CHAPTER 24

Later the same night I drove past a deserted sugar mill in the rain and parked my truck on a dead-end paved street in a rural part of St. Mary Parish. I jumped across a ditch running with brown water and cut through a hedge to the stoop of a small house with a tin roof set up on cinder blocks. I slipped a screwdriver around the edge of the door and prized the door away from the jamb, stressing the hinges back against the screws until a piece of wood splintered inside and fell on the linoleum and the lock popped free. I froze in the darkness, expecting to hear movement inside the house, but there was no sound except the rain linking on the roof and a locomotive rumbling on railway tracks out by the highway.

I pushed back the door and walked through the kitchen and into the bedroom of Legion Guidry.

He was sleeping on his back, in a brass bed, the breeze from an oscillating fan ruffling his hair, dimpling the sheet that covered his body. Even though the air outside was cool and sweet smelling from the rain, the air in the bedroom was close and thick with the odor of moldy clothes, unwashed hair, re-breathed whiskey fumes, and a salty, gray smell that had dried into the sheets and mattress.

A blue-black.38 revolver lay on the nightstand. I picked it up quietly and went into the bathroom, then came back out and sat in a chair by the side of the bed. Legion's jaws were unshaved, but even in sleep his hair was combed and the flesh on his face kept its shape and didn't sag against the bone. I placed the muzzle of my.45 against his jawbone.

"I suspect you know what this is, Legion. I suspect you know what it can do to the inside of your head, too," I said.

A slight crease formed across his forehead, but otherwise he showed no recognition of my presence. His eyelids remained closed, his bare chest rising and falling with no irregularity, his hands folded passively on top of the sheet.

"Did you hear me?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

But he used the word "yes," not "yeah," as would be the custom of a Cajun man with no education, and I would have sworn there was no accent in his pronunciation.

"Don't bother looking for your.38," I said, and opened my left hand and sprinkled the six rounds from the cylinder of his revolver on his chest. "I put your piece in the toilet bowl. I notice you don't flush after you take a dump."

He opened his eyes but kept them on the ceiling and did not look at me.

"You don't know who I am, do you?" he asked.

My skin shrunk against my face. His voice sounded like a guttural echo rising through a chunk of sewer pipe, the Cajun accent completely gone.

I started to speak, then felt the words seize in my throat. I pushed the.45 harder into his jaw and caught my breath and tried again. But he cut me off.

"Ask me my name," he said.

"Your name?" I said dumbly.

"Yes, my name," he said.

"All right," I heard myself say, as though I had stepped inside a scenario that someone other than I had written. "What's your name?"

"My name is Legion," he replied.

"Really?" I said, my eyes bunking, my heart racing. "I'm glad we've gotten that out of the way."

But my rhetoric was bravado and I felt my palm sweating on the grips of the.45.1 cleared my throat and widened my eyes, like a man trying to stretch sleep out of his face. "Here it is, Legion," I said. "I'm a recovering drunk. That means I can't hold resentments against people, even a piece of human flotsam like you, no matter what they've done to me. This may seem like I'm pulling a mind-fuck on you, but what I'm telling you is straight up. You're going down, as deep in the shitter as I can put you, but it'll be by the numbers."

I blew air out of my nostrils and wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist.

"Afraid?" he said.

"Not of you."

"Yes, you are. Inside you're a very frightened man. That's why you're a drunk."

"Watch and see," I said.

I removed the muzzle of the.45 from his jawbone and started to release the magazine. There was a small red circle where the steel had been pressed against his skin.

Suddenly he sat up and dropped his legs over the side of the mattress and pulled the sheet off his body. He was naked, his thighs and torso ridged with hair, like soft strips of monkey fur, his phallus in a state of erection.

"I can still put a hollow-point between your eyes," I said.

But he didn't try to rise from the mattress. He tilted his head back and his mouth parted. A long, moist hiss emanated from his throat. His breath covered my face like a soiled, wet handkerchief.

I backed out of the bedroom, the.45 still pointed at Legion, then hurried through the kitchen and out into the night.

I started the truck and roared away toward a streetlight burning inside a vortex of rain, my hand shaking violently on the gearshift knob.

The next morning I ate breakfast at the kitchen table with Bootsie. Outside, the sky was a washed-out blue, the trees a deep green from last night's rain. Through the side window I saw Alafair lead her Appaloosa, whose name was Tex, out of the horse lot and begin brushing him down under a pecan tree.

"You get enough sleep?" Bootsie said.

"Sure."

"Where'd you go last night, Dave?" she asked, her eyes not quite meeting mine.

"I broke into Legion Guidry's house. I held a gun to the side of his face," I said.

There was a long silence. She set her spoon down on the plate under her cereal bowl and touched her coffee cup but did not pick it up.

"Why?" she said.

"I haven't been working the program. I've been fueling my resentment against this guy and thinking of ways to drill one through his brisket. The consequence is, I want to drink or use. So I thought I'd do a Ninth Step with him, make amends, and let go of my anger."

"You don't make amends with rabid animals."

"Maybe not," I said.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Not much."

"Look at me," she said.

"I threw his piece in the toilet and left. Did Alafair hear something from Reed College yesterday? I thought I saw an envelope on the couch."

"Don't change the subject."

"The guy's got another voice. One with no accent. Like words floating up from a basement. He's got somebody else living inside him. What's it called, dissociative behavior or personality disorder or something like that?"

"You're not making any sense."

"Nothing happened, Boots. It's a new day. Evil always consumes itself. People like us live in the sunshine, right?"

"God, I can't believe I'm having this conversation. It's like talking to a cryptologist."

"I'm coming home for lunch. See you then," I said, and went out the door before she could say anything else.

I started the truck, then looked through the windshield at Alafair grooming her horse under the pecan tree. We had not spoken since she had taken me to task the previous afternoon, either out of mutual embarrassment or the fact that, as far as she knew, I had done nothing to rectify the problems I had caused in my home. I turned off the ignition and walked across the yard, through the dappled shade and the unraked leaves that had pooled in rain puddles and dried in serpentine lines. I know she saw me, but she pretended she did not. She smoothed down a quilted pad on Tex's back, then started to lift his saddle off the fence rail.

"I've got it," I said, and swung the saddle into place on Tex's back and lifted the hand-carved wood stirrup from the pommel and straightened it on his right side.

"You look nice," she said.

"Thank you," I replied.

"Where'd you go last night?" she asked.

"To set some things straight."

She nodded.

"Why do you ask?" I said.

"I thought maybe you'd gone to a bar. I thought maybe I'd caused you to do that," she replied.