I found Clete Purcel at the bar. He was drinking a shot of tequila, with a Corona and a saucer of salted limes on the side, his porkpie hat cocked over one eye. The band was putting away its instruments and the bar was almost empty.
“Where you been, noble mon? You look a couple of quarts down,” he said.
“A long day.” I sat next to him and rubbed my face. My skin felt cold, dead to the touch.
“I thought I saw Boots go out the lobby.”
“You did.”
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t worry about it. What’d you find out about this guy Mookie?”
His eyes seemed to go inside mine, then he tipped back the shot and drank from the bottle of Corona.
“The black broad, Brandy Grissum, came into Nig’s office hysterical today. Dig this, she used the two yards you gave her to score a shitload of rock and get wiped out. So while she was on the nod at her mother’s house in St. John the Baptist, our man Mookie tools on up for some more R&R. Guess what? Mookie decided he wasn’t interested in a stoned-out twenty-buck street whore. So he sodomized her little sister.”
He put a Lucky Strike in his mouth and fiddled with his Zippo, as though he were trying to remove an image from his mind, then dropped the Zippo on the bar without lighting the cigarette.
“His last name is Zerrang,” he said. “He used to be a leg breaker for a couple of shylocks on the Mississippi coast, then he made the big score as a hit man for the greaseballs in Miami. He must be pretty slick, though. I had a friend at NOPD punch on the computer. He’s never been down.”
“Who’s he working for now?”
“Brandy doesn’t know. This time I think she’s telling the truth . . . You don’t look good, Streak. What’s troubling you, mon?”
I told him. We were the only people at the bar now. Clete listened, his face empty of expression. He rubbed his thumb against his cheekbone, and I could see white lines inside the crow’s feet at the corner of his eye.
He made a coughing sound in his throat.
“That’s quite a story,” he said.
I picked up one of the salted limes from his saucer, then set it down again.
“Bootsie walked in on it?” he asked.
“When Karyn was dressing.”
“How did the LaRose broad get in?”
“She got a passkey from the maid.”
“Dave, you were throwing her out. Bootsie doesn’t know that?”
“I didn’t have a chance to tell her. I’ll call her when she’s back home.”
“Man.” He breathed through his nose, his lips crimped together. “You told Karyn LaRose to peddle her bread somewhere else, though?”
“Something like that.” A scrolled green and red Dixie beer sign was lit over the row of whiskey bottles behind the bar. I felt tired all” over and my palms were stiff and dry when I closed and opened them.
“You didn’t do anything wrong. You just got to make Boots see that. Right? This isn’t a big deal,” he said. He watched me rub the salt in the saucer with the tip of my finger. “Let’s find a late-night joint and get a steak.”
“I’m going to take a shower and go to bed,” I said.
“I’m going up with you.”
“The hell you are.”
“I know you, Streak. You’re going to get inside your own head and build a case against yourself. The slop chute is closing. For you it’s closed permanently. You got that, big mon?”
“There’s no problem here, Clete.”
“Yeah, I bet. That broad couldn’t buy you, so she decided to fuck your head.” He stood up from the barstool, then grimaced slightly. “I feel like an upended bottle. Come on, let’s get out of here. Remind me in the future to drink in low-class dumps that aren’t full of the right people.”
“You’re the best, Cletus.”
He put his arm on my shoulder, and we walked together toward the elevator like two impaired Siamese twins trying to get in sync with each other.
* * *
The next morning I was part of the caravan that escorted Karyn and Buford back to their home on the Teche. It was balmy and gray after the rain, and you could smell the wet earth in the fields and hear the clanging of the sugarcane refinery down the bayou. It was a fine, late-fall morning, disjointed from the events of last night, as though I had experienced them only in a drunken dream.
From my car I watched Karyn and her husband enter their front door, their faces opaque, perhaps still numb from the alcohol of the night before, or perhaps masking the secrets they waited to share or the buried anger they would vent on each other once inside.
Bootsie was in the backyard, at the redwood picnic table, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette when I parked in the drive. She wore sandals and a terrycloth red shirt and a pair of khakis high on her hips.
“Hi,” I said.
Her legs were crossed, and she tipped her ashes in an inverted preserve jar cap and looked at the ducks skittering across our pond.
“You don’t smoke,” I said.
“I’m starting.”
I sat down across from her. Her eyes moved up to meet mine.
“I told you the truth last night,” I said.
“For some reason that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“Why?”
“How’d she come to have this obsession with you? What’s your end of it?”
“I didn’t want to go out to their house when we were first invited there. I tried to avoid her.”
“Who are you putting on?”
I felt my throat close. My eyes burned, as though I were looking into a watery glare.
She threw her cigarette in a flower bed full of dead leaves by the back wall of the house. Her cheeks were hot and streaked with color. Before I went into the house, I removed the burning cigarette from the leaves and mashed it out in the jar cap in front of her, my gesture as foolish as my words were self-serving.
* * *
The wall phone was ringing in the kitchen. I picked it up, my eyes fixed on Bootsie’s back through the window. Her hair was thick and woven with gold in the gray light.
“Aaron Crown dumped the boat down by Maurice,” the sheriff said.
“Did anybody see him?”
“No, just the boat.”
“He’ll be back.”
“You say that almost with admiration.”
“Like an old gunbull said, Aaron’s a traveling shit storm.”
“Anyway, you got your wish. You’re off it.”
When I didn’t reply, he said, “You’re not going to ask me why?”
“Go ahead, Sheriff.”
“Buford called and said you’re resentful about the assignment. He said you don’t need to come around his house again.”
“He did, did he?”
“That’s not all. He said you made a pass at his wife last night.”
“He’s a liar.”
“I believe you. But why did he decide to make up a story about you now?”
“Ask him.”
“I will . . . Dave, you still there?”
“I’ll talk to you later, Sheriff. I have to go somewhere.”
“I always knew this job would bring me humility . . . Say, you’re not going out to get in Buford LaRose’s face, are you?”
* * *
I drove Bootsie’s Toyota to the mechanic’s garage, exchanged it for my truck, and asked the mechanic to drive the Toyota back to my house, then I headed out to the LaRose plantation.
But I was not the only person who had a grievance with Buford that day. Jerry Joe Plumb’s blue Buick was pulled at an angle to the old LaRose company store, and Jerry Joe stood on the gallery between the two wooden pecan barrels that framed the double front doors, his hands on his hips, speaking heatedly into Buford’s face.
I crunched across the shell parking lot and cut my engine. They both looked at me, then stepped inside the double doors with the oxidized and cracked windows and continued their argument, Jerry Joe jabbing his finger in th
e air, his cheeks pooling with color.
But I could still hear part of it.
“You’re shorting me. Your old man wouldn’t do this, Buford.”
“You’ll get your due.”
“Three of the jobs you promised are already let to Dock Green.”
“I gave you my word. You stop trying to cadge favors because you knew my family.”
“Persephone let you put your head up her dress?”
Jerry Joe’s back was to me. His shoulders looked stiff, rectangular, his triceps swollen with tubes of muscle, like a prizefighter’s while he waits for the referee to finish giving instructions before the bell.
But Buford turned away from the insult and lit a cigar, cupping and puffing it in the gloom as though Jerry Joe was not there.
Jerry Joe’s leather-soled oxblood loafers were loud on the gallery when he came out the double doors.
“What’s the haps, Jerry?” I said.
He balanced on his soles, his face still glowing.
“He asks me the haps? Here’s a lesson. You take up with piranha fish, don’t expect them to go on a diet.”
“Buford stiffed you?”
“That guy don’t have the lead in his Eversharp to stiff anybody. Hey, keep your hammer in your pants or get you a full-body condom,” he said, and got into his Buick and started the engine.
I got out of my truck and put my hand on his door window. He rolled it down with the electric motor.
“Spell it out,” I said.
“You’re in the way. She knows how to combine business and pleasure. Don’t pretend you’re a dumb shit.” He pushed the window button again and scorched two lines in the shell parking lot out to the state highway.
I picked a handful of pecans out of one of the barrels by the door and went inside the store.
“You again. Like bubble gum under the shoe,” Buford said.
The store was dark, the cypress floor worn as smooth as wood inside a feed bin, the half-filled shelves filmed with cobwebs. I put a half dollar for the pecans next to the brass cash register on the counter and cracked two of them together in my palm.
“Why are you telling lies about me to the sheriff?” I said.
“You propositioned Karyn at the Acadiana. What do you expect?”
“Who told you this?”
“Karyn, of course.”
“Bad source. Your wife’s a pathological liar.”
“Your job’s finished here. Go back to doing whatever you do, Dave. Just stay off my property.”
“Wrong. As long as Aaron Crown is running loose, I’ll come here anytime I want, Buford.”
He combed his thick, curly hair back with his fingernails, a dark knowledge forming in his face.
“You want to bring me down, don’t you?” he said.
“You’re a fraud.”
“What did I ever do to you? Can you answer that simple question for me?”
“You and your wife use each other to injure other people . . . You know what a bugarron is?”
The skin trembled along the lower rim of his right eye.
“Are you calling me a—” he began.
“You serve a perversity of some kind. I just don’t know what it is.”
“The next time you come here, I’ll break your jaw. That’s a promise.”
He turned and walked down the length of the counter, past the display shelves that were covered with dust, and out the back screen door into the light. The screen slammed behind him like the crack of a rifle.
* * *
I took the rest of the day off and raked piles of wet leaves and pecan husks out of the lawn. The wind was still warm out of the south and the tops of the trees in the swamp were a soft green against the sky, and the only sound louder than my own thoughts was Tripod, Alafair’s three-legged coon, running up and down on his chain in the side yard. I burned the leaves in the coulee, then I showered, took a nap, and didn’t wake until after sunset. While I was dressing, the phone rang in the kitchen. Bootsie answered it and walked to the bedroom door.
“It’s Batist,” she said.
“What’s he want?”
“He didn’t say.” She went into the living room, then out on the gallery and sat on the swing.
“That movie fella get a hold of you?” Batist asked.
“No. What’s up?”
“He was down here wit’ a truck and some people wit’ cameras. I tole him he ought to talk to you about what he was doing. I seen him talking on one of them cordless phones. He ain’t called you?”
“This man’s not a friend, Batist. Is he there now?”
“No. He ain’t the reason I called you. It’s that big black man. He ain’t up to no good.”
“Which black man?”
“The biggest one I ever seen around here.”
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
I went out on the gallery. Bootsie still sat in the swing, pushing it back and forth with one foot.
“I need to go down to the dock for a few minutes,” I said.
“Right.”
“Boots, you’ve got to cut me some slack.”
“You don’t see it.”
“What?”
“You hate the LaRoses and what they stand for. That’s the power they have over you.”
“I’m a police officer. They’re corrupt.”
“You say they are. Nobody else does.” She went inside. The swing twisted emptily on its chains under the bug light.
I walked down the slope through the trees to the dock. The string of lights was turned on over the dock, and you could see bream night-feeding off the insects that fell into the water. Batist was cleaning out the coffee urn inside the bait shop.
“Tell me about the black guy,” I said.
Batist looked up from his work and studied my face. His head was titled, one eyebrow arched.
“What you mad about?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“I can see that, all right . . . That movie fella rented a boat and took pictures up and down the bayou. That’s when I first seen this black man up the road in a pickup truck, watching the bayou out the window. Later he come on in and axed if a movie’s getting made here.
“I say that’s what it looks like. He axed me if it’s a movie about this white man broke out of Angola, the one killed that black civil rights man in Baton Rouge a long time ago. When I tole him I don’t know, he said he’s got a story he can give this movie fella, if he gets any money for it, he’s gonna give me some, but he’s got to find out where the movie man’s staying at first.
“I said, ‘What you want here?’
“He had on this straw hat, with a colored band around it. He took it off and the side of his head was shaved down to the scalp. He goes, ‘I’m so strong I got muscles in my shit, old man. I’d watch what I say.’ All the time smiling with gold all over his teet’.
“I go, ‘I’m fixing to clean up. You want to buy somet’ing?’
“Dave, this man’s arms was big as my thigh. His shoulders touched both sides of that do’ when he come in. He goes, ‘You sure that movie fella ain’t tole you where he stay at?’
“I go, ‘It ain’t my bidness. Ain’t nobody else’s here, either.’
“He kept looking at me, grinning, messing with the salt shaker on top of the counter, like he was fixing to do somet’ing.
“So I said, ‘Nigger, don’t prove your mama raised a fool.’
“He laughed and picked up a ham sandwich and crumpled up a five-dollar bill and t’rew it on the counter and walked out. Just like that. Man didn’t no more care if I insulted him than a mosquito was flying round his head.”
“Call me if you see him again. Don’t mess with him.”
“Who he is, Dave?”
“He sounds like a guy named Mookie Zerrang. He’s a killer, Batist.”
He started to wipe down the counter, then flipped his rag into the bucket.
“They ain’t nothing for it, is they?” he said.
“Beg your pardon?”
“They out there, they in here. Don’t nobody listen to me,” he said, and waved his arm toward the screened windows, the floodlighted bayou, the black wall of shadows on the far bank. “It ain’t never gonna be like it use to. What for we brought all this here, Dave?”
He turned his back to me and began dropping the board shutters on the windows and latching them from the inside.
CHAPTER
19
Early Saturday morning I made coffee and fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and blueberries in the bait shop and ate breakfast by myself at the counter and watched the sun rise over the swamp. It had rained, then cleared during the night, and the bayou was yellow with mud and the dock slick with rainwater. A week ago Jerry Joe’s vending machine company had delivered a working replica of a 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox while I wasn’t in the shop; it sat squat and heavy in the corner, its plastic casing marbled with orange and red and purple light, the rows of 45 rpm records arrayed in a shiny black semicircle inside the viewing glass. I had resolved to have Jerry Joe’s people remove it.
I still hadn’t made the phone call.
I punched Jimmy Clanton’s “Just a Dream,” Harry Choates’s 1946 recording of “La Jolie Blon,” Nathan Abshire’s “Pine Grove Blues.”
Their voices and music were out of another era, one that we thought would never end. But it did, incrementally, in ways that seemed inconsequential at the time, like the unexpected arrival at the front gate of a sun-browned oil lease man in khaki work clothes who seemed little different from the rest of us.
I unplugged the jukebox from the wall. The plastic went dead and crackled like burning cellophane in the silence of the room.
Then I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana library in Lafayette.
* * *
Buford’s bibliography was impressive. He had published historical essays on the Knights of the White Camellia and the White League and the violent insurrection they had led against the federal occupation after the War Between the States. The articles were written in the neutral and abstruse language of academic journals, but his sentiments were not well disguised: the night riders who had lynched and burned had their roles forced upon them.
His other articles were in psychological and medical journals. They seemed to be diverse, with no common thread, dealing with various kinds of phobias and depression as well as hate groups that could not tolerate a pluralistic society.