James Burke: Sunset Limited

She went inside the bait shop, but did not come back out right away. I heard the cash register drawer open and knew the subterfuge that was at work, one that she used to mask her charity, as though somehow it were a vice. She would pay for the fried pie she took from the counter, then cradle Tripod in one arm and hand-feed it to him whether he wanted it or not, while his thick, ringed tail flipped in the air like a spring.

I tried to concentrate on repairing the rail on the dock and not see the thoughts that were as bright and jagged as shards of glass in the center of my mind. I kept touching my brow and temple with my arm, as though I were wiping off sweat, but that wasn't my trouble. I could feel a band of pressure tightening across the side of my head, just as I had felt it on night trails in Vietnam or when Bedcheck Charlie was cutting through our wire.

What was it that bothered me? The presence of men like Archer Terrebonne in our midst? But why should I worry about his kind? They had always been with us, scheming, buying our leaders, deceiving the masses. No, it was Megan, and Megan, and Megan, and her betrayal of everything I thought she represented: Joe Hill, the Wobblies, the strikers murdered at Ludlow, Colorado, Woody Guthrie, Dorothy Day, all those faceless working people whom historians and academics and liberals alike treat with indifference.

I ran the electric saw through a two-by-four and ground the blade across a nail. The board seemed to explode, the saw leaping from my hand, splinters embedding in my skin like needles. I stepped backward from the saw, which continued to spin by my foot, then ripped the cord loose from the socket in the bait-shop wall.

"You all right, Dave?" Alafair said through the screen.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, holding the back of my right hand.

Through the trees next to the bayou I saw a mud-splattered stake truck loaded with boxes of chrysanthemums coming down the road. The truck pulled at an angle across the boat ramp, and Mout' Broussard got out on the passenger's side and a tiny Hmong woman in a conical straw hat with a face like a withered apple got down from the other. Mout' put a long stick across his shoulders, and the woman loaded wire-bailed baskets of flowers on each end of it, then picked up a basket herself and followed him down the dock.

"You sell these for us, we gonna give you half, you," Mout' said.

"I don't seem to have much business today, Mout'," I said.

"Season's almost over. I'm fixing to give them away," he said.

"Put them under the eave. We'll give it a try," I said.

He and the woman lay the flowers in yellow and brown and purple clumps against the bait-shop wall.

Mout' wore a suit coat with his overalls and was sweating inside his clothes. He wiped his face with a red handkerchief.

"You doing all right?" he said to me.

"Sure," I said.

"That's real good. Way it should be," he said. He replaced the long stick across his shoulders and extended his arms on it and walked with the Hmong woman toward the truck, their bodies lit by the glow of the sun through the trees.

Why look for the fires that burn in western skies? I thought. The excoriated symbol of difference was always within our ken. You didn't have to see far to find it-an elderly black man who took pride in the fact he shined Huey Long's and Harry James's shoes or a misplaced and wizened Hmong woman who had fought the Communists in Laos for the French and the CIA and now grew flowers for Cajuns in Louisiana. The story was ongoing, the players changing only in name. I believe Jack Flynn understood that and probably forgave his children when they didn't.

I sat on a bench by the water faucet and tried to pick the wood splinters out of the backs of my hands. The wind came up and the robins filled the air with a sound that was almost deafening, their wings fluttering above my head, their breasts the color of dried blood.

"Are we still going to the show tonight?" Alafair said.

"You better believe it, you," I said, and winked.

She flipped Tripod up on her shoulder like a sack of meal, and the three of us went up the slope to find Bootsie.