“That’s it,” I said to the boat pilot.
He cut back on the throttle, stared through the glass at the woods, then reversed the engine so we didn’t drift into the shore.
“You want to go head-on in there?” he asked.
“You know another way to do it?” I said.
“Bring in some SWAT guys on a chopper and blow that shack into toothpicks,” he replied.
A St. Martin Parish plainclothes homicide investigator who was on the other boat walked out on the bow and used a bullhorn, addressing the shack as though he did not know who its occupants were.
“We want to talk to y’all that’s inside. You need to work your way down that ladder with one hand on your head. There won’t nobody get hurt,” he said.
But there was no sound, except the idling boat engines and the rain that had started falling in large drops on the bay’s surface. The plainclothes wiped his face with his hand and tried again.
“Aaron, we know you in there. We afraid somebody’s come out here to hurt you, podna. Ain’t it time to give it up?” he said.
Again, there was silence. The plainclothes’ coat was dark with rain and his tie was blown back across his shirt. He looked toward our boat, shrugged his shoulders, and went inside the cabin.
“Let’s do it, skipper,” I said to the pilot.
He pushed the throttle forward and took our boat into the canal. The wake from our boat receded back through the trees, gathering with it sticks and dead hyacinths, washing over logs and finally disappearing into the flooded undergrowth. The second boat eased into the shallows behind us until its hull scraped on the silt.
Helen and I dropped off the bow into the water and immediately sank to our thighs, clouds of gray mud ballooning around us. She carried a twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, with the barrel sawed off an inch above the pump. I pulled back the slide on my .45, chambered the top round in the magazine, and set the safety.
A flat-bottom aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied to a piling under the shack. Helen and I waded through the water, ten yards apart, not speaking, our eyes fixed on the shack’s shuttered windows and the ladder that extended upward to an open door with a gunny sack curtain blowing in the door frame.
On my left, the St. Martin plainclothes and three uniformed deputies were spread out in a line, breaking their way through a stand of willows.
Helen and I walked under the shack and listened. I cupped my hand on a piling to feel for movement above.
Nothing.
Helen held the twelve-gauge at port arms, her knuckles white on the stock and pump. Her faded blue jeans were drenched up to her rump. The air was cold and felt like damp flannel against the skin, and I could smell an odor like beached gars and gas from a sewer main.
Then I felt something tick against my face, like a mild irritant, a wet leaf, a blowfly. Unconsciously, I wiped at it with my hand, then I felt it again, harder this time, against my eyebrow, my forehead, in my hair, directly in my face as I stared upward at the plank floor of the shack.
Helen’s mouth was parted wide, her face white.
I wiped my face on my coat sleeve and stared at the long red smear across the cloth.
I felt a revulsion go through my body as though I had been spat upon. I tore off my coat, soaked it in the water at my knees, and wiped my face and hair with it, my hand trembling.
Above me, strings of congealed blood hung from the planks and lifted and fell in the wind.
I moved out from under the shack, slipped the safety off the .45, and began climbing the ladder, which was set at a gradual angle, almost like stairs. Helen moved out into the water, away from the shack, and aimed the twelve gauge at the door above my head, then, just before I went inside, swung the barrel away and followed me.
I reached the top rung and paused, my hand on the doorjamb. The gunny sack curtain billowed back on the nails it hung from, exposing a rusted icebox without power, a table and chair, a solitary wood bunk, a coon hide that someone had been fleshing with a spoon.
I pulled myself up and went inside, tearing away the curtain, kicking back the door against the wall.
Except it did not fly back against the wall.
I felt the wood knock into meat and bone, a massive and dense weight that did not surrender space.
I clenched the .45 in both hands and pointed it at the enormous black shape behind the door, my finger slick with sweat inside the trigger guard.
My eyes wouldn’t assimilate the naked man in front of me. Nor the fact that he was upside down. Nor what had been done to him.
The fence wire that had been looped around his ankles and notched into the roof beam was buried so deeply in his ankles that it was nearly invisible.
Helen lumbered into the room, her shotgun pointed in front of her. She lowered it to her side and looked at the hanging man.
“Oh boy,” she said. She propped open the shutter on a window and cleared her throat and spit. She looked back at me, then blew out her breath. Her face was discolored, as though she had been staring into a cold wind. “I guess he got his,” she said. Then she went to the window again, with the back of her wrist to her mouth. But this time she collected herself, and when she looked at me again her face was composed.
“Come on, we can still nail him,” I said.
The plainclothes homicide investigator and two of the uniformed deputies were waiting for us at the bottom of the ladder.
“What’s up there?” the plainclothes said. His eyes tried to peel meaning out of our faces. “What, it’s some kind of company secret?”
“Go look for yourself. Be careful what you step in,” Helen said.
“Crown killed Mookie Zerrang. He couldn’t have gone far,” I said.
“He ain’t gone far at all,” the third deputy said, sloshing toward us from the opposite side of the woods. “Look up yonder through that high spot.”
We all stared through the evenly spaced tree trunks at a dry stretch of compacted silt that humped out of the water like the back of a black whale. It was covered with palmettos and crisscrossed with the webbed tracks of nutria, and in the middle of the palmettos, squatting on his haunches, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, was Aaron Crown.
We waded toward him, our guns still drawn. If he heard or saw us, or even cared if we were in his proximity, he showed no sign.
His body and clothes were painted with blood from his pate to the mud-encrusted basketball shoes he wore. His eyes, which were finally drained of all the heat and energy that had defined his life, seemed to look out of a scarlet mask. We stood in a circle around him, our weapons pointed at the ground. In the damp air, smoke hung at the corner of his mouth like wisps of cotton.
“You know about Sabelle?” I asked.
“That ’un in yonder couldn’t talk about nothing else before he died,” he replied.
“You’re an evil man, Aaron Crown,” I said.
“I reckon it otherwise.” He rubbed the cigarette’s hot ash between his fingers until it was dead. “If them TV people is out there, I need to wash up.”
He looked up at our faces, his lidless eyes waiting for an answer.
CHAPTER
37
On Christmas morning I sat at the kitchen table and looked at a photograph in the Daily Iberian of Buford and Karyn dancing together at the country club. They looked like people who would live forever.
Bootsie paused behind me, her palm resting on my shoulder.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Jerry Joe Plumb . . . No journalist will ever mention his name in association with theirs, but he paid their dues for them.”
“He paid his own, too, Dave.”
“Maybe.”
The window was open and a balmy wind blew from my neighbor’s pasture and swelled the curtains over the sink. I filled a cup with coffee and hot milk and walked outside in the sunshine. Alafair sat at the redwood picnic table, playing with Tripod in her lap and listening to the tape she had made
of the records on Jerry Joe’s jukebox. She flipped Tripod on his back and bounced him gently up and down by pulling his tail while he pushed at her forearm with his paws.
“Thanks for all the presents. It’s a great Christmas,” she said.
“Thanks for everything you gave me, too,” I said.
“Can Tripod have some more eggnog ice cream?”
“Sure.”
“Those creeps are gone, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, the worst of the lot are. The rest get it somewhere down the road. We just don’t see it.”
I thought perhaps I might have to explain my remark, but I didn’t. She had actually lived through more than I had in her young life, and her comprehension of the world was oftentimes far better than mine.
She went inside the house with Tripod under her arm, then came back out on the step.
“I forgot. We ate it all,” she said.
“There’s some in the freezer down at the shop. I’ll get it,” I said.
I walked down the slope through the leaves drifting out of the oak and pecan branches overhead. I had strung Christmas lights around the bait shop’s windows and hung wreaths fashioned from pine boughs and holly and red ribbon on the weathered cypress walls, and Alafair had glued a Santa Claus made from satin wrapping paper to the door. The bayou was empty of boats, and the sound of my shoes was so loud on the dock that it echoed off the water and sent a cloud of robins clattering out of the trees.
I had gotten the ice cream from the game freezer and was about to lock up again when I saw Dock Green park a black Lincoln by the boat ramp and walk toward me.
“It’s Christmas. We’re closed,” I said.
“LaRose has got my wife up at his house,” he said.
“I don’t believe that’s true. Even if it is, she’s a big girl and can make her own choices.”
“I can give you that guy, diced and fried.”
“Not interested.”
“It ain’t right.”
He sat down at a spool table and stared out at the bayou. His neck was as stiff as a chunk of sewer pipe. A muscle jumped in his cheek.
“I think you were involved with Jerry Joe’s death. I just can’t prove it. But I don’t have to talk with you, either. So how about getting out of here?” I said.
He rubbed the heel of his hand in one eye.
“I never killed nobody. I need Persephone back. It ain’t right he can steal my wife, pull a gun on me, I can’t do nothing about it . . . I told Seph this is how it’d be if we messed with people was born with money . . . They take, they don’t give,” he said.
Then I realized he was drunk.
“Get a motel room or go back to your camp, Dock. I’ll get somebody to drive you,” I said.
He rose to his feet, as though from a trance, and said, more to the wind than to me, “He controls things above the ground, but he don’t hear the voices that’s down in the earth . . . They can call me a geek, it don’t matter, her and me are forever.”
I went back into the shop and called for a cruiser. When I came outside again, he was gone.
* * *
That night Alafair and Bootsie and I went out to eat, then drove down East Main, through the corridor of live oaks, looking at the lights and decorations on the nineteenth-century homes along Bayou Teche. We passed the city hall and library, the flood-lit grotto, which contained a statue of Christ’s mother, where the home of George Washington Cable had once stood, the darkened grounds and bamboo border around the Shadows, and in the center of town the iron-and-wood drawbridge over the Teche.
I drove past the old Southern Pacific station and up the St. Martinville road, and, without thinking, like a backward glance at absolved guilt, I let my eyes linger on the abandoned frame house where Karyn LaRose had grown up. The garage that had contained her father’s boxes of gumballs and plastic monster teeth and vampire fingernails still stood at the front of the property, the doors padlocked, and I wondered when she drove past it if she ever saw the little girl who used to play there in the yard, her hands sticky with the rainbow seepage from the gum that mildewed and ran through the cracks inside.
“Look, up the road, y’all, it’s a fire,” Alafair said.
Beyond the next curve you could see the reddish orange bloom in the sky, the smoke that trailed back across the moon. We pulled to the side of the road for a firetruck to pass.
“Dave, it’s Buford and Karyn’s house,” Bootsie said.
We came around the curve, and across the cleared acreage the house looked like it was lit from within by molten metal. Only one pump truck had arrived, and the firemen were pulling a hose from the truck toward the front porch.
I stopped on the opposite side of the road and ran toward the truck. I could already feel the heat from the house against my skin.
“Is anybody in there?” I said. The faces of the firemen looked like yellow tallow in the light from the flames.
“Somebody was at the window upstairs but they couldn’t make it out,” a lieutenant said. “You’re from the sheriff’s department, aren’t you?”
“Right.”
“There’s a trail of gasoline from the back of the house out to the stables. What the hell kind of security did y’all have out here?”
“Buford worried about Aaron Crown, not Dock Green,” I said.
“Who?” he said.
Another pump truck came up the road, but the heat had punched holes in the roof now, the poplars against the side wall were wrapped with fire, and the glow through the collapsing shingles bloomed in an ever-widening circumference, defining everything in red-black shapes that was Buford’s—the brick stables and tack rooms, the fields that had already been harrowed for next year’s planting, the company store with the barrels of pecans on each side of the front doors, the stark and leafless tree that his ancestors in the Knights of the White Camellia had used to lynch members of the carpetbag government, the horses with Mexican brands that spooked and thudded through the rolling hardwoods as though they had never been bridled or broken.
Then I saw Buford come through the front door, a water-soaked blanket held in a cone over his head.
He tore the blanket away and flung it aside, as though the blanket itself contained the heat that had scalded his body. He smelled like ashes and charcoal and scorched hair, and smoke rose in dirty strings from his clothes.
“Where is she?” he said, staring wild-eyed at the firemen in his yard.
“Who? Who else is in there?” a fireman said.
“Where is she, Dave?”
“I don’t know, Buford,” I replied.
“She was on the stairs, right next to me . . .”
“She didn’t make it out, partner,” I said.
I reached out to take his arm in my hand. I felt the smooth hardness of his triceps brush my palm, then he was gone, running toward the rectangle of flame beyond the Greek pillars on the front porch. A fireman in a canvas coat and a big hat tried to tackle him and hit hard and empty-armed against the brick walkway.
Buford went up the steps, his arms in front of his face, wavering for just a moment in the heat that withered his skin and chewed apart the interior of his house, then he crossed his forearms over his eyes and went through the flames and disappeared inside.
I heard a fireman yell, “Pour it on him, pour it on him, pour it on him, goddamn it!”
The pressurized spray of water caromed off the doorway and dissected die vortex of fire that was dissolving the stairway, filling the chandeliers with music, eating the floor away, blowing windows out into the yard.
Then we saw them, just for a moment, like two featureless black silhouettes caught inside a furnace, joined at the hip, their hands stretched outward, as though they were offering a silent testimony about the meaning of their own lives before they stepped backward into the burning lake that had become their new province.
EPILOGUE
Spring didn’t come for a long time that year. The days were cold well into March, the swa
mp gray with winterkill. Batist would run his trotlines each morning at sunrise, his pirogue knocking against the swollen base of the cypress trunks. I would watch him from the bait shop window while he retrieved each empty hook and rebaited it and dropped it back in the water, wiping the coldness off his hand on his trousers, the mist rising about his bent shoulders. Then he would come back inside, shivering unduly inside his quilted jacket, and we would drink coffee together and prepare the chickens and sausage links for the few fishermen or tourists who might be in that day.
Persephone and Dock Green were never seen again; some say they fled the country, perhaps to South America. The irony was that even though a filling station attendant in St. Martinville identified Dock as the man who had bought gas in a can from him on the night Buford and Karyn died, the gas can found on the LaRose plantation had no fingerprints on it, and without an eyewitness to the arson Dock would have never been convicted.
The greater truth was that Dock Green’s strain of madness had always served a function, just as Aaron Crown’s had, and the new governor of Louisiana, a practical-minded businessman, was not given to brooding over past events and letting them encumber his vision of the future.
Jimmy Ray Dixon?
He has a late-hour radio talk show in New Orleans now, and with some regularity he tells his listeners that his brother’s spirit has finally been laid to rest. Why now? He doesn’t answer that question. He’s not comfortable with the mention of Mookie Zerrang’s name, and when he hears it, his rhetoric becomes more religious and abstruse.
Dock Green’s girls still work the same bars and street corners, Jimmy Ray jerks his listeners around and they love him for it, and Aaron Crown sits in a maximum security unit at Angola, denying his guilt to European journalists who have done front-page features on him.
The players don’t change, just the audience.
But maybe that’s just a police officer’s jaded interpretation of things, since few seem interested in the death of Short Boy Jerry, a man who everyone knew operated by choice on the edge of the New Orleans underworld and hence invited his fate.