The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Scott Bartels Swear Net by the Moon from Tamaqua

I was only nine the first time I was on fire. It was during a family vacation, or as close to one as we ever got seeing as Momma and Daddy gave up tryin’ to travel together since before I can remember. Winter break Momma would take us to Granny’s farm in Verde Pointe (good to wash the sin of the city out from under our nails, Daddy would say as he helped us pack the car). Summertime, me and him and David would strike for the beach in Mobile, or as near a beach as Alabama gulf coast comes. One time I asked him why we never went nowhere all together (except Carnival every February, and that just to shout “Repent!” at the revelers) and he just smiled that crooked smile of his — the one I later suspected he gleaned from Elvis and practiced in the cracked bathroom mirror all through high school — and said they always would fuss and fight over schedules and directions and all that shit. Not that Daddy ever said “shit” in his life. That glib hound-dog grin was as raucous as he ever got.

But that ain’t here nor there. It was during a summer trip and we had the tent up and the lines still in the water and a camp fire going under a new moon sky. A sky like that always makes me wonder how the shepherds made up all those constellations; sky like that has so many stars so close together, what you ought to do is make pictures out of the black spaces between them. Sayin’ shit like that always got David to raggin’ on me. Three years older and four years dumber and it was easier to bully and humiliate me than be overshadowed by my imagination. So while I was staring up at the rivulets of black creases between distant suns teeming with potential, David pushed me ass over teakettle into that camp fire.

I howled and rolled around in the sand long after the flames from my clothes and hair and eyelashes were out, trying to worm my way into the soft, gritty earth and save everyone the trouble of a decent burial. Daddy was in the tent and didn’t come out ’til I was screamin’ and writhing. My brother told him I was lookin’ up and musta got dizzy and fallen in. And later, after I got done floppin’ in the moist granules and spent shells; after I ran down to the ocean, refusing to heed my Daddy’s shouts; after I learned just how salt water feels on a fresh burn; after all that, I said: Yeah, Daddy, that’s just how it happened.

He tried to help me take my mind off the pain, joked about how I’d been “bathed in fire.”

“Speak us some tongues, Esau,” he egged me. (And yeah, that really is my given name, so now you know why I tell everyone to call me Creole, even though I ain’t one.) Didn’t take me to no doctor, though. Didn’t see no doctor ’til the day we got home and Momma took one look at my singed face and mostly scarred skull and that was the only time I ever saw my folks have it out. I remember Momma sayin’ something about Daddy bein’ stupid to think God would heal this one and I remember the slap (“Don’t doubt Him and don’t never doubt me”) and two hours later at Sisters of Mercy I remember me and Momma both getting bandages. To this day I still got no eyelashes and the crown of my bald spot is crinkly like pudding you left in the fridge for two weeks.

I said all that just to say this: the second time I was on fire was two weeks ago. Chase, this guy I’d been buying from, swore to me he had some China White. Got it right cheap, he said, and me being a regular, he’d lay some off to me discount. So I got me a big idea that if I could buy low and sell high I’d be on the road to redemption. And deep down, Faith always wanted a stock broker. So I got a big stash from Chase on credit. Figured to peddle some and pay back inside a week. Only I sampled a little before I sold the first gram. It cooked up nice and I had visions of sugarplums dancing in my head as I loaded up the needle. Dreamin’ about showin’ up at Faith’s doorstep with about ten grand in my pocket. Dream didn’t last long after the spike though, and this damn sure wasn’t China White.

If this were the movies, I’d tell you I knew the smack was bad the second I pushed the plunger. But that wasn’t the case. I watched the little pink cloud float into the liquid, like crimson fingers reaching from my veins to grab hold of the fix and draw it inside. I love that moment, when you know the high is coming and nothing that’s happened up to that very second has any bearing and everything in front of you is going to be fine as wine, right as rain and all that shit. People who don’t get it will ask: who would do that, stick himself in the arm with a needle. But I ask you: a moment when absolutely your whole prior existence is (as Daddy would say) washed away and all your tomorrows are sunshine and peppermint — man, who wouldn’t do that? I hear smack use is at an all time high, but I maintain it’s still the best kept secret in sanity.

So it was maybe four, five minutes after I sunk the spike before I knew I was in trouble. I was just drifting along but I could hear a buzzing, like a mosquito you can’t quite find who keeps whispering: “Here I come; gonna get you; won’t feel me ’til I slide out your skin and skit away, taking a piece of you with me and poisoning you in the bargain.” Heard them kind of skeeters plenty of times on Daddy’s summertime beach retreats.

Then the buzzing was like the muted roar of a teakettle just coming to boil, only instead of roiling, my blood began to simmer and spit, like fatty meat on a bonfire. I know I tossed my head to and fro a good bit — shaking a condemned madman’s no no no this can’t happen to me — because my neck muscles still hurt. And then the fire was there.

I wish I could describe it as an unfolding flower, the bloom of pestilence reeking revenge or a black blossom tinged red with wrath, yawning in rage. It would be much more poetic than the truth, which is that one moment I was in the void, the next I heard the buzz, and then I had porcupines rampaging through my veins. Porcupines wielding rusty, gas-powered chainsaws. They started from everywhere, spontaneously filling my world, commandeering every nerve ending in my body so that even blinking seemed to slice my eyeballs open with acidic papercuts. You would think a pain like that would have an epicenter, but it was like Daddy talked about God: there was the void, and then the void was filled, and if you blinked you missed it, and if you hadn’t blinked you’d missed it anyway, but just because you didn’t see it happen didn’t mean it hadn’t.

It was a hell of a thing to have my subconscious manning the controls while my body was begging for some action — any action — that would end the turmoil. Call 911, slit my wrists — the latter seemed a better option since the relief would come faster. I love my subconscious; I love its view of the world and the way it’s able to draw analogies between vastly segregated and seemingly incongruous events; I love its detached realization and the way it fails to marvel at its most striking discoveries, its passive and uncaring genius for observation. But as the captain of the sinking ship that was my body’s pyre, it sucked. It convinced me that the smack had intelligence, was contriving to wrest control of my body, poppies become animate. And so in the heat of battle, I shook my stash into the toilet and flushed it away, a $4,500 turd.

Chase showed up four days later (the day after Fat Tuesday, or what we in the Quarter call I-Did-Wftaf-Wednesday) looking churlish and victorious, like he’d just done the head cheerleader in the back seat of her boyfriend’s car. He wanted his money. I told him how I’d spent fourteen hours doing my best Joan of Arc and another twenty-four cramped up like a diver shot from the abyss to the surface by a nuclear cannon. How I could not have sold that smack to anyone and lived. Accused him of cutting it with Drano when the accusations got to flying.

“Yes, that’s very interesting,” Chase conceded. “But if I thought you were sincerely accusing me of intentionally misrepresenting product, I’d cut your balls off and serve them in your famous paella. Geoffery could make it Macanudo’s house special, or sell it as a take-out dish — sack in a sack.” And he spat on my floor. On the carpet.

“Hey, Chase, that’s great.” I was surprised by something I hadn’t felt in a very long time, I think since that camping trip when I survived my post-torching weekend on nothing but raw determination. After that, I figured I was pretty damn close to invincible. But I recognized the feeling right off anyway: I was scared. A man who will spit on your DuPont Plush-Lite is liable to do anything. “Only I lost my job when I was too racked to even pick up the phone to call in sick for two days.” You no-show at a restaurant in New Orleans during Carnival, you pretty much forget about asking for your back pay, much less your job.

“Damn, Creole, that’s a fucking pity. I will so miss that blackened mustard chicken.” He tisked at me the way the bad guy always mocks James Bond when he’s got 007 chained to the wall and the laser aimed at his pecker. Only I didn’t have no belt buckle grenade launcher to counter with. “Now what we gonna do, huh?”

He was on me so quickly, the knife blade fat against my throat so fast, that when I recovered enough to compose a thought, it was: Damn, let me see you do that again in slo-mo. I never saw the knife come out, or actually felt the blade under the plump of my adam’s apple. Too much adrenaline to feel anything but the air pumping in and out of my lungs. But I heard the telltale click of a butterfly being flicked open and the finger holes secured. There is no more menacing sound, not even a gun being cocked or a round sent home in the chamber. Any pussy can point a pistol at you and play chicken. But a man who’ll put a blade to your throat so tight that a hard pulse in your vein will slice you open for him, that’s a man who means business. That’s a man who’s ready to get dirty.

“Let me lay it out for you, Creole,” he whispered. It was an intimate sound, the tone of voice I’d use only with a woman I’d already seduced, the sound of a man rounding third and heading for home knowing full well the center fielder has booted the ball to the wall. “I owe Lazarus for that stash, you owe me for that stash. I don’t pay Lazarus back tonight — To-Fucking-Night — and you’ll be finding pieces of my teeth and fingernails in your andouille. Well, I’m not about to be sausage fodder, so you better stop fucking around and tell me you laid the shit off at the restaurant, or at Carnival or at your fucking grandmother’s nursing home.” His hands were shaking so wildly I could hear the cold steel clatter of the butterfly handle as it rattled between his fingers.

I kept waiting for my life to flash before my eyes, but all I got were non-sequential glimpses, like someone had tossed a couple photo albums into the air and I was watching them randomly float down. I saw Faith, and Emily our daughter, but not as we were bringing her home, or the way her little fingers encircled mine the first time I held her, or the way Faith’s soft lullaby voice used to greet me when I stumbled home at the two A.M. feeding, smelling like hickory with crawfish guts still under my nails and the raucous combination of reds and smack coursing through my brain. No, instead I saw them leaving me for Faith’s mother in Baltimore. I saw myself in the kitchen at Macanudo, but not stuffing bell peppers with trout and jambalaya, or being called out to visit so many tables the first night.

I introduced my black seared catfish in a pecan crust. Instead, I saw myself being initiated in uppers and rush and crystal-meth — anything to keep the energy flowing — by Geoffery, head chef to my sous-chef, Eve to my Adam. And I saw my brother, who pushed me into the fire and without a word convinced me to blame my own clumsy stupidity. My mother, who would later die at the hands of my father. My father, who would later die at the hands of his fellow inmates, held down and beaten to death in the shower with bars of soap cradled in towels, slings like the one David used to slay Goliath. These pictures floated by me in only a second. Failures all, except for my mother, who had dedicated her life to seeing after her children until they were big enough to see after themselves, and who had made it — though only just. And it was most likely her memory that saved my life. Her, and the way she’d stayed my father when he was in a temper.

“Chase,” I said, but I had to say it twice because the first time my voice was gravel dry and choked with the fear that if I strained my vocal cords too hard I’d slice my own throat. “Chase, I can’t pay you what I don’t have. That stash was shit. Damn near wiped me, swear to God, and I flushed it. Let me find work, the Columbia or even Antoine’s if I have to stoop to that, but I’ll pay it off. I’ll even explain it to Lazarus if you want. But Christ, Chase, you kill me and you’ll never get your money.” An appeal to logic that would have done Momma proud. She’d talked Daddy down from many a rage with that kind of thinking.

And praise the Lord and pass the pipe and all that shit if Chase didn’t back off with the blade. He shook his head and laughed the way Eva Braun must have after completing her vows, knowing how futile the whole arrangement was. “Shit, Creole. You’ve fucked me and didn’t even give me the reach around.” He got up off the floor and paced a bit, and after a minute, when he hadn’t spat again, I collected myself and tried to do the same. I stumbled a bit moving from horizontal to vertical, and suddenly was aware how badly I was jonesing. I hadn’t fixed since my smack inferno and was so badly in need that I briefly considered asking Chase to raise my credit limit.

“Look, Creole, you’re a good customer, and I can’t get blood from a stone. I’ll talk to Lazarus. We’ll work something out. You’ll pay me back and you’ll cater me a party or something and we’ll call it square. Eh?”

He offered his hand and I took it, two whores bequesting their words of honor. He pumped firmly and locked my eyes with his as he added: “And one more thing.”

In my relief I’d felt like the kingfish who dives deep enough to outrun the line on the reel, so relieved that I’d lost track of the knife. Our eyes stayed locked as I felt the blade glide through the oft-burned skin and gristly sinew of my little finger. My mouth widened in a shocked O as I heard the blade crack into bone and wind its way around the knuckle, like a seasoned butcher’s knife carving tender baby back ribs away from tougher, more muscular meat. His free hand dropped the bloody blade and held up my own pinky finger for my examination, his other hand still pumping my remaining four fingers in some perverse gentlemen’s agreement.

“I’ll give this to Lazarus, a token of your sincere intentions, eh? Come see me tomorrow at the Quad. Don’t disappoint.” He stuffed my finger in his shirt pocket and left me a man bleeding from so many different wounds that, had I a needle to do up with, the spike would have simply deflated me, releasing only air from my veins.

There was one other snapshot I saw floating non-sequentially from the heavens while waiting for Chase to make me Isaac to his Abraham. I wasn’t going to tell you about it, but what the hell; ain’t no way out but through and all that shit. It was the fight I had with Faith the night she was packing to leave. I told her that if this is what it came down to, I would quit. Cold turkey, no rehab required, the thought of her taking my little daughter away was all the therapy I needed thank you very much.

“No, Creole, you won’t, not if we stay. That’s just it.”

“Bullshit,” I tried to rage, but by then the only wind in my sails was fueled by reds and opium and three hours sleep. It was hard to sound convincing, even to myself. “You’re all that matters to me.” She stopped packing long enough to cradle my face in her hands just so. It was a melancholy, sympathetic gesture full of the sorrow of what could have been. Should have been. “If I threaten to leave, you’ll quit for a day, maybe even a week. But then when I’m still here, it will be too easy to go back to it. You keep thinking you aren’t hooked because if someone put a gun to your head and said ‘quit’ you could. But that’s never going to happen. Life is the little decisions that you make, the choices that keep you from becoming so divided against yourself that someone has to put a gun to your head. So choose for yourself, not for Emily, not for me. Choose for yourself the same way you’d pick out breakfast cereal. And maybe we can work from there.”

She was right only to the extent that there was a weapon involved, though it was a knife and not a gun. The rest of the scenario she had dead wrong, including, sadly, the path I’d choose.

The Quad was the Student Union courtyard at Loyola where I’d first met Chase and the sympathetic poison he pedaled. By then I’d been designing specials at Macanudo for two months, doing the sous-chef’s job while the sous-chef was doing Geoffery’s wife, burning seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week and serving hickory grilled shrimp Chippewa over jambalaya cakes with crowder peas and artichoke Monte Cristo while everyone else was just doubling up the saffron in their crab bisque and gouging tourists like stuck pigs. Geoffery was so fired up over the reviews he was getting, he kept springing for meth and tear drops and anything that would keep me going. And me with a new baby in the house on St. Philip Street needing a new roof or a new slab every six months, I was willing to sell my soul for way less than thirty pieces of silver.

One of the busboys at the restaurant knew what hopped-up shape I was in and said he knew a guy who had something that was good for what ailed me. Despite spending ninety percent of my waking hours inside Geoffery’s kitchen, I was still enough in touch with the outside world to know that taking a second pill to cancel the first was stupider than forgoing the first one altogether. But by then Geoffery had busted his wife and the sous-chef job was wide open and Emily was graduating from four ounces six times a day to eight ounces sixty times a day. Most men believe that chefs are pussies, complimenting each other’s fairy hats and tasting one another’s sauce, if you know what I mean. But the restaurant business — especially the New Orleans Jackson Square restaurant business — is cut-throat. You put that many cut-throat guys in that small a space around that many knives and that much fire, it gets easy to understand why stimulants are a major food group.

I wish I could believe that my habit was Geoffery’s fault, or Chase’s, or even Faith’s. God knows I told all three that plenty of times. Even more — for whatever this says about me — I wish you would believe it. But I would have found my way there somehow, like it was written in my genes, always coursing through the very veins it would later pollute. I came to drink early — I can remember sharing a flagon of filched communion wine with my brother, hiding behind the Cornstalk Fence on Royal and goofing on the tourists; I think I was eleven — and I smoked my share of grass in high school. Probably smoked several people’s shares. About the time Daddy’s inmates were revoking his sentence I got into psychedelics and became real acquainted with the subconscious that would betray me so miserably just a few days ago. Met Faith at a Michael Doucet and Beausoleil show at Tulane where we shared a sugar cube communion. I guess you can follow the line of progression from there.

But many times in the past few months, ever since Faith lost hope and took Emily with her, I’ve wondered why I was unable to right the ship when I knew I was navigating not by the stars but by the black spaces in between. My wife, never shy to be third on a quaalude, gave it all up. Geoffery pumped me full of speed but never touched the stuff. Even Chase claimed never to sample his wares. My only answer is: sometimes a man quits trusting his strengths and starts trusting his weaknesses. His weaknesses are more apt to be dependable.

I met Chase at the Quad the next day, a heavy rouge gauze wrapped around my right hand. My filleting hand, it occurred to me. I was in a bad way. Weak from blood loss, jonesing to kill all after almost five days (holy shit, five goddamn days and it was getting worse? Who ever beats this shit?) without doing up. Fuck sleepless in Seattle, I was Neurotic Needing Narcotic in New Orleans.

We went for a coffee in this beatnik coffee shop where my hand was the only thing not dressed in black. I tried to feel Chase out by saying: “Hope you’re buying. As you know I’m in poor shape financially.” Which was true to the extent that I had no money (I told Faith to clean out the checking account when she left; never knew so much money could assuage so little guilt; rationalizations are the most expensive commodity on earth) and no income. I did, however, still have my house. A street-level pastel stucco right on St. Philip Street, between Bourbon and Royal. Great sub-tropical hanging garden on the front porch and a friendly courtyard in the back.

Paid in full, courtesy of the Great State of Louisiana, which would rather settle a wrongful death case than have the security procedures of its penal institutions scrutinized by the courts and the media. Half a mil for me, half for the ambulance chaser, instant French Quarter. God bless Mommy and God bless Daddy.

Over his double espresso, Chase told me: “Your debt has been cleared.” He kept glancing around and smoking so fast that he’d light a new cigarette before the last one was half gone, even though it was obvious the clientele were all deep into their Kerouac and having narcissistic, homoerotic fantasies about Neal Cassidy. I waited as he sipped, knowing — as a man who trusts his weaknesses must know — that I had merely exchanged one debt for another. “Lazarus was not happy, not at first. This is a pretty liquid business, you know? IOU’s don’t buy shit from the Haitians, and little fingers are funny but they don’t pay bills. Yours went in his garbage disposal by the way.” He puffed heavily and glanced about, letting me take that in. I tried not to react, but I was five days sober and easy to read.

“There’s a ship in Biloxi,” he continued. “Finnegan, ever heard of it?” I shook my head and felt the drawn skin of my cheeks tight against my face. “Gambling boat, big business. Lazarus tried to buy a big stake in it and got cut out, guy by the name of Gabriel Arentino, ever heard of him?” I shook my head again and looked at my chicory mug. “Well, that deal’s not closed. If Gabriel Arentino were to suddenly rescind his offer, Lazarus would be the high man. Lazarus badly wants to be the high man. For forgiving your debt, Lazarus wants you to convince Gabriel Arentino to have a change of heart.”

“Change of heart how?” I croaked dryly, not sure how a cook with a high school diploma was supposed to argue asset allocation with an apparently large-living financier, afraid maybe I knew the answer.

“Change of heart, you know.” His eyes worked the room again while he blew as much smoke as he could, as though the clouds of tobacco would render him inaudible. “Like change from beating to still.”

“Jesus, Chase,” I moaned. “I’m bad off. I’m battered and I need a fix. I can’t do that shit, I can’t even believe I’ve come to the point that someone would ask me. I’ll just sell my house and pay you off. Gimmee a couple weeks.” And to be honest, I felt good. I’d heard former rummies talk about hitting rock bottom, how only then did they truly want to stop. And I thought maybe I’d actually gone deeper than rock bottom, that I was at mantle bottom and would have to ascend to get to rock bottom. But I was wrong; I was still in free fall.

“It’s much too late for that, my friend,” Chase grinned, and I saw something I’d never seen before. He claimed not to use what he sold, and that was obviously true of smack. But his yellow toothed, fangy, triumphant expression was the overconfident ecstasy of a speed freak. In a flash of recognition I saw how he’d overplayed my role in his debt to Lazarus, how I owed not only my soul but Chase’s as well to a small time gangster with delusions of grandeur.

Chase said: “Lazarus knows about Faith. About Faith and about Emily. About Baltimore.” And my subconscious created a new picture to float past me, even though by this time the process had become like something out of Clockwork Orange. I saw a monster I’d never met grinding my baby in his garbage disposal, and laughing as his champagne kitchen counter top and his peach and bone checkerboard linoleum were bathed in her blood.

I walked all the away home from the Quad, heading up Royal to the Quarter so I’d pass the LaBranche House. I stood on the corner and tried to take in the enormity of the front gate, which twisted halfway down St. Peter into the late February dusk. I wondered about the people who’d built it originally, New Orleans patriarchy and all that shit. A family home that had been passed from father to son for almost two centuries. How could that be when I couldn’t even hold my family together for three years? How could Henri LaBranche run a plantation and an export business and raise a family close enough to erect two cathedrals and preserve their name through a war with England, a war with Lincoln, and all the wars any family fights against itself? What a fucked-up proposition a family is. How can one man be a father, a husband, a worker, a creator? It isn’t possible to fill all the roles everyone expects of you without losing yourself in the process. You keep giving away pieces of yourself until all you have left are the parts no one wants, not even you.

I spat on the sidewalk in front of the grand mansion — not as cool as spitting on the carpet, but as close as I was likely to get — and moved up Royal toward home. I had never imagined it possible to feel as hopeless as I felt and keep going on anyway. Who is weaker, the man who gives up in the face of defeat or the man who marches into that defeat hoping to lose anyway, just to get it all over with? Chase had convinced me that my estranged family would truly be in danger if I didn’t kill Gabriel Arentino. Having them killed wouldn’t get him his gambling ship, but at least the word would get around: Don’t cross Lazarus! Damn Chase for lying about my debt. Lazarus no doubt thought I’d brought down a small savings and loan fronting for horse I couldn’t afford. Nevertheless, having accepted the bargain, I’d talked Chase into giving me two syringes worth. And then I promised to pay him back for them.

With the sun down, I packed a gym bag with what I thought I’d need to kill a guy. I was a little bit proud of myself for holding out against the heroin. Two needles under my roof and I hadn’t used either. I got everything ready first, knowing that despite how badly my brain was squirming without the drug, I’d be much more useless once I’d scratched the itch.

When I had it all together, I went into the bathroom to do up. It was an old habit from the days when Faith knew but didn’t want to know and I sure didn’t want my daughter to see. Guilt is the great inhibitor, they ought to use it instead of those silly government warning signs. We could all smoke “Your Kids Are Watching” menthols and drink “Little Timmy Junior Sees This” lite. And speaking of light, the one in the bathroom just couldn’t make the grade, not as jittery as I was and as drawn in as my veins were. It was as though they knew they were on the verge of a victory; another week in hiding and they would never be invaded by the liquid devil again. So I tied up in the bathroom and then walked to the breakfast nook where I fixed under the ten-bulb chandelier, best spot in the house.

Finished studying the map of veins in my arm, I commenced to studying the map Chase had given me. We’d done the whole exchange right there in the Quad coffee shop, Chase passing his wares to me inside a hollow book. It was his way of out ironying the ironic students whose seriousness made their self-righteousness an annoyingly convenient foil. Just another dude in black sharing some Sartre or Kant.

While I was high, my subconscious conjured an alternate future in which I got aboard the Finnegan and gambled the house so broke that Gabriel Arentino couldn’t pay me. In a supremely satirical moment, I cashed in the favor that I owed Lazarus via Chase and forced Gabriel Arentino to kill himself.

Chase made mention of a firearm he possessed — untraceable, he claimed — but I declined. Daddy’s Colt was secure in my top nightstand drawer. There ain’t many places you can pay a third of a mil for a one-story flat and still need a pistol by your head to sleep soundly, but the Quarter is one of them. I remember how Daddy loved to hunt, how he took me to the woods near DeSoto National Forest when I was eight to track deer (this would have been a year before David did his John the Baptist on me). I remember how we made camp and roasted weenies over a fire belching with knotted pine and Daddy taught me how to count points on a buck. And I remember how, so early the next morning it may as well have still been last night, an eight pointer crossed our path while we were calling turkeys.

“There he is, Esau,” Daddy mouthed to me, his breath sweet with venison jerky. He smiled that crooked hound-dog grin and motioned with his rifle. The buck was looking the other way, but I believe I could have stared at his innocent, pure-souled face and popped the trigger anyway, Bambi eyes or no. All I saw was Daddy smoking a pipe in the den and pointing to the antlers on the wall and saying “my youngest brought that one down, summer seventy-eight.” My volley was high, probably wide too but I took no notice. My first thought was that the gun had misfired and the round had exploded in the chamber. I dropped the rifle in shock at the sting of my hands while the echo of the shot — BLAM — bounced inside my brain from lobe to lobe.

“Dern,” said Daddy soon as he realized I’d dropped my weapon. He took a bead on the deer but by then it had discerned its circumstances and begun to bolt for cover. David, who had set up a 45-degree triangle of crossfire (something he’d learned as a child watching coverage of Vietnam without realizing it, he of the unexplored, deaf-mute subconscious), damn near felled the animal, but it spun on a dime, hind quarters twisting grotesquely before it camouflaged itself.

“David!” Daddy screamed. “You ever risk ruining a rump like that again, I’ll heat you up good!” He had nary a word for my high shot, and to this day I don’t know what to make of it. Did he think I could not take a licking like my brother? Did he think the poor shot simply bad luck? If David had failed to follow up an easy mark like that, there would have been hell to pay. Sometimes, at night when my brain won’t slow to my body’s fatigue level, when six espressos and three double shifts converge, I ask my Daddy why he was so light on me that day, so easy on David after he lit me afire. Sometimes I suppose he wanted us to grow up confident, be secure that our actions would meet with approval. But then I have to chastise myself for presupposing such courageous intentions upon the man who killed my own Momma.

I said all that just to say this: I didn’t take Chase’s gun for the same reason I didn’t take my rifle — too goddamn noisy. Daddy’s Colt had a silencer, the one he’d bought after that trip; bought it so I’d practice my shooting and not shit my drawers in the process.

Oil cans, stop signs, empty beer bottles, it made no difference. Sundown meant Daddy would walk the mile and a quarter home and I’d be expected to obliterate some still life. Once Daddy figured out it was the noise spooking me high and saw what I could do with some focus and a quiet piece, he bought me the silencer and the Colt was effectively mine. Among the many thoughts shaken loose in my brain as I tumbled into that camp fire a year later was: if David could still outshoot me, I’d be making him a smore right now.

I tossed the pistol nonchalantly into the trunk along with my cheap nylon gym bag which held a change of clothes and a loaded syringe. When this was all over, I wanted to be able to medicate A.S.A.FuckingP. Chase’s play-by-play told me that Gabriel Arentino would be watching the Mississippi State Bulldogs most of the night as they tanked to the U.K. Wildcats. Chase told me where and when I should be able to find my prey alone, and how I’d be able to slip out without a trace. His generous details helped fuel my suspicion that this was supposed to be his mission. The smack made me calm, and I at least felt confident that although I had obviously been set up, I hadn’t been set up to fail. After all, if I got busted, the trail led clearly back to Chase. I felt the code of the woods would let me trust him: don’t shit where you eat.

Most people who have never been there think New Orleans is fairly isolated by the Mississippi, cut off from civilization like Walton mountain before the telegraph. But the truth is that I-10, running west to east, cuts through the heart of the city, providing easily two-thirds of the nation’s drug trade. Too many convenient entry points, too few patrols. I was less than ninety minutes from my sacrificial lamb, who was at this very moment most likely pressing with three sevens and a four-hand losing streak taunting him.

I had an hour to burn before I was supposed to light out, but I didn’t want to spend it at home. The horse was already starting to wear off, or else my body was so primed by the first sip it had in days that the well seemed to dry up awful early. Either way, I didn’t want to be home and sobering up and contemplating a murder. There’d been too much death associated with that house already: the fall of my honesty with Faith; the decay of my pride when I did up while watching Emily alone for the evening; the collapse of my marriage — hell, the place was paid for with blood money.

So instead I drove Dauphine to Esplanade to Ten East. I remember the first time I drove on heroin I thought it should be required medication for the elderly. I saw the other lanes, the other cars, the signals — everything — so clearly. It was too easy to understand how every vehicle operated as a component of the infrastructure, each little tin auto playing its role like tiny corpuscles in a massive cardiovascular system. You know those people on the road who anticipate changing conditions like Bobby Fischer, always four moves ahead? That’s us, baby, the hop heads, guardians of the three-seconds rule, purveyors of the stale green light.

I drove about half an hour, hoping maybe traffic would be heavy, what with it being two days after Carnival. But everyone had either bugged out broke and hung-over or they were still hanging on to the party after it should have been over, like Elvis at the end. You hear about how heroin makes you numb to the world around you, but I had never experienced that before now. Yeah sure it cost me my wife and my kid and all that shit, but through it all I was still Creole. I knew who was president and who led the NFC West and how to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Heroin was just a way to unwind, okay? But now, driving along a lonely stretch of increasingly rural Louisiana, I realized I’d missed the Mardi Gras, had no idea if there’d been calm or the cops had been uptight or the tips good or the ta-tas plentiful or any damn thing about it other than that it had been two days ago, which meant Sunday was Lent.

I could hear the second syringe calling me from the trunk. It’s odd how much honor this drug has. It could taunt you, call you a cock-sucking mother-fucker and cut a two-inch notch in your pee hole and you’d thank it politely and invite it into your home and not even ask it to wipe its feet. But it doesn’t. It just gently reminds you — doesn’t even nag, just nudges a recollection — that you need it. And then it goes to work. Heroin is the June Cleaver of narcotics.

I didn’t want to answer that call, not ’til the deed was done, and since I was still way ahead of schedule, I pulled off at a truck stop in Alton. The sign from the highway said simply “Gas” but I knew that on Ten, outside the city limits “gas” meant “Diner.”

I expected three or four greasy spoons duking it out by the town’s only red light, where every night the people gave thanks that the state legislature had seen fit to bless their small marsh with an exit. But I was disappointed to find only one truck stop and it was beside only a flashing yellow. It didn’t have a name, or not one that was posted. But in a tiny Southeast borough off the interstate, the only sign you need is a couple of rigs in your lot and a red and white “OPEN” in your glass door. Even the parking lot was paved, not dirt, so the stereotypical dust failed to envelop my car as I braked and lumbered out.

Inside, the rebellion continued. Couldn’t these people see I was a junkie just off a jones about to commit an abominably immoral act; didn’t they know I needed a little stability from the outside world while the chaotic vortex of my inner one whirled destructively faster? No tin sounding radio playing Merle Haggard tunes in mono, no stuffed armadillos on the counter tops, and the waitress neither had high-hair nor chewed gum. And her name tag had the audacity to read “Patricia.” Not Linda Lou or Tammi with an i, just plain vanilla, waspy Patricia. I immediately dubbed her “Patsy” and felt a little better about the situation.

“The chalkboard propped behind her was lettered in bright pink: “TODAY’S SPECIAL — MEAN ASS RED BEAN CHILI.” Beneath the words, someone had drawn a chalky blue bowl with the handle of a spoon poking out, and wavy red squiggles above to simulate heat. A not-so-fine layer of dust covered the whole thing, and I could tell “today’s special” had been “today’s special” since the nameless “diner” had been (red and white letter) “open.”

“What you want ta drink, honey?” Patsy asked without turning around, breaking me out of my wry meditation. Her accent was fifth generation Cajun, but somehow her unwillingness to face me seemed to stem from shyness not apathy. Then I saw that she was looking at me, in the angled mirror high above the back counter. And I saw myself as she saw me, or as I would have seen me had I been her. And I didn’t blame her for not facing me.

By looking upwards to look down upon me, she had a prime view of the crown of scar tissue David had blessed me with. It was a cross I bore without frequent thought; after all, chefs can wear hats in the kitchen, and whenever the weather permitted I wore a light trench and fedora in the streets. The Quarter is full of freaks who cleave to and rely upon one another like ants in the mound, defending resolutely against outsiders who damn near sample the local culture into extinction. Nevertheless, I would be reminded now and again of my butchered cranium and if it wasn’t exactly a freshly cut wound, it was certainly a handful of salt ground vigorously into the oozy pus of an old one. It was like having your defining moment pinned to the breast of your shirt — I didn’t so much mind other people staring as I did being forced to realize that it was my defining moment.

I ignored the question. “About that special,” I announced loudly, trying to distract Patsy — and anyone else x-raying my soul through my nugget — with a little levity. “What kind of man — knowing he’s gonna be locked up in the ten-square-foot cab of a truck for the next six hours — orders anything with the words ‘mean ass’ in the title?” I grinned Daddy’s crooked smile, and would have arched my eyebrows had they not both been burnt off sixteen years ago.

“The kind what’s hungry, sugar,” Patsy answered sweetly, finally turning to make direct eye contact. “You hungry?” The question and her stare were pregnant with meaning, as though by sighting my Achilles heel so early in our encounter she had been able to discern both its source and its effects on the chain of happenstance that had become my meager existence.

Yes, I should have cried out, Yes I hunger to be loved, or at least to be worthy of love. I long to feel that good things can last, that something gold can stay, and that I don’t have to prove myself every single day. That the people I love recognize and remember my intrinsic value from one moment to the next. I hunger to be sitting home right now with my little girl, watching Lamb Chop’s Play-Along and singing “The Song That Doesn’t End” instead of venturing across state lines to kill a man I don’t know, all so I can keep alive within my arteries a slowly growing cancer (a process which gives a whole new meaning to chemotherapy).

But I held onto all that and shook my head, said “No, just a mug of chicory, if you don’t mind.” Said it to the counter top rather than face Patsy, knowing full well that by refusing to look up I was giving her another dead-on shot of my Daddy’s son’s hellish baptism. It was still better than looking the cunt in the eye. Either way, she was gonna know all about me — she had the knack, it flowed around her like vapor trails when you got too much strychnine — but facing her straight ahead would have forced me to see what she saw. And I already knew what she saw, knew I didn’t want to see the stretched-thin junkie sitting at her counter wearing out an already threadbare joke about her menu. It was like algebra when the teacher would squeak an especially tough problem on the board and we’d all look down so he wouldn’t call on us to answer; if we couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see us. That was my approach with Patsy now because it had always worked in the past: with Faith, with Daddy, with God.

“No appetite, huh?” she joshed, sloshing thick liquid as she slid the mug across the counter and into my hands until we each cradled a half as though it were a chalice and not a nicked enamel crock with loose grounds swimming at the bottom. “The only men I ever seen in here not hungry was love sick,” she teased, making the word love into a several-syllable abortion, drawing out “you love sick?” the same singsong way she’d called out “you hungry?” Yep, saw right through me. Like when you told the man at the deli “thin, for sandwiches,” and he held up the first slice and you could see his questioning glance through it and you had to backtrack and say “uh, not quite that thin, Tex.” Patsy must have come to work every night and built a Dagwood from the little glimpses she stole from her patrons.

“You know how Karl Marx summed up capitalism’s inherent shortcoming?” I asked, knowing full well she’d be trying to puzzle out whether Karl was the one who carried the bicycle horn and never spoke. “He said your employer will never pay you the true value of your work because he keeps more for himself.” I took a mouthful of the rich chicory and swallowed bitterly, even though the liquid was syrupy sweet. “I think love works the same way.”

In retrospect, stopping and chatting was the worst thing I could have done. My stoned intentions were good: be invisible by being brazen. Like an art thief defiantly hanging his booty in the foyer, I gambled that no one would suspect a Das Kapital-quoting would-be trucker of murdering a drug-importing riverboat casino operator. It was naked foolishness, a rash thing that I should believe will bring about my capture. But somehow I don’t. Something about the way Patsy asked her patrons “you hungry?” No, not so much how she asked, or even that she asked, but that having drawn out the confession she already took for granted, she set about satisfying the need.

An hour later I abandoned I-10 for 49, figuring to run south to Gulfport and catch 90 east to Biloxi. My craving was hitting hard and I thought a slightly slower road might ease my anxiety. The distance on 49 between the off-ramp from 10 and the on-ramp to 90 is so short that you couldn’t even play football on it; you’d have to play Arena Ball. Nevertheless, having rounded the spaghetti circle that officially welcomed me to sixty yards of due southerly travel, I managed to incur such a withdrawal-induced cramp that I whirled the car hard onto the soft shoulder, picked up a piece of nail-infected lumber, and spun 180 degrees trying to control the blowout. Facing north on the sideline of a due south highway, I listened to my heart beat out Babalu for a couple minutes before popping the trunk to free the donut. It was sad, really, how badly I was going to limp into Biloxi — strung out, on three-and-a-half wheels, shooting a twenty-year-old pistol — just so I could crawl back home with enough room on my available credit limit to start the process all over again. Once I had the jack on and was working the lug nuts loose, I realized that I could not go on repeating the cycle indefinitely: eventually I would run out of fingers. Maybe next time, I thought ruefully, I could convince Lazarus to settle for a toe.

Mulling such thoughts took what little of my concentration wasn’t incessantly chanting smack smack smack and I never even saw the trooper’s car approach until the nose of his cruiser was headlamp to headlamp with my Jetta. He popped his lamps to bright, and when he opened the door I could hear the faint hum reminding him his keys were in the ignition. It was close to the sound Chase’s nightmare opium had buzzed me with and for a moment I felt certain I would flash back and begin writhing in turmoil. But for once my subconscious was just that — sub — and I was able to endure the rattlesnake hum by focusing on what to say, what to do to end the conversation quickly.

I heard the trooper’s boot crunch the loose asphalt as he took his first step toward me. Far away, a lone rig approached us, barely seen and as yet unheard. I imagined the conversation in my head. Very simple. Picked up a tar tack. Need help? No sir, I can manage, good to do a little work during a long drive anyway, clear the head. Long haul, eh? Yes sir, clear to Tallahassee. Well, see you get that tire patched and keep it under fifty with that spare on. Yes sir.

The rig finished rounding the off-ramp and approached, its whine slowly eating into the buzz of the cop’s Chrysler. I practiced the conversation again, head down, thinking in rhythm with the crunching of his boots. The third time through the script I saw the fatal error, but it was too late. Parked nose to nose, with my left rear wheel blown, the cop would have to come around the trunk of my car to get to my side, to get to “need help?” Come around the open trunk. The one with the bag holding a loaded syringe, the one with an uncovered Colt pistol lying plainly in sight.

He was a step away from rounding my Jetta’s back side when the rig roared by. My subconscious burst on the scene and my mind splintered eighteen different ways at once. I saw the cop spotting the firearm, cuffing me and taking me in, and getting a bust for possession in the bargain; I saw Lazarus getting the word to someone on the inside who owed him; I saw myself getting a tracheotomy with a toothbrush in the hoser at the Mississippi state pen — like father, like son. I saw Faith raising Emily to believe “Daddy was killed when the mine collapsed, before you were born,” not wanting to admit to her brood, much less to herself, that her judgement could have been so flawed.

A defiant scream erupted as the rig blew past, knocking the trooper’s hat off. “Goddammit,” he insisted and bent to pick it up, even as the tail end of the trailer completed its “woosh,” leaving only a vacuum of receding yellow reflectors. When the trooper replaced his hat and turned to finally check on me, I crushed him square in the jaw with my tire iron.

The sound was anticlimactic. Bones don’t “crunch” as advertised, nor do they crack or splinter. I heard a dense wet thud, as though I were splitting logs that had just come in from a three day drizzle. Blood exploded from his mouth and his tongue protruded dumbly, forked by a deep gash running from tip to root. I swung again, then again, mesmerized by the soggy, absorbing slap of the blows and the off-beat metallic ping that preceded each one. Only later did I discover that each back-swing had cost my Jetta a tail light, a trunk lip, a dinged fender.

His eyes stayed open throughout. I kept waiting for oncoming cars but the only time in my life when things went my way happened to be the time I bludgeoned a police officer to death. You have no idea how resilient the human spirit is until you are forced to extinguish one. To pound a man’s skull with a two-foot piece of steel and have him continue to gawk at you: why, it’s all the proof of the existence of the human soul you can ever need. It took me ninety seconds to spill enough of his brains on the hardpan to ensure my escape, and then I had to scrape the pieces of his scalp from my tool so I could finish applying the spare.

And now it is a day-and-a-half later and I-90 (and I-10 for that matter) is just a memory since I hit 95 north in Jacksonville. There’s no point in fulfilling my vision quest after doing one of Mississippi’s finest. A dead cop and a dead gambler inside an hour would only help draw a line through the big red dots I left behind. A line that would form an arrow pointing straight to good old Creole. It comes down to fight or flight and I’ve done my share of the former. It’s time to do some of the latter, or more accurately to do some of the latter by doing some more of the former. And maybe not alone either. Not if I can help it.

Charlotte is an hour away and I’ll make my true destination by nightfall. It’s been a long sobering drive in the dark and I have very little reason for hope. I left the cop’s dead body in the short grass by the side of the road, his car door still open, brights still blazing. No doubt I left a breadbox full of forensic evidence as well. That rig driver could remember spotting us. Patsy probably doesn’t get Marx quoted to her all that often. Yet, very little reason or no, I remain hopeful.

For one thing, what I said to Patsy was honest, and that’s a start. If I can confess my horrific concept of love as a house-rules gamble to a stranger, how hard can it be to do the same with my wife? And once I tell her, maybe she can help me find my way back to seeing it as I did when I first fell in love with her. For another, if I can write all this down for you — you whove never even set eyes on me and have every right, every reason to believe me a monster — if I can set all this down for you, what do I have to hide from Faith? And still another: I saw that cop coming and saw my future and fought back. Inherent in that slaying must be the conviction that a better, alternate future is possible. For the second time in as many days, I had a gun at my head, but this time I chose a new path.

So all signs point to a trust my subconscious has yet to make public but might. Maybe I can beat heroin. Maybe I can find my wife and my daughter in Baltimore, a scant ten hours away, and convince them I — we — deserve another chance. Maybe we can dodge Lazarus long enough for him to lose interest, get a job in San Luis Obispo, or Cincinnati, or Canada. Maybe we can live happily ever after and all that shit.