Free Strawgirl by Abigail Padgett

wine, maybe a two-step. Then ..." He was busy acknowledging greetings from some of those present who seemed to know him, but greeted him as Jacques.
    "I come around sometimes when there's a Cajun band," he explained. "It reminds me of summers I'd spend down in the bayous with my uncle. His name was Pierre Auguste, but everybody just called him Oncle Gus. He could catch snakes right out of the water with his bare hands, and my aunt would make a mouth-watering jambalaya out of them ..."
    "Snake jambalaya—my all-time favorite," Bo said with a wide-eyed smile. "And I'm really Princess Anastasia, heir to the vanquished Russian throne. We used to catch beluga caviar, barehanded of course, right out of the Volga. What a coincidence!"
    "Mais non," came the amused reply. "I'm serious."
    His gray eyes wore a pleasant, faraway look. A look not related to the unremarkable red wine they were drinking from jelly glasses. Andrew LaMarche was plainly enjoying himself.
    "You come out here to get away from it all, don't you?" Bo asked. On the dance floor people from three to ninety waltzed and two-stepped energetically. "It's a different world. Away from what you see at the hospital ... like today?"
    "Yes." His look shifted to one of concern. "And what do you do, Bo Bradley? How do you get away?"
    Bo jabbed a boudin sausage on her plate with a plastic fork. "I jog," she informed the sausage. "Mostly I paint. Usually things like this ... things from other worlds."
    "Maybe you'll paint a Cajun sausage?" he joked.
    Bo looked straight ahead and sifted the remark for unpleasant innuendo. There was none. A silly comment, not a crude come-on. She wondered if she'd been out of circulation so long she was anticipating trouble that didn't exist. Or else the absence of lithium was allowing a manicky hypersexuality to surface, coloring every innocuous encounter with a brush of eroticism. Bo hoped not. The guy was just being nice in his courtly, old-fashioned way.
    Several lively two-steps later, she began to wonder if her politically correct, non-animal-tested deodorant would withstand the exertion. Her hair was soaked at the neck and curling ferociously.
    "Let's go outside," LaMarche suggested with flawless timing. "I do want to talk seriously about what happened today."
    In the moonlit parking lot a cool breeze ruffled the taffy-colored homespun shirt Bo had hurriedly tucked into her old jeans. Lighting a cigarette, she watched its smoke dissipate beneath a towering cottonwood beside the still-raucous building. "So why did you go off half-cocked over the Franer case today?" she asked. "And why did you do that curious sculpture of the ape carrying the baby?"
    LaMarche leaned thoughtfully against the cottonwood as Bo sat on a truck bumper the size of a church pew.
    "I have no children," he began, looking at a point above her head. "And the ape is a sort of metaphor, I guess, for what we do. The attempt to rescue children from the côté noir , the dark side of human nature, or ourselves. It's always there. And we often fail. We failed today."
    Bo chose to ignore the enigmatic first statement in favor of the one she deeply understood. "We didn't fail," she said. "You didn't fail. There was nothing you could have done. Dr. Ling's report clearly stated that Samantha's injuries were life-threatening long before she got to the hospital. Don't blame yourself for her death."
    "I don't," he went on, watching the sky as if it were making gestures he couldn't decipher. "The failure doesn't lie in the child's death. That shouldn't have happened, but it did. I'm not sure anything could have prevented it. Certainly no medical intervention could have saved her. But the failure I'm talking about is something different." He lowered his gaze to Bo's face. "The failure that resulted in my behavior today is in the way we look at things. We're blind. We only see what we expect to see, even if it's not really there. I saw that in myself today. It made me angry."
    "What are