“Because I’ve got some stuff Joey wants. Joey’s been behind all this from the beginning. The guy with the wire was probably Jewel Fluck or Jack Gates. Or any number of mechanics Joey can hire out of Miami or Houston.”
“So you are hooked up with them?”
“Sure, I am. But I’ve had it. I don’t care if I take a fall or not. I can’t keep endangering or fucking up other people anymore. Give me a minute and we’ll go to the movies.”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” he said, moving a pirogue that was upended on sawhorses. Then he knelt on one knee and lifted up a plank in the floor of the boathouse. A videocassette tightly wrapped in a clear plastic bag was stapled to the bottom of the plank. He sliced the cassette out of the bag with his pocketknife. “Come on up to the house and I’ll give you a private screening from Greaseball Productions.”
“What’s this about, Weldon?”
“Everything you want is on this tape. I’m going to give it to you.”
“Maybe you should think about calling your lawyer.”
“There’s time for that later. Come on.”
I followed him up to his house and into his living room. He turned on his television set and VCR; he plugged in the cassette and paused with the remote control in his palm.
“This is what it amounts to, Dave,” he said. “I hit two dusters in a row, I was broke, and I was about to lose my business. I borrowed everything I could at the bank, but it wasn’t enough to stay afloat. So I started talking with a couple of shylocks in New Orleans. Before I knew it I was dealing with Jack Gates and he made me an offer to do a big arms drop in Colombia.”
“Colombia?”
“That’s where it’s happening. Bush is sending a lot of arms down there to fight the druglords, but the Colombian government has a way of whacking out some of the peasants with it at the same tune. So there are antigovernment people down there who pay big money for weapons, and I figured I could make a couple of runs, twenty thou a drop, and not worry about the political complexities involved. Why not? I dropped everything in Laos from pigs to napalm homemade from gasoline and soap detergent.
“Then Jack Gates offered me the big score, eighty thou for one run. The plan was for me to fly an old C-47 into Honduras, pick up a load of arms, land at this jungle strip in Colombia, where these guys process large amounts of coke, load about eight million dollars worth of flake on board, then do the arms drop up in the mountains and head for the sea.
“But I told Gates I wanted the payoff when I loaded the coke. He said I’d get paid on this end, and I told him it was no deal, then, because I didn’t exactly trust the kind of people he represented. So he made a couple of phone calls and finally said all right, since eighty thou is used Kleenex to these guys. Also, Gates and Joey Gouza thought we’d be in business together for a long time. Except I took them over the hurdles. Sit down. You’ll enjoy this.”
He pressed the remote button, and for fifteen minutes the screen showed a series of scenes and images that could have been snipped from color footage filmed in Southeast Asia two decades earlier: wind whipping the canvas cargo straps and webbing in the empty bay of a plane; the shadow of the C-47 racing across yellow pasture-land, hummocks, earthen dikes, and brown reservoirs, the dark green of coffee plantations, a village of shacks built from discarded lumber and sheets of tin that looked as bright and hot as shards of broken mirror in the sun; then the approach over the crest of a purple mountain and the descent into a long valley that contained a landing strip bulldozed out of the jungle so recently that the broken roots in the soil were still white and pink with life.
The next images looked like they had been taken at an oblique angle from the pilot’s compartment: sweat-streaked Indians in cutoff GI fatigues dragging crates of grenades, ammunition, and Belgian automatic rifles into the bay, a man who looked like an American watching in the background, a straw hat shadowing his face; then suddenly an abrupt shift in the location and cast of characters. The second cargo was loaded at twilight, and the bags were pillow-size, wrapped in black vinyl, the ends tucked, folded, and taped, carried on board as lovingly as Christmas packages.
“The next thing you should see is a lot of parachutes popping open in the dark and those crates floating down toward a circle of burning truck flares in the middle of some mountains,” Weldon said. “That’s where I made a change in the script. Watch this.”
The screen showed a moonlit seacoast, the waves sliding up on the beach in a long line of foam, humps of coral reef protruding from the surf like the rose-colored backs of whales. Then the kickers began shoving the cargo out of the C-47.
“I call this part ‘Weldon pickles the load and says get fucked to the greaseballs,’ ” Weldon said.
The wind ripped apart the bags of cocaine and covered the black surface of the water with a floating white paste. The crates of arms tumbled out into the darkness like a flying junkyard. Some of the crates sent geysers of foam out of the groundswell; others burst apart on the exposed reef, bejeweling the coral with belts of .50 caliber shells.
The screen went white.
“That’s it?” I said.
“Yeah. What do you think of it?”
“This is what Gouza’s been after?”
“Yeah, I told both of them I had their whole operation on tape. I told them to get out of my life. I figured they owed me the eighty thou for the earlier runs, anyway. I took thirty-seven holes in the fuselage on one of them. What do you think of it?”
“Not much.”
“What?”
“What else have you got besides this tape?” I asked.
“This is the whole show.”
“Have you got something connecting Gouza to arms and dope trafficking?”
“I’ve just got this tape.”
“Will you make a sworn statement that you were flying for Joey Gouza?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I made all the arrangements with Jack Gates. Gouza stayed out of it.”
I looked out the ceiling-high window at the live oaks in Weldon’s sideyard.
“What’s Bobby Earl’s part in this?” I said.
“He’s got no part.”
“Don’t tell me that, Weldon.”
“Bobby doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Now’s not the time to cover for this guy, podna.”
“Bobby’s mind is on the U.S. Senate and his putz. Use your head, Dave. Why would he want to get mixed up with dope and guns?”
“Money.”
“He gets all he wants from right-wing simpletons and north Louisiana rednecks. Besides, that’s not what he’s after. You liberals have never figured him out. Bobby doesn’t care about black people one way or another. He’s never known any. How could he be upset by them? It’s educated and intelligent white people he doesn’t like. In his mind you’re all just like his parents. I don’t think a day went by in his life that they didn’t let him know he was a piece of shit. He’s got two loves in this world, porking the ladies and provoking the press and people like yourself.”
“That might all be true, but he’s hooked up with Joey Gouza and that means he’s in this bullshit right up to his kneecaps.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I’m weary of you holding out on me, Weldon.”
“I’m not. I’ve told you everything. What else do you want out of me? A guy tried to take my head off with a piano wire. I can’t think about it without shuddering all over. It really got to me, man. I can even smell the guy.”
“What do you mean?”
He stopped, and his eyes looked into space.
“I didn’t think about it before,” he said. “The guy had a smell. It was like embalming fluid or something.”
“Say it again.”
“Embalming fluid. Or chemicals. Hell, I don’t know. It was there just a second, then my light switch clicked off.”
“It wasn’t one of Gouza’s people, Weldon.?
??
His brow furrowed, and he fingered the red line around his neck.
“I think your brother, Lyle, was right all along,” I said. “I think your father has made a spectacular reappearance in your life. Take this tape to the DEA or the U.S. Customs office, if you want. It doesn’t fall under my jurisdiction.”
“You’re not interested in it?”
“We already have a murder warrant out on Jack Gates. You haven’t shown or told me anything that will help put any of the other players in jail.”
“You mean I’ve been holding this evidence and taking all this heat for nothing? And all you can tell me is that my poor demented brother has been right all along, that my own father wants to put my head on a pike?”
“I’m afraid that’s about it.”
“No, that’s not it, Dave,” he said. “I think this time I finally read you. You’re not interested in Joey Gouza or Jack Gates or any of these Aryan Brotherhood clowns. You want to staple my brother-in-law’s butt to the furniture. In fact, if you had your way, you’d blow up his shit big time, wouldn’t you? Just like a Gatling gun locking down on Charlie in the middle of a rice field.”
We stared at each other in the silence like a pair of bookends.
I DROVE TO THE Salvation Army transient shelter in Lafayette to try and find Vic Benson. A portly, red-cheeked, kindly man with big sideburns who ran the shelter said that Benson had had a fistfight with another man two days ago and had been asked to leave. He had responded by packing his duffel bag quietly and walking out the door without a word; then he had stopped, snapped his fingers as though he had forgotten something, and returned to the dormitory long enough to stuff his bed sheets in the toilet bowl.
“Where do you think he went?” I asked.
“Anywhere there’s Southern Pacific tracks,” the Salvation Army officer said.
“Can I talk to the other men?”
“I doubt if they know anything. You can try, though. They were a little afraid of Vic. He wasn’t like the rest. Most of our men are harmless. Vic always made you feel he was working on a dark thought, like he was grinding sand between his back teeth. One time he was watching television . . .” He stopped, smiled, and shook the memory out of his face.
“Go on,” I said.
“He and some of the other men were watching this minister, then Vic said, ‘I’d pour lye down that one’s throat if his brother didn’t deserve it worse.’ ”
“Which minister?”
“That fellow in Baton Rouge, what’s-his-name.”
“Lyle Sonnier?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. I tried to make a joke out of it, and I said, ‘Vic, what could you possibly have against that man up there?’ He said, ‘The same thing the rooster’s got against the baby chick that thinks the brooder house is his.’ Talking with Vic could be a little bit like walking through cobwebs. Or accidentally raking your hand across a yellow-jacket nest.”
We talked to a half-dozen men in the dormitory, and they all had the same vacant response and benign, vacuous expressions that they wore and used as habitually as the identities and personal histories that they had created for themselves in hundreds of drunk tanks and trackside jungle camps. They reminded me of figures in a van Gogh or Munch painting. Palm fronds and the sunlit leaves of banana trees rustled against the screen windows, but in contrast the men inside looked wind-dried, the color of cardboard, weightless in their emaciation, their hollow chests devoid of heartbeat, the skin of their arms wrapped as tight as fish scales around their bones. Their squared-away bunks, which cast no shadows because of the sun’s position, looked in their exactitude like a line of coffins.
Why the morbidness over a bunch of drunks? Because they brought back the ever-present knowledge in my life that I was one drink away from their fate—despair, murder of the soul, insanity, or death—and that realization was like someone working my heart muscle with an angry thumb.
The Salvation Army officer and I walked out of the dormitory into the sunlight, into the clean sweep of wind through oak and myrtle trees and a twirling water sprinkler on the grass.
“How would you describe that odor they have?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That smell. They all have it. How would you describe it?”
“Oh. It’s those short-dogs they drink. It’s one step above paint-thinner.”
“It’s like they have liquefied mothballs in their blood, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, something like that.”
“Would you say it smelled like embalming fluid?”
He scratched one sideburn with a fingernail.
“I was never a mortician,” he said, “but, yeah, that seems to come pretty close. Yeah, some of those ole boys are mite near dead and don’t know it yet. Poor fellows.”
He didn’t understand the direction of my questions, and I didn’t explain it to him. I simply gave him my business card and said, “If Vic comes back here, call me. Don’t mess with him. I think your intuitions about him are correct. He’s probably a deranged and dangerous man.”
“What’s he done?”
“I think only Vic Benson and God could tell you that. I don’t think the rest of us would even want to know. He’s one of those who make you want to believe that all of us didn’t fall out of the same tree.”
“It’s got something to do with children, doesn’t it?”
“How did you know?”
“One of the old-timers told me Vic flipped a hot cigarette in the face of a little colored boy who was pestering him. I kind of put it out of my mind because I didn’t want to believe it.”
His face looked momentarily sad, then he shook hands with me and walked back across the wet, shining lawn into the gloom of the dormitory.
I WENT BACK to the office, planning to call Lyle Sonnier in Baton Rouge to ask if he had any idea where his father might have gone. Just as I picked up the phone, I looked through the window and saw Clete Purcell park his automobile in a yellow zone, step out on the street, and stretch his arms like a bear coming out of hibernation. Two fishing rods were sticking out of a back window. I didn’t wait for him to come into the office. At best, my colleagues thought of Clete as a happy zoo animal; others had a way of disappearing from a room as soon as he entered it.
I met him outside on the walk.
“What’s happening, Dave?” he said. “Did you eat lunch yet?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s eat some red beans and rice, then drown some worms after you get off work.”
He wore a sleeveless tropical shirt, Budweiser shorts that hung off his navel, and his powder-blue porkpie hat slanted over one eye. His huge biceps were glowing with sunburn.
“We’re going down to Cypremort Point for crabs tonight. You’re welcomed to go with us,” I said.
He looked disappointed.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I thought I’d fish a little bit more today, that’s all. Anyway, let’s get something to eat and I’ll fill you in on some stuff I found out about Joey Gouza and the white man’s hope.”
We drove down the street to a small café run by a black man. Crushed beer cans littered the floor of Clete’s car, and I could smell beer on his breath.
“Are things slow at your office?” I asked.
“I just felt like taking off, that’s all. Hey, let’s eat.”
We took paper plates loaded with red beans, rice, and links of sausage to a plank table under a live-oak tree. The café owner didn’t have a beer license, and Clete went to the trunk of his car and came back with a sweating six-pack of Jax. It was warm in the shade of the trees, and smoke from a barbecue fire floated in a blue haze through the overhead limbs.
“I did some checking on Joey’s business connections around town,” Clete said. “I’m talking about his legitimate businesses—a linen service, a movie house up on Prytania, a bunch of dago restaurants, places where he launders his drug money for the IRS. Anyway, the word is Joey and his peo
ple are putting up big gelt for Bobby Earl’s U.S. Senate campaign. In other words, the greaseballs are into PACs now.”
I nodded. “Yeah?”
“That’s it.”
“So what’s new in that? It’s what we thought all along.”
“You’re reading it wrong, noble mon.”
“How’s that?”
“If Joey Meatballs was piecing off his drug action to Bobby Earl, he wouldn’t have to give him money through a bunch of PACs. He’d already own the guy.”
“Maybe that’s the way he launders Earl’s cut.”
“They don’t do it that way, Streak. They give the guy something he can’t resist, they bring him in on one of their deals, their shylocks lend him money, they set him up with some hot-ass broad on videotape. But they don’t go into the drug business with the guy, then create a lot of public records to show everybody they got the guy’s tallywacker tied around their neighborhood fireplug.”
“You drove all the way to New Iberia to tell me Bobby Earl is clean?”
“Oh, they know all the same people, and Joey would like to put a U.S. senator in his pocket, but there’s no law against that, mon.”
“Bobby Earl’s dirty.”
“Maybe so. I’m just telling you what I found out and what I think. The guy’s a sonofabitch but so are half the politicians in Louisiana.”
“I get the feeling something else is bothering you, Clete.”
He ripped open another beer and lit a cigarette, his food unfinished.
“It comes with the territory. It’s nothing new,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I might get my PI ticket pulled.”
“What for?”
He bit one of his fingernails and shrugged.
“I’ve had two or three beefs since I opened my office. It’s my own fault,” he said.
“You’re always in a beef, Clete. Why is somebody giving you trouble about your ticket now?”
“That’s what I asked this bozo who called me up from Baton Rouge.”
“Which bozo?”
“With the state regulatory agency.” His eyes moved around on my face.
“It’s Bobby Earl, isn’t it?” I said.
“Maybe.”