Robicheaux

Chapter 13

Maximo and Juju went to the hospital, and Clete went to the can. I called Helen and told her I’d be late getting back to New Iberia.

“What happened?” she asked.

I told her. In detail.

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “Have you lost your mind?”

“New Orleans does that to you.”

She hung up.

In the morning I went to Iberia General to visit Rowena Broussard, less out of concern for her than the fact that she had blamed her attempted suicide on Helen and me.

She was out of intensive care and propped up on the bed in a sunny room that gave onto Bayou Teche and live oaks strung with Spanish moss. Her lips were gray, her face pale, her wrists heavily bandaged. A glass of ice water sat on the table next to her. Water had been spilled on the table.

“Levon just left,” she said.

“I came to see you,” I said.

“I forgot. It’s a felony to commit suicide in Louisiana.”

“How about losing the victim routine?”

“You’re a hard-nosed wanker, aren’t you.”

I sat in a chair next to her bed and picked up her water glass. I held the straw to her mouth. She drank from it and laid her head back on the pillow.

“What’s a wanker?” I said.

“A fucking Seppo who doesn’t know where to plant his bishop.”

I thought it better not to pursue any more Australian definitions.

“I heard you put your suicide attempt on Sheriff Soileau and me,” I said.

“You’re right. That’s probably not fair. There was nothing good on the telly, so I thought I’d shuffle off to the crematorium.”

“Were you ever treated for depression?”

“Leave the psychoanalysis at the door, if you would.”

“I’ve had a long relationship with depression, Rowena. It eats at you in ways you can’t describe to others.”

“That’s why you’re a juicer?”

“I’m a juicer because I chose to be one.”

Her eyes held on mine, perhaps with curiosity. Or disdain. I had no idea who she was. I went to the window and gazed down at the bayou. “A Union flotilla came down the Teche in 1863. Twenty thousand Yankee soldiers marched right past the site of this hospital. They raped slave women and set fire to plantation homes up and down the bayou. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’ ”

“Tell me there’s a drop of sense in that, because it sounds like drivel.”

“I think Jefferson was saying that justice eventually comes about but often in an imperfect way. I’m saying I don’t know if you’ll get the justice you deserve.”

“You’re going to let him get away with this?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe there’re others he’s attacked.”

“That’s not his reputation.”

Wrong words.

“I’m the exception? Just out of nowhere he turns into a rapist?”

“At least that we know about.”

“That’s a grand explanation. You’re not responsible for information you’re too lazy to find out about. Lovely.”

“Jimmy Nightingale has no history of abusing women. His problem is ambition and besting his father.”

“Who, I understand, was a walking penis. This gets better all the time. Would you please get the fuck out?”

I left without saying good-bye. I couldn’t blame her for her anger, but I wasn’t sympathetic with it, either. She seemed to nurse it as a friend at the expense of others. I believed Rowena Broussard might take up residence in a black box for the rest of her life.

Out in the corridor, I heard the elevator door open, then found myself looking at the last person I expected to see at Iberia General that particular day. He looked fresh and radiant, as though he had just wakened from a good night’s sleep and was ready to start a new day. A bouquet of flowers in an electric-blue vase was cradled in his arms.

“Are you going where I think you’re going?” I said.

“I couldn’t find anybody to bring the flowers up, so I brought them myself,” Jimmy Nightingale said. “Will you take them the rest of the way?”

“I just got eighty-sixed. I wouldn’t advise going in there.”

“That bad, huh?”

“What do you expect?” I said.

“She knows what happened or, rather, what didn’t happen. I think she’s a bit of a thespian. Is Levon here?”

“No!”

“I’ll toggle in and toggle back out.”

“Leave her alone, Jimmy.”

“Sorry.” He started to walk around me.

“I’m speaking to you as an officer of the law. You’re not going into that room.”

“You’re showing poor form, Dave.”

“If you go in there, you’re going to be under arrest.”

“Then you’d better get your handcuffs out.”

The elevator door opened again. Levon Broussard stepped into the corridor. He remained motionless, staring at us, his lanky frame backlit by a window. His face was as empty as a bread pan. He walked toward us, his eyes never leaving my face, completely ignoring Nightingale. “Why is this lizard standing in front of my wife’s hospital room?”

People are what they do, not what they think, not what they say. But I think we all have moments when we realize we never quite know a person in his or her totality.

“I brought your wife flowers,” Nightingale said. “I’d appreciate your not referring to me in a derogatory way.”

Levon didn’t take his eyes off me. “Get him out of here, Dave.”

“Everything is under control here,” I said, raising my hand.

“Only a psychopath would do something like this,” Levon said.

“Give us a minute here,” I said.

“No, I will not,” Levon said.

“You don’t know how much I admire your novels and your wife’s art,” Nightingale said. “Drunk or sober, I would never do either of you harm. For God’s sake, use reason, man.”

Levon watched a black custodian drag a wheeled bucket of soapy water down the corridor. Then he looked at Nightingale and the electric-blue vase and the roses inside it. “Thank you, sir. I’ll take care of those.”

His fingers were and long and tapered, like a pianist’s or a basketball player’s. He took the vase from Nightingale and walked to the elevator and pushed the button. When the doors opened, he lobbed the vase inside and watched the doors close again. He walked past us to the custodian and handed him a crisp fifty-dollar bill. “I had an accident in the elevator,” he said. “Sorry to make trouble for you.”

“It’s all right, suh,” the black man said.

Then Levon turned around and walked calmly toward Nightingale and me.

“Whoa,” I said.

“Woe unto thyself,” he replied.

He grabbed Nightingale by the lapels and crashed him into the wall, pinning him against it, staring straight into his eyes. Then he gathered all the spittle in his mouth and spat it in Nightingale’s face.

I placed my hand on Levon’s arm. “That’s enough.”

He released Nightingale and stepped backward. I moved between him and Nightingale. “Let’s go, Jimmy.”

Nightingale wiped his face on his sleeve. His skin was discolored, as though it had been freeze-burned; his eyes were full of tears.

“Did you hear me?” I said. “I’ll walk with you to your car.”

“Yes, let’s do that,” he replied.

I rested my hand on his shoulder. “We’ll take the stairs.”

“That would be fine.” He started to look back.

“Step along now,” I said.

“It’s funny how things can go amiss, isn’t it? A wrong word here, a misunderstanding there. I don’t think I’ll ever quite get over this.”

“Let it slide, Jimmy.”

“There’s nothing like moralizing at the expense of another, is there? I must learn the art of it.”

I accompanied him to his car and then went back to the office.

Clete called just before noon. Maximo and JuJu hadn’t filed charges. Clete had paid a fine at guilty court and was back on the street. “I’ll be in New Iberia this afternoon.”

“Did Tony Nemo actually buy your markers?”

“If he did, he screwed himself. I already paid them off.”

“I don’t think Fat Tony will see it that way.”

“He’s one step away from worm food and knows it. You know what I think? Every one of these bastards is scared shitless of dying.”

The gospel according to Cletus Purcel.

That evening brought rain and an ink-wash sky and the throbbing of hundreds of frogs. The air was sweet and cold, and I put on a jacket and opened a can of sardines and poured the juice on top of Tripod’s old hutch and set the can inside, next to a bowl of water, careful not to get the smell on my hands or clothes. Then I sat in a big wooden deck chair outfitted with water-resistant cushions and watched the light go out of the sky and the shadows disappear from the bayou’s surface and the alligator gars rolling like serpents on the edge of the lily pads.

The house was dark except for Alafair’s bedroom, where she was working on her film adaptation of Levon Broussard’s Civil War novel. Boys who had been playing softball in the park had left for the evening, and one by one the floodlamps above the diamond clicked off. I felt my eyes closing and a great fatigue seeping through my body, one that I did not argue with, in the same way that, at a certain age, you do not argue with the pull of the earth. In my dream, I saw the boys in tattered gray and butternut brown marching through the trees in the park, a sergeant with a kepi canted on his brow high-stepping and counting cadence. I walked along beside them and spoke to them in both English and French, once again expecting them to pass by without acknowledging me. But this time was different. They were gesturing, waving me into their ranks.

Now? I said.

What better time? the sergeant said. His cheeks were spiked with blond whiskers, his uniform sun-faded and stiff with salt, white light radiating from a hole in his chest.

I have a daughter who needs me.

We all get to the same place. She’ll be joining us one day as well.

You wouldn’t talk like that if you had a daughter.

I had a son, though. The blue-belly who put a ball through my heart didn’t care about him or me.

If God had a daughter, I bet He wouldn’t have let her die on a cross.

Then perhaps you belong among the quick. Right you are, sir. Top of the evening to you.

The column disappeared inside the fog. I felt a weight bounce sharply on my lap and tumble off my knees. I thought I had wakened, then realized I was still dreaming, because I saw a raccoon waddling through the leaves, his furry tail flicking like a fat spring. I fell deeper into my sleep, into a place that was cool and warm at the same time, when the year was 1945 and people in my community spoke only French and on festival days danced under the stars with the innocence of medieval folk.

Someone shook my arm, hard and steady. “Wake up, Dave.”

I looked up at Alafair’s face.

“Better come in before you get rained on,” she said.

I stood up, off balance. “What a dream.”

“You were laughing.”

“I thought a big coon jumped in my lap.”

“Better take a look at your trousers.”

The muddy paw prints were unmistakable. There was a gummy smear on one thigh. I touched it and smelled my fingers.

“What is it?” she said.

“Sardines.”

“Maybe he got in somebody’s trash.”

“Coons don’t jump in people’s laps.”

“Tripod did,” she said.

“He sure did. How you doin’, Alfenheimer?”

“Why are you acting so weird?”

“I’ll take weird over rational any day of the week,” I said.

The next day, I went to the office of the Broussard family physician, Melvin LeBlanc. “Now what?” he said.

“Rowena cut her wrists right above the palms,” I said.

“Yes?”

“If you’re serious about going off-planet, you do it higher up, don’t you?”

“People are not in a rational state when they try to take their lives,” he replied.

“Am I right or not, Doc?”

“They do it here.” He drew two fingers high up on his inner forearm. He gazed innocuously out the window.

“Is there something else you want to tell me?”

“No.”

“Let me rephrase. Is there something else you feel I should know?”

“I’d like to have you banned from my office. How about that?”

I held his eyes.

“Rowena had medical training in Australia,” he said. “She nursed Indians in South America. What we used to call meatball medicine.”

“She wasn’t serious about getting to the barn?”

“This doesn’t mean she wasn’t assaulted.”

“Thanks for your time,” I said.