Creole Belle (64 page)

“Ice cream?”

“I’ve been clean and sober three years now. There’s a truck outside. Look up in the balcony. They’re all eating ice cream. It’s free.”

“I’m happy for you, Dixie.”

“What was the deal with the photographer?”

“Somebody stole her childhood, so she lives every day of her life full of rage.”

“She was molested?” he said, his gaze coming back on mine.

I nodded.

“I’d say she’s ahead of the game.”

“How do you mean?”

“If that happened to me, I think I’d be killing people. Instead, this gal is making films. Sounds like she’s done all right, don’t you think?”

The western band’s first number was “Cimarron.” I was about to rejoin Alafair and Molly and take a pass on Dixie Lee’s invitation when something in our conversation began to bother me, like a piece in a mosaic that is cut wrong and doesn’t fit no matter which way you turn it. I looked up at the balcony again. It was filled with children eating ice cream from paper bowls with plastic spoons. They were not eating Popsicles or soft ice cream from a mechanical dispenser. They were eating ice cream that had been hand-scooped from hard-frozen containers, the kind that neighborhood vending trucks didn’t carry.

“You said there’s a truck outside and the ice cream is free?” I asked.

Either Dixie Lee didn’t hear my question or he didn’t consider it worth answering. His deep-set eyes were looking at the crowd and at the tinseled confetti someone was throwing out of the balcony into the beam of the spotlight.

“What kind of truck?” I said.

“A freezer truck. Who cares?” he said. “Look at the women in this place. Great God Almighty, tell me this world ain’t a pleasure. Pull your tallywhacker out of the hay baler and join the party, Dave.”

I
WENT OUTSIDE
into the coldness of the night and the brilliance of the stars and the smell of barbecue smoke and crawfish boiling in a cauldron of cob-corn and artichokes and whole potatoes, and I saw a tan-colored freezer truck parked between the Sugar Cane Festival Building and the picnic shelters. There were rows of latched freezer compartments on either side of it, and against the background of the tiny white lights strung in the oak trees, its surfaces looked armored and hard-edged and cold to the touch, like a tank parked in the middle of a children’s playground. It was the same kind of truck the Patin brothers used when they tried to blow my head off. The driver was wearing a brown uniform and a cap with a lacquered bill and a scuffed leather jacket, and he was scooping French-vanilla ice cream out of a big round container on a picnic table and placing it in paper bowls for a line of children. His head and face reminded me of an upended ham, his eyes serious with his work, his mouth a tight seam. But when he looked up at me, he smiled in recognition. “I’ll be darned. Remember me?” he said.

“You’re Bobby Joe Guidry,” I replied. “You were in Desert Storm.”

“That’s me.”

“Clete Purcel and I met you at that outdoor dinner for Amidee Broussard. I told you to check out a dispatcher’s job with the department.”

“That’s right. But the job didn’t offer enough hours. Everything worked out okay, though. I just started driving for this offshore supply company. I’m going to meetings, too. You helped me out a lot.”

“You deliver food for deepwater rigs?”

“Yeah, every kind of frozen food there is. I drive to Morgan City and Port Fourchon, mostly.”

“How’d you get on with the company?”

“A lady in your department gave me a number and told me to call them up. She told me to use her name.”

“Which lady, Bobby Joe?”

“Miss Julie. I saw her inside the building just a few minutes ago.”

“What’s her last name, podna?”

“Ardoin. I heard her husband wasn’t any good, but to my mind, Miss Julie is a fine lady.”

“What did you hear about Miss Julie’s husband?”

“He got in with the wrong guys and was flying coke and weed into the country. That’s why he killed himself. Maybe it’s just one of those stories, though.”

“I never heard those stories, Bobby Joe.”

“You probably wouldn’t. He flew out of Lake Charles and Lafayette. Better get some of this ice cream. It’s going fast,” he said.

When I went back into the building, the western swing band was blaring out “The San Antonio Rose,” the horns so loud that the floor was quaking under our feet.

I
SAT DOWN
next to Molly. Alafair’s chair was empty. I looked around and couldn’t see her anywhere. “Where’s Alf?” I said, my voice almost lost inside the volume of Bob Wills’s most famous song.

“She went to find Gretchen Horowitz,” Molly said.

I tried to think and couldn’t. Everything happening around me seemed fragmented and incoherent but part of a larger pattern, like a sheet of stained glass thrown upon a flagstone. A truck like the one from which a man had blown out my windshield was parked outside the building, and its driver had just told me he’d gotten his job from the same woman Gretchen Horowitz had warned me about. Could Clete and I have been wrong all this time? Had Julie Ardoin been a key player in all the events that had transpired over the last two months? Were we that blind? And now “The San Antonio Rose” was thundering inside my head, the same song Gretchen Horowitz had been whistling after she pumped three rounds into Bix Golightly’s face.

I got up and worked my way around the back of the crowd toward the beer concession. I could see Clete sitting at the end of a row, but there was no sign of Alafair or Gretchen or Julie Ardoin. I sat down next to him and scanned the audience. “Have you seen Alf?” I asked.

“Yeah, she and Gretchen were just here. They went to the ladies’ room,” he replied.

“Where’s Julie?”

“She went with them.”

“Clete, I just ran into that guy Bobby Joe Guidry, the Desert Storm vet.”

“Yeah, yeah, what about him?” he said irritably, trying to concentrate on the band.

“The company Guidry works for is supplying the ice cream for the concert. It’s the same company that owned the truck used by the guys who tried to kill me in Lafayette.”

“The truck was stolen, right? What’s the point? A guy who works for the same company is scooping ice cream outside? Big deal.”

“Guidry says he got his job through Julie Ardoin. She told him to call the company and use her name.”

“Julie is on the Sugar Cane Festival committee. She helps with all the events connected with the building.”

“No, it’s too much coincidence. Guidry says her husband was flying dope into the country.”

“That’s not exceptional,” he said. “Most of the guys who do that stuff are either crop dusters or helicopter pilots who get tired of landing on rigs in fifty-knot gales. For fuck’s sake, let’s listen to the band, okay?”

“Think about it, Cletus. When we landed in that harbor off the island, she came in like a leaf gliding onto a pond.”

“Yeah, because she’s a good pilot. You want somebody from the Japanese air force flying us around?”

“You’re not going to listen to anything I say, are you?”

“Because nothing you say makes sense,” he replied. “You’ve got me worried, Dave. I think you’re losing it.”

“I’ve got
you
worried? That’s just great,” I said, and punched him in the top of the chest with my finger.

I saw the pain flicker in his face and wanted to shoot myself. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” I said.

“Forget it, big mon. I’m right as rain. Now let’s listen to the music.”

I propped my hands on my knees, then squeezed my temples and closed my eyes and reopened them and stared at a spot between my
shoes. I felt as though I were drowning. I felt exactly as I had when a black medic straddled my thighs and tore a cellophane wrapper from a package of cigarettes with his teeth and pressed it over the red bubble escaping from the hole in my chest, my lung filling with blood, my body dropping from beneath his knees into a black well. When I raised my head, the audience and the western band were spinning around me.

“Speak of the devil,” Clete said, “here she comes.”

“Who?”

“Who else? Every time I think of that woman, I want to unscrew my big boy and mail it to the South Pole in hopes the penguins will bury it under a glacier.”

Varina Leboeuf was not merely passing by. She was headed right toward us. “I’m glad I found you,” she said.

“Yeah, what’s the haps? I thought Halloween was over,” Clete said.

“You asshole,” Varina said.

“I hear that a lot—mostly from skells and crack whores. I’m sorry for whatever harm I caused you, Varina, but how about giving us a break here?”

“You don’t know who your friends are,” she said.

“You had my office creeped,” he said.

She clenched her jaw, her mouth tightening. “Is everything all right?” she said.

“Why shouldn’t it be?” Clete said.

“Because I saw Alafair and Gretchen outside,” she said. “I think they were with Julie Ardoin.”

“They went to the restroom,” Clete said.

“No, they didn’t. They were outside.”

“Why would they be outside? So what if they were?” Clete said.

“You’re not listening to me. Two men were out there. I know them. They work for Pierre. I think they’re involved with stolen paintings or something. They’re the ones Gretchen beat up.”

“Sit down and say all that again,” I said.

“I’m trying to help out here. Don’t be angry at me,” she said.

“I’m not angry at you. I can’t hear you. There’s too much noise. Sit down,” I said.

“Did Julie Ardoin ever work for you?” Clete said.

“Of course not. Why would she work for me? I hardly know her. Her husband used to fly Pierre around, but I never spent any time with Julie. I have to go.”

I took her by the arm and pulled her down to Julie Ardoin’s empty chair. “Are you telling us Alafair and Gretchen are in harm’s way?” I said.

“God, you’re an idiot. Do I have to write it on the wall?” she said. She walked away from us, her southwestern prairie skirt swishing on the backs of her legs.

“She’s wearing a gold belt,” Clete said.

“So what?”

“So was the woman I saw with Pierre Dupree at Dupree’s house.”

My head was splitting.

I
WENT BACK
to my seat. Molly was still sitting by herself. “You didn’t see Alf?” I said.

“No. She wasn’t with Clete?” she said.

“She and Gretchen went to the restroom with Julie Ardoin. I thought maybe she came back here.”

“She’s fine. Stop worrying. Come on, Dave, enjoy yourself.”

“Varina Leboeuf said some gumballs who want to hurt Gretchen were outside, and so were Alafair and Gretchen.”

“Varina likes to stir things up. She’s a manipulator. She wants to stick pins in Clete for dumping her. Now sit down.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Where’s Clete?”

“Looking for Gretchen.”

“I’m coming, too.”

“No, stay here. Alafair won’t know where we are if she comes back and you’re gone.”

Maybe I was losing it, as Clete had said. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Would a couple of goons try to do payback on Gretchen Horowitz at a music festival attended by hundreds of people? Was Varina Leboeuf telling the truth? Was she a mixture of
good and evil rather than the morally bankrupt person I had come to regard her as? Did she have parameters I hadn’t given her credit for?

Clete and I had thrown away the rule book and were paying the price. We had protected Gretchen Horowitz and, in the meantime, had accomplished nothing in solving the abduction of Tee Jolie Melton and the murder of her sister, Blue. The greatest irony of all was the fact that our adversaries, whoever they were, thought we had information about them that we didn’t. Ultimately, what was it all about? The answer was oil: millions of barrels of it that had settled on the bottom of the Gulf or that were floating northward, like brownish-red fingers, into Louisiana’s wetlands. But dwelling on an environmental catastrophe in the industrial era did little or no good. It was like watching the casket of one’s slain son or daughter being lowered into the ground and trying to analyze the causes of war at the same time. The real villains always skated. The soldier paid the dues; a light went out forever in someone’s home; and the rest of us went on with our lives. The scenario has never changed. The faces of the players might change, but the original script was probably written in charcoal on the wall of a cave long ago, and I believe we’ve conceded to its demands ever since.

At the moment I didn’t care about the oil in the Gulf or Gretchen Horowitz or even Tee Jolie Melton. I didn’t care about my state or my job or honor or right and wrong. I wanted my daughter, Alafair, at my side, and I wanted to go home with her and my wife, Molly, and be with our pets, Tripod and Snuggs, in our kitchen, the doors locked and the windows fastened, all of us gathered around a table where we would break and share bread and give no heed to winter storms or the leaves shedding with the season and the tidal ebb that drained the Teche of its water.

The acceptance of mortality in one’s life is no easy matter. But anyone who says he has accepted the premature mortality of his child is lying. There is an enormous difference between living with a child’s death and accepting it. The former takes a type of courage that few people understand. Why was I having these thoughts? Because I felt sick inside. I felt sick because I knew that Clete and I had provoked a group of people who were genuinely iniquitous
and who planned to hurt us as badly as they could, no matter what the cost. This may seem like a problematic raison d’être for the behavior of villainous individuals, unless you consider that there are groups of people in our midst who steal elections, commit war crimes, pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe, and get away with all of it.