All the Devil's Creatures (21 page)

Geoff sat up, ignoring the pain in his head. “T-Jacques said that? That’s—”

“And Mr. Rubell told me about you …” He read from his pad. “Geoff Waltz of Dallas, Texas. He says this is the second time you’ve shown up at one of his gigs to pester him. That you have some kind of obsession.” The detective stood as if to leave. “He says you’re loony, Mr. Waltz.”

“No, I—”

“So let me tell you something. The people of this city have enough to worry about without weirdos showing up with their own set of problems. I suggest you go back to Texas and leave Mr. Rubell alone.”

Geoff lay speechless as the detective left. The overcrowded hospital discharged him a few hours later with a prescription for pain pills and instructions to visit his own doctor when he got home. The bullet had only grazed his skull.

He walked back to the hotel in an angry and mournful fugue. As he neared the hotel entrance, he saw the despised black pickup in the garage. He jumped back and scanned his surroundings—no sign of its hideous owner. He tried to call Marisol—no answer. He felt nauseous and exhausted, like he had walked a hundred miles instead of a few blocks. He went upstairs to his room and lay down on the bed and slept and dreamed of his dead wife Janie and of Eileen—like old pals, they cooked together in the cramped kitchen of Eileen’s college apartment, a little nest of a place over a garage shaded by pecan trees and crawling with honeysuckle vines. As if Janie had been around during that time of his life. As if Eileen had ever taken the time away from indie rock and engineering school pranks to cook a holiday feast. Eileen stirred a pot and Janie held their baby. The two women laughed and the baby cooed and its heart beat loud and clear in Geoff’s head. Janie saw him first and her laugh turned to a sad smile.
“It’s fallen to you, babe. I’m sorry.”
Geoff tried to speak but he couldn’t form the words, as if his mouth was stuffed with cotton. Eileen held out a wooden spoon for him to taste the sauce and it smelled warm and hearty and of cumin and fennel and he walked over and then smelled something else beneath—an odor of swamp gas and cypress, of unholy life with rot at its core. And Joey Kincaid stood weeping in the corner as Eileen spoke of beings that should never be and the coming holocaust but it was as if she spoke from miles away or from another world and in the pot Geoff saw floating the faces of those beings and he stumbled back and the heart beat stopped and he turned and Janie was gone and around him now the walls pulsed with mold and decay and Eileen was gone and then he was swimming with those godless beings and they explained to him that it was their time and he knew that they were wrong and he opened his mouth to make the arguments to prove them wrong but he remained mute.

He woke with a start in his dark hotel room and he could hear a trombone player on the street below and he thought of T-Jacques and then he thought of Marisol. He checked his phone—no calls. He called Marisol—no answer. He punched a nine and a one and then paused and pressed “cancel.” He walked downstairs and flagged a cab at the curb and directed the driver to Eileen’s lot and the storage unit but the driver refused to travel to the devastated zone after dark.

He leaned against an ancient plastered wall in a sinister neon glow and rubbed his face. Then he started moving and he walked around a corner and looked for another taxi and prepared to offer the driver whatever it would take but then his phone vibrated in his pocket, sending him a jolt of shock and hope.

•

Marisol woke up on a plush purple sofa to the smell of candles and the sound of soulful R&B wafting from another room. She sat up and a lead weight shifted deep in her skull and sent ripples of dull pain to her forehead. A chemical ice pack shifted off her knee and onto the polished cypress floor. A bandage covered her hand and beneath the bandage she could feel an ointment. She had no memory of the sofa or the ice pack or the ointment or the bandage.

A woman walked in from a doorway leading deeper into the house—the short-haired woman Marisol did remember but as if from a dream.

“You’re awake.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“You’re pretty banged up. I would have called 911 but you would have just ended up in a waiting room over night—it’s been hopeless without Charity, and now the assholes say they won’t even reopen it. Bullshit, am I right?”

“Um, sure.”

“I’m sorry. What can I get you? Tea? Something harder? You look like you could use it.”

“Just water, please.”

The woman left and Marisol studied the room—well-appointed, walls painted crimson with spiraled texturing and hung with framed Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest posters. The woman brought her water and a can of beer for herself and sat in a yellow club chair, and then she said: “You got a story?”

“It’s a long one. Short version: I got beat up and then I got lost.”

Another woman entered, tall and heavy with plain graying hair down to her shoulders. She took a matching yellow chair and the short-haired one introduced her as her wife.

Marisol said, “It’s a miracle I found you two.”

“We’re the only house back up for a four block radius. Just got our power on last week.”

The heavy one said, “I sense you are searching, on a quest of some kind. Is that correct?”

“Yeah, sure.” She drank her water in a gulp and felt the lightheadedness returning and, with effort, checked her sarcasm. “It’s my job to always be looking for the truth.”

“The land here has been tortured. This has always been a spiritual place; now the spirits have been stirred up. Whatever truth that can be found here will be well concealed or diffracted.”

Swallowing hard, rubbing her head, Marisol said, “I don’t think what I’m looking for has anything to do with any of that.”

“It all has to do with everything. The desolation you wandered around in out there, it’s the center. But the entropy travels further than you can see and consumes all our constructs. None of the systems that frame and hold and explain this world are any sturdier than the levees. We’re in dangerous and unsound and evil times.”

The short-haired one said, “But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a cold beer.”

She laughed and drank and snorted and Marisol feared she would choke. The heavy one stood and left the room. Marisol blinked.

“I’d really like to use your phone.”

She called Geoff Waltz, her damn client, who had gotten her into this disturbing, terrifying fiasco of a case.

B
obby and Tasha walked arm-in-arm down the gangway over the muddy Red River and into a faux paddlewheel steam boat. A simulacrum—the diesel powered ship sailed seldom and only as a formality. The lights of Shreveport and Bossier City embraced them like a minor heaven.

Inside, the bells and flashes of a million slot machines at once disoriented them and grounded them in this strange world lacking in dimensions of time and of direction. The vast interior of the floating casino bulged with a mass of tacit souls focused on their games—old black women in long dresses, lake people in last century’s polyester, Vietnamese catfish farmers, retirees brought in by the bus load from Dallas.

Bobby and Tasha had come to this place to get away from the town they both felt too big for, that Bobby saw as a quicksand place from which he might never escape; that Tasha saw as a temporary stopover on her way to glory in Austin and then Washington.

Bobby led her to a quarter slot with a classic fruit and sevens motif. “I usually drop a twenty in one of these babies and then hit the blackjack tables.”

He slid the bill into the machine and the LED display tallied up four hundred credits with cheerful dings, as if it were a friendly shop keep ringing up coupons.

“You pull first.”

Tasha did not pull the lever but instead pushed a button that spun the wheel with the same effect. Bobby said, “I don’t know why, but I think the old fashioned lever’s more honest.

“I don’t think it’s very honest either way. Or at least not random.”

They took turns spinning the wheel and were at one point seven dollars ahead but the overall trend was downward and within a few minutes the display was in the single digits and then it was down to two. Bobby said, “We each get one.” He pulled the lever and won nothing and Tasha pushed the button for the last credit. When the wheels stopped and the win line came up mismatched and worthless and the display read zero, Tasha looked crestfallen but Bobby put his arm around her and said, “It’s okay.”

They settled in at a five dollar blackjack table beside an obese man with red cheeks and a cowboy hat. Tasha stood behind Bobby seated there and put her arm around his shoulders as if posing for a vacation brochure. A young white woman with a pimple on her chin dealt the cards and looked bored. Bobby stayed even and then inched ahead. A tiny waitress in a burlesque get-up came by and gave Bobby a free beer. Tasha drank white wine and clapped and squealed every time Bobby won a hand. Then he grew tired of counting cards and started to lose so he quit.

They ravished the seafood buffet like it was some decadent feast set out solely for them. Sated, they walked with their arms around each others’ waists into the concert venue where they watched and cheered a geriatric Nashville star enjoying his third run of fame in six decades and whose fan base consisted of equal parts young hipsters and elderly country folk. But there were no hipsters there that night.

•

Riding along the two-lane blacktop over the Texas border and back to town, Tasha lolled her head against the passenger window of Bobby’s sporty Japanese pickup, watching the Milky Way through the pines.

They arrived just past midnight, and Tasha directed Bobby to her little house on the edge of town, near a bayou that long ago had carried steamboats all the way to the river and on down to New Orleans.

“This is the place.”

It lay in a little community apart from the rest of the town, an area Bobby had seen his whole life but never much noticed. “You own this place?”

“Yes—I figured, houses are so cheap here, I may as well buy. I’ll probably keep it as a rental when I move on.”

Bobby nodded and followed her up the stone path and past a three-foot iron fence with its gate hanging crooked on rusty hinges. They mounted the cypress porch, and she led him inside to a wide living area with plaster walls painted yellow and more cypress as the floor boards. Gesturing to a series of colorful abstract paintings on the wall above a blue sofa, he said, “Those are cool.”

“They’re Romare Bearden prints.” Then she stood before him in that ancient room and said: “Now, deputy. How about a drink? I’ve got wine.” She touched his nose and grinned. “And a bottle of peppermint schnapps leftover from New Years.”

“Wine, wine, it does me fine.” He sang low as he peered about the room with his hands in his pockets.

After she poured, she led him through time-worn rooms in various states of renovation to a broad screen porch furnished with rustic pieces made from native trees and water plants. In the faint glow of the light of the house, Bobby could make out the gentle slope of the yard down to the bayou—the cypress trees and Spanish moss, the still water as black as oil.

Something flashed large and green in the yard beyond the eaves. And then another and then another. Bobby did not sit down but stared out the screen. “What are those things?”

Tasha joined him, standing near the edge of the porch. “Those are our phosphorescent dragonflies. Amazing, aren’t they?”

“They’re like lightening bugs, but …”

“Twenty times as big? And radioactive green instead of yellow?” Tasha laughed. “I know—they’re something.”

“I’ve always known that there’s weird animals on the lake, but I’ve lived around here my whole life and never seen anything like that.”

“Yeah, it does seem like there are more strange insects, at least. And larger ones. Maybe it’s the milder winters. I don’t know.”

Bobby made a soft grunting noise of acquiescence and backed himself into a rough-hewn chair. Tasha lit the tall beeswax candles scattered around the porch and their orange glow encapsulated them so that the night was a presence known and sensed but not threatening.

“Thanks for tonight,” she said. “I don’t get out much.”

“Me neither.”

They did not turn on any music and they did not talk much there on the porch as they drank their wine, and after a while Bobby rose as if to leave. Standing before him, Tasha tilted her head and looked up at him without words, parting her lips to reveal the slight gap between her front teeth, and he could smell her honey sweetness. After they kissed, she took his hand and led him to her room, where they undressed each other in the moonlight. Bobby admired her smooth caramel skin as she brushed her fingers along his wounded arm—just a simple gauze bandage wrapping it now, the shallow flesh wound already healing—and she moaned a little when he took a nipple in his mouth, but when she lay back and he found his way inside her, she stiffened and moved beneath him with only the slightest rhythm, and then she pursed her lips and squinted her eyes and let out only the faintest squeak to let him know she had finished. He came right away after that and rolled off her onto his back and they turned their heads toward each other and traded little smiles.

“It’s been a while,” she said.

“Same here.”

They lay in silence and Bobby thought about the route he would take home. But when he pictured his bland little apartment by the interstate, he found himself not quite ready to leave.

He said, “Ol’ Seastrunk thinks there might be more to the Bordelon case than just the Tatum twins.”

“Where’d he get that idea?” She sounded too drowsy for the suggestion to perturb her. “The DNA came back a match. They did it, slam dunk.”

“But how will you know which one—”

“Like I’ve said, we’re working on that.”

“Okay. But they might not have acted alone. They could have been working with somebody. Or for somebody …” He saw her eyes open wide and glow in the moonlight.

“And, what—stage it to look like a hate crime?”

“Something like that. This Dallas lawyer, Waltz, called up the sheriff. Told him we should dig deeper. That Dalia may have been killed because of some research she was doing for him down on the lake, at the old Texronco refinery.”