punk, if you ask me. Who’re the greaseball and the other guy at the table?”
“Who knows? The old man was famous on the cockfighting circuit. He used to fly in a DC-3 to Cuba and Nicaragua with his cocks. He was pals with Batista and the Somozas.”
“I need a drink. You want anything from the bar?” Clete said.
“Take it easy on the booze.”
“I wish I was stone drunk. I wish I was wearing a full-body condom. You think these chairs have been sprayed for crab lice?”
A man sitting in front of us turned around and gave us a look.
“You got a problem?” Clete said.
The man turned his back to us and didn’t reply. Clete leaned forward and punched him with one finger between the shoulder blades. “I asked if I could help you with something.”
“No, I’m fine,” the man said, looking at Clete from the side of his eye.
“Glad to hear it. Enjoy your evening,” Clete said. He went to the bar, scraping his chair loudly. When he returned, carrying a highball glass packed with ice that was dark with bourbon, his gaze was fixed on the Abelard table. “See the guy next to the greaseball, the one with his arm in a sling? There’s a cast or a big wad of bandages on his hand. You clipped a guy’s fingers off at the gig on the river?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“You remember his face at all?”
“I didn’t see any of their faces except the guy who got his ticket canceled.”
“The guy in the sling is hinky. He saw me looking at him and turned away real quick, like he’d made me.”
A different man in front of us turned in his chair, his brow furrowed. “Will you people be quiet?” he said.
“Mind your business,” Clete said.
“Sir?”
Clete leaned forward in his chair. “Call me ‘you people’ again and see what happens.”
I put my hand on Clete’s arm. He pushed it away and raised his glass and drank from it, his eyes already taking on an alcoholic luster, and I realized he had probably had a shot or two straight up before returning from the bar.
“What?” he said.
“Shut up.”
“These guys all smell like Brut. You know what Brut smells like? An armpit. Take a whiff. The barman could make a fortune selling gas masks.”
“Lower your voice.”
“I’m very collected and cool and simpatico. You need to lighten up.” Clete took a deep drink from his glass and filled his jaw with ice and began crunching it between his molars. He tapped the soles of his loafers, creating a staccato like a drumroll on linoleum. Then he said out of the side of his mouth, his eyes lowered, “The guy in the
