“So I ran security for a grease ball I also had two of his goons slam my hand in a car door. Sometime when you have a chance, tell the bride of Frankenstein what happened when Sal and his hired gum balls were flying friendly skies.”
The plane had crashed and exploded in a fireball on a mountainside in western Montana. The National Transportation Safety Board said someone had poured sand in the gas tanks. Clete finished his beer and blew out his breath. He pushed his hand down in the ice for another bottle. “You okay, partner?” I said. “I've never dealt real well with that bullshit I got involved with in Central America. Sometimes it comes back in the middle of the night, I mean worse than when I got back from Vietnam. It's like somebody striking a match on my stomach lining.”
There were white lines at the corners of his eyes. He watched his red-and-white bobber move across the water in the shade of an oil platform, dip below the surface and rise quivering again; but he didn't pick up his rod.
“Maybe it's time for the short version of the Serenity Prayer.
Sometimes you just have to say fuck it,” I said. “What's the worst day you had in ”Nam, I mean besides getting nailed by that Bouncing Betty?“
, ”A village chieftain called in the 1055 on his own people.“
”Sonny Boy and I hooked up with the same bunch of gun runners It was like an outdoor mental asylum down there. Half the time I ' didn't know if we were selling to the rebels or the government. I was so strung out on rum and dope and my own troubles I didn't care, either. Then one night we got to see what the government did when they wanted to put the fear of God in the Indians.“ He pinched his mouth with his hand. His calluses made a dry sound like sandpaper against his whiskers. He took a breath and widened his eyes. I ”They went into this one ville and killed everything in sight. Maybe four hundred people. There was an orphanage there, run by some Mennonites. They didn't spare anybody …
all those kids .. . man.“ He watched my face. ;, ”You saw this?“ I asked. ”I heard it, from maybe a half mile away. I'll never forget the sound of those people screaming. Then this captain walked us through the ville. The sonofabitch didn't give it a second thought.“
He put a Lucky Strike in his mouth and tried to light it with a Zippo cupped in his hands. The flint scratched dryly and he took the cigarette back out of his mouth and closed his big hand on it. ”Let the past go, Cletus. Haven't you paid enough dues?“ I said. ”You wanted to hear about Sonny Boy? Three weeks later we were with a different bunch of guys, I was so wiped out I still don't know who they were, Cubans maybe and some Belgians working both sides of the street. Anyway, we were on a trail and we walked right into an L-shaped ambush, M-6o's, blookers, serious shit, they must have shredded twelve guys in the first ten seconds. “Sonny was on point … I saw this … I wasn't hallucinating … Two guys next to me saw it, too .. .”
“What are you talking about?”
“He got nailed with an M-6o. I saw dust jumping all over his clothes.
I didn't imagine it. When he went down his shirt was soaked with blood. Three weeks later he shows up in a bar in Guatemala City. The rebels starting calling him the red angel. They said he couldn't die.”
He took a long drink off the beer. The sunlight looked like a yellow flame inside the bottle.
“Okay, mon, maybe I fried my head down there,” he said. “But I stay away from Sonny. I don't know how to describe it, it's like he's got death painted on his skin.”
“It sounds like another one of Sonny's cons.”
“There's nothing like somebody else telling you what you saw. You remember what an M-6o bouncing on a bungee cord could do to an entire ville? How about a guy who gets it from ten yards away? No, don't answer that, Dave. I don't think I can handle it.”
In the silence I could hear the whir of automobile tires on the elevated highway that spanned the swamp. The setting sun looked like lakes of fire in the clouds, then a shower began to march across the bays and willow islands and dance in a yellow mist on the water around us. I pulled up the sash weight I used for an anchor, cranked the engine, and headed back for the levee. Clete opened another bottle of Dixie, then reached deep down in the crushed ice, found a can of Dr.
Pepper, and tossed it to me. “Sorry, Streak,” he said, and smiled with his eyes.
But the apology would be mine to make.
That night I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a T-shirt, and drove out toward Spanish Lake and the little community of Cade. I can't explain why I decided to jog there rather than along the bayou, by my house, south of town. Maybe it was because the only common denominator in the case, so far, was a geographical one. For no reason I understood, Sonny Boy had mentioned a barra-coon, built near the lake by Jean Lafitte, then Sweet Pea Chaisson,
who could never be accused of familial sentiment, other than a violent one, had decided to exhume his adoptive mother's remains from the Bertrand plantation and transport them in a garbage truck back to Breaux Bridge. Both men operated in a neon and concrete world where people bought and sold each other daily and lived by the rules that govern piranha fish. What was their interest or involvement in a rural community of poor black people? I parked my truck and jogged along a dirt road between sugarcane acreage, over the railroad tracks, past a dilapidated clapboard store and a row of shacks. Behind me, a compact white automobile turned off the highway, slowed so as not to blow dust in my face, and drove toward the lighted houses on the lake. I could see the silhouettes of two people talking to each other. The breeze was warm and smelled of horses and night-blooming flowers, freshly turned soil, and smoke blowing off a stump fire hard by a pecan orchard. The tree trunks seemed alive with shadows and protean shapes in the firelight, as though, if you let imagination have its way, the residents from an earlier time had not yet accepted the inevitability of their departure. I've often subscribed to the notion that perhaps history is not sequential; that all people, from all of history, live out their lives simultaneously, in different dimensions perhaps, occupying the same pieces of geography, unseen by one another, as if we are all part of one spiritual conception. Attakapas Indians, Spanish colonists, slaves who dredged mud from the lake to make bricks for the homes of their masters, Louisiana's boys in butternut brown who refused to surrender after Appomattox, federal soldiers who blackened the sky with smoke from horizon to horizon—maybe they were all still out there, living just a breath away, like indistinct figures hiding inside an iridescent glare on the edge of our vision. But the lights I saw in a distant grove of gum trees were not part of a metaphysical speculation. I could see them bouncing off tree trunks and hear the roar and grind of a large machine at the end of the dirt lane that ran past Bertie Fontenot's house.
I slowed to a walk, breathing deep in my chest, and wiped the sweat out of my eyes at the cattle guard and wisteria-grown arched gate that marked the entrance to the Bertrand property. The dirt lane was faintly haloed with humidity in the moonlight, the rain ditches boiling with insects. I began jogging toward the lights in the trees, the steady thud of my shoes like an intrusion on a nocturnal plantation landscape that had eluded the influences of the twentieth century.
Then I had the peculiar realization that I felt naked. I had neither badge nor gun, and hence no identity other than that of jogger. It was a strange feeling to have, as well as to be forced into acknowledging simultaneously the ease with which my everyday official capacity allowed me to enter and exit any number of worlds where other people lived with an abiding trepidation.
The grinding sounds of the machine ceased and the headlights dimmed and then went off. I strained my eyes to see into the gum trees, then realized that the machine, a large oblong one with a cab and giant steel tracks, was parked beyond the trees in a field, its dozer blade glinting in the moonlight.
Bertie's house and the nephew's were dark. When I walked toward the grove I could see where the dozer blade had graded whole roadways through the trees, ripping up root systems, snapping off limbs, slashing pulpy divo
ts out of the trunks, scooping out trenches and spreading the fill out into the cane field, churning and flattening and re grinding the soil and everything in it, until the entire ground area in and around the grove looked like it had been poured into an enormous bag and shaken out at a great height.
There was no one in sight.
I walked out onto the edge of the field by the earth mover. The moon was bright above the treetops and the new cane ruffled in the breeze. I picked up handfuls of dirt and sifted them through my fingers, touched the pieces of fractured bone, as tiny and brown as awcient teeth; strips of wood porous with rot and as weightless as balsa; the remains of a high button shoe, mashed flat by the machine's track.
The wind dropped and the air suddenly smelled of sour mud and humus and dead water beetles. The sky was a dirty black, the clouds like curds of smoke from an oil fire; sweat ran down my face and sides like angry insects. Who had done this, ripped a burial area apart, as though it had no more worth than a subterranean rat's nest?
I walked back down the dirt lane toward my truck. I saw the white compact car returning down the access road, slowing gradually.
Suddenly, from a distance of perhaps forty yards, the person in the passenger's seat shined a handheld spotlight at me. The glare was blinding; I could see nothing except a circle of white red-rimmed heat aimed into my eyes. ;
No gun, no badge, I thought, a sweating late-middle-aged man
trapped on a rural road like a deer caught in an automobile's head- i lights.
“I don't know who you are, but you take that light out of my eyes!” I shouted.
The car was completely stopped now, the engine idling. I could hear two people, men, talking to each other. Then I realized their concern had shifted from me to someone else. The spotlight went out, leaving my eyes filled with whorls of color, and the car shot forward toward my parked truck, where a man on foot was leaning through the driver's window.
He bolted down the far side of the railway, his body disappearing like a shadow into weeds and cattails. The white compact bounced over the train embankment, stopped momentarily, and the man in the passenger seat shined the spotlight out into the darkness. I used my T-shirt to wipe my eyes clear and tried to read the license plate, but someone had rubbed mud over the numbers.
Then the driver scorched a plume of oily dust out of the road and floored the compact back onto the highway.
I opened the driver's door to my truck. When the interior light flicked on, I saw curled on the seat, like a serpent whose back has been crushed with a car tire, a twisted length of rust-sheathed chain the color of dried blood. I picked it up, felt the delicate shell flake with its own weight against my palms. Attached to one end was a cylindrical iron cuff, hinged open like a mouth gaping in death. I had seen one like it only in a museum. It was a leg iron, the kind used in the transportation and sale of African slaves.
Chapter 6
NEXT MORNING was Saturday. The dawn was gray and there were strips of mist in the oak and pecan trees when I walked down the slope to help Batist open up the dock and bait shop. The sun was still below the treeline in the swamp, and the trunks on the far side of the bayou were wet and black in the gloom. You could smell the fecund odor of bluegill and sun perch spawning back in the bays.
Batist was outside the bait shop, poking a broom handle into the pockets of rainwater that had collected in the canvas awning that extended on guy wires over the dock. I had never known his age, but he was an adult when I was a child, as black and solid as a woodstove, and today his stomach and chest were still as flat as boilerplate. He had farmed and trapped and fished commercially and worked on oyster boats all his life, and could carry an outboard motor down to the ramp in each hand as though they were stamped from plastic. He was illiterate and knew almost nothing of the world outside of Iberia Parish, but he was one of the bravest and most loyal men I ever knew.
He began wiping the dew off the spool tables, which we had inset with Cinzano umbrellas for the fishermen who came in at midday for the barbecue lunches that we sold for $5.95.
“You know why a nigger'd be setting in one of our boats this morning?”
he asked.
“Batist, you need to forget that word.”
“This is a nigger carry a razor and a gun. He ain't here to rent boats.”
“Could you start over?”
“There's a high-yellow nigger wit' slacks on and shiny, pointy shoes,”
he said, tapping his finger in the air with each word as though I were obtuse. “He's setting out yonder in our boat, eating boudin out of a paper towel wit' his fingers. This is a nigger been in jail, carry a razor on a string round his neck. I ax what he t'inks he's doing. He look up at me and say, ”You clean up round here?“
”I say, “Yeah, I clean trash out of the boat, and that mean you better get yo' worthless black ass down that road.”
“He say, ”I ain't come here to argue wit' you. Where Robicheaux at?“
”I say, “He ain't here and that's all you got to know.” I say, “Vas ten, neg. ”That's it. We don't need them kind, Dave.“
He used a half-mooned Clorox bottle to scoop the ashes out of the split oil barrel that we used for a barbecue pit. I waited for him to continue.
”What was his name?“ I said. ”What kind of car did he drive?“
”He didn't have no car, and I ain't ax him his name.“
”Where'd he go?“
”Wherever people go when you run them down the road with a two-by-fo'.“
”Batist, I don't think it's a good idea to treat people like that.“
”One like that always work for the white man, Dave.“
”I beg your pardon?“
”Everyting he do make white people believe the rest of us ain't got the right to ax for mo' than we got.“
It was one of those moments when I knew better than to contend with Batist's reasoning or experience.
”Someting else I want to talk wit' you about,“ he said. ”Look in yonder my shelves, my pig feet, my graton, tell me what you t'ink of that.“
I opened the screen door to the shop but hated to look. The jar of pickled hogs' feet was smashed on the floor; half-eaten candy bars, hard-boiled eggs, and cracklings, called graton in Cajun French, were scattered on the counter. In the midst of it all, locked in a wire crab trap, Tripod, Alafair's three-legged coon, stared back at me.
I picked him up in my arms and carried him outside. He was a beautiful coon, with silver-tipped fur and black rings on his tail, a fat stomach and big paws that could turn doorknobs and twist tops off of jars.
”I'll send Alf down to clean it up,“ I said.
”It ain't right that coon keep messing up the shop, Dave.“
”It looks to me like somebody left a window open.“
”That's right. Somebody. “Cause I closed every one of them.”
I stopped.
“I didn't come down here last night, partner, if that's what you're saying.”
He straightened up from a table, with the wiping rag in his hand. His face seemed to gather with a private concern. Two fishermen with a minnow bucket and a beer cooler stood by the door of the shop and looked at us impatiently.
“You wasn't down here last night, Dave?” he asked.
“No. What is it?”
He inserted his thumb and forefinger in the watch pocket of the bell-bottom dungarees he wore.
“This was on the windowsill this morning. I t'ought it was some-ting you found on the flo',” he said, and placed the oblong piece of stamped metal in my hand. “What you call them tings?”
“A dog tag.” I read the name on it, then read it again.
“What's wrong?” he said.
I felt my hand close on the tag, felt the edges bite into my palm.
“You know I cain't read, me. I didn't want to give you so meting bad, no.”
“It's all right. Help those gentlemen there, will you? I'll be back down in a minute,” I said.
“It ain't good you not tell me.”
“It's the name of a man I was in the army with. It's some kind of coincidence. Don't worry about it.”
But in his eyes I could see the self-imposed conviction that somehow his own ineptitude or lack of education had caused me injury.
“I ain't mad about that coon, Dave,” he said. “Coon gonna be a coon.
Tell Alafair it ain't nobody's fault.”
I sat at the redwood table with a cup of coffee under the mimosa tree in the backyard, which was still cool and blue with shadow. The breeze ruffled the periwinkles and willows along the edge of the coulee, and two greenhead mallards, who stayed with us year-round, were skittering across the surface of the pond at the back of our property.
The stainless steel dog tag contained the name of Roy J. Bumgartner, his serial number, blood type, religion, and branch of service, the simple and pragmatic encapsulation of a human life that can be vertically inserted as neatly as a safety razor between the teeth and locked in place with one sharp blow to the chin.
I remembered him well, a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from Galveston, Texas, who had brought the slick in low out of the molten sun, the canopy and elephant grass flattening under the down draft while AK-47 rounds whanged off the ship's air-frame like tack hammers.
Ten minutes later, the floor piled with wounded grunts, their foreheads painted with Mercurochromed Ms to indicate the morphine that laced their hearts, we lifted off from the LZ and flew back through the same curtain of automatic weapons fire, the helicopter blades thropping, the windows pocking with holes like skin blisters snapping.