"Black Cherry Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)CHAPTER 3I had never liked the Lafayette Oil Center. My attitude was probably romantic and unreasonable. As chambers of commerce everywhere are fond of saying, it provided jobs and an expanded economy, it meant progress. It was also ugly. It was low and squat and sprawling, treeless, utilitarian, built with glazed brick and flat roofs, tinted and mirrored windows that gave onto parking lots that in summer radiated the heat like a stove. And to accommodate the Oil Center traffic the city had widened Pinhook Road, which ran down to the Vermilion River and became the highway to New Iberia. The oak and pecan trees along the road had been cut down, the rural acreage subdivided and filled with businesses and fast-food restaurants, the banks around the Vermilion Bridge paved with asphalt parking lots and dotted with more oil-related businesses whose cinder-block architecture had all the aesthetic design of a sewage-treatment works. But there was still one cafe on Pinhook left over from my college days at Southwestern in the 1950s. The parking lot was oyster shell the now-defunct speakers from the jukebox were still ensconced in the forks of the spreading oak trees, the pink and blue and green neon tubing around the windows still looked like a wet kiss in the rain. The owner served fried chicken and dirty rice that could break your heart. I finished eating lunch and drinking coffee and looked out at the rain blowing through the oaks, at the sheen it made on the bamboo that grew by the edge of the parking lot. The owner propped open the front door with a board, and the mist and cool air and the smell of the trees blew inside. Then a Honda stopped in a rain puddle out front, the windshield wipers slapping, and an Indian girl with olive skin and thick black hair jumped out and ran inside. She wore designer jeans, which people had stopped wearing, a yellow shirt tied across her middle, and yellow tennis shoes. She touched the raindrops out of her eyes with her fingers and glanced around the restaurant until she saw the sign over the women's room. She walked right past my table, her damp wrist almost brushing my shoulder, and I tried not to look at her back, her thighs, the way her hips creased and her posterior moved when she walked; but that kind of resolution and dignity seemed to be more and more wanting in my life. I paid my check, put on my rain hat, draped my seersucker coat over my arm, and ran past the idling Honda to my truck. Just as I started the engine the girl ran from the restaurant and got into the Honda with a package of cigarettes in her hand. The driver backed around so that he was only ten feet from my cab and rolled his window down. I felt my mouth drop open. I stared dumbfounded at the boiled pigskin face, the stitched scar that ran from the bridge of his nose up through one eyebrow, the sandy hair and intelligent green eyes, the big shoulders that made his shirt look as though it were about to rip. Cletus Purcel. He grinned and winked at me. "What's happening, Streak?" he said into the rain, then rolled up the window, and splashed out onto Pinhook Road. My old homicide partner from the First District in the French Quarter. Bust 'em or smoke 'em, he used to say. Bury your fist in their stomachs, leave them puking on their knees, click off their light switch with a slapjack if they still want to play. He had hated the pimps, the Nicaraguan and Colombian dealers, the outlaw bikers, the dirty-movie operators, the contract killers jl the mob brought in from Miami, and if left alone with him, they would gladly cut any deal they could get from the prosecutor's office. But with time he became everything that he despised. He took freebies from whores, borrowed money from shylocks, fought the shakes every morning with cigarettes, aspirin, and speed, and finally took ten thousand dollars to blow away a potential government witness in a hog lot. Then he had cleaned out his and his wife's bank account, roared the wrong way down a one-way street into the New Orleans airport, bounced over a concrete island, and abandoned his car with both doors open in front of the main entrance. He just made the flight to Guatemala. A month later I received a card from him that had been postmarked in Honduras. I watched his taillights glimmer and fade in the rain. As far as I knew, there was still a warrant on him. What was Cletus doing back in the States? And in Lafayette? But he was somebody else's charge now, not mine. So good luck, partner, I thought. Whatever you're operating on, I hope it's as pure and clean as white gas and bears you aloft over the places where the carrion bircis clatter. I drove across the street and parked in front of the Star Drilling Company's regional office. Confronting them probably seems a foolish thing to do, particularly in the capacity of a citizen rather than that of a law officer. But my experience as a policeman investigating white-collar criminals always led me to the same conclusion about them: they might envision a time when they'll have to deal with the law, but in their minds the problem will be handled by attorneys, in a court proceeding that becomes almost a gentlemen's abstraction. They tremble with both outrage and fear when a plainclothes cop, perhaps with an IQ of ninety-five, a.357 showing under his coat, a braided blackjack in his pocket, steps into the middle of their lives as unexpectedly as an iron door slamming shut and indicates that he thinks habeas corpus is a Latin term for a disease. I put on my coat and ran through the rain and into the building. The outer offices of Star Drilling, which were separated by half-glass partitions, were occupied by draftsmen and men who looked like geologists or lease people. The indirect lighting glowed on the pine paneling, and the air-conditioning was turned so high that I felt my skin constrict inside my damp seersucker. The geologists, or whatever they were, walked from desk to desk, rattling topography maps between their outstretched hands, their faces totally absorbed in their own frame of reference or a finger moving back and forth on the numbers of a township and range. The only person who looked at me was the receptionist. I told her I wanted to see the supervisor about a mineral lease in Montana. His desk was big, made of oak, his chair covered with maroon leather, the pine walls hung with deer's heads, a marlin, two flintlock rifles. On a side table was a stuffed lynx, mounted on a platform, the teeth bared, the yellow glass eyes filled with anger. His name was Hollister. He was a big man, his thick, graying hair cut military, his pale blue eyes unblinking. Like those of most managerial people in the Oil Center, his accent was Texas or Oklahoma and his dress eccentric. His gray Oshman coat hung on a rack, his cuff links were the size of quarters and embossed with oil derricks. His bolo tie was fastened with a brown and silver brooch. He listened to me talk a moment, his square hands motionless on the desk, his face like that of a man staring into an ice storm. "Wait a minute. You came to my office to question me about my employees? About a murder?" (I could see tiny stretched white lines in the skin around the corners of his eyes." "It's more than one, Mr. Hollister. The girl in the fire and maybe some people in Montana." "Tell me, who do you think you are?" "I already did." "No, you didn't. You lied to my receptionist to get in here." "You've got a problem with your lea semen It won't go away because I walk out the door." His pale eyes looked steadily at me. He lifted one finger off his desk and aimed it at me. "You're not here about Dixie Pugh," he said. "You've got something else bugging you. I don't know what it is, but you're not a truthful man." I touched the ball of my thumb to the corner of my mouth, looked away from him a moment, and tapped my fingers on the leather arm of my chair. "You evidently thought well enough of Dixie Lee to give him a job," I said. "Do you think he made all this up and then set himself on fire?" "I think you're on your way out of here." "Let me tell you a couple of things about the law. Foreknowledge of a crime can make you a coconspirator. Knowledge after the fact can put you into an area known as aiding and abetting. These guys aren't worth it, Mr. Hollister." "This discussion is over. There's the door." "It looks like your company has made stonewalling an art form." "What?" "Does the name Aldous Robicheaux mean anything to you?" "No. Who is he?" "He was my father. He was killed on one of your rigs." "When?" "Twenty-two years ago. They didn't have a blowout preventer on. Your company tried to deny it, since almost everybody on the rig went down with it. A shrimper pulled a floor man out of the water two days later. He cost you guys a lot of money." "So you got a grudge that's twenty-two years old? I don't know what to tell you, Robicheaux, except I wasn't with the company then and I probably feel sorry for you." I took my rain hat off my knee and stood up. "Tell Mapes and Vidrine to stay away from Dixie Lee," I said. "You come in here again, I'll have you arrested." I walked back outside into the rain, got in my truck, and drove out of the maze of flat, uniform brick buildings that composed the Oil Center. On Pinhook Road I passed the restaurant where I had seen Cletus an hour before. The spreading oak trees were dark green, the pink and blue neon like smoke in the blowing mist. The wind blew hard when I crossed the Vermilion River, ruffling the yellow current below and shuddering the sides of my truck. "I don't buy that stuff about a death wish. I believe some guys in Vienna had too much time to think," I said to the therapist. "You don't have to be defensive about your feelings. Facile attitudes have their place in therapy, too. For example, I don't think there's anything complex about depression. It's often a matter of anger turned inward. What do you have to say about that, Dave?" "I don't know." "Yes, you do. How did you feel in Vietnam when the man next to you was hit?" "What do you think I felt?" "At some point you were glad it was him and not you. And then you felt guilty. And that was very dangerous, wasn't it?" "All alcoholics feel guilt. Go to an open meeting sometime. Learn something about it." "Cut loose from the past. She wouldn't want you to carry a burden like this.", "I can't. I don't want to." "Say it again." "I don't want to." He was bald and his rimless glasses were full of light. He turned!; his palms up toward me and was silent. I visited Dixie Lee one more time and found him distant, taciturn perhaps even casually indifferent to my presence in the room. I wasn't pleased with his attitude. I didn't know whether to ascribe it to the morphine-laced IV hooked into his arm, or possibly his own morose awareness of what it meant to throw in his lot with his old cell partner. "You want me to bring you anything else before I leave?" I asked. "I'm all right." "I probably won't be back, Dixie. I'm pretty tied up at the dock these days." "Sure, I understand." "Do you think maybe you used me a little bit?" I grinned at him and held up my thumb and forefinger slightly apart in the air. "Maybe just a little?" His voice was languid, as though he were resting on the comfortable edge of sleep. "Me use somebody else? Are you kidding?" he said. "You're looking at the dildo of the planet." "See you around, Dixie." "Hell, yes. They're kicking me out of here soon, anyway. It's only second-degree stuff. I've had worse hangovers. We're in tall cotton, son." And so I left him to his own menagerie of snapping dogs and hungry snakes. That Saturday I woke Alafair early, told her nothing about the purpose of our trip, and drove in the cool, rose-stippled dawn to the Texas side of Sabine Pass, where the Sabine River empties into the Gulf. A friend of mine from the army owned a small, sandy, salt-flecked farm not far from the hard-packed gray strip of sandbar that tried to be a beach. It was a strange, isolated place, filled with the mismatched flora of two states: stagnant lakes dotted with dead cypress, solitary oaks in the middle of flat pasture, tangles of blackjack along the edges of coulees, an alluvial fan of sand dunes that were crested with salt grass and from which protruded tall palm trees silhouetted blackly against the sun. Glinting through the pines on the back of my friend's farm were the long roll and pitch of the Gulf itself, and a cascade of waves that broke against the beach in an iridescent spray of foam. It was a place of salt-poisoned grass, alligators, insects, magpies, turkey buzzards, drowned cows whose odor reached a half mile into the sky, tropical storms that could sand the paint off a water tower, and people like my friend who had decided to slip through a hole in the dimension and live on their own terms. He had a bad-conduct discharge from the army, had been locked up in a mental asylum in Galveston, had failed totally at AA, and as a farmer couldn't grow thorns in a briar patch. But he bred and raised some of the most beautiful Appaloosa horses I had ever seen. He and I had coffee in his kitchen while Alafair drank a Coke, then I picked up several sugar cubes in my palm and we walked out to his back lot. "What we doing, Dave?" Alafair said. She looked up at me in the sunlight that shone through the pine trees. She wore a yellow T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and pink tennis shoes. The wind off the water ruffled her bangs. My friend winked and went inside the barn. I "You can't ride Tripod, can you, little guy?" I said. "What? Ride Tripod?" she said, her face confused, then suddenly lighting, breaking into an enormous grin as she looked past me and saw my friend leading a three-year-old gelding out of the barn. The Appaloosa was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots across his rump. He snorted and pitched his head against the bridle, and Alafair's brown eyes went back and forth between the horse and me, her face filled with delight. "You think you can take care of him and Tripod and your rabbits, too?" I said. "Me? He's for me, Dave?" "You bet he is. He called me up yesterday and said he wanted to come live with us." "What? Horse call up?" I picked her up and set her on top of the fence rail, then let the Appaloosa take the sugar cubes out of my palm. "He's like you, he's got a sweet tooth," I said. "But when you feed him something, let him take it out of your palm so he doesn't bite your fingers by mistake." Then I climbed over the fence, slipped bareback onto the horse; and lifted Alafair up in front of me. My friend had trimmed thef horse's mane, and Alafair ran her hand up and down it as though it | were a giant shoe brush. I touched my right heel against the horse's f flank, and we turned in a slow circle around the lot. "What his name?" Alafair said. "How about Tex?" "How come that?" "Because he's from Texas." "What?" " Texas." "This where?" "Nevermind." I nodded for my friend to open the gate, and we rode out through | the sandy stretch of pines onto the beach. The waves were slate green and full of kelp, and they made a loud smack against the sand and slid in a wet line up to a higher, dry area where the salt grass and the pine needles began. It was windy and cool and warm at the same time, and we rode a mile or so along the edge of the surf to a place where a sandbar and jetty had created a shallow lagoon, in the middle of which a wrecked shrimp boat lay gray and paint less on its side, a cacophony of seagulls thick in the air above it. Behind us the horse's solitary tracks were scalloped deep in the wet sand. I gave my friend four hundred for the Appaloosa, and for another three hundred he threw in the tack and a homemade trailer. Almost all the way home Alafair stayed propped on her knees on the front seat, either looking backward through the cab glass or out the window at the horse trailer tracking behind us, her fine hair flattening in white lines against her scalp. On Monday I walked up to the house for lunch, then stopped at the mailbox on the road before I went back to the dock. The sun was warm, the oak trees along the road were full of mockingbirds and blue jays, and the mist from my neighbor's water sprinkler drifted in a wet sheen over his hydrangea beds and rows of blooming azalea and myrtle bushes. In the back of the mailbox was a narrow package no more than ten inches long. It had been postmarked in New Orleans. I put my other mail in my back pocket, slipped the twine off the corners of the package, and cracked away the brown wrapping paper with my thumb. I lifted off the cardboard top. Inside on a strip of cotton was a hypodermic needle with a photograph and a sheet of lined paper wrapped around it. The inside of the syringe was clouded with a dried brown-red residue. The photograph was cracked across the surface, yellowed around the edges, but the obscene nature of the details had the violent clarity of a sliver of glass in the eye. A pajama-clad Vietcong woman lay in a clearing by the tread of a tank, her severed head resting on her stomach. Someone had stuffed a C-ration box in her mouth. The lined paper looked like the kind that comes in a Big Chief notebook. The words were printed large, in black ink. "For what your face like that? What it is, Dave?" Batist was standing behind me, dressed in a pair of navy bell bottoms and an unbuttoned sleeveless khaki shirt. There were drops of sweat on his bald head, and the backs of his hands and wrists were spotted with blood from cleaning fish. I put the photograph, letter, and torn package back in the mailbox and walked hurriedly down to the dock. I called the elementary school, asked the principal to make sure that Alafair was in her classroom, then told her not to let Alafair board the school bus that afternoon, that I would be there to pick her up. When I walked back toward the house Batist was still at the mailbox. He was illiterate and so the letter inside meant nothing to him, but he had the photograph cupped in his big palm, an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth, and there was an ugly glaze in his eyes. "Que qa veut dire, Dave? What that needle mean, too?" he said. "Somebody's threatening Alafair." "They say they gonna hurt that little girl?" "Yes." The word created a hollow feeling in my chest. "Who they are? Where they at, them people that do something like this?" "I believe it's a couple of guys in Lafayette. They're oil people. Have you seen any guys around here who look like they don't belong here?" "I ain't paid it no mind, Dave. I didn't have no reason, me." "It's all right." "What we gonna do?" "I'm going to pick up Alafair, then I'll talk to the sheriff." I picked the photograph out of his palm by the edges and set it back inside the mailbox. "I'm going to leave this stuff in there, then take it in later and see if we can find fingerprints on it. So we shouldn't handle it anymore." "No, I mean what we gonna do?" he said. His brown eyes looked intently into mine. There was no question about his meaning. "I'm going to pick up Alafair now. Watch the store and I'll be back soon." Batist's mouth closed on his dry cigar. His eyes went away from me, stared into the shade of the pecan trees and moved back and forth in his head with a private thought. His voice was quiet when he spoke. "Dave, in that picture, that's where you was at in the war?" "Yes." "They done them kind of things?" "Some did. Not many." "In that letter, it say that about Alafair?" I swallowed and couldn't answer him. The hollow feeling in my chest would not go away. It was like fear but not of a kind that I had ever experienced before. It was an obscene feeling, as though a man's hand had slipped lewdly inside my shirt and now rested sweatily on my breastbone. The sunlight shimmered on the bayou, and the trees and blooming hyacinths on the far side seemed to go in and out of focus. I saw a cottonmouth coiled fatly on a barkless, sun-bleached log, its triangular head the color of tarnished copper in the hard yellow light. Sweat ran out of my hair, and I felt my heart beating against my rib cage. I snicked the mailbox door shut, got into my truck, and headed down the dirt road toward New Iberia. When I bounced across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche, my knuckles were white and as round as quarters on the steering wheel. On the way back from the school the spotted patterns of light and shadow fell through the canopy of oaks overhead and raced over Alafair's tan face as she sat next to me in the truck. Her knees and white socks and patent leather shoes were dusty from play on the school ground. She kept looking curiously at the side of my face. "Something wrong, Dave?" she said. "No, not at all." "Something bad happen, ain't it?" "Don't say 'ain't.' " "Why you mad?" "Listen, little guy, I'm going to run some errands this afternoon and I want you to stay down at the dock with Batist. You stay in the store and help him run things, okay?" "What's going on, Dave?" "There's nothing to worry about. But I want you to stay away from people you don't know. Keep close around Batist and Clarise and me, okay? You see, there're a couple of men I've had some trouble with. If they come around here, Batist and I will chase them off. But I don't want them bothering you or Clarise or Tripod or any of our friends, see." I winked at her. "These bad men?" Her face looked up at me. Her eyes were round and unblinking. "Yes, they are." "What they do?" I took a breath and let it out. "I don't know for sure. But we just need to be a little careful. That's all, little guy. We don't worry about stuff like that. We're kind of like Tripod. What's he do when the dog chases him?" She looked into space, then I saw her eyes smile. "He gets up on the rabbit hutch," she said. "Then what's he do?" "He stick his claw in the dog's nose." "That's right. Because he's smart. And because he's smart and careful, he doesn't have to worry about that dog. And we're the same way and we don't worry about things, do we?" She smiled up at me, and I pulled her against my side and kissed the top of her head. I could smell the sun's heat in her hair. I parked the truck in the shade of the pecan trees, and she took her lunch kit into the kitchen, washed out her thermos, and changed into her play clothes We walked down to the dock, and I put her in charge of soda pop and worm sales. In the corner behind the beer cases I saw Batist's old automatic Winchester twelve-gauge propped against the wall. "I put some number sixes in it for that cottonmouth been eating fish off my stringer," he said. "Come see tonight. You gonna have to clean that snake off the tree." "I'll be back before dark. Take her up to the house for her supper," I said. "I'll close up when I get back." "You don't be worry, you," he said, dragged a kitchen match on a wood post, lit his cigar, and let the smoke drift out through his teeth. Alafair rang up a sale on the cash register and beamed when the drawer clanged open. I put everything from the mailbox in a large paper bag and drove to the Iberia Parish sheriff's office. I had worked a short while for the sheriff as a plainclothes detective the previous year, and I knew him to be a decent and trustworthy man. But when he ran for the office his only qualification was the fact that he had been president of the Lions Club and owned a successful dry cleaning business. He was slightly overweight, his face soft around the edges, and in his green uniform he looked like the manager of a garden-supply store. We talked in his office while a deputy processed the wrapping paper, box, note, and hypodermic needle for fingerprints in another room. Finally the deputy rapped on the sheriff's door glass with one knuckle and opened the door. "Two identifiable sets," he said. "One's Dave's, one's from that colored man, what's his name?" "Batist," I said. "Yeah, we have his set on file from the other time" His eyes flicked away from me and his face colored. "We had his prints from when we were out to Dave's place before. Then there's some smeared stuff on the outside of the wrapping paper." "The mailman?" the sheriff said. "That's what I figure," the deputy said. "I wish I could tell you something else, Dave." "It's all right." The deputy nodded and closed the door. "You want to take it to the FBI in Lafayette?" the sheriff said. "Maybe." "A threat in the mails is in a federal area. Why not make use of them?" I looked back at him without answering. "Why is it that I always feel you're not a man of great faith in our system?" he said. "Probably because I worked for it too long." "We can question these two guys, what's their names again?" "Vidrine and Mapes." "Vidrine and Mapes, we can let them know somebody's looking over their shoulder." "They're too far into it." "What do you want to do?" "I don't know." "Dave, back off of this one. Let other people handle it." "Are you going to keep a deputy out at my house? Will one watchf Alafair on the playground or while she waits for the bus?" He let out his breath, then looked out the window at a clump of oak trees in a bright, empty pasture. "Something else bothers me here," he said. "Wasn't your daddy killed on a Star rig?" "Yes." "You think there's a chance you want to twist these guys, no matter what happens?" "I don't know what I think. That box didn't mail itself to me, though, did it?" I saw the injury in his eyes, but I was past the point of caring about his feelings. Maybe you've been there. You go into a police or sheriff's station after a gang of black kids forced you to stop your car while they smashed out your windows with garbage cans; a strung-out addict made you kneel at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store, and before you knew it the begging words rose uncontrollably in your throat; some bikers pulled you from the back of a bar and sat on your arms while one of them un zippered his blue jeans. Your body is still hot with shame, your voice full of thumbtacks and strange to your own ears, your eyes full of guilt and self-loathing while uniformed people walk casually by you with Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands. Then somebody types your words on a report and you realize that this is all you will get. Investigators will not be out at your house, you will probably not be called to pull somebody out of a lineup, a sympathetic female attorney from the prosecutor's office will not take a large interest in your life. Then you will look around at the walls and cabinets and lockers in that police or sheriff's station, the gun belts worn by the officers with the Styrofoam coffee cups, perhaps the interior of the squad cars in the parking lot, and you will make an ironic realization. The racks of M-16 rifles, scoped Mausers, twelve-gauge pumps loaded with double-aught buckshot,.38 specials and.357 Magnums, stun guns, slap jacks batons, tear gas canisters, the drawers that contain cattle prods, handcuffs, Mace, wrist and leg chains, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, all have nothing to do with your safety or the outrage against your person. You're an increase in somebody's work load. "You've been on this side of the desk, Dave. We do what we can," the sheriff said "But it's not enough most of the time. Is it?" He stirred a paper clip on the desk blotter with his finger. "Have you got an alternative?" he said. "Thanks for your time, Sheriff. I'll think about the FBI." "I wish you'd do that." The sky had turned purple and red in the west and rain clouds were building on the southern horizon when I drove home. I bought some ice cream in town, then stopped at a fruit stand under an oak tree by the bayou and bought a lug of strawberries. The thunder-heads off the Gulf slid across the sun, and the cicadas were loud in the trees and the fireflies were lighting in the shadows along the road. A solitary raindrop splashed on my windshield as I turned into my dirt yard. It rained hard that night. It clattered on the shingles and the tin roof of the gallery, sluiced out of the gutters and ran in streams down to the coulee. The pecan trees in the yard beat in the wind and trembled whitely when lightning leapt across the black sky. I had the attic fan on, and the house was cool, and I dreamed all night. Annie came to me about four A.M." as she often did, when the night was about to give way to the softness of the false dawn. In my dream I could look through my bedroom window into the rain, past the shining trunks of the pecan trees, deep into the marsh and the clouds of steam that eventually bleed into the saw grass and the Gulf of Mexico, and see her and her companions inside a wobbling green bubble of air. She smiled at me. Hi, sailor, she said. How you doing, sweetheart? You know I don't like it when it rains. Bad memories and all that. So we found a dry place for a while. "Your buddies from your platoon don't like the rain, either. They say it used to give them jungle sores. Can you hear me with all that thunder? It sounds like cannon!" Sure. It's lightning up on top of the water. That night I couldn't tell the lightning from the gun flashes. I wish you hadn't left me alone. I tried to hide under the bed sheet. It was a silly thing to do. Don't talk about it. It was like electricity dancing off the walls, you're not drinking, are you? No, not really. Not really? Only in my dreams. But I bet you still get high on those dry drunks, don't you? You know, fantasies about kicking butt, 'fronting the lowlifes, all that stuff swinging dicks like to do. A guy has to do something for kicks. Annie? What is it, baby love? I want Tell me. I want to It's not your time. There's Alafair to take care of, too. It wasn't your time, either. She made a kiss against the air. Her mouth was red. So long, sailor. Don't sleep on your stomach. It'll make you hard in the morning. I miss you. Annie She winked at me through the rain, and in my dream I was sure I felt her fingers touch my lips. It continued to rain most of the next day. At three o'clock I picked up Alafair at the school and kept her with me in the bait shop. The sky and the marsh were gray; my rental boats were half full of water, the dock shiny and empty in the weak light. Alafair was restless and hard to keep occupied in the shop, and I let Batist take her with him on an errand in town. At five-thirty they were back, the rain slacked off, and the sun broke through the clouds in the west. It was the time of day when the bream and bass should have been feeding around the lily pads, but the bayou was high and the water remained smooth and brown and un dented along the banks and in the coves. A couple of fishermen came in and drank beer for a while, and I leaned on the window jamb and stared out at the mauve- and red-streaked sky, the trees dripping rain into the water, the wet moss trying to lift in the evening breeze. "Them men ain't gonna do nothing. They just blowing they horn," Batist said beside me. Alafair was watching a cartoon on the old black-and-white television set that I kept on the snack shelf. She held Tripod on her lap while she stared raptly up at the set. "Maybe so. But they'll let us wonder where they are and when they're coming," I said. "That's the way it works." "You call them FBI in Lafayette?" "No." "How come?" "It's a waste of time." "Sometime you gotta try, yeah." "There weren't any identifiable prints on the package except yours and mine." I could see in his face that he didn't understand. "There's nothing to tell the FBI," I said. "I would only create paperwork for them and irritate them. It wouldn't accomplish anything. There's nothing I can do." "So you want get mad at me?" "I'm not mad at you. Listen" "What?" "I want her to stay with you tonight. I'll pick her up in the morning and take her to school." "What you gonna do, you?" "I don't know." "I been knowing you a long time, Dave. Don't tell me that." "I'll tell Clarise to pack her school clothes and her pajamas and toothbrush. There's still one boat out. Lock up as soon as it comes in." "Dave-" But I was already walking up toward the house in the light, sun-spangled rain, in the purple shadows, in the breeze that smelled. of wet moss and blooming four-o'clocks. It was cool and still light when I stopped on the outskirts of Lafayette and called Dixie Lee at the hospital from a pay phone. I asked him where Vidrine and Mapes were staying. "What for?" he said. "It doesn't matter what for. Where are they?" "It matters to me." "Listen, Dixie, you brought me into this. It's gotten real serious in the last two days. Don't start being clever with me." "All right, the Magnolia. It's off Pinhook, down toward the river. Look, Dave, don't mess with them. I'm about to go bond and get out of here. It's time to ease off." "You sound like you've found a new confidence." "So I got friends. So I got alternatives. Fuck Vidrine and Mapes." The sun was red and swollen on the western horizon. Far to the south I could see rain falling. "How far out are these guys willing to go?" I said. He was quiet a moment. "What are you talking about?" he said. "You heard me." "Yeah, I did. They burn a girl to death and you ask me a question like that? These guys got no bottom, if that's what you mean. They'll go down where it's so dark the lizards don't have eyes." I drove down Pinhook Road toward the Vermilion River and parked under a spreading oak tree by the motel, a rambling white stucco building with a blue tile roof. Rainwater dripped from the tree onto my truck cab, and the bamboo and palm trees planted along the walks bent in the wind off the river and the flagstones in the courtyard were wet and red in the sun's last light. A white and blue neon sign in the shape of a flower glowed against the sky over the entrance of the motel, an electrical short in it buzzing as loud as the cicadas in the trees. I stared at the front of the motel a moment, clicking my keys on the steering wheel, then I opened the truck door and started inside. Just as I did the glass door of a motel room slid open and two men and women in bathing suits with drinks in their hands walked out on the flagstones and sat at a table by the pool. Vidrine and Mapes were both laughing at something one of the women had said. I stepped back in the shadows and watched Mapes signal a Negro waiter. A moment later the waiter brought them big silver shrimp-cocktail bowls and a platter of fried crawfish. Mapes wore sandals and a bikini swimming suit, and his body was as lean and tan as a long-distance runner's. But Vidrine wasn't as confident of his physique; he wore a Hawaiian shirt with his trunks, the top button undone to show his chest hair, but he kept crossing and recrossing his legs as though he could reshape the protruding contour of his stomach. The two women looked like hookers. One had a braying laugh; the other wore her hair pulled back on her head like copper wire, and she squeezed Mapes's thigh under the table whenever she leaned forward to say something. I got back in the truck, took my World War II Japanese field glasses out of the glove box, and watched them out of the shadows for an hour. The underwater lights in the swimming pool were smoky green, and a thin slick of suntan oil floated on the surface. The waiter took away their dishes, brought them more rounds of tropical drinks, and their gaiety seemed unrelenting. They left the table periodically and went back through the sliding glass door into the motel room, and at first I thought they were simply using the bathroom, but then one of the women came back out touching one nostril with her knuckle, sniffing as though a grain of sand were caught in her breathing passage. At ten o'clock the waiter began dipping leaves out of the pool with a long-handled screen, and I saw Mapes signal for more drinks and the waiter look at his watch and shake his head negatively. They sat outside for another half hour, smoking cigarettes, laughing more quietly now, sucking on pieces of ice from the bottoms of their glasses, the women's faces pleasant with a nocturnal lassitude. Then a sudden rain shower rattled across the motel's tile roof, clattered on the bamboo and palm fronds, and danced in the swimming pool's underwater lights. Vidrine, Mapes, and the women ran laughing for the sliding door of the room. I waited until midnight, and they still had not come back out. I put on my rain hat and went into the motel bar. It was almost deserted, and raindrops ran down the windows. Outside, I could see the white and blue neon flower against the dark sky. The bartertder smiled at me. He wore black trousers, a white shirt that glowed almost purple in the bar light, and a black string tie sprinkled with sequins. He was a strange-looking man. His eyes were close-set and small as dimes, and he smoked a Pall Mall with three fingers along the barrel of the cigarette. I sat at the corner of the bar, where I could see the front door of Vidrine and Mapes's rooms, and ordered a 7-Up. "It's pretty empty tonight," I said. "It sure is. You by yourself tonight?" he said. "Right now I am. I was sort of looking for some company." I smiled at him. He nodded good-naturedly and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink. Finally he said, "You staying at the motel?" "Yeah, for a couple of days. Boy, I tell you I got one." I blew out my breath and touched my forehead with my fingertips. "I met this lady last night, a schoolteacher, would you believe it, and she came up to my room and we started hitting the JD pretty hard. But I'm not kidding you, before we got serious about anything she drank me under the table and I woke up at noon like a ball of fire." I laughed. "And with another problem, too. You know what I mean?" He ducked his head and grinned. "Yeah, that can be a tough problem," he said. "You want another 7-Up?" "Sure." He went back to his work in the sink, his small eyes masked, and a moment later he dried his hands absently on a towel, turned on a radio that was set among the liquor bottles on the counter, and walked into a back hallway, where he picked up a house phone. He spoke into the receiver with his back turned toward me so that I could not hear him above the music on the radio. Outside the window, the trees were black against the sky and the blue tile of the motel roof glistened in the rain. The girl came through the side door ten minutes later and sat one stool down from me. She wore spiked heels, Levi's, a backless brown sweater, and hoop earrings. She shook her wet hair loose, lit a cigarette, ordered a drink, then had another, and didn't pay for either of them. She talked as though she and I and the bartender were somehow old friends. In the neon glow she was pretty in a rough way. I wondered where she came from, what kind of trade-off was worth her present situation. I wasn't making it easy for her, either. I hadn't offered to pay for either of her drinks, and I had made no overture toward her. I saw her look at her watch, then glance directly into the bartender's eyes. He lit a cigarette and stepped out the door as though he were getting a breath of fresh air. "I hate lounges, don't you? They're all dull," she said. "It's a pretty slow place, all right." "I'd rather have drinks with a friend in my room." "What if I buy a bottle?" "I think that would be just wonderful," she said, and smiled as much to herself as to me. Then she bit down on her lip, leaned toward me, and touched my thigh. "I've got a little trouble with Don, though. Like a seventy-five-dollar bar tab. Could you lend it to me so they don't eighty-six me out of this place?" "It's time to take off, kiddo." "What?" I took my sheriff's deputy badge out of my back pocket and opened it in front of her. It was just an honorary one, and I kept it only because it got me free parking at Evangeline Downs and the Fairgrounds in New Orleans, but she didn't know that. "Don's in deep shit. Go home and watch television," I said. "You bastard." "I told you you're not busted. You want to hang around and have some of his problems?" Her eyes went from my face to the bartender, who was coming back through the side door. Her decision didn't take long. She took her car keys out of her purse, threw her cigarettes inside, snapped it shut, and walked quickly on her spiked heels out the opposite door into the rain. I held up the badge in front of the bartender's smalj, close-set eyes. "It's Iberia Parish, but what do you care?" I said. "You're going to do something for me, right? Because you don't want Lafayette vice down here, do you? You're a reasonable guy, Don." He bit down on the corner of his lip and looked away from my face. "I got a. number I can call," he said… "Not tonight you don't." I could see his lip discolor where his tooth continued to chew on it. He blew air out his nose as though he had a cold. "I don't want trouble." "You shouldn't pimp." "How about lightening up a bit?" He looked at the two remaining customers in the bar. They were young and they sat at a table in the far corner. Behind them, through the opened blinds, headlights passed on the wet street. "Two of your girls are in room six. You need to get them out," I said. "Wait a minute…" "Let's get it done, Don. No more messing around." "That's Mr. Mapes. I can't do that." "Time's running out, partner." "Look, you got a beef here or something, that's your business. I can't get mixed up in this. Those broads don't listen to me, anyway." "Well, I guess you're a stand-up guy. Your boss won't mind you getting busted, will he? Or having heat all over the place? You think one of those girls might have some flake up her nose? Maybe it's just sinus trouble." "All right," he said, and held his palms upward. "I got to tell these people I'm closing. Then I'll call the room. Then I'm gone, out of it, right?" I didn't answer. "Hey, I'm out of it, right?" he said. "I'm already having trouble remembering your face." Five minutes after the bartender phoned Mapes's room the two prostitutes came out the front door, a man's angry voice resounding out of the room behind them, and got into a convertible and drove away. I opened the wooden toolbox in the bed of my pickup truck and took out a five-foot length of chain that I sometimes used to pull stumps. I folded it in half and wrapped the two loose ends around my hand. The links were rusted and made an orange smear across my palm. I walked across the gravel under the dripping trees toward the door of room 6. The chain clinked against my leg; the heat lightning jumped in white spiderwebs all over the black sky. Vidrine must have thought the women had come back because he was smiling when he opened the door in his boxer undershorts. Behind him Mapes was eating a sandwich in his robe at a wet bar. The linen and covers on the king-sized bed were in disarray, and the hallway that led into another bedroom was littered with towels, wet bathing suits, and beer cups. Vidrine's smile collapsed, and his face suddenly looked rigid and glazed. Mapes set his sandwich in his plate, wet the scar on his lower lip as though he were contemplating an abstract equation, and moved toward a suitcase that was opened on a folding luggage holder. I heard the chain clink and sing through the air, felt it come back over my head again and again, felt their hands rake against the side of my face; my ears roared with sound a rumble deep under the Gulf, the drilling-rig floor trembling and clattering violently, the drill pipe exploding out of the wellhead in a red-black fireball. My hand was bitten and streaked with rust; it was the color of dried blood inside a hypodermic needle used to threaten a six-year-old child; it was like the patterns that I streaked across the walls, the bedclothes, the sliding glass doors that gave onto the courtyard where azalea (petals floated on the surface of a lighted turquoise pool. |
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