It ain't shoe polish, darling'. It ain't gonna rub off on you. Why you looking for him?'
'He helped murder a sheriff's deputy.'
She looked out the French doors at the jungle of potted geraniums, philodendron, and banana trees on her balcony.
'You ain't got to look for him, Mr. Streak. 'that boy ain't got a long way to run,' she said.
'What do you mean?'
'I told him it ain't no accident he got that tiger on his arm. I told him tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. Just like in the Bible, glowing out there in the trees. That tiger gonna, eat him.'
'I respect your wisdom and your experience, Tante Majorie, but I need to find this man.'
She twisted a strand of hair between her fingers and gazed thoughtfully at a calico cat nursing a half-dozen kittens in a cardboard box.
'Every noon I send out astrology readings for people on my list,' she said. 'He's one of them people. But Raintree ain't the name he give me. I don't 'member the name he give me. Maybe you ain't suppose to find him, Mr. Streak.'
'My name's Dave, Tante Majorie. Could I see your list?'
'It ain't gonna he'p. His kind come with a face, what they get called don't matter. They come out of the womb without no name, without no place in the house where they're born, without no place down at a church, a school, a job down at a grocery sto', there ain't a place or a person they belong to in this whole round world. Not till that day they turn and look at somebody at the bus stop, or in the saloon, or sitting next to them in the hot-pillow house, and they see that animal that ain't been fed in that other person's eyes. That's when they know who they always been.'
Then she went into the back of the apartment and returned with several sheets of typing paper in her hand.
'I got maybe two hundred people here,' she said. 'They're spread all over Lou'sana and Mississippi, too.'
'Well, let's take a look,' I said. 'You see, Tante Majorie, the interesting thing about these guys is their ego. So when they use an alias they usually keep their initials. Or maybe their aliases have the same sound value as their real names.'
Her list was in alphabetical order. I sorted the pages to the 'R's.'
'How about Elton Rubert?' I asked.
'I don't 'member it, Mr. Davis. My clerk must have put it down, and he don't work here anymore.'
'My name is Dave, Tante Majorie. Dave Robicheaux. Where's your clerk now?'
'He moved up to Ohio, or one of them places up North.'
I wrote down the mailing address of Elton Rubert, a tavern in a small settlement out in the Atchafalaya basin west of Baton Rouge.
'Here's my business card,' I said. 'If the man in the photo shows up here again, read his palm or whatever he wants, then call me later. But don't question him or try to find out anything about him for me, Tante Majorie. You've already been a great help.'
'Give me your hand.'
'I beg your pardon?' She reached out and took my hand, stared into my palm and kneaded it with her fingers. Then she stroked it as though she were smoothing bread dough.
'There's something I ain't told you,' she said. 'The last time that man was in here, I read his hand, just like I'm reading yours. He axed me what his lifeline was like. What I didn't tell him, what he didn't know, was he didn't have no lifeline. It was gone.'
I looked at her.
'You ain't understood me, darling',' she said. 'When your lifeline's gone, his kind get it back by stealing somebody else's.' She folded my thumb and fingers into a fist, then pressed it into a ball with her palms. I could feel the heat and oil in her skin. 'You hold on to it real hard, Mr. Streak. That tiger don't care who it eat.'
I had had trouble finding a parking place earlier and had left my pickup over by Rampart Street, not far from the lberville welfare project. When I rounded the corner I saw the passenger door agape, the window smashed out on the pavement, the flannel-wrapped brick still in the gutter. The glove box had been rifled and the stereo ripped out of the panel, as well as most of the ignition wires, which hung below the dashboard like broken spaghetti ends.
Because First District headquarters was only two blocks away, it took only an hour to get a uniformed officer there to make out the theft report that my insurance company would require. Then I walked to a drugstore on Canal, called Triple A for a wrecker, and called Bootsie and told her that I wouldn't be home as I had promised, that with any luck I could have the truck repaired by late tomorrow.
'Where will you stay tonight?' she asked.
'At Clete's.'
'Dave, if the truck isn't fixed tomorrow, take the bus back home and we'll go get the truck later. Tomorrow's Friday. Let's have a nice weekend.'
'I may have to check out a lead on the way back. It might be a dud, but I can't let it hang.'
'Does this have to do with Drew?'
'No, not at all.'
'Because I wouldn't want to interfere.'
'This may be the guy who tried to take my head off with a crowbar.'
'Oh God, Dave, give it up, at least for a while.'
'It doesn't work that way. The other side doesn't do pit stops.'
'How clever,' she said. 'I'll leave the answering machine on in case we're in town.'
'Come on, Boots, don't sign off like that.'
'It's been a long day. I'm just tired. I don't mean what I say.'
'Don't worry, everything's going to be fine. I'll call in the morning. Tell Alafair we'll go crabbing on the bay Saturday.'
I was ready to say goodnight, then she said, as though she were speaking out of a mist, 'Remember what they used to teach us in Catholic school about virginity? They said it was better to remain a virgin until you married so you wouldn't make comparisons. Do you ever make comparisons, Dave?'
I closed my eyes and swallowed as a man might if he looked up one sunny day and felt the cold outer envelope of a glacier sliding unalterably into his life.
When I was recuperating from the bouncing Betty that sent me home from Vietnam, and I began my long courtship with insomnia, I used to muse sometimes on what were the worst images or degrees of fear that my dreams could present me with. In my innocence, I thought that if I could face them in the light of day, imagine them perhaps as friendly gargoyles sitting at the foot of my bed, even hold a reasonable conversation with them, I wouldn't have to drink and drug myself nightly into another dimension where the monsters were transformed into pink zebras and prancing giraffes. But every third or fourth night I was back with my platoon, outside an empty ville that stunk of duck shit and unburied water buffalo; then as we lay pressed against a broken dike in the heated, breathless air, we suddenly realized that somebody back at the firebase had screwed up bad, and that the 105 rounds were coming in short.
The dream about an artillery barrage can be as real as the experience. You want to burrow into the ground like an insect; your knees are pulled up in a fetal position, your arms squeezed over your pot. Your fear is so great that you think the marrow in your skull will split, the arteries in your brain will rupture from their own dilation, blood will fountain from your nose. You will promise God anything in order to be spared. Right behind you, geysers of mud explode in the air and the bodies of North Vietnamese regulars are blown out of their graves, their bodies luminescent with green slime and dancing with maggots.
I had seen Vietnamese civilians who had survived B-52 raids. They were beyond speech; they trembled all over and made mewing and keening sounds that you did not want to take with you. When I would wake from my dream my hands would shake so badly that I could hardly unscrew the cap on the whiskey bottle that I kept hidden under my mattress.
As I slept on Clete's couch that night, I had to deal with another creation of my unconscious, one that was no less difficult than the old grainy filmstrips from Vietnam. In my dream I would feel Bootsie next to me, her nude body warm and smooth under the sheet. I would put my face in her hair, kiss her nipples, stroke her stomach and
