The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

James Lee Burke THE WILD SIDE OF LIFE ^{from The Southern Review}

The club where the oil-field people hung out was called the Hungry Gator. It stood on pilings by a long green humped levee in the Atchafalaya Basin, a gigantic stretch of bayous and quicksand and brackish bays and flooded cypress and tupelos that looked like a forgotten piece of Creation before fish worked their way up on the land and formed feet. There were no clocks inside the Gator, no last names, sometimes not even first ones, just initials. By choice most of us lived on the rim. Of everything. Get my drift?

I liked the rim. You could pretend there was no before or after; there was just now, a deadness in the sky on a summer evening, maybe a solitary black cloud breaking apart like ink in clear water, while thousands of tree frogs sang. It was a place I didn’t have to make comparisons or study on dreams and memories that would come flickering behind my eyelids five seconds into sleep.

I worked on a seismograph rig, ten days on and five days off; on land, I sometimes played drums and mandolin at the club and even did a few vocals. My big pleasure was looking at the girls from the bandstand, secretly thinking of myself as their protector, a guy who’d been around but didn’t try to use people. The truth is I was a mess with women and about as clever in a social situation as the scribbles on the washroom wall.

I’d blank out in the middle of conversations. Or go away someplace inside my head and not get back for a few hours. People thought it was because I was at Pork Chop Hill. Not so. I was never ashamed of what we did at Pork Chop.

I was thinking on this and half in the bag when a woman at the bar touched my cheek and looked at me in a sad way, probably because she was half jacked on flak juice too, even though it was only two in the afternoon. “You got that in Korea?” she said.

“My daddy made whiskey,” I replied. “Stills blow up sometimes.”

Her eyes floated away from me. “You don’t have to act smart.”

I tried to grin, the scarred skin below my eye crinkling. “It wasn’t a big deal. On my face it’s probably an improvement.”

She gazed at herself in the mirror behind the liquor counter. I waited for her to speak, but she didn’t.

“Buy you a drink?” I said.

She lifted her left hand so I could see her ring. “He’s nothing to brag on, but he’s the only one I got.”

“I admire principle,” I said.

“That’s why you hang out in here?”

“There’s worse.”

“Where?”

I didn’t have an answer. She picked the cherry out of her vodka collins and sucked on it. “It’s not polite to stare.”

“Sorry.”

“I get the blues, that’s all,” she said.

“I know what you mean,” I replied.

I couldn’t tell if she heard me or not. Kitty Wells was singing on the jukebox.

“Will you dance with me?” I said.

“Another time.”

Through the screen door the sun was bright and hot, and heat waves were bouncing on the bay. The electric fan on the wall feathered her hair against her cheeks. She had a sweet face and amber eyes, with a shine in them like beer glass. There was no pack of cigarettes or an ashtray in front of her. She bent slightly forward, and I saw the shine on the tops of her breasts. I didn’t think it was intentional on her part.

“I played piano for Ernie Suarez and Warren Storm at the Top Hat in Lafayette,” she said.

“Looking for a job?”

“My husband doesn’t like me hanging in juke joints.”

“What’s he do?”

“He comes and goes.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Not what you’re thinking. He flies a plane out to the rigs.”

“How’d you know I was in Korea?”

“The bartender.”

Her face colored, as though she realized I knew she’d been asking about me. “My name is Loreen Walters.”

“How you do, Miss Loreen?”

“Where’d you get the accent?” she asked.

“East Kentucky.”

She put her wallet in her drawstring bag. The leather was braided around the edges and incised with a rearing horse ridden by a naked woman. It was a strange wallet for a woman to carry. I glanced at Loreen. She seemed to be one of those people whose faces change constantly in the light, so you never know who they actually are.

“Are you fixing to leave?” I said.

“There’s nothing wrong in talking, is there?” she said.

“No, ma’am, not at all.”

I could see myself close to her, next to the jukebox, my face buried in her hair, breathing her perfume and the coolness of her skin. I felt my throat catch.

“Then, again, why borrow trouble?” she said. “See you, sweetie. Look me up in our next incarnation. Far as I’m concerned, this one stinks.”

I went back on my seismograph barge early the next day. The sun was red and streaked with dust blowing out of the cane fields, the steel plates on the pilothouse dripping with drops of moisture as big as silver dollars.

The lowest and hardest job in the oil business was building board roads through swamps and marshland; the second lowest was “doodlebugging,” stringing underwater cable off a jug boat, sometimes carrying it on a spool along with the seismic jugs through a flooded woods thick with cottonmouths and mosquitoes. We’d drop eighteen dynamite cans screwed end-to-end down a drill hole and teach the earth who was running things. The detonation was so great it jolted the barge on its pilings and blew fish as fat as logs to the surface and filled the air with a sulfurous yellow cloud that would burn the inside of your head if you breathed it.

Lizard was the driller. His skin looked like leather stretched on a skeleton. At age twenty he already had chain-gang scars on his ankles and whip marks from the Black Betty on his back. He whistled and sang while he worked, and bragged on his conquests in five-dollar brothels. I was jealous of his peace of mind. He knew about what happened on our drill site down in South America, but he slept like he’d just gotten it on with Esther Williams. I had nightmares that caused me to sit on the side of my bunk until the cook clanged the breakfast bell.

My first day back on the quarter boat, Lizard sat down across from me at supper. He speared a steak off the platter and scooped potatoes and poured milk gravy on it and sliced it up, and started eating like he was stuffing garbage down a drain hole. “Word to the wise, Elmore,” he said.

“What’s that, Lizard?” I asked.

“Don’t be milking through the wrong fence.”

“Who says I am?”

“Saw you with Miss Loreen at the Gator.”

“Then you didn’t see very much.”

He worked a piece of steak loose from his teeth. “Know who her old man is?”

“No, and I don’t care, because I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.

“Except not listen to the wisdom of your betters.”

“How’d you like your food pushed in your face?”

“Where’s that shithole you grew up in?”

“The Upper South.”

“Much inbreeding thereabouts, retardation and such?”

My dreams were in Technicolor, full of murmurs and engine noise and occasionally the sundering of the earth. A man caught by a flamethrower makes a sound like a mewing kitten. A shower of potato mashers is preceded by the enemy clanging their grenades on their helmets before lobbing them into our foxholes. A toppling round becomes a hummingbird brushing by your ear. The canned dynamite we slide down our drill pipe kills big creatures stone dead and belly-up, somehow assuring us we are the dispatchers of death and not its recipient. Sometimes I heard a baby crying.

I once used a boat hook to kill a moccasin that was trapped in the current. I threw it up on the deck to scare Lizard. I don’t know why. Later I felt ashamed and told a prostitute in a Morgan City bar what I’d done. She tapped her cigarette ash in a beer can.

“My stories are a little weird?” I said.

“I think you’re in the wrong bar,” she replied.

Every memory in my head seemed like a piece of glass. I woke the second day on the hitch to a single-engine, canary-yellow pontoon plane coming in above the trees, swooping right over the upper deck. Ten minutes later, down in the galley, I saw the plane touch the water and taxi to the bow of the quarter boat. The pilot was Hamp Rieber, a geologist with degrees from the University of Texas and MIT. His hair was mahogany-colored and wavy, combed straight back with Brylcreem. He liked to wear polo shirts and jodhpurs and tight, ventilated leather gloves, and always buzzed us when he visited the quarter boat or the drill barge. One time Lizard climbed on the pilothouse and flung a wrench at him. He missed the prop by less than a foot.

Hamp was sent to check on us by the Houston office. Sometimes he went to a brothel in Port Arthur with the crew, although I couldn’t figure out why. He was rich and lived with a handsome wife in an old plantation house south of Lake Charles.

He came in and started eating scrambled eggs and bacon and pancakes across from me. Lizard was three places down. A big window fan drew a cool breeze through the room. It was a fine time of day, before the sun started to flare on the water and the smell of carrion rose out of the swamp. Hamp’s face was full of self-satisfaction while he talked. I wished Lizard had parked that wrench in his mouth.

“You look thoughtful, Elmore,” he said.

“I’m philosophically inclined.”

“Been reading your thesaurus?”

“I go my own way and don’t have truck with those who don’t like it,” I said.

“You’re a mystery man, all right,” he said, reaching for the grits. “I always get the feeling you’re looking at me when my back is turned. Why is that?”

“Search me.”

“Yes, sir, a regular mystery man.”

I got up with my plate and coffee mug and finished eating in a shady spot on the deck. I wished I could float away to a palm-dotted island beyond the horizon, a place where machines had never been invented, where people drank out of coconut husks and ate shellfish they harvested from the surf with their hands.

The real reason I didn’t like Hamp was because of what happened down in Latin America. At first the Indians were curious about our seismograph soundings, but eventually they lost interest and disappeared back into trees that clicked and rattled with animal bones. Hamp selected a drill site in the jungle and we started clearing the earth with a dozer, piling greenery as high as a house, soaking and burning it with kerosene and turning the sun into an orange wafer. The soil was soggy, with thousands of years of detritus in it. When it was compressed under the weight of the dozer, the severed root systems twitched like they were alive.

We put up the derrick and starting drilling twenty-four hours a day, using three crews, tying canvas on the spars when monsoon amounts of rain swept through the jungle. After we punched into a pay sand, the driller ignited the flare line to bleed off the gas, and a flame roared two hundred feet into the sky. The sludge pit caught fire and blew a long flume of thick, black, lung-choking smoke all the way to the horizon. It hung over the jungle like a serpent until morning.

The next night the Indians showered us with arrows.

The company built a wooden shell around the rig. It must have been 120 degrees inside. By noon the floor men were puking in a bucket and pouring water on their heads to keep from passing out. But at least we’d stymied the Indians, we thought. Then an Indian shot a blowgun from the trees at one of our supply trucks coming up the road. A kid from Lufkin got it in the cheek and almost died.

“This shit ends,” Hamp said.

He’d flown a spotter plane in Korea and bragged he’d shot down Bed Check Charlie with a .45.

“What are you aiming to do?” I asked.

“Know who Alfred Nobel was?”

“The man who invented dynamite.”

“Nobody is going to catch flies on you.”

At sunset Hamp and another guy flew away in a two-cockpit biplane. About ten minutes later we heard a dull boom and felt a tremor under our feet and saw birds lift from the canopy in the jungle. A minute later there was a second boom, this one much stronger, then we heard the drone of the plane’s engine headed back toward us. Lizard was standing next to me, bare-chested, staring at the smoke rising from the trees and the sparks churning inside it. He poured mosquito repellent on his palm and rubbed it on his neck and face. “Satchel charges,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“He brought them from town a couple of days ago. He was just waiting on the excuse.” He looked at my expression. “You keep them damn thoughts out of your head.”

“What thoughts?”

“The kind a water walker has. It’s their misfortune and none of our own. Stay the hell out of it.”

I looked around at the other men on the crew. They had come out of the bunkhouse, some of them with GI mess kits in their hands. None of them seemed to know what they should say. The tool pusher, a big man who always wore khaki trousers and a straw hat and a Lima watch fob and long-sleeve shirts buttoned at the wrists, looked at the red glow in the jungle. You could hear the wind rustling the trees and smell an odor like the chimney on a rendering plant. “I don’t know about y’all, but I got to see a man about a dog,” he said.

The others laughed as he unzipped his fly and urinated into the dark.

In the morning the tool pusher told me to take a supply truck to the port twenty miles away and pick up a load of center cutters for the ditching machine. I tried to convince myself that Hamp had frightened the Indians out of the village before he dropped the satchel charges, that he meant to scare people and not kill them. My head was coming off as we drove down the dirt road that skirted the jungle. It was raining and the sun was shining, and a rainbow curved out of the clouds into almost the exact spot where the fire had burned out during the night.

I told the driver to stop.

“What for?” he said.

“I got dysentery. I’ll walk back.” I took the first-aid kit and a roll of toilet paper from under the seat.

The gearshift knob was throbbing in his palm. “You sure you know what you’re doing, Elmore?”

“Some Tums and salt tablets and I’ll be right as rain.”

The huts in the village had been made from thatch and scrap lumber and corrugated tin the Indians stole from construction sites. The satchel charges had blown them apart and set fire to most everything inside. I counted nine dead in the ashes, their eyes starting to sink in the sockets like they were drifting off to sleep. I took some alcohol out of the first-aid kit and poured it on my bandanna and tied it across my nose and mouth, and tried not to breathe too deeply.

There was not a living creature in the village, not even a bird or insects. The only sound came from the cry of a small child, the kind that says the child is helpless, unfed, and thirsty, its diaper soaked and dirty and raw on the skin.

I followed a path along a stream that had overflowed its banks. The ground was carpeted with leaves and broken twigs. Then I started to see more bodies. There were nails embedded in some of the trees, blood drags where people had tried to reach the water, pieces of hair and human pulp on the rocks by the stream. The child was lying on its back next to a woman who looked made out of sticks. One of her breasts was exposed. She wore old tennis shoes without socks and a wooden cross on a cord around her neck. A tear was sealed in one eye.

I could see branches that were broken farther down the path. The air was sweet from the spray on the rocks in the stream, the rain pattering on huge tropical plants that had heart-shaped leaves. I cleaned the child and pulled the shirt off a dead man and wrapped the child’s thighs and genitals and bottom inside it, and tied the first-aid kit on my belt and started walking. My passenger was a little boy. I had never married and had always wanted to have a little boy, or a little girl, it didn’t matter, and it felt funny walking with him curled inside my arms, like I was back in the infantry, except this time I wasn’t humping a BAR.

I walked until high noon, when I saw the edge of the jungle thin into full sunlight. Farther down the dirt road I could see a stucco farmhouse, with a deuce-and-a-half army truck parked in front and a canvas tarp on poles where people were lying on blankets in the shade. I looked down at my little passenger. His eyes were closed, the redness gone from his face, his nostrils so tiny I wanted to touch them to make sure he was all right.

“¿Qué quieres?” a soldier said.

“What does it look like?” I said.

“No entiendo. ¿Qué haces aquí?”

He wore a dirty khaki uniform and a Sam Browne belt and a stiff cap with a lacquered bill, a bandolier full of M1 clips strapped around his waist. His armpits were looped with sweat, his shirt unbuttoned, his chest shiny. He kept swiping at a fly, his eyes never leaving my face. There were other soldiers standing around, as though their role was just to be there. The Indians lying on the ground in the shade of the tarp looked frightened, afraid to speak. A nun in a soiled white habit was giving water to a woman out of a canteen.

“I’ve got to get the child to a hospital,” I said. “Where’s the hospital?”

“Está aquí, hombre.” He pointed to the child in my arms. “Put down.”

“No.”

“Yes, you put down.”

I stepped back from him.

“You don’t hear, gringo?” he said.

“Stay away from me.”

He gestured to one of his men. The nun stepped between them and me and took the child from my arms.

“See, everything gonna be okay, man,” the soldier in the cap said.

“No, it isn’t. A plane bombed the village.”

“You ain’t got to say nothing, man. Go back to where you come from. All is taken care of.”

“You’re not going to do anything about it?”

“Go back with your people, gringo.”

“Where’s the jefe?”

“I’m the jefe. You want to be my friend? Tell me now. If you ain’t our friend, I got to take you back to town, give you a place to stay for a while, let you get to know some guys you ain’t gonna like.”

The wind was hot, the tarp popping in the silence, the sky filled with an eye-watering brilliance.

“You don’t look too good,” he said. “Sit down and have some pulque. I’m gonna give you some food. See, it’s cool here in the shade.”

“What are you going to do with the child?”

“What you think? Está muerto. You been in the jungle too long, man.”

Now back to the present. When I got off the hitch, I headed straight for the Hungry Gator and went to work on an ice-cold bottle of Jax and four fingers of Jack Daniel’s. I heard somebody drop a nickel in the jukebox and play Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Somehow I knew who was playing that song. I also knew the kind of trouble I might get into drinking B-52s. She sat down next to me, wearing a white skirt and blouse and thin black belt and earrings with red stones in them. She smelled like a garden full of flowers.

“I thought I might have scared you off,” she said.

“You’re not the kind that scares people, Miss Loreen,” I said.

“Still want to buy me a drink?”

Warning bells were clanging and red lights flashing. An oscillating fan fluttered the pages of a wall calendar in a white blur. “Anytime,” I replied.

She ordered a small Schlitz. The bartender put the bottle and a glass in front of her. She poured it into the glass and put salt in it and watched the foam rise. “I’m trying to take it easy today.”

“You have a taste for it?”

“You could call it that.” She took a sip. “I was going to ask your bandleader if he could use a piano player.”

“He’s not around today. He plays weekends.”

“Oh,” she said, her disappointment obvious.

“You okay?”

“Sure.” She kept her face turned to one side, away from the sunlight blazing on the shell parking lot.

“Look at me, Miss Loreen.”

“What for?”

“Somebody hurt you?”

“He was drunk.”

“Your husband?”

“Who else?”

“A man who hits a woman is a coward.”

“He takes the fall for other people and resents himself. You never do that?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Lucky you.” She ordered a whiskey sour.

“Miss Loreen, they say if you think you’ve got a problem with it, you probably do.”

“Too late, sailor.”

She watched the bartender make her drink in the blender and pour it into a glass. She drank it half empty, her eyes closed, her face at peace. “Did you know that song was banned from the Grand Ole Opry?”

“No.”

“It’s the female answer to ‘The Wild Side of Life,’” she said.

“You know a lot about country music.”

“I got news for you,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know shit about anything.”

“You shouldn’t talk rough like that.”

“Yeah?”

“I think you put on an act. You’re a nice lady.”

She stared into the gloom, her eyes sleepy. The wall calendar had a glossy picture on it; a cowboy on a horse was looking into the distance at purple mountains, snow on the peaks.

“I went to a powwow once in Montana,” I said. “Hundreds of Indian children were dancing in jingle shirts, all of them bouncing up and down. You should have heard the noise.”

“Why are you talking about Indians?”

“Whenever I’m down about something, I think about those Indian kids dancing, the drums pounding away.”

“You’re not a regular guy, I mean, not like you meet in this place.”

Her bag lay open on the bar. I could see the steel frame and checkered grips of a revolver inside. I touched the bag with one finger. “What you’ve got in there can get a person in trouble.”

She turned her face so I could see her bruise more clearly. “Like I’m not already?”

“Why do somebody else’s time?”

“It beats the graveyard.” She licked the rim of her glass. “You know where this is going to end.”

“What’s going to end?”

“You got a place?”

When I didn’t reply, she lowered her hand until it was under the bar and put it in mine. “Did you hear me?”

Don’t answer. Say goodbye. Walk into the sunlight and get in the truck. It’s never too late. “The Teche Motel in New Iberia,” I said. “It’s on the bayou. When the sun sets behind the oaks, you’d think it was the last day on earth.”

She squeezed my hand, hard.

When I woke up the next morning, she was sitting at the table by the window shade in her panties and bra, writing on a piece of stationery, an empty bottle of Cold Duck on the floor.

“You were talking about the Indian dancers in your sleep,” she said.

“What’d I say?”

“They’re happy. The way kids ought to be.”

I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies. Between the curtains I could see a shrimp boat passing on Bayou Teche; the wake, yellow and frothy, slapped the oak and cypress trees along the bank.

“My husband says Indians are no good,” she said.

“What’s he know about Indians?”

“He’s an expert on everything.”

“Did he give you your wallet?”

“For Christmas. With a naked woman on it.”

I didn’t speak.

“Why’d you ask?” she asked.

“Was he in the pen?”

“His brother is a guard in Huntsville. The whole family works in prisons. If they weren’t herding convicts, they’d be doing time themselves.”

“Were you writing me a Dear John?”

“I was going to tell you last night didn’t happen.”

“That’s how you feel about it?”

“My feelings don’t matter.”

“To me they do. Tear it up.”

“You’ve never messed around, have you?”

“Not with a married woman, if that’s what you mean.”

“You know what that just did to my stomach?”

“Way I see it, a man who hits his wife doesn’t have claim.”

“Tell the state of Louisiana that,” she said. “Tell my in-laws.”

Ten minutes later the owner knocked on the door and told me I had a phone call. “A man named Lizard,” he added.

“She with you?” he said.

“Who?”

“The one whose husband I warned you about and who’s looking for you now,” he said.

“He’s headed here?”

“I told him you hung out in the French Quarter.”

“Who is this guy?”

“The same guy who liked to throw satchel charges out of a plane with his buddy Hamp Rieber. You know how to pick them, Elmo.”

I said nothing to Loreen and showered and shaved and took my time doing it, pretending I didn’t care about the bear trap I had stepped in. Then I threw my duffel bag in the back of the truck and told her to hop in.

She was pinning back her hair with both hands, her bare arms as big as a man’s. “Where we going?” she said.

“The beach in Biloxi is beautiful this time of year,” I replied.

The storm was way out in the Gulf and not a hurricane yet, but you could feel the barometer dropping and see horsetails of purple rain to the south and hundreds of breakers forming and disappearing on the horizon. When we checked into the motel the waves were sliding over the jetties and sucking backward into the Gulf, scooping truckloads of sand and shellfish with them. The air smelled like brass and iodine and seaweed full of tiny creatures that had died on the beach, the way it smells when you know a hard one is coming.

I opened the windows in our room. Up on the boulevards the fronds of the palm trees were straightening in the wind. I told Loreen what Lizard had said. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her face white. “Does he know where we are?”

“I don’t see how.”

“His whole family are cops and prison guards. They know everybody. They all work together.”

“It’s not against the law to check into a motel.”

“This is Mississippi. The law is what some redneck says it is.”

“He’s just a man, nothing more.”

But she wasn’t listening. She seemed to be looking at an image painted on the air.

“He’s buds with Hamp Rieber?” I said.

“Who?”

“A pilot. Rieber and another guy killed a bunch of Indians on a job in South America. They dropped explosive charges on their village. Maybe the other guy was your husband.”

“Charles is an asshole but he wouldn’t do that.”

“His name isn’t Charlie? I think a guy like that would be called Charlie.”

“Who told you this about Charles?”

“Nobody had to tell me anything. I was there when it happened.”

“Why didn’t we hear about it? It would have been in the paper or on television.”

I looked at the confusion and alarm in her face. “You want a drink?”

“See? You can’t answer my question. It wasn’t in the news because it didn’t happen.”

“I carried an infant for miles to a first-aid station. He was dead when I arrived.”

Her eyes were too large for her face. “I need to sit down. This isn’t our business. We have to think about ourselves. You didn’t tell anybody where we were going?”

“Give me the gun.”

“What for?”

“We’ve got each other. Right?”

She stared at me, her upper lip perspiring, her pulse jumping in her neck.

I had acted indifferent about taking off with a married woman. It wasn’t the way I felt. My father was a pacifist who made and sold moonshine, and my mother a minister in the Free Will Baptist Church. They gave me a good upbringing, and I felt I’d flushed it down the commode.

While Loreen slept off her hangover, I sat on a bench by the surf and played my mandolin. I could hear a buoy clanging and electricity crackling across the sky. The beach was empty, the sand damp and biscuit-colored, a towel with Donald Duck on it blowing end over end past my foot. I wondered how long it would take for Loreen’s husband and in-laws to catch up with me.

Southern culture is tribal. They might holler and shout in their church houses, but they want blood for blood, and at the bottom of it is sex. The kind of mutilation the KKK visits on its lynch victims isn’t coincidental. The system wasn’t aimed at just people of color, either. Guys I knew who’d done time in Angola said there were over one hundred convicts buried in the levee, and the iron sweatboxes on Camp A that had been bulldozed out in ’52 were a horror story the details of which no newspaper would touch.

Thinking about these things made my eyes go out of focus.

The next day Loreen was drunk again and told me she was taking the bus to Lafayette to stay with her sister. “Give me back the gun,” she said.

“Bad idea.”

“It’s my goddamn gun. Give it to me.”

I took the revolver from my duffel bag and flipped the cylinder out of the frame. I noticed that only five chambers were loaded.

“Where’d you learn to set the hammer on an empty chamber?”

“I don’t know what you mean. You squeeze them on one end and a bullet comes out the other.”

I shook the bullets into my palm and dropped them in my pocket. I tossed the revolver on the bed. “I’ll drive you to the depot.”

I decided to stay clear of the Teche Motel in case Loreen or her husband came looking for me. I drove to Lizard’s trailer outside Morgan City and asked if I could stay with him. In two more days I’d be back on the quarter boat, maybe back to a regular life. Lizard stood in the doorway, wearing only swim trunks and cowboy boots, gazing at the palmettos and palm and persimmon trees. “You threw a rock at a beehive,” he said.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“Did she go back to him?”

“They usually do.”

“You got played, son.”

“By who?”

“She’s one of those who digs badasses and taking chances. She’ll have you sticking a gun in your mouth.”

“She’s scared to death,” I said.

“That’s how she gets off.” He tapped his fist against the jamb. “For a man who spends a lot of time in libraries, you’re sure dumb. Come inside.”

We listened to the weather reports and read his collection of Saga and Argosy and True West magazines, and went to a beer garden in town and ate boiled crawfish and crabs. The storm we’d worried about had disappeared, although another one had developed unexpectedly out of a tropical swell in the Bay of Campeche and was headed toward the central Gulf Coast.

Lizard sucked the fat out of a crawfish shell and threw the shell in a trash barrel. “They try to keep everybody scared and tuned to the radio. That’s how they sell more products.”

“I don’t think the United States Weather Bureau is involved in a plot,” I said.

“Like Roosevelt didn’t know the Japs was fixing to bomb Pearl Harbor. You’re a card.”

I tried to keep in mind that after being thrown out of a roadhouse in Maringouin, Lizard got in the welding truck and drove it through the front wall and onto the dance floor, blowing his horn for a drink. The bouncers almost killed him.

I wanted to believe my problems would pass. The Japanese lanterns were swaying in a light breeze; a solitary raindrop touched my face. I watched a shooting star slip down the side of the sky.

“You’re a good guy, Lizard.”

His expression was as blank as a breadboard.

We paid the check and walked out to his beloved cherry-red pickup, a little lighthearted, feeling younger than our years. Two men were eating cracklings out of a paper bag in a patrol car. The car was old, salt-eaten around the fenders, the white star on the door streaked with mud. The two men got out of the car. They were big and wore slacks and short-sleeve tropical shirts. One wore a straw cowboy hat; the other had a baton that hung from a lanyard on his wrist. Their eyes passed over me and locked on Lizard.

“That your truck?” the man with the baton said.

“Yes, sir,” Lizard said.

“My name is Detective Benoit. I saw this vehicle run a red light.” He adjusted the mirror on the driver’s door and examined his face as though looking for a razor nick. Then he hammered the mirror loose from the door, tearing the screws out of the metal. “Your taillights working?”

Lizard’s face turned gray. “Why y’all bracing me?”

Benoit walked to the back of the pickup. “Looks like they’re busted, all right.”

He broke out both taillights, then tapped the fragments off the baton.

Neither man seemed to take interest in me.

“I ain’t caused y’all no trouble,” Lizard said.

“We’ve seen your jacket,” the man in the hat said. A white scar hung from one eye, like a piece of string. “You’re here on interstate parole. You shouldn’t have been drinking.”

“I ain’t on parole,” Lizard said.

“It’s me they’re after,” I said.

Neither cop looked at me. They turned Lizard around and pushed him against the truck, then cuffed his wrists behind him, snicking them tight into the skin. The man in the hat pushed him into the back seat of the patrol car.

I felt like I was standing by while my best friend drowned.

The car drove away, with Lizard looking out the back window. A group in the beer garden was singing “You Are My Sunshine.” At the end they clapped and shouted.

I walked back to the highway and hitched a ride to the trailer court. The door to Lizard’s trailer hung on one hinge. The inside was a wreck. Most of my clothes had been taken from my duffel bag and stuffed in the toilet and pissed on. My mandolin had been smashed into kindling.

The cops were partly right. Lizard had finished his parole time in Georgia, but he had a minor bench warrant in Florida. The cops put him in a can down by Plaquemines Parish, the kind of place where people thought habeas corpus was a Yankee name for a disease.

In the oil patch there were no second chances. If you were wired, you were fired. Lizard wasn’t wired, but he got fired just the same.

I went back to the Teche Motel in New Iberia. That’s where she found me, and didn’t even bother to turn off her engine when she knocked on the door. When I opened it she was breathing hard through her nose, a clot of blood in one nostril, her little fist knotted on her drawstring bag. “You’ve got to help me.”

“What did he hit you with?”

“A belt. Can I come in?”

There was no one in the long, tree-shaded driveway that separated the two rows of cottages. Chickens were pecking on the lawns. “Park the car behind the building,” I said.

She came back a minute later and closed the door after her. She tried to hand me her car keys.

“You can’t stay, Loreen.”

“He’s going to kill me.”

“Call the cops. Show them what he did.”

“He saw me look at the phone and asked me how I’d like to dial it with broken fingers. Then he said he was just kidding and poured me a drink. He’s crazy.”

“I’ve got a couple of hundred dollars. That’ll get you to Los Angeles. A friend of mine owns a hillbilly nightclub in Anaheim. I can probably get you a job there.”

“I asked him about this Hamp Rieber guy.”

“What about him?”

“Charles said Hamp was going to take care of you. Charles says you bug him.”

“Say that again?”

“He said something happened in South America. I pretended not to know what he was talking about. He said Hamp knows people who can shut you up. Hamp told Charles somebody should have done it a long time ago.”

She took the revolver out of her bag and set it heavily on the nightstand. Her mouth was a tight line. “You still have the bullets?”

“I don’t want it.”

“Throw it in the bayou. It’s your life. Charles says if he has his way he’s going to put something of yours in a pickle jar.”

She went out on the stoop. I followed her. “Take the two hundred anyway.”

Her hair was blowing in the wind. It was thick and auburn, and almost hid the stripes and lumps on her face. “We could have had fun, you and me.”

Lizard said I was being played. Maybe he was right, maybe not. It didn’t matter. Hamp Rieber was in the mix. He knew I knew what he had done down in the tropics, and I suspected it had probably eaten a hole in his stomach.

I still had the rounds for the revolver. It was a .38 Special, blue-black and snub-nosed, the serial numbers burned off. I sat in a chair by the front window and dropped the shells one by one into the cylinder. The bayou was chained with rain rings, the light in the trees turning to gold needles. I remembered the words to a song my mother’s congregation used to sing:

I wanted to crawl inside the lyrics and never come out. Instead I drove to Lake Charles and found the antebellum home of Hamp Rieber, where he lived in the middle of wetlands with a rainbow arching overhead. The rainbow reminded me of the one that seemed to fall on the village Hamp had bombed.

No one in my acquaintance thought me capable of wicked acts. I knew different. If people asked me how my face came to be burned, I would make a joke about whiskey stills or if pressed mention Pork Chop Hill or for fun say “friendly fire.”

I pulled the tanks from the back of a corporal who had caught one right through his steel pot, and went straight up the hill and jammed the igniter head into the slit of a North Korean pillbox. I had never pulled the trigger on a flamethrower. The blowback cooked half my face. What it did to the men inside I won’t try to describe.

I parked my pickup behind an old Hadacol billboard on a dirt road and entered the back of Hamp’s property through a pecan orchard. The house was a two-story antebellum, with twin chimneys and a veranda, and from behind the stable I could hear people in the side yard. I had the pistol stuck in the back of my khakis, the barrel cutting into my skin.

What were my plans?

I had none. Or none I would admit.

I began walking across the lawn toward the side yard, sweating, a warm wind on my face, my pulse beating in my wrists. I saw not only Hamp Rieber and his wife but the man who I used to see with him, the man who was probably Charles Walters. Three children were hitting croquet balls on the lawn.

I had never shot an unarmed man. I had seen it happen, but I never did it. I saw F-80s strafe roads choked with civilians and wood carts and draft animals because intelligence said the refugee columns streaming south had been infiltrated by the Chinese. But I had not let these things lay claim on me.

Walters had sun-browned skin, pale eyes, the military posture of a man who is constantly aware of himself, and coarse, large hands that swallowed the small paper plate and plastic fork he was using to eat a piece of pie. As I gazed at the emptiness in his face, I realized that he was not a man I would ever take seriously. He was a wife-beater. I never saw one of them who wouldn’t cut bait when you called him out. The issue was Hamp. It had always been Hamp.

I grew up on a ridge above a place called Snaky Hollow. I knew children who lived in dirt-floor cabins and went barefoot in the snow and wore clothes made from Purina feed sacks. When I looked at Hamp, I saw those children. Call me a communist.

I wanted him to pick up a cake knife and cut me, or come at me with a shotgun. I was ready to go out smoking, as long as I could sling his blood on the shrubbery with a clear conscience.

But under my hatred I knew the real problem was the fact I had never been to the company about him or reported him to the authorities. I told myself it was a waste of time and I would lose my job for no purpose. But the words I didn’t try wouldn’t go out of my head.

He sighed. “Tired of being a spectator?”

“That’s close.”

“And thought you’d roll the dice.”

“You’re a mind reader, Hamp.”

His eyes traveled up and down my person. “You packing, kid?”

“You never know.”

“Let’s talk out by the gazebo.”

“Right here is okay,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” he replied.

My hands were at my sides. “Why’d you do it?”

“Do what?” he asked.

“You know. Down there.”

“I didn’t do anything there except do my job.”

“Our man Charles here didn’t do anything either?” I said.

“Ask him.”

“What about it, Charles?” I said. “Did you fling the charges or just fly the plane?”

“Let’s go out to the stable,” Charles replied. “I’ll show you Hamp’s horses.”

“I toted a child out of the jungle and never knew he died,” I said.

“Lower your voice, please,” Hamp said.

“Sorry. I have a hard time sleeping at night. It reduces my powers of judgment.”

“Try a glass of warm milk,” Hamp said.

Then I felt myself slipping loose from my tether, a red bubble swelling inside my brain. I saw myself pulling the snub-nose from my belt and squeezing off a round in Hamp’s throat, then a second one in Walters’s forehead before he knew what hit him. I wet my lips and swallowed.

“Are you going to get sick on us?” Hamp said.

“No, sir,” I said. “I just want to say I’m sorry to do this.”

I arched an imaginary crick out of my back and let my right hand drift to the butt of the revolver, my fingertips touching the grips. I saw Hamp’s wife pick up a little girl and heft her on her hip. The little girl’s face was like a flower turning into the sunlight. “Daddy! Come back and play with us,” she said, extending her arms.

“I’ll be right there, hon,” he said.

I stepped backward and hooked the thumb of my right hand on my pocket.

“You got something else to say?” Hamp asked.

“Y’all or somebody y’all hired busted my mandolin. I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“You need to give your listeners a decoder, Elmore,” Hamp said.

“See y’all down the track,” I said. I looked at his wife. “Forgive me for breaking in on y’all’s party, ma’am.”

I walked backward until I was clear of the picket gate, then went to my pickup, my hands shaking so badly I could hardly start the engine.

I drove to town along the edge of the lake, the palm trees bending, waves scudding, and went into a stationery store and bought a writing tablet and a small shipping box and a pencil and a ball of string. Then I drove to a park and sat at a picnic table and wrote the following note:

I wrote down the place and date of the bombing and the name of the company we all served. Then I added:

I unloaded the revolver and placed it in the box, and wrote FBI across the top, and tied the box with string, and stopped long enough at the post office to drop it in the mailbox outside.

I was fired from my job. Lizard was sprung from the can. A federal agent interviewed me at the Teche Motel. Loreen dumped her husband, opened a bakery in Lafayette, and asked me to marry her. My attempt at telling the world of our misdeeds in the tropics changed nothing. In fact, I think my account had all the weight of an asterisk.

The big news of that summer was Hurricane Audrey. The tidal surge curled like a huge fist over Cameron, Louisiana, and killed hundreds of people. I worked a minimum-wage cleanup job pulling bodies out of the Calcasieu River. Over in the Atchafalaya Swamp I saw every type of animal in the wetlands starve or drown on the tops of flooded trees and floating piles of trash. I smelled more death in the aftermath of the storm than I did in war.

Hamp Rieber died trying to rescue people on a rooftop with his pontoon plane. Charles Walters became a drunk who worked the gate at Angola because he was too fat to sit on a horse and too scared to walk among the inmates. I started my own company and drilled for oil in eastern Montana and hit four dusters in a row, and, dead broke, headed over to Lame Deer and put on a jingle shirt and danced among the Cheyenne children. What a noise we made.