“Is it safe to cross?”
Washington cocks his round head to one side. “Well, that’s a stretchy kind of word, safe. I been over this old thing many a time and it ain’t caved in yet. But one of these days, it’s bound to happen. Dr. Kirkland need to put a little more money in this old bridge. Make life a lot safer for everybody over here.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Tell you what. Why don’t you ride over with me? When you done talking to Jesse, he’ll bring you back here to your car. And if he can’t, I will.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Talking to another person—particularly a stranger—has forced me to reenter the world of time and motion. After backing the Audi under a pecan tree and locking it, I climb up into the cab of Henry’s truck and perch on the passenger seat.
This truck is nothing like the pickup in my dream. It’s high off the ground, with a fancy sound system, thick upholstery, and a roomy backseat. The truck in my dream is old and rusted, with round front fenders that make it look like a toy. A stick shift rises from the floor, and there’s no upholstery at all, not even on the roof.
“You related to Dr. Kirkland?” Henry asks, putting the truck in gear and easing onto the soft dirt of the causeway.
“He’s my grandfather.”
“Huh. How come I ain’t seen you down here before?”
“You probably have. It’s been ten years since I visited, though. Longer than that since I spent any real time here.”
“Well, it ain’t changed much. We got electricity about five years back. Used to have to use generators when we wanted power.”
“I remember. What about telephone service?”
Henry taps a cell phone on his belt. “These all we got, and they work about half the time. That’s why we keep two-way radios in the trucks.”
We hit a muddy patch, and the tail of the truck slides almost out from under us. I clench every muscle, but Henry just laughs as we straighten up again.
“You think you scared?” he booms. “My big ass goes into that water, it’s all over but the crying.”
“Why?”
“I can’t swim.”
Some people would laugh, but I can’t. It makes me sad. As we near the shore of the island, a few raindrops splatter on the windshield.
“Will the rain cover the bridge?” I ask.
“Probably not,” says Henry. “But I’ve seen it happen. Still, rain ain’t gonna come down hard for another hour yet.”
“How do you know?”
He looks at me and taps his nose. “The smell. They ought to put me on Channel Sixteen. I’m lots better than that weatherman they got.”
“You have TV out here now?”
“Satellite. No cable, though.”
Things have changed indeed. The last time I was here, DeSalle Island was as primitive as an Appalachian hollow. Two dozen shotgun shacks for the workers, my grandfather’s clinic, some cabins near the lake for visiting hunters, and various utility buildings. Most of the shacks had outdoor plumbing. The only buildings with “modern” conveniences were my grandfather’s hunting lodge—a plantation-style house built of cypress that overlooks the lake, designed by the noted Louisiana architect A. Hays Town—and the clinic.
“Almost there,” Henry says, giving the pickup a little gas.
As the wall of trees gets nearer, I catch sight of a small shed near the water, and a chill runs through me. Like almost every other building on DeSalle Island, the shed has a tin roof. As the chill subsides, my heart suddenly pounds against my sternum.
Parked beside the shed is the round-nosed pickup truck from my dream.
Chapter
27
The moment Henry Washington’s truck rolls onto the gravel road that follows the eastern shore of the island, a strange thrumming starts in my body. It’s as though a mild current of electricity is sparking along my peripheral nerves, worsening the hand tremor that’s bothered me for the past three days.
The island looks the same as it always did, the perimeter skirted with cypress trees growing out of the shallow water near the shore, the interior forested with willow brakes and giant cottonwoods. The cypresses are on my right now; we’re driving north. I want to ask Henry about my grandfather’s old truck, but a tightness in my chest stops me. As it falls farther behind, I try to remember the layout of the island.
From the air, DeSalle Island looks like a foreshortened version of South America. It’s nearly bisected at the center by a horseshoe lake that was once a bend in the Mississippi River. Grandpapa’s hunting lodge stands on the north shore of the lake, the shacks of the workers on the south. West of the lake lie five hundred acres of rice fields. The northern end of the island is pastureland dotted with cattle and oil wells, and south of the lake lie the woods we’re passing now. Nestled among the trees at the lower edge of the woods are the cabins and utility buildings of the hunting camp, and below them—the Argentina of our island—low-lying sand dunes and muddy slews tail down to the confluence of the old channel and the Mississippi River.
“Jesse’s been on the north end chasing stray cows,” Henry says, shaking his head as though such labor requires a certain level of insanity. “He said something about doing some plumbing work at the hunting camp after that.”
In a few seconds the trees on my left will thin and reveal the lake and the cluster of shacks where the workers live.
“Didn’t we already pass the road to the camp?”
Henry laughs. “The closest road, we did. But I don’t take this truck into no slews. There’s a gravel road goes into the camp from the north now.”
I see the lake, dark green under the clouds, with small whitecaps whipped up by the wind. Henry turns left and follows a road that runs between the lake and the south edge of the woods. He waves broadly at a group of shotgun shacks by the lake. The sun has started to sink, and most of the porches have people on them, the old ones rocking slowly, the children scampering around in the dust with cats and dogs.
“Here we go,” Henry says, turning right onto a narrow gravel road through the trees.
“What’s Jesse like?” I ask.
“You don’t know him?”
“No.”
“Jesse’s a mystery. He used to be the most laid-back cat on this island. Loved to smoke and talk. But now he’s a hard-ass. I don’t know why, exactly. But he is.”
“Was it the war?”
Henry shrugs his big shoulders. “Who knows? Jesse don’t talk too much. He mostly work, or watch other people work.”
A minute passes in silence. The cabins of the hunting camp appear ahead. Unlike the shacks of the workers, many of which are made of tar paper or clapboard on brick stilts, the cabins are built of sturdy cypress, weathered gray and hard as steel. The roofs are corrugated tin that’s rusted to dark orange.
“There Jesse,” says Henry.
I don’t see a man, but I do see a brown horse tied to the porch rail of one of the cabins. Henry pulls up in front of the cabin and honks his horn three times.
Nothing happens.
“He’ll be here,” Henry says.
Sure enough, a wiry black man wearing no shirt crawls from beneath the cabin, stands, and brushes himself off. At first he looks like a hundred other black workmen I’ve seen. Then he turns, and I see the right side of his face. Blotches of bright pink skin stand out like splatters of paint from his right shoulder to his right temple, and his cheek is a mound of deformed scar tissue.
“He got burned over in Vietnam,” Henry says. “It looks bad, but we used to it now.”
Henry leans out his window and shouts, “Yo, Jesse! Got a lady in here wants to talk to you!”
Jesse walks over to the truck—my side, not Henry’s—and looks me in the eye. Henry uses his switch to roll down my window, which leaves only six inches of space between my face and Jesse Billups’s scars.
“What you want with me?” he says in an insolent voice.
“I want to talk t
o you about my father.”
“Who’s your father?”
“Luke Ferry.”
Jesse’s eyes widen, and then he snorts like a horse. “Goddamn. All this time, and now you come back? I met you when you was a little girl. I knew your mama pretty well. How’d you get down here?”
Henry says, “Her car’s parked on the other side of the bridge. I told her you’d take her back to it when she’s ready. You got her okay?”
Jesse studies me for a bit. “Yeah, I’ll take her back.”
He opens my door and helps me down from the high cab. Jesse must have a half inch of calluses on his hand. As Henry drives away with a blast of his horn, Jesse leads me to the next cabin down from the one where his horse is tied.
“Hardass don’t like strangers,” he explains.
“You named your horse Hardass?”
“People call me hard-ass all the time behind my back, so I figured I’d let ’em know I know it.”
He climbs onto the porch and sits against the wall of the cabin. I sit on the top step and brace my back against the rail. There’s no doubt that Jesse Billups works hard for a living. He has to be fifty to have served in Vietnam, but his stomach is still as tight as a teenager’s. His arms don’t bulge, but the long muscles in them ripple with every movement. His face is another matter. It’s hard to get an impression of his looks; I can’t really see past the scars yet.
“Diesel fuel,” he says in a ragged voice.
“What?”
“This face I got. I was cleaning toilets at a firebase when Mr. Charlie dropped a few mortar rounds on us for Christmas. We used to burn our shit with diesel fuel. I was standing next to five burning drums when the round went off. Covered me with shit and burning diesel. Would have been funny except for the infection I got from it.”
“I’m sorry.”
He gives me a cynical wink, then takes a pack of Kool menthols from his back pocket. Lighting one with a silver lighter, he inhales deeply, then blows blue smoke away from the porch. He seems to be settling in for a long talk. After another deep drag on his cigarette, he turns his dark eyes on me.
“You here to ask about your daddy?”
“I heard you knew him pretty well.”
This seems to amuse Jesse. “I don’t know about all that. But me and Lukie hung together some, yeah. A long time ago.”
“I was hoping you could tell something about what happened to him in the war.”
“You know anything already?”
“Somebody told me he was a sniper. I didn’t know that. They also said he was part of a unit that was accused of war crimes. Do you know anything about that?”
Jesse snorts in derision. “War crimes? Shit. That the craziest expression I ever heard. War is a motherfucking crime, start to finish. It’s only people who don’t know that be talkin’ ’bout shit like war crimes.”
I’m not sure how to continue. “Well, there must have been some unusual events, at least, for the army to talk about prosecuting his unit.”
“Unusual?” Jesse barks a humorless laugh. “Yeah. That’s a good word.”
“Can you tell me anything?”
“Luke told me a little about that. He was a country boy, see? That’s what got him in trouble. He knew how to shoot. I’m a good shot, but that boy was something with a rifle. Like he was born holding one. Wouldn’t kill nothing after the war, though, not even deer for food. Anyway, the army made him a sniper. And he did that job for a couple months. Then they took him into this special unit called the White Tigers. Supposed to be a all-volunteer thing, but I think the CO pretty much volunteered anybody he wanted into it. That’s how old Lukie got stuck.”
“The White Tigers? What was the purpose of the unit?”
“They was put together for one reason. What they call incursion into enemy territory. Only this incursion wasn’t exactly legal. The Tigers went into Cambodia to try to hit the Cong where they hid from our bombers.”
“Do you know what happened there?”
“Same shit that happened a lot of other places, only worse. The Tigers went from village to village looking for weapons, VC, or VC sympathizers. Thing was, they didn’t operate like we did over in I Corps. In Cambodia, they didn’t wait around to get shot at. They went in there to scare the shit out the people, keep ’em from helping Mr. Charlie. To deny the enemy sanctuary and interdict lines of supply, MACV would have said. Double-talking motherfuckers. Anyway, they had some bad boys in this Tiger outfit. Hard cases from other platoons. So naturally, they did some bad shit.”
“What exactly falls into that category?”
Jesse stubs out his cigarette and immediately lights another. “Assassinated tribal chiefs and VC paymasters. Punished anybody known or suspected of helping the VC or the Khmer Rouge. Questioned people vigorously.” He laughs bitterly. “That means torture.”
“My father did some of this?”
He nods deliberately. “That was the job, you know? That shit happened down where I was, too. Especially shooting prisoners so you wouldn’t have to drag them around with you. But if the wrong officer saw you, you could get in bad trouble. Luke’s outfit was different. In the Tigers, it was the officers instigating the shit. Cutting off heads and leaving them on sticks to scare the Khmer Rouge. Taking girls from the villages and using them for recreation. Getting—”
“Wait a second,” I cut in. “You mean they kidnapped girls and raped them?”
Jesse nods like it’s no big deal. “Sure. That’s how the CO rewarded his men. When his boys did good, they could pick a girl from a village and keep her for a couple days.”
“What happened to the girl when they were done with her?”
Jesse raises his hand and makes a quick slicing motion across his throat. The deadness in his eyes makes me shiver. “I told you they done some bad shit.”
“How did my dad feel about that?”
Jesse shrugs. “He blamed the government. Shit, that’s who put him in the middle of it. He didn’t ask for that. And what could he do about it? Way out in the bush…the whole operation off the books…CO had the only radio. So Luke did what he had to do and got the hell out.”
“What about the war crimes investigation? Who started that?”
“Some rat in their unit, probably. Somebody looking to get his name in the papers.”
This doesn’t sound right to me. “Reporting that kind of thing seems like a good way to get dead. It must have been someone with a conscience who first went public.”
Jesse shakes his head. “All I know is, when the government questioned Luke, he didn’t tell ’em shit. The government dropped the investigation, end of story.”
Jesse takes a drag from his cigarette, inhaling so deeply that he seems to draw sustenance from the smoke. As I watch him, it strikes me that his lean frame is not the result of good health. It’s almost as if the fat that a normal human would accumulate is being consumed by a deep-banked anger.
“Well, do you think—”
“What you come down here for?” Jesse growls with sudden intensity. “You didn’t come here to talk about no Vietnam.”
“Yes, I did.”
He barks another laugh. “Maybe you think you did. But there’s something else behind these questions.”
I look away, hoping to hide the guilt I feel over what my grandfather told me today. Because that’s what I feel, I realize. Guilt. That’s why I’m asking these questions. If my father really did those things to me, something must have pushed him to it. And if it wasn’t the war, then what else could it have been but me? I’ve always craved attention, and I’ve always been very sexual—
“Hey,” says Jesse. “You look like you about to cry on me.”
I tilt back my head and blink away tears. “You’re right. I don’t know what I came here for exactly. I was hoping for…something. I don’t know what.”
“You looking for some kind of explanation for the way Luke was? Hoping I’d tell you he was a saint or something, behind that c
losed-up face of his? He was just a dude, like me. We all got good and bad deep down inside.” He points a long-nailed finger at me. “But I ain’t telling you nothing you don’t already know. I can look in your eyes and see that. You Luke Ferry’s kid, I know you got both inside of you.”
Now the tears come, too many to blink away. “Why did my daddy spend so much time down here, Jesse? What was it that drew him?”
Jesse scowls and looks off into the trees.
“Was he growing dope down here?”
“He tried, but he wasn’t no good at it.”
“Did he ever deal? Drugs, I mean?”
The scarred head turns slowly left and right. “Shit, I had to get Luke’s weed for him.”
“What am I missing, then? How much time did he actually spend down here?”
“A lot. Specially in the winter. Summertime, your family was down here a lot. In deer season, Dr. Kirkland and his buddies would visit. But all the other times, Luke stayed down here.”
“What the hell did he do, if he didn’t hunt or fish?”
Jesse looks back at me, but the anger I sensed before seems to have leaked out of his pores. “He walked around a lot. Drew things in a notebook. Played a little music. Had him a guitar down here. I taught him some bottleneck stuff.”
I faintly remember a guitar in my father’s barn studio, but I don’t remember him playing it. “Was he any good?”
“He was all right, for a white boy. He could bend a note. Had some blues in him.”
“Well, did he—”
The ring of a cell phone stops me, but it’s not mine. Jesse takes a Nokia from his pocket and answers. He listens for a bit, then says he’ll get right on it and hangs up.
“I got to go,” he says.
“Right now?”
“Yep. Gotta get some supplies from the mainland in case the water covers the bridge. S’posed to rain a couple of days straight, all along the river. We better get moving.”
“But I have some more questions.”
“We can talk on the way.” He walks over to his horse, unties him, and leads him over to where I’m standing. Hardass flicks his tail at a buzzing horsefly. “I’m gonna get on, then pull you up behind me. You just stay clear of his hindquarters.”