"Sunset Limited" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

FOUR

THAT NIGHT THE MOON WAS yellow above the swamp. I walked down to the dock to help Batist, the black man who worked for me, fold up the Cinzano umbrellas on our spool tables and close up the bait shop. There was a rain ring around the moon, and I pulled back the awning that covered the dock, then went inside just as the phone rang on the counter.

"Mout' called me. His son wants to come in," the voice said.

"Stay out of police business, Megan."

"Do I frighten you? Is that the problem here?"

"No, I suspect the problem is use."

"Try this: he's fifteen miles out in the Atchafalaya Basin and snakebit. That's not metaphor. He stuck his arm in a nest of them. Why don't you deliver a message through Mout' and tell him just to go fuck himself?"

After I hung up I nicked off the outside flood lamps. Under the moon's yellow light the dead trees in the swamp looked like twists of paper and wax that could burst into flame with the touch of a single match.

AT DAWN THE WIND was out of the south, moist and warm and checkered with rain, when I headed the cabin cruiser across a long, flat bay bordered on both sides by flooded cypress trees that turned to green lace when the wind bent their branches. Cranes rose out of the trees against a pink sky, and to the south storm clouds were piled over the Gulf and the air smelled like salt water and brass drying in the sun. Megan stood next to the wheel, a thermos cup full of coffee in her hand. Her straw hat, which had a round dome and a purple band on it, was crushed over her eyes. To get my attention, she clasped my wrist with her thumb and forefinger.

"The inlet past that oil platform. There's a rag tied in a bush," she said.

"I can see it, Megan," I replied. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face jerk toward me.

"I shouldn't speak or I shouldn't touch? Which is it?" she said.

I eased back the throttle and let the boat rise on its wake and drift into a cove that was overgrown by a leafy canopy and threaded with air vines and dimpled in the shallows with cypress knees. The bow scraped, then snugged tight on a sandspit.

"In answer to your question, I was out at your brother's movie set yesterday. I've decided to stay away from the world of the Big Score. No offense meant," I said.

"I've always wondered what bank guards think all day. Just standing there, eight hours, staring at nothing. I think you've pulled it off, you know, gotten inside their heads."

I picked up the first-aid kit and dropped off the bow and walked through the shallows toward a beached houseboat that had rotted into the soft texture of moldy cardboard.

I heard her splash into the water behind me.

"Gee, I hope I can be a swinging dick in the next life," she said.

THE HOUSEBOAT FLOOR WAS tilted on top of the crushed and rusted oil drums on which it had once floated. Cool Breeze sat in the corner, dressed in clothes off a wash line, the wound in his cut face stitched with thread and needle, his left arm swollen like a black balloon full of water.

I heard Megan's camera start clicking behind me.

"Why didn't you call the Feds, Breeze?" I asked.

"That woman FBI agent wants me in front of a grand jury. She say I gonna stay in the system, too, till they done wit' me."

I looked at the electrical cord he had used for a tourniquet, the proud flesh that had turned the color of fish scale around the fang marks, the drainage that had left viscous green tailings on his shirt. "I tell you what, I'll dress those wounds, hang your arm in a sling, then we'll get a breath of fresh air," I said.

"You cut that cord loose, the poison gonna hit my heart."

"You're working on gangrene now, partner."

I saw him swallow. The whites of his eyes looked painted with iodine.

"You're jail-wise, Breeze. You knew the Feds would take you over the hurdles. Why'd you want to stick it to Alex Guidry?"

This is the story he told me while I used a rubber suction cup to draw a mixture of venom and infection from his forearm. As I listened on one knee, kneading the puncture wounds, feeling the pain in his body flicker like a candle flame under his skin, I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, DOWN the Teche, he owned a dirt-road store knocked together from scrap boards, tin stripped off a condemned rice mill, and Montgomery Ward brick that had dried out and crusted and pulled loose from the joists like a scab. He also had a pretty young wife named Ida, who cooked in a cafe and picked tabasco peppers on a corporate farm. After a day in the field her hands swelled as though they had been stung by bumblebees and she had to soak them in milk to relieve the burning in her skin.

On a winter afternoon two white men pulled up on the bib of oyster shell that served as a parking lot in front of the gallery, and the older man, who had jowls like a bulldog's and smoked a cigar in the center of his mouth, asked for a quart of moonshine.

"Don't tell me you ain't got it, boy. I know the man from Miss'sippi sells it to you."

"I got Jax on ice. I got warm beer, too. I can sell you soda pop. I ain't got no whiskey."

"That a fact? I'm gonna walk back out the door, then come back in. One of them jars you got in that box behind the motor oil better be on the counter or I'm gonna redecorate your store."

Cool Breeze shook his head.

"I know who y'all are. I done paid already. Why y'all giving me this truck?" he said.

The younger white man opened the screen door and came inside the store. His name was Alex Guidry, and he wore a corduroy suit and cowboy hat and western boots, with pointed, mirror-bright toes. The older man picked up a paper bag of deep-fried cracklings from the counter. The grease in the cracklings made dark stains in the paper. He threw the bag to the younger man and said to Cool Breeze, "You on parole for check writing now. That liquor will get you a double nickel. Your woman yonder, what's her name, Ida? She's a cook, ain't she?"

THE MAN WITH BULLDOG jowls was named Harpo Delahoussey, and he ran a ramshackle nightclub for redbones (people who are part French, black, and Indian) by a rendering plant on an oxbow off the Atchafalaya River. When the incinerators were fired up at the plant, the smoke from the stacks filled the nearby woods and dirt roads with a stench like hair and chicken entrails burned in a skillet. The clapboard nightclub didn't lock its doors from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night; the parking lot (layered with thousands of flattened beer cans) became a maze of gas-guzzlers and pickup trucks; and the club's windows rattled and shook with the reverberations of rub board and thimbles, accordion, drums, dancing feet, and electric guitars whose feedback screeched like fingernails on slate.

At the back, in a small kitchen, Ida Broussard sliced potatoes for french fries while caldrons of red beans and rice and robin gumbo boiled on the stove, a bandanna knotted across her forehead to keep the sweat out of her eyes.

But Cool Breeze secretly knew, even though he tried to deny it to himself, that Harpo Delahoussey had not blackmailed him simply to acquire a cook, or even to reinforce that old lesson that every coin pressed into your palm for shining shoes, cutting cane, chopping cotton, scouring ovens, dipping out grease traps, scrubbing commodes, cleaning dead rats from under a house, was dispensed by the hand of a white person in the same way that oxygen could be arbitrarily measured out to a dying hospital patient.

One night she wouldn't speak when he picked her up, sitting against the far door of the pickup truck, her shoulders rounded, her face dull with a fatigue that sleep never took away.

"He ain't touched you, huh?" Cool Breeze said.

"Why you care? You brung me to the club, ain't you?"

"He said the rendering plant gonna shut down soon. That mean he won't be needing no more cook. What you gonna do if I'm in Angola?"

"I tole you not to bring that whiskey in the store. Not to listen to that white man from Miss'sippi sold it to you. Tole you, Willie."

Then she looked out the window so he could not see her face. She wore a rayon blouse that had green and orange lights in it, and her back was shaking under the cloth, and he could hear her breath seizing in her throat, like hiccups she couldn't control.

HE TRIED TO GET permission from his parole officer to move back to New Orleans.

Permission denied.

He caught Ida inhaling cocaine off a broken mirror behind the house. She drank fortified wine in the morning, out of a green bottle with a screw cap that made her eyes lustrous and frightening. She refused to help out at the store. In bed she was unresponding, dry when he entered her, and finally not available at all. She tied a perforated dime on a string around her ankle, then one around her belly so that it hung just below her navel.

"Gris-gris is old people's superstition," Cool Breeze said.

"I had a dream. A white snake, thick as your wrist, it bit a hole in a melon and crawled inside and ate all the meat out."

"We gonna run away."

"Mr. Harpo gonna be there. Your PO gonna be there. State of Lou'sana gonna be there."

He put his hand under the dime that rested on her lower stomach and ripped it loose. Her mouth parted soundlessly when the string razored burns along her skin.

The next week he walked in on her when she was naked in front of the mirror. A thin gold chain was fastened around her hips.

"Where you get that?" he asked.

She brushed her hair and didn't answer. Her breasts looked as swollen and full as eggplants.

"You ain't got to cook at the club no more. What they gonna do? Hurt us more than they already have?" he said.

She took a new dress off a hanger and worked it over her head. It was red and sewn with colored glass beads like an Indian woman might wear.

"Where you got money for that?" he asked.

"Mine to know, yours to find out," she replied. She fastened a hoop earring to her lobe with both hands, smiling at him while she did it.

He began shaking her by the shoulders, her head whipping like a doll's on her neck, her eyelids closed, her lipsticked mouth open in a way that made his phallus thicken in his jeans. He flung her against the bedroom wall, so hard he heard her bones knock into the wood, then ran from the house and down the dirt road, through a tunnel of darkened trees, his brogans exploding through the shell of ice on the chuckholes.

IN THE MORNING HE tried to make it up to her. He warmed boudin and fixed cush-cush and coffee and hot milk, and set it all out on the table and called her into the kitchen. The dishes she didn't smash on the wall she threw into the back yard.

He drove his pickup truck through the bright coldness of the morning, the dust from his tires drifting out onto the dead hyacinths and the cattails that had winter-killed in the bayou, and found Harpo Delahoussey at the filling station he owned in town, playing dominoes with three other white men at a table by a gas stove that hissed with blue flame. Delahoussey wore a fedora, and a gold badge on the pocket of his white shirt. None of the men at the table looked up from their game. The stove filled the room with a drowsy, controlled warmth and the smell of shaving cream and aftershave lotion and testosterone.

"My wife ain't gonna be working at the club no more," Cool Breeze said.

"Okay," Delahoussey said, his eyes concentrated on the row of dominoes in front of him.

The room seemed to scream with silence.

"Mr. Harpo, maybe you ain't understood me," Cool Breeze said.

"He heard you, boy. Now go on about your business," one of the other men said.

A moment later, by the door of his truck, Cool Breeze looked back through the window. Even though he was outside, an oak tree swelling with wind above his head, and the four domino players were in a small room beyond a glass, he felt it was he who was somehow on display, in a cage, naked, small, an object of ridicule and contempt.

Then it hit him: He's old. An old man like that, one piece of black jelly roll just the same as another. So who give her the dress and wrap the gold chain around her stomach?

He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his canvas coat. His ears roared with sound and his heart thundered in his chest.

HE WOKE IN THE middle of the night and put on an overcoat and sat under a bare lightbulb in the kitchen, poking at the ashes in the wood stove, wadding up paper and feeding sticks into the flame that wouldn't catch, the cold climbing off the linoleum through his socks and into his ankles, his confused thoughts wrapped around his face like a net.

What was it that tormented him? Why was it he couldn't give it words, deal with it in the light of day, push it out in front of him, even kill it if he had to?

His breath fogged the air. Static electricity crackled in the sleeves of his overcoat and leaped off his fingertips when he touched the stove.

He wanted to blame Harpo Delahoussey. He remembered the story his daddy, Mout', had told him of the black man from Abbeville who broke off a butcher knife in the chest of a white overseer he caught doing it with his wife against a tree, then had spit in the face of his executioner before he was gagged and hooded with a black cloth and electrocuted.

He wondered if he could ever possess the courage of a man like that.

But he knew Delahoussey was not the true source of the anger and discontent that made his face break a sweat and his palms ring as though they had been beaten with boards.

He had accepted his role as cuckold, had even transported his wife to the site of her violation by a white man (and later, from Ida's mother, he would discover the exact nature of what Harpo Delahoussey did to her), because his victimization had justified a lifetime of resentment toward those who had forced his father to live gratefully on tips while their cigar ashes spilled down on his shoulders.

Except his wife had now become a willing participant. Last night she had ironed her jeans and shirt and laid them out on the bed, put perfume in her bathwater, washed and dried her hair and rouged her cheekbones to accentuate the angular beauty of her face. Her skin had seemed to glow when she dried herself in front of the mirror, a tune humming in her throat. He tried to confront her, force the issue, but her eyes were veiled with secret expectations and private meaning that made him ball his hands into fists. When he refused to drive her to the nightclub, she called a cab.

The fire wouldn't catch. An acrid smoke, as yellow as rope, laced with a stench of rags or chemically treated wood, billowed into his face. He opened all the windows, and frost speckled on the wallpaper and kitchen table. In the morning, the house smelled like a smoldering garbage dump.

She dressed in a robe, closed the windows, opened the air lock in the stove by holding a burning newspaper inside the draft, then began preparing breakfast for herself at the drainboard. He sat at the table and stared at her back stupidly, hoping she would reach into the cabinet, pull down a bowl or cup for him, indicate in some way they were still the people they once were.

"He tole me, you shake me again, you going away, Willie," she said.

"Who say that?"

She walked out of the room and didn't answer.

"Who?" he called after her.

IT WAS THE LETTER that did it.

Or the letter that he didn't read in its entirety, at least not until later.

He had driven the truck back from the store, turned into his yard, and seen her behind the house, pulling her undergarments, jeans, work shirts, socks, and dresses, her whole wardrobe, off the wash line.

A letter written with a pencil stub on a sheet of lined paper, torn from a notebook, lay on the coffee table in the living room.

He could hear his breath rising and falling in his mouth when he picked it up, his huge hand squeezing involuntarily on the bottom of the childlike scrawl.

Dear Willie,

You wanted to know who the man was I been sleeping with. I am telling you his name not out of meaness but because you will find out anyway and I dont want you to go back to prison. Alex Guidry was good to me when you were willing to turn me over to Mr. Harpo because of some moonshine whisky. You cant know what it is like to have that old man put his hand on you and tell you to come into the shed with him and make you do the things I had to do. Alex wouldnt let Mr. Harpo bother me any more and I slept with him because I wanted to and-

He crumpled up the paper in his palm and flung it into the corner. In his mind's eye he saw Alex Guidry's fish camp, Guidry's corduroy suit and western hat hung on deer anders, and Guidry himself mounted between Ida's legs, his muscled buttocks thrusting his phallus into her, her fingers and ankles biting for purchase into his white skin.

Cool Breeze hurled the back screen open and attacked her in the yard. He slapped her face and knocked her into the dust, then picked her up and shook her and shoved her backward onto the wood steps. When she tried to straighten her body with the heels of her hands, pushing herself away from him simultaneously, he saw the smear of blood on her mouth and the terror in her eyes, and realized, for the first time in his life, the murderous potential and level of self-hatred that had always dwelled inside him.

He tore down the wash line and kicked over the basket that was draped with her clothes. The leafless branches of the pecan tree overhead exploded with the cawing of crows. He didn't hear the truck engine start in the front and did not realize she was gone, that he was alone in the yard with his rage, until he saw the truck speeding into the distance, the detritus of the sugarcane harvest spinning in its vacuum.

TWO DUCK HUNTERS FOUND her body at dawn, in a bay off the Atchafalaya River. Her fingers were coated with ice and extended just above the water's surface, the current silvering across the tips. A ship's anchor chain, one with links as big as bricks, was coiled around her torso like a fat serpent. The hunters tied a Budweiser carton to her wrist to mark the spot for the sheriffs department.

A week later Cool Breeze found the crumpled paper he had flung in the corner. He spread it flat on the table and began reading where he had left off before he had burst into the back yard and struck her across the face.

I slept with him because I wanted to and because I was so mad at you and hurt over what you did to the wife that has always loved you.

But Alex Guidry dont want a blakgirl in his life, at least not on the street in the day lite. I know that now and I dont care and I tole him that. I will leave if you want me to and not blame you for it. I just want to say I am sorry for treating you so bad but it was like you had thrown me away forever.

Your wife,

Ida Broussard

COOL BREEZE LAY ON a row of air cushions inside the cabin cruiser, his arm in a sling, his face sweating. When he had finished speaking, Megan looked at me sadly, her eyes prescient with the knowledge that a man's best explanation for his life can be one that will never satisfy him or anybody else.

"Y'all ain't gonna say nothing?" he asked.

"Let go of it, partner," I said.

"The Man always got the answer," he replied.

"Your daddy is an honest and decent person. If you're still ashamed of him because he shined shoes, yeah, I think that's a problem, Breeze," I said.

"Dave…"Megan said.

"Give it a break, Megan," I said.

"No… Behind us. The G sent us an escort," she said.

I turned and looked back through the hatch at our wake. Coming hard right up the trough was a large powerboat, its enamel-white bow painted with the blue-and-red insignia of the United States Coast Guard. A helicopter dipped out of the sky behind the Coast Guard boat, yawing, its downdraft hammering the water.

I entered a channel that led to the boat ramp where my truck and boat trailer were parked. The helicopter swept past us and landed in the shell parking area below the levee. The right-hand door opened and the FBI agent named Adrien Glazier stepped out and walked toward us while the helicopter's blades were still spinning.

I waded through the shallows onto the concrete ramp.

"You're out of your jurisdiction, so I'm going to save you a lot of paperwork," she said.

"Oh?"

"We're taking Mr. William Broussard into our custody. Interstate transportation of stolen property. You want to argue about it, we can talk about interference with a federal law officer in the performance of her duty."

Then I saw her eyes focus over my shoulder on Megan, who stood on the bow of my boat, her hair blowing under her straw hat.

"You take one picture out here and I'll have you in handcuffs," Adrien Glazier said.

"Broussard's been snakebit. He needs to be in a hospital," I said.

But she wasn't listening. She and Megan stared at each other with the bright and intimate recognition of old adversaries who might have come aborning from another time.