'You don't even know that it's him,' Weldon said.
'Do you want me to go up there?' Drew said.
Good ole Drew, I thought. Always letter-high and right down the middle. She stood by the bar, her weight resting on one foot, her thick, round arms covered with tan and freckles.
'No, I'll do it,' Lyle said.
'Why do you keep stirring up the past all the time?' Weldon said. 'If it's not moving, don't poke it. Why don't you learn that?'
'Have another beer, Weldon,' Lyle said.
'Lyle, this is your craziness. Don't act like somebody else is responsible,' Weldon said.
Lyle got up from his chair and walked across the lawn toward the garage apartment.
'Lord h'ep me Jesus,' he said to no one in particular.
Later, he came back down the stairs. Then, a few minutes later, the man who called himself Vic Benson stepped out the door and walked slowly down the stairs, a shaft of late sunlight breaking across his destroyed face.
He wore a frayed white shirt that was gray with washing and creaseless shiny black trousers that were hitched tightly around his bony hips. People glanced once at his face, then focused intensely on their conversations with the people next to them. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth, and the paper was wet with saliva all the way down to the glowing ash.
His eyes made you think he was being entertained by a private joke. He stopped by the edge of the patio, threw his cigarette into a flower bed, and picked up an empty glass off the bar. Then he knotted up a handful of mint from a silver bowl and bruised it around the inside of the glass.
'What you having, sub?' the black bartender asked.
Vic Benson didn't reply. He simply reached over the bar, picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel's and poured four fingers straight up.
Lyle rose from his chair and stood beside him awkwardly.
'This is Vic,' he said to Bama and his brother and sister.
'Glad to meet you,' Vic said.
Drew's and Weldon's eyes narrowed, and I saw Drew wet her lips. Weldon stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then took it out.
'I'm Weldon Sonnier. Do you know me?' he said.
'I don't know you. But I heard about you,' Vic said.
'What'd you hear?' Weldon asked.
'You're a big oil man hereabouts'
'I've got a record for dusters,' Weldon said.
'You only got to hit a pay sand one in eight. Ain't that right?'
'You sound like you've been around the oil business, Vic,' Weldon said.
'I roughnecked some. But I ain't ever run acrost you, if that's what you're asking. I seen her though.' He lifted a shriveled forefinger at Drew.
I saw the side of her face twitch. Then she recovered herself.
'I'm afraid I don't recall meeting you,' she said.
'I didn't say you'd met me. I seen you jogging on the street. In New Iberia. You was with some other people. But a man don't forget a handsome woman.'
Her eyes looked away. Bama stared down at her hands.
'Lyle says you're our old man, Vic,' Weldon said.
'I ain't. But I don't argue with it. People abide the likes of me for different reasons. Mostly because they feel guilty about something. It don't matter to me. What time we eat? There's a TV show I want to watch.'
'Yeah, those crabs ought to be good and red now,' Lyle said.
'You cook them in slow water, they taste better,' Vic said. 'There's people don't like to do it 'cause of the sound they make in the pot.'
He took a long drink from his whiskey, his eyes roving over us as though he had just made a profound observation.
Batist and Lyle began dipping the crabs out of the boiling water with tongs and dropping them in the empty washtub to cool. Vic filled half of a paper plate with dirty rice, walked to the fire pit ahead of everyone else, picked up two hot crabs from the tub with his bare hand, and began eating by himself on a folding chair under an oak tree.
'Is that the man you saw at your window?' Drew said to Barna.
Barna's pulse was quivering like a severed muscle in her throat.
'I'm not sure what I saw,' she said. 'It was quite dark. Perhaps it was a man in a mask. To be frank, I've tried to put it out of my mind. I prefer not to talk about it, Drew. I don't know why we should be talking about these things at a dinner party.'
Weldon smoked a cigarette and watched Vic Benson with a whimsical look on his face.
'Weldon?' Drew said.
'What?'
'Say something.'
'What do you want me to say?'
'Is it him?'
'Of course it's him. I'd recognize that old sonofabitch if you melted him into glue.'
Bootsie and I got in the serving line, then tried to isolate ourselves from the Sonniers' conversation. But Barna was having her troubles with it, too. She made a mess of shelling the crab on her plate, spraying her dress and face with juice when she squeezed a claw between the nutcrackers, then rushing from the table as though the deck of the Titanic had just tilted under her.
When, she returned from the bathroom, her face was fresh and composed and her eyes were rekindled with an ethereal blue light.
'My, I didn't realize it had gotten so late,' she said. 'We must be running, Weldon.'
'Give it a minute. Bobby's not going anywhere,' he said.
But he wasn't looking at her. His eyes were still on Vic Benson, who was hunkered forward on the folding chair under the oak tree, drinking another glass of whiskey as though it were Kool-Aid.
'I don't want him to think we've forgotten his birthday,' she said.
'Maybe he'd like for you to forget it, Bama. Maybe that's why he has the wrinkles chemically rinsed out of his face,' Weldon said.
'I think that's an unkind remark to make, Weldon,' she said.
But he wasn't listening to her.
'You know, the old fart did a lot of bad things to us,' he said. 'But there's one that always stuck in my mind.' He shook his head back and forth. 'He caught me whanging it when I was about thirteen, and he clipped a clothespin on my penis and made me stand out in the backyard like that for a half hour.'
'Hey, ease up, Weldon,' Lyle said.
'I insist that we not continue this,' Bama said.
Bootsie was already excusing herself from the table, and I was looking at my watch.
'You're right, damn it,' Weldon said. 'Let's drive the nail in this bullshit, give Bobby his present, then come back for some serious drinking.'
Weldon got up from his chair and walked toward the tree under which Vic Benson sat.
'What are you going to do?' Lyle said. Then, 'Weldon?'
But he paid no attention. He was talking to Vic Benson now, his back to us, his big hands gesturing, while Benson looked up at him silently. Then Benson set his glass down and rose to his feet. Clemmie poured the water from the caldron into the fire pit, and steam billowed out of the bricks and drifted across Benson and Weldon's bodies.
We couldn't hear what Weldon said, but the puckered skin of Benson's face was pulled back from his mouth in a leer of teeth and blackened gums, and his thin shoulders were as rectangular and stiff as if they were made of wire.
