DR10 - Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke

swing, staring at his hands, his massive shoulders slumped
like a bag of crushed rock.
     
    IT WAS HOT AND dry Friday night, with
a threat of rain that
never came. Out over the Gulf, the clouds would vein and pulse with
lightning, then the thunder would ripple across the wetlands with a
sound like damp cardboard tearing. In the middle of the night I put my
hands inside Bootsie's nightgown and felt her body's heat against my
palms, like the warmth in a lampshade. Her eyes opened and looked into
mine, then she touched my hardness with her fingertips, her hand
gradually rounding itself, her mouth on my cheek, then on my lips. She
rolled on her back, her hand never leaving me, and waited for me to
enter her.
    She came before I did, both of her hands pushing hard into the
small of my back, her knees gathered around my thighs, then she came a
second time, with me, her stomach rolling under me, her voice muted and
moist in my ear.
    She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running. She
walked toward me out of the light, touching her face with a towel, then
lay on top of the sheet and put her head on my chest. The ends of her
hair were wet and the spinning blades of the window fan made shadows on
her skin.
    "What's worrying you?" she asked.
    "Nothing."
    She kicked me in the calf.
    "Clete Purcel. I think he's going to be hurt," I said.
    "Advice about love and money. Give it to anyone except
friends."
    "You're right. You were about Megan, too. I'd thought better
of her."
    She ran her fingernails through my hair and rested one ankle
across mine.
     
    SUNDAY MORNING I WOKE at dawn and went
down to the bait shop
to help Batist open up. I was never sure of his age, but he had been a
teenager during World War II when he had worked for Mr. Antoine, one of
Louisiana's last surviving Confederate veterans, at Mr. Antoine's
blacksmith shop in a big red barn out on West Main. Mr. Antoine had
willed Batist a plot of land and a small cypress home on the bayou, and
over the years Batist had truck farmed there, augmented his income by
trapping and fishing with my father, buried two wives, and raised five
children, all of whom graduated from high school. He was illiterate and
sometimes contentious, and had never traveled farther from home than
New Orleans in one direction and Lake Charles in the other, but I never
knew a more loyal or decent person.
    We started the fire in the barbecue pit, which was fashioned
from a split oil drum with handles and hinges welded on it, laid out
our chickens and sausage links on the grill for our midday customers,
and closed down the lid to let the meat smoke for at least three hours.
    Batist wore a pair of bell-bottomed dungarees and a white
T-shirt with the sleeves razored off. His upper arms bunched like
cantaloupes when he moved a spool table to hose down the dock under it.
    "I forgot to tell you. That fella Cool Breeze was by here last
night," he said.
    "What did he want?"
    "I ain't ax him."
    I expected him to say more but he didn't. He didn't like
people of color who had jail records, primarily because he believed
they were used by whites as an excuse to treat all black people
unfairly.
    "Does he want me to call him?" I asked.
    "I know that story about his wife, Dave. Maybe it wasn't all
his fault, but he sat by while them white men ruined that po' girl. I
feel sorry for him, me, but when a man got a grief like that against
hisself, there ain't nothing you can do for him."
    I looked up Mout's name in the telephone book and dialed the
number. While the phone rang Batist lit a cigar and opened the screen
on the window and flicked the match into the water.
    "No one home," I said after I hung up.
    "I ain't gonna say no more."
    He drew in on his cigar, his face turned into the breeze that
blew through the screen.
     
    BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR AND I went to
Mass, then I dropped them
off at home and drove to Cisco Flynn's house on the Loreauville road.
He answered the door in a terry-cloth bathrobe that he wore over a