82 Desire

course not.”
    “I thought you just said …”
    Beau put up a hand like a traffic cop. “Okay, okay. I see what you’re getting at. It was just a figure of speech. I mean, they say they’re unhappy and then they say it again. You could die of boredom.”
    “And when he said he was unhappy, what did you say?”
    “Me? I don’t know. I just listened, I guess.”
    “Russell made the calls from home. That puzzles me.”
    “Why?” Beau was just too innocent for words.
    “Bebe could hear him.”
    Beau looked almost triumphant, as if they were playing tennis and he’d finally scored. “She was always out at some meeting or other. That was part of the problem.”
    “So you think he left her? “
    He looked like a person who’d just found a lost child. He nodded emphatically. “I do. I really do.”
    “Why didn’t you say so before?”
    “The LaBarre story hadn’t come out yet. I couldn’t break a confidence.”
    Skip smiled. “You’ve heard from him, haven’t you?”
    “Of course not.” Outrage was written all over his face. But something was off. Had he spoken a little too quickly?
    He took a moment to compose himself. “You know, he’s a pretty different guy lately—I can’t predict what he’ll do.”
    Ha! Maybe we’re getting somewhere . She said, “Different how?”
    “I don’t know. It just seems like he’s lost the old killer instinct. He’s become less competitive, I guess, less interested in his work.”
    “And how long has this been going on?”
    “A couple of years. Since that sailing thing—you know about that?”
    She nodded.
    “I think that really took the starch out of him. After that he seemed like—well, ‘a broken man’ is putting it too strongly, I guess. He’s just seemed kind of subdued. Quieter.” Beau shrugged. “But then his mother died the week after, and his father died a few weeks ago. So let’s see—if your mother died and your wife was having an affair, and your father wasn’t doing so well, maybe you would be subdued.” Beau looked extremely proud of himself.
    “Well, speaking theoretically—if your theory is correct, and Russell did decide to disappear, where would he go? You probably know him better than anybody. What do you think?”
    Beau did a strange thing. He put both hands over his mouth, separated them slightly, spoke briefly, and then put them back. “Let me think,” was what he said. He thought for a full minute.
    In the end, he shook his head. “I just don’t have any idea.” As if as an afterthought, he said, “Your guess is as good as mine.” And shrugged again.

Fourteen
    RAY WAS SITTING on the levee drinking beer, trying to cheer himself up, convince himself he’d done the right thing, but it was uphill work. He suspected there were lots of bad things he didn’t even know about; consequences of his own actions.
    The river was itself—big and muddy, like its nickname. Big and muddy and inevitable. It was what it was, it flowed like it flowed, and there wasn’t that much could be done about it, unless you were the Corps of Engineers and even then it wasn’t easy. He was trying to find a metaphor for life in this. The levee system was a good thing; the Bonnet Carré Spillway was debatable—both were attempts to control the river. Did that do anything for him? He turned it over in his mind a few times.
    The part that worked for him was the part about big and muddy. Now that described life, or anyway, life’s problems.
    Or anyway, his.
    He thought about chucking his beer can into the river because he was already such worthless scum that one more misdemeanor didn’t matter, but in the end his better nature won out. He put it on the floor of his car and drove home, where he carefully carried it into the house and threw it in the recycling bin.
    The act was like shaving and getting dressed every day even though he had no company to run, and in fact, no job at all. You had to hang on to some vestige of dignity.
    He heard Cille’s car in the driveway. One day a week she worked the early shift, but he’d forgotten it was today, had looked forward to an afternoon of wallowing in his misery.
    The door banged as she came in. “Hi.”
    She was wearing white jeans and a white T-shirt, what passed, these days, for a nurse’s uniform. She was heavier than she’d been when they met, maybe ten or twenty pounds heavier, but it looked good on her. Her hair was no longer blond, because she couldn’t afford to have it colored