Garrigue returned with the rusty shovel and together they carried the dead woman deeper into the woods. Then he stood by, rubbing his mouth compulsively as he watched Arceneaux hack at the hard earth. In the same small voice as before, he said, “I scare, me, Ti-Jean,” calling Arceneaux by his childhood nickname. “What we do to him.”
“What he did to us.” Arceneaux’s own voice was cold and steady. “What he did to ma Sophie.”
As he had known it would, the mention of Arceneaux’s sister immediately brought Garrigue back from wherever terror and guilt together had taken him. “I ain’t forgot Sophie.” His gray eyes had closed down like the steel shutters whose color they matched. “I ain’t forget nothing.”
“I know, man,” Arceneaux said gently. He finished his work, patted the new grave as flat as he could make it-one good rain, two, grass cover it all-and said, “We come back before next moon, clean up a little. Right now, we going home.” Garrigue nodded eagerly.
In the car, approaching the freeway, Garrigue could not keep from talking about Sophie Arceneaux as he had not done in a very long while. “So pretty, that girl, that sister of yours. So pretty, so kind, who wouldn’t want to marry such a fine woman like her?” Then he hurriedly added, “Of course, my Elizabeth, Elizabeth was a fine woman too, I don’t say a word against Elizabeth. But Sophie… la Sophie…” He fell silent for a time, and then said in a different voice, “I ain’t blame Duplessis for wanting her. Can’t do that, Jean-Marc.”
“She didn’t want him,” Arceneaux said. There was no expression at all in his voice now. “Didn’t want nothing to do with him, no mind what he gave her, where he took her, never mind what he promised. So he killed her.” After a pause, he went on, “You know how he killed her.”
Garrigue folded his hands in his lap and looked at them.
So low he could barely be heard, he answered, “In the wolf… in the wolf shape. Hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed.”
“Ripped her throat out,” Arceneaux said. “Ma colombe, ma pauv’ p’ti, she never had no chance-no more than him with her.” He looked off down the freeway, seeing, not a thousand cars nor a distant city skyline, but his entire Louisiana family, wolves all, demanding that as oldest male he take immediate vengeance on Duplessis. For once-and it was a rare enough occurrence-he found himself in complete agreement with his blood kin and their ancient notions of honor and retribution. In company with Garrigue, one of Sophie’s more tongue-tied admirers, he had set off on the track of his sister’s murderer.
“Duplessis kill ma Sophie, she never done nothing but good for anyone. Well, I done what I done, and I ain’t sorry for it.” His voice rose as he grew angry all over again, more than he usually allowed himself these days. He said, “Ain’t a bit sorry.”
Garrigue shivered, remembering the hunt. Even with an entire werewolf clan sworn to avenge Sophie Arceneaux, Duplessis had made no attempt to hide himself, or to flee the region, so great was his city man’s contempt for thick-witted backwoods bumpkins. Arceneaux had run him to earth in a single day, and it had been almost too easy for Garrigue to lure him into a moonshiner’s riverside shebeen: empty for the occasion and abandoned forever after, haunted by the stories of what was done there to Alexandre Duplessis.
It had taken them all night, and Garrigue was a different man in the morning.
After the first scream, Garrigue had never heard the others; he could not have done otherwise and held on to his sanity. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had indeed gone mad that night, and that all the rest of his life-the flight north, the jobs, the marriage, the beloved children and grandchildren, the home-had never been anything but a lunatic’s hopeless dream of forgetfulness. More than forty years later he still shuddered and moaned in his sleep, and at times still whimpered himself awake. All the blood, all the shit… the… the… sound when Ti-Jean took that old cleaver thing… and that man wouldn’t die, wouldn’t die… wasn’t nothing left of him but open mouth, awful open mouth, and he wouldn’t die…
“Don’t make no sense,” Arceneaux said beside him. “Days burying… four, five county lines-”
“Five,” Garrigue whispered. “Evangeline. Joyelle. St. Landry. Acadia. Rapides. Too close together, I told you…”
Arceneaux shook his head. “Conjure. Conjure in it somewhere, got to be. Guillory, maybe, he evil enough… old Fontenot, over in St. Landry. Got to be conjure.”
They drove the rest of the way in near-silence, Arceneaux biting down hard on his own lower lip, Garrigue taking refuge in memories of his wife Elizabeth, and of Arceneaux’s long-gone Pauline. Both women, non-Creoles, raised and encountered in the city, believed neither in werewolves nor in conjure men; neither one had ever known the truth about their husbands. Loups-garoux run in families: Arceneaux and Garrigue, marrying out of their clans, out of their deep back-country world, had both produced children who would go through their lives completely unaware of that part of their ancestry. The choice had been a deliberate one, and Garrigue, for his part, had never regretted it. He doubted very much that Arceneaux had either, but it was always hard to tell with Arceneaux.
Pulling to the curb in front of the frame house where Garrigue lived with Claude and his family, Arceneaux cut the engine, and they sat looking at each other. Garrigue said finally, “Forgot to fish. Grandbabies always wanting to know did we catch anything.”
“Tell them fish wasn’t biting today. We done that before.”
Garrigue smiled for the first time. “Claude, he think we don’t do no fishing, we goes up there to drink, get away from family, get a little wild. Say he might just come with us one time.” Arceneaux grunted without replying. Garrigue said, “I keeps ducking and dodging, you know? Ducking and dodging.” His voice was growing shaky again, but he never took his eyes from Arceneaux’s eyes. He said, “What we going to do, Ti-Jean?”
“Get you some sleep,” Arceneaux said. “Get you a good breakfast, tell Claude you likely be late. We go find Duplessis tomorrow, you and me.”
Garrigue looked, for a moment, more puzzled than frightened. “Why we bothering that? He know right where we live, where the chirrens lives-”
Arceneaux cut him off harshly. “We find him fast, maybe we throw him just that little bit off-balance, could help sometime.” He patted Garrigue’s shoulder lightly. “We use what we got, Rene, and all we got is us. You go on now-my knee biting on me a little bit.”
In fact-as Garrigue understood from the fact that Arceneaux mentioned it at all-the bad knee was hurting him a good deal; he could only pray that it wouldn’t have locked up on him by morning. He brought the car back to Noelle, who took one look at his gait and insisted on driving him home, lecturing him all the way about his need for immediate surgery. She was his oldest child, his companion from her birth, and the only one who would ever have challenged him, as she did now.
“Dadda, whatever you and Compe’ Rene are up to, I will find it out-you know I always do. Simpler tell me now, oui?”
“Ain’t up to one thing,” Arceneaux grumbled. “Ain’t up to nothing, you turning such a suspicious woman. You mamere, she just exactly the same way.”
“Because you’re such a bad liar,” his daughter replied tenderly. She caressed the back of his neck with a warm, work-hardened hand. “Ma’dear and me, we used to laugh so, nights you’d be slipping out to drink, play cards with Compe’ Rene and your old zydeco friends. Make some crazy little-boy story-whoo, out the door, gone till morning, come home looking like someone dragged you through a keyhole backwards. Lord, didn’t we laugh!”