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"You've got to give me something I can use against Mapes."
"I got nothing to offer. I told you all of it. They're like piranha in a goldfish bowl. You stick your finger in it, you take back a polished bone."
I left him thumbing the bass string on his guitar and staring out at the lawn, as though the blue and green shades in the grass held a secret for him. A few minutes later he came into the house and changed into an old shirt and a pair of ripped and faded pink slacks and drove off toward the smoking stacks of the pulp mill west of town.
After he was gone, I sat alone in the silence of the house with the realization that there was nothing I could do today to help my case. I knew of nothing I could do tomorrow or the next day either. I had run out of options. The time has come, I thought, to think not in terms of what to do but instead of where to go. Any jail or prison is a bad place. The person who thinks otherwise has never been in one. Angola is worse than most. The man who would willingly submit to do time unjustly in a place like that would take pleasure in his own crucifixion, I thought. It was a big country, and there were lots of places to get lost in it.
But the idea of being a permanent fugitive from the law was so strange and removed from any concept I had ever had about my fate in this world that thinking about it left me numb and staring at phantasms in the air.
A
But she came to me only in the darkness, and her visits had become less frequent and her voice had grown weaker across the water and in the din of the rain. I had only myself to depend on now, and my Higher Power and the AA program that I followed. Maybe, as I had told Dixie Lee in the hospital, it was time to look at the things that I had rather than at the problems that seemed to beset me without a solution. I was sober, even though I had set myself up for a fall by not attending meetings. When I had wanted to join A
Maybe it's like the seventh-i
And I wasn't going to let Tess Regan have the final statement, either. You don't walk out of a room on someone, with tears in your eyes, as though he's an ogre, unless you want to inflict a certain amount of damage. I ate lunch, then told her that over the phone. Then I asked her to have di
"Stop hiding behind that elementary-school-teacher stuff."
"You stop talking to me like that."
"Don't treat me like I fell through a hole in the dimension, either."
"You're an incredible person. You can't say everything that's on your mind to somebody, then ask them out to di
"I've been straight with you, Tess. I'm indebted to you for the care you've given Alafair. I respect and like you. I don't want you to be unaware of that fact. That's all I had to say. We'll leave it at that."
She paused a moment, then, away from the receiver, cleared her throat.
"I have aPTA buffet at five-thirty," she said.
"We could go out for dessert later, if you'd like to."
That evening I shined my loafers, put on a pair of seersucker slacks, a long-sleeved blue shirt with a red-and-black-striped tie, and Alafair and I picked her up in the truck at seven-thirty. She lived on the bottom floor of an old orange-brick apartment building, with a wood porch and thick wood columns and an enormous white-trunked birch tree in the front yard. She wore beige sandals and a print dress covered with small blue and pink flowers. We went to an outdoor cafe by the river and had ice cream and Black Forest chocolate cake, and I paid for it with my MasterCard, hoping that it hadn't been canceled yet. It rained briefly; now the sky looked like an ink wash above the mountains and I could see lightning striking hard on a distant ridge.
Alafair was overjoyed at the thought of Tess Regan and me being together. But it wasn't a romantic overture on my part. Or at least that was what I told myself, although she was surely good to look at. I think she reminded me of one of those girls whom Catholic boys were always told, when I was growing up, that they should marry. I doubt that a girl of that kind ever existed, but we believed she did, anyway. Before I met Darlene, I was involved seriously with only three women in my adult life. My first wife was from Martinique, a descendant of French Huguenots, or probably iconoclasts who liked to smash statues in cathedrals. She tired quickly of living with a drunk, for which I couldn't blame her, but she also tired of living on a policeman's salary and became fond of wealth and clubhouse society. She married a Houston geologist, and the last I heard they lived in River Oaks and raced quarter horses at Rio Dosa.
A
I became involved with Robin Gaddis after A
The wind began to blow, and in the fading twilight I could see the smoke from the pulp mill flatten in the valley west of town and smell its odor like a tinge of sewage in the wet air. We drove Tess Regan back to her apartment house, and I walked her to her door. The porch light was on, and there was a sheen in her auburn hair, and her shoulders looked pale against her pink-and-blue-flowered dress.