The Trinity Game

closer look at the picture. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I seen the younger one just today.”
    “You sure?”
    “Sure I’m sure. He bought a cell phone and a hat.”
    “When?”
    “Couple hours ago. There was another man in his truck, but I didn’t see him too good, don’t know if it was the preacher. They left here heading south.”

    It cooled off some as evening fell. Pat Wahlquist made a crawfish boil, and they ate outdoors, piles of spicy crawdads and corncobs spread before them on newspapers covering the picnic table in the backyard. Half the yard was fenced off into a pen, about twenty feet square, ten feet tall, chain-link stretched over a steel pipe frame, even covering the top. Inside the fence, a doghouse, a soccer ball, an old tire, and some chew-toy made of knotted yellow rope.
    “Edgar’s playpen,” said Pat, scratching his coonhound’s ear. A handsome dog, splotches of black and white, with expressive brown eyebrows. Pat put a crawdad tail between his puckered lips, pushed his face forward, and Edgar gently took the crawdad with his teeth and ate it. “Who’s my spoiled puppy?” Pat baby-talked. “Who’s my baby?” Edgar licked him square on the mouth, then turnedin a circle and lay at his master’s feet. A nickel-plated .12-guage pump-action Mossberg leaned against Pat’s leg on the other side.
    Daniel broke open another crawfish, sucked the head, dropped it in the communal pail in the middle of the table, and drank some sweet tea. He looked up and was startled yet again by Trinity’s new look.
    Trinity had resisted the idea, but Pat assured him that it would wash out, so he’d reluctantly taken the bottle and dyed his hair brown. Daniel had given Pat the
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version of their journey and told him the goal was to get Trinity into the French Quarter to see a woman, and back out again. The silver mane was Trinity’s most identifiable feature, so it had to go. Pat had lent them some clothes, shown them to a guest room with double beds, and they’d freshened up while he made dinner.
    With the dye job, Trinity more resembled the man Daniel lived with as a boy, and the effect on Daniel was almost surreal. Not altogether unpleasant, but profoundly strange, like he’d become unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim in that great Vonnegut novel Daniel loved as a teenager.
    Daniel ate one more crawdad and, realizing how full he was, declared it his last.
    “Make more sense for you guys to stay here,” said Pat, his tone signaling a return to the business at hand. “I can go and get the woman, bring her to you.”
    “No way,” said Trinity. “I’m telling you, it was a vision, me standing in front of her place. A vision. I have to go there.”
    Edgar sprang up, cocked his head at the waterline, and said, “Woof.” His attention was focused just to the right of the dock, to the right of Pat’s aluminum airboat, where the wake of a gator moved steadily toward shore.
    “Stay,” said Pat, and in one fluid motion, he stood and swept the shotgun into position, pumping a round into the chamber as he walked forward. He stopped about six feet from the water. The gator stopped about the same distance in the water, its snout and eyes just above the surface. They stared each other down.
    “Keep comin’ and your new name’s gonna be Handbag,” Pat told the gator. After a few seconds, the gator turned away and glided on down the bayou. “Tell your friends,” Pat called after him. He clicked the safety back on, returned to the table. “Tim, I’m agnostic about the metaphysics of your predicament,” he said. “Maybe you’ve been touched by God, maybe you’ve just gone batshit crazy. Not my area of expertise. My area of expertise is thwarting bad guys, and I’m telling you, it’s poor tactics to go there if you don’t have to.”
    “Not negotiable,” said Trinity.
    Pat looked to Daniel for help.
    Daniel shrugged. “What can I say? That’s the vision he had.”
    “All right, be that way.” Pat turned to Trinity. “Can I assume that your vision doesn’t prohibit me coming along to help protect you?”
    Trinity smiled, started to speak.
    “No,” Daniel interrupted. “Pat, I didn’t ask you—”
    “Fuck off, man,” said Pat. “I’d have been dead four years ago if not for you. So as long as it’s OK with the Amazing Kreskin over here, I’m in.”
    After a few seconds Daniel said, “Fine. Thank you.”
    “Don’t thank me.”

T he bedside clock