Garrigue had been coached half the night, or he would have gone for Duplessis’s throat on the instant. Instead he answered, mildly enough, “I’m real proud of her, you got that right. You lay a hand on her, all Fontenot’s gris-gris be for nothing next time.”
Duplessis seemed not to have heard him. “Should she be the first-not Jean-Marc’s Patrice or Zelime? It’s so hard to decide-”
The strong old arms that blocked Garrigue away also neatly framed Duplessis’s throat. Arceneaux said quietly, “You never going to make it to next moon, Compe’ Alexandre. You know that, don’t you?”
Duplessis looked calmly back at him, the red-brown eyes implacable far beyond human understanding. He said, “Compe’ Jean-Marc, I died at your hands forty and more years ago, and by the time you got through with me I was very, very old. You cannot kill such a man twice, not so it matters.” He smiled at Arceneaux. “Besides, the moon is perhaps not everything, even for a loup-garou. I’d give that a little thought, if I were you.” His canine teeth glittered wetly in the late-autumn sunlight as he turned and walked away.
After a while Noelle dropped back to take her father’s arm. She rubbed her cheek lightly against Arceneaux’s shoulder and said, “Your knee all right? You’re looking tired.”
“Been a long morning.” Arceneaux hugged her arm under his own. “Don’t you worry about the old man.”
“I do, though. Gotten so I worry about you a whole lot. Antoine does, too.” She looked up at him, and he thought, Her mama’s eyes, her mama’s mouth, but my complexion-thank God that’s all she got from me… She said, “How about you spend the night, hey? I make gumbo, you play with the grandbabies, talk sports with Antoine. Sound fair?”
It sounded more than fair; it sounded such a respite from the futile plans and dreaded memories with which he and Garrigue had been living that he could have wept. “I’m gone need take care some business first. Nothing big, just a few bits of business. Then I come back, stay the night.” She prompted him with a silent, quizzical tilt of her head, and he added, “Promise.” It was an old ritual between them, dating from her childhood: he rarely used the word at all, but once he did he could be absolutely relied on to keep it. His grandchildren had all caught on to this somewhat earlier than she had.
He slipped away from the party group without even signaling to Garrigue: a deliberately suspicious maneuver that had the waiting Duplessis behind him before he had gone more than a block from the house. It was difficult to pretend not to notice that he was being followed-this being one of the wolf senses that finds an echo in the human body-but Arceneaux was good at it and took a certain pleasure in leading Duplessis all over the area, as the latter had done to him and Garrigue. But the motive was not primarily spite. He was actually bound for a certain neighborhood botanica run by an old Cuban couple who had befriended him years before, when he first came to the city. They were kind and brown, and spoke almost no English, and he had always suspected that they knew exactly what he was, had known others like him in Cuba, and simply didn’t care.
He spent some forty-five minutes in the crowded little shop, and left with his arms full of brightly-colored packages. Most amounted to herbal and homeopathic remedies of one sort and another; a very few were gifts for Damballa Wedo, whose needs are very simple; and one-the only one with an aroma that would have alerted any loup-garou in the world-was a largish packet of wolfbane.
Still sensing Duplessis on his track, he walked back to Noelle’s house, asked to borrow her car briefly, claiming to have heard an ominous sound from the transmission, and took off northeast, in the direction of the old cabin where he and Garrigue imprisoned themselves one night in every month. The car was as cramped as ever, and the drive as tedious, but he managed it as efficiently as he could. Arriving alone, for the first time ever, he spent some while tidying the cabin, and the yet-raw grave in the woods as well; then carefully measured out all the wolfbane in a circle around the little building, and headed straight back to the city. He bent all his senses, wolf and human alike, to discovering whether or not Duplessis had trailed him the entire way, but the results were inconclusive.
“Way I been figuring it over,” he said to Garrigue the next day, drinking bitter chicory coffee at the only Creole restaurant whose cook understood the importance of a proper roux, “we lured him into that blind pig back on the river, all them years ago, and he just know he way too smart for us to get him like that no second time. So we gone do just exactly what we done before, cause we ain’t but pure-D country, and that the onliest trick we know.” His sigh turned to a weary grunt as he shook his head. “Which ain’t no lie, far as I’m concerned. But we go on paying him no mind, we keep sneaking up there, no moon, no need… he smell the wolfbane, he keep on following us, we got to be planning something… All I’m hoping, Compe’ Rene, I’m counting on a fool staying a fool. The smart ones, they do sometimes.”
Garrigue rubbed the back of his neck and folded his arms. “So what you saying, same thing, except with the cabin? Man, I wouldn’t fall for that, and you know I’m a fool.”
“Yeah, but see, see, we know we fools-we used to it, we live with it like everybody, do the best we can. But Duplessis…” He smiled, although it felt as though he were lifting a great cold weight with his mouth. “Duplessis scary. Duplessis got knowledge you and me couldn’t even spell, never mind understand. He just as smart as he think he is, and we just about what we were back when we never seen a city man before, we so proud to be running with a city man.” He rubbed the bad knee, remembering Sophie’s warnings, not at all comforted by the thought that no one else in the clan had seen through the laughter, the effortless charm, the newness of the young loup-garou who came so persistently courting her. He said, “There’s things Duplessis never going to understand.”
He missed Garrigue’s question, because it was mumbled in so low a tone. He said, “Say what?”
Garrigue asked, “It going to be like that time?” Arceneaux did not answer. Garrigue said, “Cause I don’t think I can do that again, Ti-Jean. I don’t think I can watch, even.” His face and voice were embarrassed, but there was no mistaking the set of his eyes, not after seventy years.
“I don’t know, me.” Arceneaux himself had never once been pursued by dreams of what they had done to Alexandre Duplessis in Sophie’s name; but in forty years he had gently shaken Garrigue out of them more than once, and held him afterward. “We get him there-just you, me, and him, like before-I know then. All I can tell you now, Rene.”
Garrigue made no reply, and they separated shortly afterward. Arceneaux went home, iced his knee, turned on his radio (he had a television set, but rarely watched it), and learned of the discovery of a second homeless woman, eviscerated and partly devoured, her head almost severed from her body by the violence of the attack. The corpse had been found under the Viaduct, barely two blocks from Arceneaux’s apartment, and the police announced that they were taking seriously the disappearance of the woman Arceneaux had buried. Arceneaux sat staring at the radio long after it had switched to broadcasting a college football game.
He called Garrigue, got a busy signal, and waited until his friend called him back a moment later. When he picked up the phone, he said simply, “I know.”
Garrigue was fighting hysteria; Arceneaux could feel it before he spoke the first word. “Can’t be, Ti-Jean. Not full moon. Can’t be.”
“Well,” Arceneaux said. “Gone have to ask old Duplessis what else he sold that Fontenot.” He had not expected Garrigue to laugh, and was not surprised. He said, “Don’t be panicking, you hear me, Rene? Not now. Ain’t the time.”