“He pissed you off, he dragged his shit into your life, but you took his fall, anyway. Don't you dare put this on your conscience,” she said. She aimed her index finger at me.
She walked toward her car, then stopped and turned.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
“Sure.”
Her eyes fixed on mine, then her breasts rose and she walked through the wet leaves and pools of water to the drive, her shoulders squared with a moral certitude that I could only envy.
I woke at four in the morning and sat on the edge of the bed. I couldn't remember the details of the dream I'd just had, but in the center of my mind was an ugly and inescapable thought, like an angry man walking toward you in a darkened, wood-floored hallway.
We'd had him in custody. Then Johnny Giacano had put out the word he didn't want Sonny bailed out.
Question: What was the best way to make sure I heard what Johnny wanted?
Answer: Feed the information to Clete Purcel.
Had Johnny sucked me in?
I didn't know.
I couldn't accept Sonny's death. People like Sonny didn't die. They stayed high on their own re bop heard Charlie Parker's riffs in the friction of the spheres, thrived without sunlight in the neon glaze of Canal and St. Charles, fashioned sonnets out of street language, and proved to the rest of us that you could live with the full-tilt boogie in your heart and glide above the murderous fastenings of triviality.
They didn't find a body, I told myself. The sea always gives back its dead, and they didn't find Sonny's body.
You're dead when they unzip the bag, pry your dog tag out of your teeth, and drain your fluids through a grate in the bottom of a stainless steel trough. That's dead.
I lay back on the pillow with my forearm across my eyes and fell asleep. I dreamed I saw Sonny rise like Triton from the sea, his body covered with fish scales, a wreathed horn in his hand, already transforming into a creature of air and spun light.
The next afternoon Batist answered the phone in the bait shop, then handed me the receiver. The weather was hot and muggy, and I pressed a sweating can of Dr. Pepper against my cheek and sat on a counter stool with the phone against my ear.
“Robicheaux?” the voice said.
There was no mistaking the thick, whiskey-and-cigarette-seared rasp, the words that rose like ash inside a chimney.
“Yes,” I said, and swallowed something stale and bitter in my throat.
“You must have run your thumb up somebody's hole. You got eighty-sixed out of your own department?”
“What's on your mind, Pogue?”
“I think you're not a bad dude. We need local guys to make it work.
You want to piece off Purcel, it's copacetic with us.”
“Make what work? Who's us?”
“The whole fucking planet. Get with the program, ace.”
“I don't know what the program is.”
He laughed, his voice wheezing as though there were pinholes in his lungs.
“I like you, motherfucker,” he said. “I told them to cut you in. I'd rather see you front points for us than y'all's resident cunt, what's the name, Bertrand?”
“Moleen?”
“Got to get the locals humping for you. Ever light up a ville with Zippo tracks? Something about the stink of fried duck shit really gets their attention.”
The phone receiver was warm and moist against my ear. Someone slammed the screen door behind me like the crack of a rifle.
“You were one of the shooters,” I said.
“The Marsallus gig? He took out some good men. He had it coming.”
“You fucked it up.”
I heard him shift the phone in his hand, his breath fan the mouthpiece in a dry, heated exhalation.
“Fucked it up, huh?”
“The Feds didn't find a body. I think Sonny'll be back to piss on your grave,” I said.
“You listen—” A nail caught in his throat and he began again. “We busted his wheels, ace. I saw the bone buckle. That punk's down in the slime where he belongs.”
“He shows up when you don't expect him. Your buddy Jack got capped before he knew what hit him. Think about it,” I said, and hung up the receiver.
I hoped I left him with razors turning in his viscera.
20$
Chapter 22
NOON TUESDAY a city cop picked up Ruthie Jean outside a restaurant on Main Street and took her to the city jail, where she was booked for disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct. He even cuffed her, put his hand hard inside her arm before he sat her down in the back of the cruiser and threw her cane across her lap and slammed the door to indicate his sympathies to anyone watching. I heard the story from a half dozen people, all of whom told it with a sense of genteel dismay, but I suspected they were secretly pleased, as small-town people are, when the sins of another are exposed and they no longer have to be comp licit in hiding them. People at first thought she was simply drunk, then they saw the feverish shine in the eyes, like someone still staring into the flame held to a crack pipe. An elderly woman who lived by Spanish Lake recognized and tried to counsel her, shushing her, patting her shoulders, trying to turn her away from Julia Bertrand, who had just parked her red Porsche at the curb in front of the Shadows and was walking cheerfully toward the restaurant, her mental fortifications in place, her long tan riding skirt whipping against her legs. “Oh, it's all right,” she said to the other white woman. “Ruthie Jean's upset about a tenant problem Moleen had to settle on the plantation. Now, you go on about your business, Ruthie Jean, and don't be bothering people. You want me to call somebody to drive you home?”
“You put me off the plantation, Julia. When you cut the balloon loose, it goes where it wants.”
“I'd appreciate it if you didn't address me by my first name.”
“You cain't hide from your thoughts. Not when he touches you in the dark, under the sheets, his eyes shut, and you know where his hand's been on me, you know he's thinking of me and that's why he does it to you with his eyes shut, he hurries it so he doesn't have to think about who he's doing it with, about how he's making a lie for both y'all, just like he hepped make my baby and kept pretending I could have it without a husband and live on the plantation like colored folks are suppose to do, like his ancestors did to us, like there wasn't any sin on the child, 'cause the child got Bertrand blood in him.”
“How dare you!”
“You cain't run away when you see that li'l boy in your headlights, either, see the fright in his li'l face, hear his voice speaking to you through the dirt they packed in his mouth. Liquor and drugs cain't keep a spirit in the grave. That li'l boy, his name was John Wesley, he sits on the floor by your nightstand and whispers all the secrets he learned down in the ground, all the things he didn't get to do, the questions he got about his momma and daddy and why they aren't there to take care of him or bring him things on his birthday 'cause your father run them out of the parish.”
“If you come close to me again, I'm going to slap your face.”
Julia crossed the street against the light, her waxed calves flashing like scissors.
But Ruthie Jean followed her, into the restaurant, through the linen-covered tables, past the framed charcoal sketches and pastel paintings of rural Louisiana on the walls, into an interior dining room that should have been an enclave for Julia but had become a cul-de-sac.
Julia sat erectly in her chair, her menu held tightly in her fingers,
a bitter thought clenched in her face. When Ruthie Jean took a chair at the next table, Julia began to laugh. It was a braying, disconnected sound, ongoing, like furniture falling down stairs. “Is anything wrong, Miss Julia?” the owner asked. “I thought this was a private dining room. It is a private dining room, isn't it?”
“Sometimes. When people reserve it for banquets and club meetings,” he answered. “I'd like another table. Over there. By the window.”
“You bet. Are you sure everything's all right, Miss J
ulia?”
“Are you blind, sir?” The owner held the chair for her at a table whose linen glowed in the sunlight. Now Ruthie Jean approached both of them, her dark eyes as bright as glass. “John Wesley was buried in the rain in a casket made of papier-mache and kite sticks,” she said. “It's rotted away, eaten up with worms now, and that's how come he can visit in your room at night, sit right by your pillow and draw a picture in the air of the thing that got bounced up under your car and lost inside that sound that doesn't ever go out of your head.”
“You're a vicious, cunning, ungrateful nigra, Ruthie Jean. You can end in an asylum. Mark my word,” Julia said. Someone was punching numbers on a telephone in the background. “You cain't do nothing to stop Moleen from coming 'round my house again,” Ruthie Jean said. “But I don't want him anymore. In Mexico one time he put a flower on my stomach and put his mouth on my nipples and put himself inside me and said I was all the food he'd ever need. Except he stole my nipples from my baby. That's 'cause y'all's kind of white people don't know how to love anything outside of what y'all need.” After Ruthie Jean had been taken away in the cruiser, her soft black hair like the wig on a mannequin in the rear window, Julia sat numbed and motionless at the table in the deserted dining room; her lips were bloodless, her makeup dry and flaking from her facial hair, as though parched by an inner heat. One thumb kept digging into her cuticles, cutting half-moons into her knuckles, massaging a nest of thoughts that crawled through her veins like spiders.
She smiled and rose from the chair to meet her husband, who had just hurried from his law office down the street.
“Moleen, you dear,” she said. “How good of you to come. Is something bothering you? Oh, what shall we do, dear boy?”
She used one sharpened fingernail to draw vertical red lines in the skin under his eyes, as though she were imprinting tears on a clown.
At dusk that same evening Clete Purcel's rust-eaten Caddy, with its mildewed and tattered top folded back at a twisted angle, throbbed into the drive and died like a sick animal.
He wore his porkpie hat and a tropical shirt with tiny purple sea horses printed all over it. He was eating an oyster po'-boy sandwich with one hand, tuning the radio with the other.
“Take a ride with me,” he said.
“What's up?”
“I need to talk, that's all.”
“Turn the radio down,” I said.
“Hey, you listen to Dr. Boogie and the Bon Ton Soul Train?”
“No.”
He started the engine again and kept feeding it the gas while the Caddy's gutted muffler vibrated and rattled against the frame.
“Okay!” I said, above the noise, and got in beside him. A few minutes later we were approaching the drawbridge. “Do you realize you always end up driving the same kind of cars grease balls do?” I said.
“That's because I buy them off grease balls I'm lucky I can afford grease ball hand-me-downs.”
I waited for him to get to it. We turned into New Iberia, then headed out toward Spanish Lake. He bit down softly on his thumbnail, his face reflective and cool in the wind.
“I heard about Sonny. The guy didn't deserve to die like that,” he said. We were on the old two-lane road now. The azaleas and purple wisteria along the roadside were still in bloom and you could see the lake through the trees. Clete's voice was hoarse, down in his throat.
“Something else bothers me, too.” He turned and looked at me. “I told you, when I hit Sonny, I got a red bruise on my knuckles, it looked like strawberry juice under the skin, it wouldn't go away?”
He shook his head, without waiting for me to answer.
“I was always pissed off at Sonny, I can't even tell you why. When I heard he got clipped, I felt really bad the way I treated him. I was in the can at Tujague's last night, washing my hands, and that strawberry bruise was gone.”
He held up the back of his hand in the sun's red glow off the dashboard.
“This stuff's in your mind, Clete.”
“Give me some credit, mon. My hand throbbed all the time. Now it doesn't. I think Johnny Carp used both of us to set up the whack.”
He turned left off the two-lane, drove past a collapsed three-story house that had been a gambling club in the sixties, then followed a dirt road to a woods where people had dumped raw garbage and mattresses and stuffed chairs in the weeds. Clete backed the Caddy into the gloom of the trees. The sun was below the horizon now, the air thick with birds.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Helen Soileau got the warrant on Sweet Pea's house. Guess what? He'd ripped the carpet out of his Caddy.”
The radio was off now, and when he cut the engine I heard movement in the trunk, a shift of weight, the scrape of shoe leather against metal.
“This is a mistake,” I said.
“Watch the show. He's a geek. Geeks get off on being the center of attention.”
Clete took a can of beer from the Styrofoam cooler in the backseat and popped the trunk. Sweet Pea Chaisson's long body was curled between the tire wells, his webbed eyes glistening in the enclosed heat, his tin-colored silk shirt swampy with sweat. He climbed out over the bumper, his small mouth compressed as though he were sucking a mint.
“Hey, Dave. What's the word, babe?” he said.
Clete shoved him backward across a log, onto the ground.
“Streak lost his shield, Sweet Pea. We're operating on different rules now. Bad time to be a wiseass, know what I'm saying?” Clete said.
Sweet Pea inserted his little finger into an empty space in his teeth, then looked at the blood on the tip of it and spit in the weeds. He grinned up at Clete.
“I got to go to the bat' room he said.
”Do it in your clothes,“ Clete said. Then to me, ”I found our man behind a colored juke joint. He was beating the shit out of one of his chippies with a rolled newspaper.“
”That was my wife,“ Sweet Pea said.
Clete pitched the can of beer into his lap.
”Rinse your mouth out. Your breath's bad,“ he said.
”T'anks, Purcel,“ Sweet Pea said, ripped the tab, and drank deeply from the can. His face was covered with pinpoints of sweat and dirt. ”Where we at?“ He looked off into the purple haze above the cane fields. ”Oh yeah, my mother's grave was right across them railway tracks.“
”Who put the whack on Sonny?“ Clete said.
”I live in Breaux Bridge now. A crawfish getting run over on the highway is big news there. How do I know?“
Sweet Pea tipped the beer can to his mouth. Clete kicked it into his face. Sweet Pea's lips were suddenly bright red, his eyebrows dripping with beer foam, his face quivering with the force of the blow. But not one sound came from his throat. I pushed Clete away from him.
”No more,“ I said.
”Take a walk down the road. Enjoy the evening. Stroll back in ten minutes,“ he said. His blue-black .38 one-inch hung from his right hand.
”We take him back to wherever you got him. That's the way it is, Cletus.“
”You're screwing it up, Streak.“
Behind me, I heard Sweet Pea stirring in the weeds, getting to his feet.
”Stay where you are, Sweet Pea,“ I said.
He sat on a log with his head between his legs and let the blood and saliva drain out of his mouth. When he looked up at me again, his face was changed.
”You're a pair of white clowns playing big shit out in the wood,“ he said. His sharp, tiny teeth looked like they were stained with Mercurochrome.
Clete stepped toward him. I put my hand on his chest.
”What the fuck y'all know?“ Sweet Pea said. ”Yall ever hear there's a glow hanging over the ground at night on the Bertrand place? Where all them convicts was killed and buried in their chains. You t'ink you shit vanilla ice cream?“
”You're not making much sense, Sweet Pea,“ I said.
”The juke where I bring my broads, how's it stay open? It's Bertrand's.“
”
That's not true, partner. I've seen the deeds on all the land around here.“
”It's part of a con … a cons or .. . something .. . what do you call it?“ he said.
”Consortium.“
”Yeah,“ he said. ”Hey, Purcel, you look like you need an enema. Why don't you shove that gun up your ass?“
Clete took a Lucky Strike out of his pocket and lit it. Then he pulled a strand of tobacco off his lip and dropped it in the air. The lighted windows of the Amtrak streamed by on the train tracks across the cane field. Sweet Pea sat on the log and looked at the train and scratched his cheek as though we were no longer there.
”You got a lot of luck, Sweet Pea,“ I said.
”Yeah? Tell your wife I got an opening. For an older broad like that, I'll make an exception, too. Just straight dates, no sixty-nines,“ he said.
I dream that night of people who live in caves under the sea. Their arms and shoulders are sheathed in silver feathers; their abalone skins dance with fiery sparks.
I once knew a helicopter pilot from Morgan City whose Jolly Green took an RPG right through the door. He had been loaded with ammunition and wounded civilians, and when they crashed in the middle of a river, most of the civilians burned to death or drowned. He became psychotic after the war and used to weigh and sink plastic statues of Jesus all over the waterways of southern Louisiana. He maintained that the earth was wrapped with water, that a bayou in the Atchafalaya Basin was an artery that led to a flooded rice plain in the Mekong Delta, that somehow the presence of a plastic statue could console those whose drowned voices still spoke to him from the silt-encrusted wreckage of his helicopter.
When he hung himself, the wire service story made much of his psychiatric history. But in my own life I had come to believe in water people and voices that can speak through the rain. I wondered if Sonny would speak to me.
It was a blue-gold morning, the sky clear, the wind balmy out of the south, when the sheriff parked his cruiser by the boat ramp and walked down the dock. I was shirtless, sanding dried fish scales out of the guardrail, the sun warm on my back, the day almost perfect. I didn't want to hear about someone else's troubles, their guilt, or even an apology for wrongs real or imagined.