CHAPTER 21

Tee Bobby Hulin had parked his gas-guzzler by the cement boat ramp and had walked up into the gloom of the trees. His autistic sister, Rosebud, sat in the passenger's seat, a safety belt locked across her chest, staring at an empty pirogue floating aimlessly on the bayou. The evening was warm, the string of lightbulbs above my dock glowing with humidity, but Tee Bobby wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned at the wrists. His armpits were damp with sweat, his lips dry and caked at the edges.

"I just cut a CD. It's got 'Jolie Blon's Bounce' on it. Nobody else seem to like it too much. Anyway, see what you think," he said.

"I appreciate it, Tee Bobby. You kind of warm in that shirt?" I said.

"You know how it is," he replied.

"I can get you into a treatment program."

He shook his head and kicked gingerly at a tree root.

"Your sister okay?" I asked.

"Ain't nothing okay."

"We're getting ready to eat dinner right now. Maybe we can talk later," I said.

"I just dropped by, that's all."

It was dark where we stood under the trees, the molded pecan husks and blackened leaves soft under our feet, the air tannic, like water that has stood for a long time in a wooden cistern. The dying light was gold on the tops of the cypresses in the swamp, and snow egrets were rising into the light, their wings feathering in the wind.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"You busted up Jimmy Dean Styles real bad. You shamed him in front of other people. Jimmy Sty always square the score."

"Forget about Jimmy Sty. Tell the truth about what happened to Amanda Boudreau."

"The lie detector say I didn't do it. That's all that counts. I ain't raped or shot nobody. Got the proof."

"You were there."

He tried to stare me down, then his eyes watered and broke.

"I wish I ain't come here. The lie detector say I'm innocent. But ain't nobody listening," he said.

"That girl is going to live in your dreams. She'll stand by your deathbed. You'll never have any peace until you get honest on this, Tee Bobby."

"Oh, God, why you do this to me?" he said, and walked hurriedly down the incline, slightly off balance.

That night I listened to his CD down at the bait shop.

The rendition of his new composition, "Jolie Blon's Bounce," was the best Acadian rhythm and blues I had ever heard. But I had a feeling the larger world would never come to know the tormented musical talent of Tee Bobby Hulin.

The next morning the sheriff took me off the desk and sent me to New Orleans with Helen Soileau to pick up a prisoner. It was noon when we crossed the Mississippi and drove into the city. While she ate lunch, I went back across the river to Algiers and caught the end of a low-bottom AA meeting off an alley, next to a bar, in the back of a warehouse with painted-over windows.

But this was not an ordinary AA group.

The failed, the aberrant, the doubly addicted, and the totally brain-fried whose neurosis didn't even have a name found their way to the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting: strippers from the Quarter, psychotic street people, twenty-dollar hookers, peckerwood fundamentalists, leather-clad, born-again bikers, women who breast-fed their infants in a sea of cigarette smoke, a couple of cops who had done federal time, male prostitutes dying of AIDS, parolees with a lean, hungry look who sought only a signature on an attendance slip for their P.O.'s, methheads who drank from fire extinguishers in the joint, and Vietnam vets who wore their military tattoos and black- or olive-colored 1st Cav. and airborne T-shirts and still heard the thropping of helicopter blades in their sleep.

When it was my turn to speak, I began to do another Fifth Step, confessing my use of speed, the injury I had done Jimmy Dean Styles, the abiding anger and violence that seemed to afflict my life. But as I looked out into the smoke at the seamed and unshaved and rouged faces of the people sitting around the long table strewn with AA pamphlets, my words seemed twice-told and melodramatic, removed from the problems of people who counted themselves fortunate if they had food to eat that evening or a place to sleep that night.

I took a breath and started over again.

"An evil man did me physical injury. I think I know to at least a degree what a woman must feel like after she's been raped. For this deed and others he has committed, I believe this man does not deserve to live. These are serious and not idle thoughts that I have. In the meantime, I'm possessed of an enormous desire to drink," I said.

The discussion leader was a gaunt-faced biker with sunglasses as dark as welders' goggles and long silver hair that looked freshly shampooed and blow-dried.

"I'd get a lot of gone between me and them kind of thoughts, Dave. In California I went down for twenty-five and did twelve flat because of a dude like that. When I got out, I married his wife. She wrecked my truck, give my P.O. the clap, and run off with my Harley. Tell me that dude wasn't laughing in his grave," he said.

Everybody howled.

Except me and a street person at the far end of the table, a man with the glint of genuine madness in his eyes, his blond hair like melted and recooled tallow.

When the meeting broke up, he caught me at the door, his fingers biting into my upper arm, the vinegary stench of his body welling out of his yellow raincoat.

"Remember me?" he said.

"Sure," I replied.

"Not from New Iberia. You remember me from 'Nam?"

"A guy has lots of memories from the war," I said.

"I killed a child," he said.

"Sir?"

"We got into a meat grinder. It was after you got hit. We burned the ville. I seen a little girl run out of a hooch. She come apart in the smoke."

There were lines like pieces of white thread in the dirt around the corners of his eyes. His breath was odorless, his face inches from mine. He waited, as though I held a key that could unlock doors that were welded shut in his life.

"You want something to eat?" I asked.

"No."

"Take a ride with me," I said.

"Where?"

"I'm not sure," I replied.

There was no place for him, really. He was trapped inside memories that no human being should have to bear, and he would do the time and carry the cross for those makers of foreign and military policy who long ago had written their memoirs and appeared on televised Sunday-morning book promotions and moved on in their careers.

I took him to a motel and put two nights' rent on my credit card and gave him thirty dollars from my wallet.

"There's a Wal-Mart down the street. Maybe you can get yourself a razor and some clothes and a couple of food items," I said.

He was sitting on the bed in his motel room, staring at the motes of dust in a column of sunlight. I studied his face and his hair and eyes. I tried to remember the face of the medic who had cradled me in his arms as the AK-47 rounds from the trees below whanged off the helicopter's frame.

"How'd you get to New Orleans?" I asked.

"Rode a freight."

"The medic who saved my life was Italian. He was from Staten Island. You from Staten Island, troop?" I said.

"The trouble with killing somebody is it makes you forget who you used to be. I get places mixed up," he said. He rubbed his face on his sleeve. "You gonna pop that guy you was talking about in the meeting?"

Huey Lagneaux, also known as Baby Huey, had been hired as a bartender and bouncer at his uncle's club because of his massive size, the deep black tone of his skin, which gave him the ambience of a leviathan rising from oceanic depths, and the fact he only needed to lay one meaty arm over a troublemaker's shoulders in order to walk him quietly to the door.