Heaven's Prisoners (33 page)

But I always feared a worse consequence for myself. One day a curious light dies in the eyes. The unblemished place where God once grasped our souls becomes permanently stained. A bird lifts its span of wings and flies forever out of the heart.

Then I did a self-serving thing that impersonated a charitable act. I pulled off the causeway into a rest area to use the men’s room, and saw an elderly Negro man under one of the picnic shelters. Even though it was a summer night, he wore an old suitcoat and a felt hat. By his foot was a desiccated cardboard suitcase tied shut with rope, the words
The Great Speckled Bird
painted on one side. For some reason he had lighted a fire of twigs under the empty barbecue grill and was staring out at the light rain that had begun to fall on the bay.

“Did you eat tonight, partner?” I asked.

“No, suh,” he said. His face was covered with thin brown lines, like a tobacco leaf.

“I think I’ve got just the thing for us, then,” I said, and took my half-eaten hamburger and the untouched one from the truck and heated them on the edge of the grill. I also found two cans of warm Dr. Pepper in my toolbox.

The rain slanted in the firelight. The old man ate without speaking. Occasionally his eyes looked at me.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“Lafayette. Or Lake Charles. I might go to Beaumont, too.” His few teeth were long and purple with rot.

“I can take you to the Salvation Army in Lafayette.”

“I don’t like it there.”

“It might storm tonight. You don’t want to be out here in an electrical storm, do you?”

“What chu doing this for?” His eyes were red, the lines in his face as intricate as cobwebs.

“I can’t leave you out here at night. It’s not good for you. Sometimes bad people are out at night.”

He made a sound as though a great philosophical weariness were escaping from his lungs.

“I don’t want no truck with them kind. No, suh,” he said, and allowed me to pick up his suitcase and walk him to the pickup.

It started raining hard outside of Lafayette. The sugarcane fields were green and thrashing in the wind, and the oak trees along the road trembled whitely in the explosions of lightning on the horizon. The old man fell asleep against the far door, and I was left alone in the drumming of the rain against the cab, in the sulfurous smell of the air through the wind vane, in the sulfurous smell that was as acrid as cordite.

When I awoke in the morning, the house was cool from the window fans, and the sunlight looked like smoke in the pecan trees outside the window. I walked barefoot in my undershorts to the bathroom, then started toward the kitchen to make coffee. Robin opened her door in her pajamas and motioned me inside with her fingers. I still slept on the couch and she in the back room, in part because of Alafair and in part, perhaps, because of a basic dishonesty in myself about the nature of our relationship. She bit down quietly on her lip with a conspiratorial smile.

I sat on the edge of the bed with her and looked out the window into the backyard. It was covered in blue shadow and dripping with dew. She put her hands on my neck and face, rubbed them down my back and chest.

“You came in late,” she said.

“I had to take an old man to the Sally in Lafayette.”

She kissed my shoulder and traced her hand down my chest. Her body was still warm from sleep.

“It sounds like somebody didn’t sleep too well,” she said.

“I guess not.”

“I know a good way to wake up in the morning,” she said, and touched me with her hand.

She felt me jerk involuntarily.

“You got your chastity belt on this morning?” she said. “Scruples about mommy again?”

“I blew away Victor Romero last night.”

I felt her go quiet and stiff next to me. Then she said in a hushed voice, “You killed Victor Romero?”

“He dealt it.”

Then she was quiet again. She might have been a tough girl raised in a welfare project, but she was no different from anyone else in her reaction to being in proximity to someone who has recently killed another human being.

“It comes with the fucking territory, Robin.”

“I know that. I wasn’t judging you.” She placed her hand on my back.

I stared out the window at the yard, my hands on my knees. The redwood picnic table was dark with moisture.

“You want me to fix breakfast for you?” she said finally.

“Not now.”

“I’ll make toast in a pan, the way you like it.”

“I don’t want anything to eat right now.”

She put her arms around me and squeezed me. I could feel her cheek and her hair on my shoulder.

“Do you love me, Dave?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Come on, Streak. Fair and square. Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“No, you don’t. You love things about me. There’s a difference. It’s a big one.”

“I’m not up to this today, Robin.”

“What I’m telling you is I understand and I got no complaint. You were decent to me when nobody else was. You know what it meant to me when you took me to midnight Mass at the Cathedral? I never had a man treat me with that kind of respect before. Mommy thought she had Cinderella’s glass slippers on.”

She picked up my hand in hers and kissed it on the back. Then, almost in a whisper, she said, “I’ll always be your friend. Anytime, anywhere, for anything.”

I slipped my hand up her back, under her pajama top, and kissed the corner of her eye. Then I drew her against me, felt her breath on my chest, felt her fingers on my thighs and stomach, and I lay down next to her and looked at her eyes, the tanned smoothness of her skin, the way her lips parted when I touched her; then she pressed hard against me for a brief moment, got up from the bed and slid the bolt on the door, and took off her pajamas. She sat beside me, leaned over my face and kissed me, her mouth smiling as though she were looking at a little boy. I pulled off my undershorts, and she sat on top of me, her eyes closing, her mouth opening silently, as she took me inside her. She put her hands in my hair, kissed my ear, then stretched herself out against my body and tucked her feet inside my calves.

A moment later she felt me tense and try to hold back before I gave in to that old male desire that simply wants to complete that bursting moment of fulfillment, whether the other person gets to participate or not. But she raised herself on her arms and knees and smiled at me and never stopped her motion, and when I went weak inside and felt sweat break out on my forehead and felt my loins heat like a flame burning in a circle through paper, she leaned down on my chest again and kissed my mouth and neck and forced her hands under my back as though some part of me might elude her in that final, heart-twisting moment.

Later we lay on top of the sheets under the fan while the sunlight grew brighter in the tree limbs outside. She turned on her side, looking at my profile, and took my fingers in hers.

“Dave, I don’t think you should be troubled like this,” she said. “You tried to arrest him, and he tried to kill you for it.”

I looked at the shadows of the wood-bladed fan turning on the ceiling.

“Look, I know New Orleans cops who would have just killed the guy and never given him a chance. Then they’d plant a gun on him. They’ve got a name for it. What do they call it?”

“A ‘drop’ or a ‘throwaway’.”

“You’re not that kind of cop. You’re a good man. Why do you want to carry this guilt around?”

“You don’t understand, Robin. I think maybe I’m going to do it again.”

Later I called the office and told them I wouldn’t be in that day, then I put on my running shorts and shoes, lifted weights under the mimosa tree in the backyard, and ran three miles along the bayou road. Wisps of fog still hung around the flooded roots of the cypress trees. I went inside the paintless wood-frame general store at the four-corners, drank a carton of orange juice and talked French with the elderly owner of the store, then jogged back along the road while the sun climbed higher into the sky and dragonflies dipped and hovered over the cattails.

When I came through the front screen, hot and running with sweat, I saw the door of Annie’s and my bedroom wide open, the lock and hasp pried loose from the jamb, the torn wood like a ragged dental incision. Sunlight streamed through the windows into the room, and Robin was on her hands and knees, in a white sun halter and a pair of cutoff blue jean shorts, dipping a scrub brush into a bucket of soapy water and scouring the grain in the cypress floor. The buckshot-pocked walls and the headboard of the bed were wet and gleaming, and by a bottle of Clorox on the floor was another bucket filled with soaking rags, and the rags and the water were the color of rust.

“What are you doing?” I said.

She glanced at me, then continued to scrub the grain without replying. The stiff bristles of the brush sounded like sandpaper against the wood. The muscles of her tan back rippled with her motion.

“Damn you, Robin. Who gave you the fucking right to go into my bedroom?”

“I couldn’t find your keys, so I pried the lock off with a screwdriver. I’m sorry about the damage.”

“You get the fuck out of this room.”

She paused and sat back on her heels. There were white indentations on her knees. She brushed the perspiration out of her hairline with the back of her wrist.

“Is this your church where you go every day to suffer?” she said.

“It’s none of your business what it is. It’s not a part of your life.”

“Then tell me to get out of your life. Say it and I’ll do it.”

“I’m asking you to leave this room.”

“I have a hard time buying your attitude, Streak. You wear guilt like a big net over your head. You ever know guys who are always getting the clap? They’re not happy unless some broad has dosed them from their toenails to their eyes. Is that the kind of gig you want for yourself?”

The sweat was dripping off my hands onto the floor. I breathed slowly and pushed my wet hair back over my head.

“I’m sorry for being profane at you. I truly am. But come outside now,” I said.

She dipped the brush in the bucket again and began to enlarge the scrubbed circle on the floor.

“Robin?” I said.

She concentrated her eyes on the strokes of the brush across the wood.

“This is my house, Robin.”

I stepped toward her.

“I’m talking to you, kiddo. No more free pass,” I said.

She sat back on her heels again and dropped the brush in the water.

“I’m finished,” she said. “You want to stand here and mourn or help me carry these buckets outside?”

“You didn’t have the right to do this. You mean well, but you didn’t have the right.”

“Why don’t you show some respect for your wife and stop using her? If you want to get drunk, go do it. If you want to kill somebody, do that. But at least have the courage to do it on your own, without all this remorse bullshit. It’s a drag, Dave.”

She picked up one of the buckets with both hands to avoid spilling it, and walked out the door past me. Her bare feet left damp imprints on the cypress floor. I continued to stand alone in the room, the dust spinning in the shafts of light through the windows, then I saw her cross the backyard with the bucket and walk toward the duck pond.

“Wait!” I called through the window.

I gathered up the soiled rags from the floor, put them in the other bucket, and followed her outside. I stopped by the aluminum shed where I kept my lawn mower and tools, took out a shovel, and walked down to the small flower garden that Batist’s wife had planted next to a shallow coulee that ran through my property. The soil in the garden was loamy and damp from the overflow of the coulee and partly shaded by banana trees so the geraniums and impatiens didn’t burn up in the summer; but the outer edge was in full sun and it ran riot with daisies and periwinkles.

They weren’t the cornflowers and bluebonnets that a Kansas girl should have, but I knew that she would understand. I pushed the shovel into the damp earth and scooped out a deep hole among the daisy roots, poured the two buckets of soap and water and chemicals into the dirt, put the brush and rags into the hole, then put the buckets on top and crushed them flat with my foot, and covered the hole back up with a wet mound of dirt and a tangle of severed daisy and periwinkle roots. I uncoiled the garden hose from the side of the house and watered the mound until it was as slick and smooth as the ground around it and the chemicals had washed far below the root system of the flower bed.

It was the kind of behavior that you don’t care to think about or to explain to yourself later. I cleaned the shovel under the hose, replaced it in the shed, and walked back into the kitchen without speaking to Robin. Then I took a shower and put on a fresh pair of khakis and a denim shirt and read the newspaper at the redwood table under the mimosa tree. I could hear Robin making lunch in the kitchen and Alafair talking to her in a mixture of Spanish and English. Then Robin brought a ham-and-onion sandwich and a glass of iced tea to me on a tray. I didn’t look up from the table when she set it on the table. She remained standing next to me, her bare thigh only an inch from my arm, then I felt her hand touch me lightly on the shoulder and finger my damp collar and tease the hair along my neck.

“I’ll always be your biggest fan, Robicheaux,” she said.

I put my arm around her soft bottom and squeezed her against me, my eyes shut.

Late that afternoon Minos Dautrieve was at my front door, dressed in blue jeans, tennis shoes without socks, and a paint-flecked gold shirt. A fishing rod stuck out the passenger’s window of his parked Toyota jeep.

“I hear you know where all the big bass are,” he said.

“Sometimes.”

“I’ve got some fried chicken and Dixie beer and soda in the cooler. Let’s get it on down the road.”

“We were thinking of going to the track tonight.”

“I’ll have you back early. Get your butt moving, boy.”

“You’ve really got the touch, Minos.”

We hitched my trailer and one of my boats to his jeep and drove twenty-five miles to the levee that fronts the southwestern edge of the Atchafalaya swamp. The wind was down, the water quiet, the insects just beginning to rise from the reeds and lily pads in the shadows of the willow islands. I took us across a long bay dotted with dead cypresses and oil platforms, then up a bayou, deep into the swamp, before I cut the engine and let the boat drift quietly up to the entrance of a small bay with a narrow channel at the far end. I still didn’t know what Minos was up to.