'How'd you get here?'
'Rode the bus to New Iberia. Then walked.'
'You walked fifteen miles?'
'That man yonder give me a ride the last two miles.' He pointed up the road to a parked, mud-caked van where a man in coveralls was working under the front end with a wrench. 'I'll work hard for you, Mr. Dave. I won't get in no trouble, either.'
'What about school, partner?'
'I ain't going back there. I need to train, get in shape, maybe get on a card. You don't need school for that. Mr. Tommy tole me he quit school when he was sixteen.'
'That's part of the reason he's a moral imbecile, Zoot.'
'A wha—'
'What's your mom say about all this?'
He didn't answer.
'Does she know where you are?' I said.
'What she care? She told me this morning I ain't gonna be no better than my daddy. How can I be like my daddy when I never even seen my daddy? I want to join the Marine Corps but she won't sign for me. She say all they'll use me for is cleaning their toilets. She called up the sergeant at the recruiting center and tole him that. That's what she done.'
'Let me be up-front with you, partner. I've got a mess of grief around here right now. I can't help you out, at least not in the way you want me to.'
'Mr. Dave—'
'Sorry, Zoot.'
The air was cool, and red and gold leaves tumbled out of the sunlight into the water. He looked down the road at the shadows among the oak trees, as though they held an answer to his situation.
'I'll find you a place to stay tonight, then I'll drive you to the bus depot in the morning,' I said.
I saw the flicker of injury in his face.
'There've been some bad people around my house, Zoot. I don't want you getting mixed up in it,' I said. 'Look, maybe you should give your mom another chance. Maybe she's scared. In her mind, you're all she's got. That makes her possessive and probably a little selfish. But it's not because she doesn't respect you.'
'It don't make what she say right. You ain't got to find a place for me. That fellow yonder's from New Orleans. He say when he get his van fixed, I can ride back wit' him.'
'You want me to call your mom for you?'
'I ain't going back home. Mr. Tommy'll he'p me out. Y'all can say what you want about him, he ain't a bad white man. He don't get on my case and run me down, he don't tell me he got a mess of grief and don't got time for his friends.'
'I'm sorry you feel that way.'
'You a cop, Mr. Dave.'
'What's that mean?'
'You talk different, you ain't mean like Mr. Baxter, you're smart and educated, too, but you a cop, just like my mama. When it come down to it, you ain't gonna go against the rule, you're on the side got the power. Don't tell me it ain't so, neither.'
He walked down the road through the tunnel of oak trees. His tennis shoes and the bottoms of his jeans were gray with dust, and one elbow poked through the sleeve of his sweater. He squatted in a clump of four-o'clocks and watched the man in coveralls work on his van. In the waning afternoon light his black skin seemed lit with an almost purple sheen.
I went in the house, and Bootsie, Alafair, and I had supper at the kitchen table. Later, Alafair and I fed Tripod and put him in his hutch so he wouldn't make noise in the dead leaves during the night, then I checked the baling wire and tin cans that I had strung the day before and locked up the house. Just after Bootsie and Alafair went to bed, someone knocked on the front screen door.
It was Zoot. He was yawning when I opened the door, and his hair was mussed with pieces of leaves under the yellow porch light.
'Can you come he'p the man wit' the van?' he said.
'I thought you didn't want any favors, Zoot.'
'I didn't ax for one. The man did. He got the tire rod fixed. His batt'ry dead, though.'
'Oh, I see, that's different. Zoot, you're becoming a pain in the butt.'
'He tole me to ax. You don't want to he'p, I can walk down to the fo' corners.'
I locked the door behind me, and we got in my truck. Zoot rubbed the sleep out of his face. Then he said, 'I ain't meant to be rude, Mr. Dave. I just had a lot of stuff on my mind today. I don't see no answer for it, either.'
'You really want to join the Corps?'
'Sure.'
'Let me talk to your mom about it.'
'You'll do that?'
'Why not, partner?'
We drove down the road toward the parked van. The moon was yellow, veiled with a rain ring, low over the cypress trees in the marsh. A few raindrops began hitting on the bayou's surface. In the headlights I could see the man in coveralls bent down into the van's engine, his back pocket swollen with chrome wrenches. But behind the van's shadow I also saw a parked pickup truck, its lights off.
'It looks like your friend's already found some help,' I said.
'That guy come by earlier but he don't have no cables,' Zoot said.
I left my lights and engine on, got out in the road, and unlocked the lid of the equipment box that was welded to the floor of my truck bed. I looped the jumper cables over my shoulder and walked toward the man in coveralls. His face was as pointed as an ax blade, his jaws covered with a fine silver beard that grew to a point on his chin. His smile was like a wrinkled red line inside his beard.
'Thanks for coming out, Mr. Robicheaux,' he said.
'I don't think I know you,' I said.
'You don't. The boy told me your name.'
'I see.' I glanced at his face again in the slanting rain. His eyes were as bright as a pixie's. 'Well, clamp the red cable on your positive terminal and the black on your negative and we'll get you started.' I handed him the ends of the cables and turned to pop my hood. As I did I saw Zoot step backwards toward my truck, his mouth open, his stare suddenly disjointed.
I turned back toward the man in coveralls and saw the Luger in his hand. His smile was wet, his eyes dancing with light.
'That's the way it goes,' he said. 'I wouldn't feel bad about it. It took me a half day and Son of Sambo here to work this scam.'
'What's going on, Mr. Dave?' Zoot said.
'Who you working for, podjo?' I said.
'Podjo? I dig it. I heard you were a cute motherfucker,' he said, still smiling, and moved past me to my open truck door, the Luger aimed at my chest, and switched off the ignition and headlights.
'Cut the kid loose. He's not a player,' I said.
'Nits makes lice. Stamp 'em out when you get the chance. That's what some people say.'
'I think you're standing in your own shit, buddy,' I said. 'You pop a cap on this road and you won't get back across the drawbridge.'
But even while I was talking I saw a shadow, a large one, moving from the parked pickup truck, along the side of the van, and I knew that I had not yet confronted my real adversary that night.
A scorched-black bank of thunderclouds over the marsh pulsed and flickered with veins of lightning, and in the white glow through the canopy of trees I saw Will Buchalter step out in front of the van, his Panama hat pushed back on his head, his lopsided Will Rogers grin as affectionate as that of an old friend.
He reached out with his hand to feel my face, just as a blind man might. My head jerked back from the sour smell of his palm.
'I'm sorry to do this to you, Dave, but you don't ride the beef easy,' he said, stepped close to me, his thighs widening, and clamped both his forearms on each side of my neck.
'Yeah, ride the beef„ man. Ride that motherfucker down,' the other man said, and began giggling.
Then Buchalter's forearms flexed as tight as iron and squeezed into the sides of my neck like machinery breaking bird bone. I could feel his body trembling with strain, his breath quivering like a feather against my ear, then I felt the arteries to the brain shut down, and my knees buckled as though the tendons had been severed. A wave of nausea and red-black color slid across my eyes, and I was tumbling into a dark, cool place where the rain bounced off the skin as dryly as pap
er flowers and the distant thunder over the gulf was only the harmless echo of ships' guns that had long since been muted with moss and the lazy, dull drift of sand and time.
* * *
chapter nineteen
Pain can be a bucket of gasoline-smelling water hurled into the face, the concrete floor that bites into the knees, the hemp knotted into the wrists behind the squared wood post, the wrenched muscles in the arms, the Nazi flag coming back into focus against a urine yellow cinder-block wall, then once again the gears turning dully on a hand-crank generator, gaining speed now, starting to hum now, whining louder through the metal casing as the current strikes my genitals just like an iron fist, soaring upward into the loins, mashing the kidneys, seizing an area deep in the colon like electric pliers.
I was sure the voice coming out of my mouth was not my own. It was a savage sound, ripped out of the viscera, loud as cymbals clapped on the ears, degrading, eventually weak and plaintive, the descending tremolo like that of an animal with its leg in a steel trap.
A redheaded, crew-cut, porcine man in a black Grateful Dead T-shirt, with white skin, a furrowed neck, and deep-set, lime green eyes, sat forward on a folding chair, pumping his chubby arms furiously on the handles of the generator. Then he stopped and stared at one of his palms.
'I got a blister on me hand,' he said.
'Ease it up, Will. You're gonna lose him again,' the man with the silver beard said.
'It ain't Will's fault. All the sod's got to do is flap 'is fouking 'ole for us,' the man at the generator said.
'Electricity's funny, Will. It settles in a place like water. Maybe it's his heart next,' the man with the beard said.
Will Buchalter was shirtless, booted in hobnails. His upper torso tapered down inside his olive, military-style dungarees like the carved trunk of a hardwood tree. His armpits were shaved and powdered, and, just above his rib cage, there were strips of sinew that wrinkled and fanned back like pieces of knotted cord from the sides of his breasts. He sat with one muscular buttock propped on a battered desk, his legs crossed, his face bemused, lost in thought under the brim of his Panama hat.
'What about it, Dave?' he asked.
My head hung forward, the sweat and water streaming out of my hair.
'Answer the man, you dumb fouk,' the porcine man in the black T-shirt said, and lifted my chin erect with a wood baton. His skin was as white as milk.
'Don't hurt his face again, Freddy,' Buchalter said.
'I say leave off with the technology, Will,' the man called Freddy answered. 'I say consider 'is nails. I could play a lovely tune with 'em.'
Will Buchalter squatted down in front of me and pushed his hat to the back of his head. A bright line of gold hair grew out of his pants into his navel.
'You've got stainless-steel cojones, Dave,' he said. 'But you're going through all this pain to prevent us from having what's ours. That makes no sense for anybody.'
He slipped a folded white handkerchief out of his back pocket and blotted my nose and mouth with it. Then he motioned the other two men out of the room. When they opened the door I smelled grease, engine oil, the musty odor of rubber tires.
'Freddy and Hatch aren't the sharpest guys on the block, Dave. But armies and revolutions get built out of what's available,' Buchalter said. His eyes glanced down at my loosened trousers. He picked up one of the generator's wires and sucked wistfully on a canine tooth. 'I promise you you'll walk out of it. We have nothing to gain by hurting you anymore or killing you. Not if you give us what we want.'
A bloody clot dripped off the end of my tongue onto my chin.
'Go ahead, Dave,' he said.
But the words wouldn't come.
'You're worried about the Negro?' he said. 'We'll let him go, too. I promise I won't let Freddy get out of control like that again, either. He's just a little peculiar sometimes. When he was a kid some wogs took a liking to him in the back room of a pub, you know what I mean?'
He placed his palm across my forehead, as though he were gauging my temperature, then pressed my head gently back into the post. His eyes studied mine.
'It's almost light outside,' he said. 'You can have a shower and hot food, you can sleep, you can have China white to get rid of the pain, you can have a man's love, too, Dave.'
He brought his face closer to mine and smiled lopsidedly.
'It's all a matter of personal inclination, Dave. I don't mean to offend,' he said. He looked at the smear of blood and saliva across his squared handkerchief, folded it, and slipped it back into his pocket. Then the light in his eyes refocused, as though he were capturing an elusive thought. 'We're going to take back our cities. We're driving the rodents back into the sewers. It's a new beginning, Dave, a second American Revolution. You can be proud of your race and country again. It's going to be a wonderful era.'
He shifted his weight and settled himself more comfortably on one knee, like a football coach about to address his players. He grinned.
'Come on, admit it, wouldn't you like to get rid of them all, blow them off the streets, chase them back into their holes, paint their whole end of town with roach paste?' he said. He winked and poked one finger playfully in my ribs.
'I apologize, it's a bad time for jokes,' he said. 'Before we go on, though, I need to tell you something. In your house you said some ugly things to me. I was angry at the time, but I realize you were afraid and your only recourse was to try to hurt and manipulate me. But it's all right now. It makes our bond stronger. It's pain that fuses men's souls together. We're brothers-in-arms, Dave, whether you choose to think so or not.'
He got to his feet, went to the desk, and returned with a nautical chart of the Louisiana coast unrolled between his hands. He squatted in front of me again. In the shadow of his hat the spray of blackheads at the corners of his eyes looked like dried scale.
'Dave, the sub we want had the number U-138 on the conning tower. It also had a wreathed sword and a swastika on the tower,' he said. 'Is that the one you found? Can you tell me that much?'
A floor fan vibrated in the silence. I saw him try to suppress the twitch of anger that invaded his face. He put his thumb on a spot south of Grand Isle.
'Is this the last place you saw it?' he asked.
The red, black, and white flag puffed and ruffled against the cinder-block wall in the breeze from the fan.
His hand slipped over the top of my skull like a bowl. I could feel the sweat and water oozing from under his palm.
'You going to be a hard tail on me? Are the Jews and Negroes worth all this?' he said. He slowly oscillated my head, his mouth open, his expression pensive, then wiped his palm on the front of my shirt. 'Do you want me to let Hatch and Freddy play with your hands?'
He waited, then-said, rising to his feet, 'Well, let's have one more spin with army surplus, then it's on to Plan B. Freddy and Hatch don't turn out watchmakers, Dave.'
He walked past the corner of my vision and opened the door.
'It's going to be daylight. I need to get 'ome to me mum, Will,' Freddy said.
'He's right. We're spending too much time on these guys,' the man named Hatch said. 'Look at my pants. The burrhead was swallowing the rag I put in his mouth. When I tried to fix it for him, he kicked me. A boon putting his goddamn foot on a white man.'
'We're not here to fight with the cannibals, Hatch,' Buchalter said. 'Dave's voted for another try at electro-shock therapy. So let's be busy bees and get this behind us.'
I hear the rotary gears gain momentum, then the current surges into my loins again, vibrating, binding the kidneys, lighting the entrails, but this time the pain knows its channels and territory, offers no surprises, and nestles into familiar pockets like an old friend. The hum becomes the steady thropping of helicopter blades, the vibrations nothing more than the predictable shudder of engine noise through the ship's frame. The foreheads of the wounded men piled around me are painted with Mercurochromed M's to indicate the morphine that laces their hearts and nerve endings; in t
heir clothes is the raw odor of blood and feces. The medic is a sweaty Italian kid from Staten Island; his pot is festooned with rubber spiders, a crucifix, a peace symbol, a bottle of mosquito dope. My cheek touches the slick hardness of his stomach as he props me in his arms and says, 'Say good-bye to Shitsville, Lieutenant. You're going home alive in 'sixty-five. Hey, don't make me tie your hands. It's a mess down there, Loot.'
But I'm not worried about the steel teeth embedded in my side and thighs. My comrades and I are in the arms of God and Morpheus and a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from Galveston, Texas, who flew the dust-off in through a curtain of automatic weapons fire that sounded like ball peen hammers whanging against the fuselage, and now, with the windows pocked and spiderwebbed, the floor yawing, the hot wind sucking through the doors, the squares of flooded rice plain flashing by like mirrors far below, we can see green waves sliding toward us like a wet embrace and a soft pink sun that rises without thunder from the South China Sea.
Oh, fond thoughts. Until I hear the bucket filling again under a cast-iron tap and the water that stinks of gasoline explodes in my face.
'Time I had a go at 'im, Will,' Freddy said.
Then the door opened again, and I could hear leather soles on the concrete floor. The three men's faces were all fixed on someone behind me.
'Give me another hour and we'll have it resolved,' Buchalter said.
'E's a tight-ass fouker,' Freddy said. 'We give him a reg'lar grapefruit down there.'…
'It's all getting to be more trouble than it's worth, if you ask me,' Hatch said. 'Maybe we should wipe the slate clean.'
The person behind me lit a cigarette with a lighter. The smoke drifted out on the periphery of my vision.
'You want to call it?' Buchalter said.
'AH I ask is ten fouking minutes, one for each finger,' Freddy said. 'It'll come out of 'im loud enough to peel the paint off the stone.'
'I've had a little problem in controlling some people's enthusiasms,' Buchalter said to the person behind me.
'You've got a problem with acting like a bleeding sod sometimes,' Freddy began.