'Not far. Right there,' he said, and pointed across a sugarcane field to a collapsed barn, a rusted and motionless windmill, and some brick pilings that had once supported a house. The field behind the barn was unplowed, and in it were a half-dozen oil wells.
We pulled off the parish road into a weed-grown dirt lane that led back to the barn. Lyle cut the engine, removed a pint bottle of bourbon from under the seat, and unscrewed the cap with one thumb. His hair, which he wore on-camera in a waved conk that reminded me of a washboard, was windblown and loose and hanging in his eyes.
'I own a third of it, a third of them wells out there, too,' he said. 'But I'm not fond of coming out here. I surely ain't.'
'Why are we here, then?'
'You got to go back where the dragons live if you want to get rid of them.'
'I tried to make myself clear before, Lyle. I sympathize with the problems your family had in the past, but my concern now is with a murdered police officer.'
'Drew came home last night from her Amnesty International meeting and she noticed the light on the back porch was out. She went on into the house, and there was a guy in the kitchen, in the dark, looking at her. He had something in his hand, a screwdriver or a knife. She ran back out the front of the house to the neighbor's and tried to get hold of Weldon, then she called me up in Baton Rouge.'
'Why didn't she call the cops, Lyle?'
'She thinks she's protecting Weldon from something.'
'What?'
'I'm not sure. Neither one of them is real convinced about my religious conversion. They tend to think maybe my brain cells soaked up a little too much purple acid when I came back from Vietnam. So they don't always confide everything in me. But it doesn't matter. I know who that fellow was.'
'Your father?'
'I don't have a doubt.'
'Everybody else seems to, including me.'
He took a sip from his pint bottle and looked away at the red sun over the bayou. The wind was warm, and I could smell the reek of natural gas from the wells.
'What does Drew say? What did this man look like?' I asked.
'She didn't see his face.'
'I'll talk to her tomorrow. Now I'd better get back home.'
'All right, I'm going to tell you all of it. Then you can do any damn thing you want with it, Loot. But by God, first, you're going to listen.'
The scars dripping down the side of his face looked like smooth pieces of red glass in the late sunlight.
CHAPTER 5
And this is the way Lyle told it to me, or as I have reconstructed it.
His mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on a burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink uniform, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard, shucking off their feathers in a caldron of scalding water. The father, Verise, came home later than he should have, parked his pickup by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi's, His shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with sweat and black hair.
The mother sat on a wood chair, with her knees apart in front of the steaming caldron, her forearms covered with wet chicken feathers. Headless chickens flopped all over the grass.
'I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint. Like you some kind of big ladies' man,' she said.
'I ain't been with nobody,' he said, 'except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh.'
'You said you'd leave her alone.'
'You children go inside.'
'That gonna make your conscience right 'cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise.'
'I ain't seen her.'
'You sonofabitch, I smell her on you,' the mother said, and swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across his chest and Levi's.
'You ain't gonna act like that in front of my children, you,' he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. 'I said y'all get inside. This is between me and her.'
Weldon and Lyle were used to their parents' quarrels, and they turned sullenly toward the house; but Drew stood mute and tearful under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.
'Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We're gonna play with the Monopoly game,' Lyle said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.
Then Lyle saw his father's large, square hand go up in the air, saw it come down hard against the side of the mother's face, heard the sound of her weeping, as he tried to step into Drew's line of vision and hold her and her cat against his body, hold the three of them tightly together outside the unrelieved sound of his mother's weeping.
Three hours later her car went through the railing on the bridge over the Atchafalaya River. Lyle dreamed that night that an enormous brown bubble arose from the submerged wreck, and when it burst on the surface her drowned breath stuck against his face as wet and rank as gas released from a grave.
The woman called Mattie wore shorts and sleeveless blouses with sweat rings under the arms, and in the daytime she always seemed to have curlers in her hair. When she walked from room to room, she carried an ashtray with her, into which she constantly flicked her lipstick-stained Chesterfields. She had a hard, muscular body, and she didn't close the bathroom door when she bathed; once Lyle saw her kneeling in the tub, scrubbing her big shoulders and chest with a large, flat brush. The area above her head was crisscrossed with improvised clotheslines, from which dripped her wet underthings. Her eyes fastened on his, and he thought she was about to reprimand him for staring at her; but instead her hard-boned, shiny face continued to look back at him with a vacuous indifference that made him feel obscene.
If Verise was out of town on a Friday or Saturday night, she fixed the children's supper, put on her blue suit, and sat by herself in the living room, listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride, while she drank apricot brandy from a coffee cup. She always dropped cigarette ashes on her suit and had to spot-clean the cloth with drycleaning fluid before she drove off for the evening in her old Ford coupe. They didn't know where she went on those Friday or Saturday nights, but a boy down the road told them that Mattie used to work in Broussard's Bar on Railroad Avenue, an infamous area in New Iberia where the women sat on the galleries of the cribs, dipping their beer out of buckets and yelling at the railroad and oil-field workers in the street.
Then one morning when Verise was in Morgan City a man in a new silver Chevrolet sedan came out to see her. It was hot, and he parked his car partly on the grass to keep it in the shade. He wore sideburns, striped brown zoot slacks, two-tone shoes, suspenders, a pink shirt without a coat, and a fedora that shadowed his narrow face. While he talked to her he put one shoe on the car bumper and wiped the dust off it with a rag. Then their voices grew louder and he said, 'You like the life. Admit it, you. He ain't given you no wedding ring, has he? You don't buy the cow, no, when you can milk through the fence.'
'I am currently involved with a gentleman. I do not know what you are talking about. I am not interested in anything you are talking about,' she said.
He threw the rag back inside the car and opened the car door.
'It's always trick, trade, or travel, darling',' he said. 'Same rules here as down on Railroad. He done made you a nigger woman for them children, Mattie.'
'Are you calling me a nigra?' she said quietly.
'No, I'm calling you crazy, just like everybody say you are. No, I take that back, me. I ain't calling you nothing. I ain't got to, 'cause you gonna be back. You in the life, Mattie. You be phoning me to come out here, bring you to
