“You! Wirtz!” Moleen shouted. “You hold up there!”
“Yes, sir?” Wirtz smiled from under his leather cap, his skin as dark as if it had been smoked in a fire.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Cleaning up the trash the niggers throwed on the ground at lunchtime.”
I 60
“I don't see any trash.”
“That's 'cause I buried hit. You want me to haul hit back to my house?” His seamed face was as merry as an elf's.
They looked at each other in the fading light. “Have a good evening, cap'n,” Wirtz said, and spit a stream of Red Man before he got into the cab of his truck. Moleen walked back through the trees to the shack.
Even in the soft yellow afterglow through the canopy he knew, without looking, what he would find below the unshuttered and gaping shack window. The heels of the boots had bitten through the dry leaves into the wet underlayer, with the sharp and razored precision of a cleft-footed satyr. The blackmail began later, after Moleen's marriage to Julia, but it was not overt, and never a difficult yoke to bear; in fact, it was so seemingly benign that after a while Moleen convinced himself that better it be Wirtz, who did what he was told, who was obsequious and contemptible (who sometimes even played the role of pimp and ensured their trysts would not be disturbed), than someone who was either more cunning or less predictable. Moleen gave him a useless tractor that would have rusted into the weeds otherwise; a smoked ham at Christmas and Thanksgiving; venison and ducks when he had too much for his own freezer; the use of five acres that had to be cleared and harrowed first. Ironically, the denouement of their arrangement came not because of Wirtz's avarice but because of his growing confidence that he no longer needed Moleen. He began selling liquor in his grocery store and lending money to black field hands and housemaids, on which they made five-percent interest payments one Saturday night a month until the principal was liquidated. His farm machinery filled a rented tin shed up Bayou Teche. Moleen heard the story first as rumor, then from the mouth of the sixteen-year-old girl who said Wirtz came to her house for his laundry when the parents were gone, then, after paying her and hanging the broomstick hung with his ironed shirts across the back of his truck cab, had gone back in the kitchen, not speaking, his eyes locked on the girl's, his breath now covering her face like a fog, and had clenched one of her wrists in his hand and simultaneously unzipped his overalls.
Moleen drove straight from the girl's house to Wirtz's and didn't even bother to cut the engine or close the door of his Buick behind him before he strode through the unpainted picket gate and up the narrow path lined with petunias to the gallery, where Wirtz, his face cool and serene in the shade, was eating from a box of Oreo cookies, his leather cap suspended on a nail above his head.
“The girl's too scared and ashamed to bring charges against you, but I want you off my property. In fact, I want you out of the parish,”
Moleen said.
“Out of the parish, huh?” Wirtz said, and smiled so broadly his eyes were slits.
“Why in God's name I hired some white trash like you I'll never know,”
Moleen said.
“White trash, huh? You hear this, cap'n. Befo' I'd put mine in that nigger, I'd cut hit off and feed hit to the dog.”
“Clean your house out. I want you gone by nightfall.”
Moleen started toward his car.
“You're a piece of work, Bertrand. You fuck down and marry up and don't give hit a second thought,” Wirtz said. He bit down softly on a cookie.
The blood climbed into Moleen's neck. He leaned inside the open door of the Buick, pulled the keys, and unlocked the trunk.
Noah Wirtz stared at him impassively, brushing his hands with a sound like emery paper, as Moleen came toward him with the horse quirt. He barely turned his face when the leather rod whipped through the air and sliced across his cheek.
“You ever speak to me like that again, I'll take your life,” Moleen said.
Wirtz pressed his palm to the welt, then opened and closed his mouth.
His eyes seemed to study a thought inches in front of his face,
then reject it. He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles between his knees.
“I got me a contract,” he said. “Till the cane's in, I got a job and I got this house. You're trespassing, cap'n. Get your automobile off my turnaround.”
“The shooting,” I said to Luke, as he sat across from me at a picnic table under the pavilion in the park.
“I don't want to talk about that,” he said. He tried to light a cigarette, but the match was damp with his own perspiration and wouldn't ignite against the striker. “They was gonna electrocute me. I still wake up in the middle of the night, I got the sheets tangled all over me, I can feel that man drawing his razor across my scalp.”
“Tell me what happened in that saloon, Luke.”
“He said it in front of all them men, about a woman ain't done anything to him, ain't ever hurt anybody.”
“Who?”
“Noah Wirtz, he talk about her at the bouree table like ain't even niggers gonna take up for her.”
“Said what, Luke?”
“
”That bitch got a pumpkin up her dress, and I know the name of the shit hog put it there.“ That's what he say, Mr. Dave, looking me right in the eyes, a li'l smile on his mouth.”
Then he described that winter night in the saloon, almost incoherently, as though a few seconds in his life had been absorbed through his senses in so violent a fashion that he now believed the death he had been spared was in reality the only means he would ever have to purge and kill forever the memory that came aborning every night in his sleep.
It's the first Saturday of the month, and the bar and tables are crowded with blacks, mulattos, red bones and people who look white but never define themselves as such. The air smells of expectorated chewing tobacco and snuff, animal musk, oily wood, chemically treated sawdust, overcooked okra, smoke, and unwashed hair. The video poker machines line an unadorned fiberboard wall like a magical neon-lit instrument panel that can transport the player into an electronic galaxy of wealth and power. But the big money is at the round, felt-covered bouree table, where you can lose it all-the groceries, the rent on a pitiful shack, the installment on the gas-guzzler, the weekly payment for the burial insurance collector, even the food stamps you can discount and turn into instant capital. The man at the table with the cash is Noah Wirtz, and he takes markers in the form of bad checks, which he holds in lieu of payment on his loans and which he can turn over to the sheriff's office if the borrower defaults. Sometimes he uses a shill in the game, a hired man who baits a loser or a drunk and goads him into losing more, since bouree is a game in which great loss almost always follows recklessness and impetuosity. Wirtz consoles, buys a drink for those who have lost all their wages, says, “Come see me at the store in the morning. We'll work something out. ” He knows how far to press down on a nerve, when to give it release. Until tonight, the cane harvest in, the contract with Bertrand finished, when perhaps his own anger, the quiet residual rage of his kind (and that had always been the word used to describe his social class), passed down like an ugly heirloom from one generation to the next, begins to throb like the blow of a whip delivered contemptuously across the face, and the name Moleen Bertrand and the world he represents to Wirtz and which Wirtz despises and envies becomes more important than the money he has amassed through stint and self-denial and debasing himself to the servile level of the blacks with whom he competes. “Whatyou got to say about it, Luke?” Wirtz says. Luke's eyes can't focus, nor can he make the right words come out of his throat. His face contains the empty and deceptive intensity of a scorched cake pan. “A certain white man didn 't have to pull you off hit to get to hit his self did he?”
Wirtz says. Luke's one-inch nickel-plated .38 revolver, with no trigger guard and electrician's tape holding the handles together, is one step above scrap metal. But its power and shor
t-range accuracy are phenomenal. The
I 64
single steel-jacketed round he squeezes off splinters through the tabletop and felt cover and enters Wirtz's chin as though a red hole were punched there with a cold chisel. Wirtz stumbles through the washroom door, a crushed fedora squeezed against the wound, his mouth a scarlet flower that wishes to beg for help or mercy or perhaps even forgiveness but that can only make unintelligible sounds that seem to have no human correspondent. “He curls into a ball behind the toilet tank, his knees drawn up in front of him, his eyes pleading, his hands trembling on the fedora. Luke pulls the trigger and the hammer snaps dryly on a defective cartridge. This time he cocks the hammer, feels the spring and cylinder and cogs lock into place, but the rage has gone, like a bird with hooked talons that has suddenly freed itself from its own prey and flown away, and he drops the pistol in the toilet bowl and walks into the larger room and the collective stare of people who realize they never really knew Luke Fontenot. But the man he leaves behind closes and opens his eyes one more time, then expels a red bubble of saliva from his mouth and stares sightlessly at an obscene word scrawled in pencil on the wall. ”What happened to Wirtz's gun?“ I said. ”Moleen found witnesses who saw Wirtz pull a gun.“
”Mr. Moleen got money. You got money, you find anybody, anything you need.“
”I see,“ I said. It was starting to sprinkle on the bayou. A mother opened an umbrella over her child, and the two of them ran for the cover of the trees. ”You mentioned a baby,“ I said. ”I done tole you, he ain't want it.“ Then his face became indescribably sad, unmasked, devoid of any defense or agenda. ”What they call that, 'trimester,“ yeah, that's it, third trimester, she went did it wit'
some man in Beaumont, cut up the baby inside her, cut her up, leave her walking on a cane, leave her with that baby crying in her head.” He cleaned off his place and walked in the rain toward his car.
Chapter 17
LUKE DROPPED me off at the department, I found a phone message from Clete Purcel in my mailbox. I called him at his office in New Orleans.
“You still got Marsallus in the bag?” he said. “Yeah, he's on a hunger strike now.”
“The word's out Johnny Carp doesn't want anybody writing his bond.”
“I was right, then. Johnny's been after him from the jump.”
“He's probably already got somebody inside, or he'll get a local guy to bail him out. Any way you cut it, I think Sonny's floated into deep shit.”
“How do you figure Johnny's stake?” I said. “Something to do with money. I hear his toilet seats are inset with gold pesos. He owned a lot with a thirty-foot Indian mound on it and sold it for landfill. It's a great life, isn't it, mon?” Later, I gazed through the window at a rainbow arching across the sky into a bank of steel-colored clouds that were hung with wisps of rain. Sonny Boy was trussed and tagged and on the conveyor belt, like a pig about to be gutted, and the man who had kicked the machinery into gear was a police officer.
I crumpled up a letter inviting me to speak to the Rotary Club and threw it against the wall.
Moleen's law office was in a refurbished white-columned Victorian home, shaded by oaks, down the street from the Shadows on East Main.
I had to wait a half hour to see him. When the door opened, rather, when it burst back on its hinges, Julia Bertrand came through it as though she were emerging from the dry heat of a bake oven.
“Why, Dave,” she said, her makeup stretching on her features as though it had been painted there by a blind man. “It's so appropriate for you to be here. You fellows can kick the war around. Moleen has all this guilt but he never got to kill anybody. How unfair of the gods.”
She brushed past me before I could answer.
I picked up the paper bag by my feet and closed Moleen's office door behind me. He sat behind a huge, dark red oak desk, his knitted brown tie pulled loose at the throat. His face was flushed, as though he had a fever.
“How's life, Moleen?”
“What do you want?”
“She's still in jail.”
He bit his thumbnail.
“Moleen?”
“I can't do anything.”
“She lives on your plantation. Bail her out. Nobody'll question your motivation.”
“Where the hell do you get off talking to me like that?” he said.
I sat down without being asked. I set the paper bag containing the leg iron on his desk. The manacle yawned out of the bag like a rusty mouth.
“Luke owned up to putting this in my truck. He said he doesn't care if I tell you about it or not.”
“I think you should see a therapist. I don't mean that unkindly, either,” he said.
“Luke's pretty sharp for a guy who didn't finish high school. He read a story in a magazine about a construction site that was shut down because there was an Indian mound on it. He thought he'd given me the means to put you out of business, whatever it is.”
“It's been a long day, Dave.”
“Is it a gambling casino?”
“Good-bye.”
“That's why you got rid of the cemetery.”
“Is there anything else you want to say before you leave?”
“Yeah. It's quarter to five on Friday afternoon and she's still in jail.”
He looked at me distractedly, breathing with his mouth open, his chest sunken, his stomach protruding over his belt like a roll of bread dough. When I got up to go, three buttons were flashing hot pink on his telephone, as though disembodied and cacophonous voices were waiting to converge and shout at him simultaneously.
After supper that night I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou, then I did three sets of military presses, dead lifts, and arm curls with my barbells in the backyard. The western sky was streaked with fire, the air warm and close and alive with insects. I tried to rethink the day, the week, the month, my involvement with Sonny Boy Marsallus and Ruthie Jean and Luke and Bertie Fontenot and Moleen Bertrand, until each of my thoughts was like a snapping dog.
“What's bothering you, Dave?” Alafair said behind me.
“I didn't see you there, Alf.”
She held Tripod on her shoulder. He tilted his head at me and yawned.
“Why you worrying?” she asked.
“A guy's in jail I don't think belongs there.”
“Why's he in there then?”
“It's that fellow Marsallus.”
“The one who shot the-”
“That's right. The guy who was looking out for me. Actually, looking out for all of us.”
“Oh,” she said, and sat down on the bench, her hand motionless on Tripod's back, an unspoken question in the middle of her face.
“The man he shot died, Alf,” I said. “So Sonny's down on a homicide beef. Things don't always work out right.”
Her eyes avoided mine. I could smell my own odor, hear my breathing in the stillness.
“It's not something I had a choice about, little guy,” I said.
“You said you wouldn't call me that.”
“i'm sorry.”
“It's all right,” she said, then picked up Tripod in her arms and walked away.
“Alafair?”
She didn't answer.
I put on a T-shirt without showering and began hoeing weeds out of the vegetable garden by the coulee. The air was humid and mauve colored and filled with angry birds.
“Time for an iced tea break,” Bootsie said.
“I'll be inside in a minute.”
“Cool your jets, Streak.”
“What's with Alf?”
“You're her father. She associates you with perfection.”
I chipped at the weeds with the corner of the hoe. The shaft felt hard and dry and full of sharp edges in my hands.
“Moleen's the problem, Dave. Not Sonny,” Bootsie said.
“What?”
“You think he's a hypocrite because he left the black woman in jail.
Now maybe you're wondering about yourself and Sonny Boy.”
I looked up at her, squinted through the sweat in my eyes. I wanted to keep thudding the hoe into the dirt, let her words go by me as though they were illogical and unworthy of recognition. But there was a sick feeling in my stomach.
I propped my hands on the hoe handle, blotted my eyes on my forearm.
“I'm a police officer,” I said. “I can't revise what happened. Sonny killed a man, Boots. He says he's killed others.”
“Then put it out of your mind,” she said, and went back inside the house.
Across the fence in my neighbor's field, I saw an owl swoop low out of the sun's last red light and, in a flurry of wings, trap and then scissor a field mouse in its beak. I could hear the mouse's voice squeaking helplessly as the owl flew into the sun.
Saturday morning I worked until noon at the bait shop, counting change twice to get it right, feigning interest in conversations I hardly heard. Then I put a Dr. Pepper and two bottles of beer in a paper bag, with two ham and onion sandwiches, called the sheriff, and asked him to meet me up the road by the four corners.
He walked down the bank in a pair of floppy khaki shorts with zipper pockets, a white straw cowboy hat, and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off at the armpits. He carried a spinning rod that looked like it belonged to a child.
“Beautiful day for it,” he said, lifting his face in the breeze.
The boat dipped heavily when he got into the bow. The tops of his arms were red with sunburn and unusually big for a man who did administrative work.
I took us through a narrow channel into the swamp, cut the engine, and let the boat drift on its wake into a small black lagoon surrounded with flooded cypress. A deserted cabin, built on pilings, was set back in the trees. A rowboat that was grayish blue with rot was tied to the porch and half-submerged in the water.
The sheriff bit into a ham sandwich. “I got to admit this beats hitting golf balls in sand traps,” he said.
But he was an intelligent and perceptive man whose weekend humor served poorly the concern in his eyes.
Then I said it all, the way as a child I took my confused and labored thoughts into the confessional and tried to explain what both my vocabulary and loneliness made unexplainable. Except now, in order to undo a wrong, I was He said the word for me.