I had never confronted the driver or even spoken to him, because he was part of an official investigation, and my contacting him would have been improper. But the day after I talked with Fat Tony, I drove up the Teche to what were called the Quarters, outside the little town of Loreauville. The Quarters were composed of cabins and shotgun houses that went back to the corporate-plantation era of the nineteenth century. Most of them were painted a yellowish gray and aligned in rows on dirt streets with rain ditches and bare yards where whites and people of color lived in harmony and seemed to enjoy the lives they had. On weekends the residents barbecued and drank beer on their small galleries, washed their cars in the yard, and flew kites and played softball in the streets with their children. I don’t mean to romanticize poverty. The Loreauville Quarters were a window into my childhood, a time when few people in the community spoke English and few had traveled farther than two parishes from their place of birth. It wasn’t a half-bad world in which to grow up.
I found his name, T. J. Dartez, on a mailbox. I slipped my badge holder and my clip-on holster from my belt and put them under the seat, and stepped across the rain ditch into his yard. An old washing machine converted into a barbecue pit was smoking on the gallery, a chicken dripping in the coals. I heard children’s voices in back. I walked up the dirt driveway. A dented washed-out blue pickup was parked in a shed. An unshaved man in work pants and a clean strap undershirt was lobbing a Wiffle ball at two little girls armed with plastic baseball bats. His hair was black and greasy and curly on the back of his neck. He turned around, smiling. The stub of a filter-tipped cigar was clenched in his teeth. I had never seen him before.
“You looking for somebody?” he asked.
“Are you Mr. Dartez?”
“Yes, suh.”
I stared at him. I don’t know for how long. The little girls looked about six and eight. They had both gone silent. “I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
I glanced at the girls. “A serious matter.”
“Y’all go he’p your mama,” he said.
His house looked like a boxcar, a poorer version of mine, set up on cinder blocks. The girls went up the wooden steps and let the screen slam behind them.
“You’re from the agency?” he said.
“What agency?”
“The bill-collection one.”
“No, I’m not.”
He looked at nothing. “You’re him, ain’t you?”
“I don’t know who ‘him’ is.”
“The husband of the woman in the accident.”
“Yes, that’s who I am.”
“What you want wit’ me?”
“You know who Tony Nemo is?”
“Who?”
“You may not know him, but he knows you. He says you ran over a child in Alabama.”
“That’s a damn lie.”
“It didn’t happen?”
“I got a DWI for driving drunk in a school zone there. I didn’t hurt nobody. I don’t drink no more, either.”
“But you were driving faster than forty-five when you hit my wife, weren’t you?”
Through the screen, I could see his wife and children staring at us. These were people for whom bad luck was not an abstraction but a constant; a knock on the door, a puff of wind, and their lives could be up the spout.
“You always got your eye on the speedometer when you’re driving at night?” he said. “I think I was driving forty-five. I cain’t say for sure. She come out of the dark.”
“Her lights weren’t on?”
He tried to hold his eyes on mine. “I cain’t remember.”
“Your lawyer told you to say that?”
“Suh?”
“You heard me.”
His expression turned into a pout, like a child’s. “I ain’t got nothing else to say.”
“I hear you tried to pump State Farm.”
“I missed eight days of work. Who’s gonna pay for that? You?”
“My wife was a nun in Central America,” I said.
His mouth moved, but no sound came out.
“She was a former sister. She devoted her life to helping the poor.”
“She’s a farmer—?”
How do you get angry at a man who cannot understand or speak his own language?
“If you were me, what would you do, Mr. Dartez? What would you feel?”
There was a big thickly leafed shade tree by his garage. It was filled with wind, its leaves dark green against an orange sun. He stared at it as though he wanted to hide inside its branches. “This guy you call Tony? He’s a dago gangster you using to scare me?”
“How do you know he’s a gangster?”
“I know what goes on.”
“I’m telling you he took an interest in you. I’m not sure why. I told him to butt out. I’m telling you to learn who your friends are.”
“You’re my friend? A man who comes to my house and scares my wife and children?”
I stepped closer to him. I couldn’t help my feelings, the surge of bile in my stomach, the visceral disgust I felt for his ignorance, my desire to do things with my fists that were ultimately a confession of defeat. He stepped back. “My old lady is calling the cops.”
The wind shifted. I could smell his odor, the barbecue smoke on his skin, the grease in his hair. “You lied to the state trooper. Until you admit your part in the accident, you’ll never have peace.”
“I’m sorry your wife is dead. She come at me. I didn’t do nothing wrong. If you won’t accept that, go fuck yourself.”
“You had your warning,” I said.
“My family heard that. What’s the sheriff gonna say if I call him and tell him that? Answer me that. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Fuck you twice.”
I walked away, the sugarcane fields and the horizon tilting, my long-sleeve white shirt peppered with sweat, a war taking place in my chest that I knew I would never win.
Clete had two offices, one in New Orleans, one in New Iberia. When he worked out of his New Iberia office, he rented a cottage at the Teche Motel on East Main, down the bayou from my house. When I woke Sunday morning, there were clouds of thick white fog bumping against the tree trunks in the backyard, like cotton on the floor of a gin. I saw a raccoon on top of Tripod’s hutch, its coat shiny with dew. I went to the back door and looked through the screen. The coon had climbed into an oak tree and was looking at me from atop a limb. I pushed open the screen. “Tripod?”
Then he was gone. I went outside in my pajamas and slippers and looked up at the branches but saw no sign of him. I went back inside and dressed and ate breakfast and went to Mass at St. Edward’s. When I returned home, Clete’s metallic-purple Cadillac was parked in the driveway, the top up, his stocking feet sticking out the back window. He was asleep on the backseat with a pillow over his face. He smelled like a beer truck.
I went inside and made coffee and warmed a pan of milk and put four cinnamon rolls in the oven, then went into the backyard again and looked for the coon. Tripod had died years ago, but I often dreamed of him in my sleep, as I did my other pets, and I wondered if animals, like people I’ve known, have ways of contacting us again. A half hour later, Clete came through the back door, his face wrinkled on one side by the pillow, his eyes bleary.
“You just hit town?” I said.
“I’m not sure what I did. I was drinking Jack with a beer back in Morgan City, then my lights went out. You got a beer?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll drink kerosene if you’ve got it.” He sat down at the breakfast table. He was wearing his porkpie hat and the long-sleeve tropical shirt he had bought in Miami. “You got any uppers?”
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