glaze in their eyes, or the oblique glance, as though an M-1 tank is about to burst through their mental fortifications. They drive their convertibles into automatic carwashes with the tops down, cause psychiatrists and priests to sigh helplessly, leave IRS auditors speechless, turn town meetings into free-fire zones, and even frighten themselves when they wake up in the middle of the night and think they've left the light on, and then realize that perhaps their heads simply glow in the dark.
But they save us from ourselves. Whenever I hear and see a politician or a military leader, a bank of American flags at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy or a deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced myself that setting humanitarian concern in abeyance can be justified in the interest of a greater good, I pause and ask myself what my brain-smoked friends would have to say. Then I realize that the rhetoric would have no effect on them, because for those who were most deeply injured as children, words of moral purpose too often masked acts of cruelty.
So that's when you let go of reason and slip deep into the wobbling, refracted green light of a marsh, with a child as your guide, and let the season have its way with your heart.
Alafair decided to go to a movie with the neighbor's children that evening and spend the night at their house. So Bootsie fixed her an early supper, and just as the heat began to go out of the day, Bootsie, Batist, and I got in her car and, in the lengthening shadows, took the back road along the Teche, through St. Martinville, to the interstate and Baton Rouge.
We went over the wide sweep of the Mississippi at Port Allen, looked out over the crimson-yellow wash of sunlight on the capitol building and the parks and green trees in the center of Baton Rouge, and passed the old brick warehouses on the river that had been refurbished into restaurants and shops and named Catfish Town by the Chamber of Commerce (one block away from a black neighborhood of paintless cypress shacks, with sagging galleries and dirt yards, where emancipated slaves had lived during Reconstruction).
Then we turned out onto Highland, toward the LSU campus, and began to see more and more posters advertising Bobby Earl's barbecue and political rally.
I slowed the car at a congested intersection where directional signs had been nailed to telephone posts pointing to the site of the rally at a public park two blocks away. Many of the cars around us had yellow ribbons tied on their radio aerials and Bobby Earl stickers plastered on their bumpers.
I felt Bootsie's eyes on my face.
'What?' I said.
'Don't be bothered by them,' she said. 'It's just Louisiana. Think about the Longs.'
'It's not the same thing, — Boots. The Longs weren't racists. They didn't sponsor legislation that would make it a twenty-five-dollar fine to beat up flag burners.'
'Well, I'm just not going to let a person like that affect me.
'Yeah, I guess that's why you told Alafair that Bobby Earl was a shit.'
My window was down. So was the window of the pickup truck next to me. The man in the passenger seat, whose chewing tobacco in his jaw looked as stiff as a biscuit, glanced directly into my face.
'You got a problem, partner?' I asked.
He rolled up his window and looked directly ahead.
'Dave..' Bootsie said.
'All right, I'm sorry. Sometimes I'm just not sure that democracy is the right idea.'
'Talk about narrow attitudes,' she said.
'Hey, Dave, that man Bobby Earl ain't been all bad,' Batist said from the back seat.
'What?' I said.
'Mais black folk wasn't votin' for a long time. Now they is. I bet you ain't Vought about that, no.'
Bootsie smiled and punched me in one of my love handles, then reached across the seat and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. How do you argue with that kind of company?
Lyle had tried to do it right. He had strung bunting in the trees, laid out a wonderful hors d'oeuvre and salad table, hired a professional bartender, piped music out onto the patio, and hung baskets of petunias from the ironwork on the upstairs veranda. The lawn had just been mowed, and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly cut grass and the wood smoke curling around the iron caldron on the brick barbecue pit.
He wore a pair of cream-colored pleated slacks, shined brown loafers, and a Hawaiian shirt outside his belt; his hair was wet and combed back on his collar, his cheeks still glowing from a fresh shave. His smile was electric when he greeted us in the side yard and shook hands and walked us to the patio, where Weldon, his wife Barna, Drew, and several people whom I didn't know stood around the drink table. The deference, the unrelenting smile, the nervous light in Lyle's eyes made me feel almost as though he were trying to rearrange all the elements in his life in front of a camera so he could freeze-frame the moment and correct the inadequacies of a past, a childhood, that would never be acceptable to him or finally to anyone who had had a similar one imposed upon him.
But I didn't see Vic Benson, and while we fixed paper plates of chilled shrimp and popcorn crawfish and tried to be convivial, as though we had not all been brought together by a violent event, my eyes kept wandering to the garage apartment where he lived. Clemmie, the black maid who had done time in St. Gabriel, picked up a washtub filled with live bluepoint crabs and poured them skittering into the caldron on the fire pit.
'My, that surely smells good,' Bama said. Her ash-blond hair was brushed out thick on her shoulders, and she wore a yellow sundress, gold earrings, and a tiny gold cross and chain around her neck. I never saw anyone with skin so white. You could see her blue veins as though they had been painted on her with the fine point of a watercolor brush.
'I'm real glad y'all could make it,' Weldon said. He had already put out a cigarette in his plate and was drinking a beer out of the bottle, his eyes, like mine, glancing sideways unconsciously at the garage apartment. 'I'm glad you brought Batist, too. It looks like he's making friends with Clerninie. I hope she doesn't pull a razor on him.'
'Lyle is very good to people of color,' Barna said.
'Lyle's known Batist since he was knee-high to a tree frog,' Weldon said.
'I was speaking of Lyle's kindness to the woman, Weldon.'
'Oh.'
She turned toward me. Her face was as small as a child's.
Her mouth made a red button before she spoke. There was a steady, serene blue light in her eyes, and I wondered how many downers she had dropped before her first highball.
'Weldon is overly conscious about who my brother is,' she said.
'Dave gets a little upset on the subject of Bobby's politics,' Weldon said.
'I don't subscribe to everything my brother stands for, but I don't deny that he's my brother, either,' she said.
'I see,' I said.
'He has many fine qualities of which the press is not aware or which they seem to have no interest in writing about.'
Weldon idly twirled a shrimp on a toothpick between his fingers.
'Actually, today is Bobby's birthday,' she continued.
'We have to leave a bit early and drop off his present at the rally.'
'Bama-' Weldon began.
'It'll take a few minutes. You can stay in the car,' she said to him.
He made a face and looked away into the shadows. A moment later Clemmie passed our table.
'Go up and ask Vic to join us, would you, Clemmie?' Lyle said.
She began clearing paper plates off the glass-topped table as though she hadn't heard him. Her breasts looked like watermelons inside her gray-and-white uniform.
'Clemmie, would you please tell Vic all our guests are here?' Lyle said.
'I got to live on the other side of the wall from that nasty old man. That don't mean I got to talk to him,' she said.
Lyle's face reddened with embarrassment.
'Maybe he doesn't want to come down. Leave him alone,' Weldon said.
'No, he's going to come down here and eat with us,' Lyle said. 'He's paid for whatever he did to us, Weldon.'
