Every Dead Thing

Yet I had heard Susan speak through Tante Marie, and once, like a memory from a delirium, I had awakened in the darkness to feel her hand on my face and I had caught a trace of her scent beside me in the bed. More than that, I saw traces of Susan and Jennifer in every young wife, in each female child. In a young woman’s laughter, I heard the voice of my wife. In the footsteps of a little girl, I heard the echo of my daughter’s shoes.

I felt something for Rachel Wolfe, a mixture of attraction and gratitude and desire. I wanted to be with her but only, I thought, when my wife and child were at peace.

36

DAVID FONTENOT died that night. His car, a vintage Jensen Interceptor, was found on 190, the road that skirts Honey Island and leads down to the shores of the Pearl. The front tires of the car were flat and the doors were hanging open. The windshield had been shattered and the interior was peppered with 9 millimeter holes.

The two St. Tammany cops followed a trail of broken branches and flattened scrub to an old trapper’s shack made of bits of salvaged wood, its tin roof almost obscured by overhanging Spanish moss. It overlooked a bayou lined with gum trees, its waters thick with lime green duckweed and ringing with the sound of mallards and wood ducks.

The shack had been abandoned for a long time. Few people now trapped in Honey Island. Most had moved farther out into the bayous, hunting beaver, deer, and in some cases, alligators.

There were noises coming from the shack as the party approached, sounds of scuffling and thudding and heavy snorting drifting through the open door.

“Hog,” said one of the deputies.

Beside him, the local bank official who had called them in flicked the safety on his Ruger rifle.

“Shit, that won’t do no good against no hog,” said the second deputy. The local, a thick-set, balding man in a Tulane Green Wave T-shirt and an almost unused hunting jacket, reddened. He was carrying a 77V with a telescopic sight, what they used to call in Maine a “varmint rifle.” It was good for small game and some police forces even used it as a sniper rifle, but it wouldn’t stop a feral hog first time unless the shot was perfect.

They were only a few feet away from the shack when the hog sensed them. It erupted from the open door, its tiny, vicious eyes wild and blood dripping from its snout. The man with the Ruger dived into the bayou waters to avoid it as it came at him. The hog spun, cornered at the water’s edge by the party of armed men, then lowered its head and charged again.

There was an explosion in the bayou, then a second, and the hog went down. Most of the top of its head was gone and it twitched briefly on the ground, pawing at the dirt, until eventually it ceased to move. The deputy blew smoke theatrically from the long barrel of a Colt Anaconda, ejected the spent.44 Magnum cartridges with the ejector rod, then reloaded.

“Jesus,” said the voice of his partner. He was standing in the open doorway of the shack, his gun by his side. “Hog sure got at him, but it’s Dave Fontenot all right.”

The hog had ruined most of Fontenot’s face and part of his right arm was gnawed away, but even the damage caused by the hog couldn’t disguise the fact that someone had forced David Fontenot from his car, hunted him through the trees, and then cornered him in the shack, where he was shot in the groin, the knees, the elbows, and the head.

“Mon,” said the hog killer, exhaling deeply. “When Lionel hears about this, there’s gonna be hell to pay.”

I learned most of what had taken place during a hurried telephone conversation with Morphy and a little more from WDSU, the local NBC affiliate. Afterward, Angel, Louis, and I breakfasted at Mother’s on Poydras Street. Rachel had barely worked up the energy to answer the phone when we called her room, and had decided to sleep on and eat later in the morning.

Louis, dressed in an ivory-colored linen suit and a white T-shirt, shared my bacon and homemade biscuits, washed down with strong coffee. Angel opted for ham, eggs, and grits.

“Old folks eat grits, Angel,” said Louis. “Old folks and the insane.”

Angel wiped a white grit trail from his chin and gave Louis the finger.

“He’s not so eloquent first thing in the morning,” said Louis. “Rest of the day, he don’t have no excuse.”

Angel gave Louis the finger again, scraped the last of the grits from the bowl, and pushed it away.

“So, you figure Joe Bones took a preemptive strike against the Fontenots?” he said.

“Looks that way,” I replied. “Morphy figures he used Remarr to do the job-pulled him out of hiding, then squirreled him away again. He wouldn’t entrust a job like that to anyone else. But I don’t understand what David Fontenot was doing out by Honey Island without any backup. He must have known that Joe Bones would take a crack at him if the opportunity arose.”

“Could be one of his own people set him up, hauled him out there on some dead-end pretext, and let Joe Bones know he was coming?” said Angel.