“You feel ashamed because of what he did to you?” he asked.
When I didn’t reply, he walked to the window and looked at the trees out on the road and the moss on the limbs lifting in the wind.
“I can set it up. He’ll never know what hit him. I’ve got the throw-down, too, all numbers acid-burned and ground on an emery wheel,” he said.
“I’ll let you know.”
“Yeah, I bet,” he said, turning from the window. He picked his porkpie hat off the sill and slanted it on his brow. “I’ll see you this afternoon, Streak. But with or without you, that cocksucker is going to get blown out of his socks.”
Bootsie came through the door with a vase of flowers and a box of doughnuts. She had slept all night in a chair under a rough woolen blanket, but her face, even without makeup, was as pink and lovely as the morning.
“What’s going on?” she said, looking from me to Clete.
Two days later I left the hospital, limping on a cane, my head spinning with painkillers, one eye swollen almost shut, the side of my face inflated with a large yellow and purple bruise. It was Friday, a workday, but I did not go back to the office. Instead, I sat for a long time in the living room by myself, the blinds drawn, and listened to a strange whirring sound in my head. I found myself at the kitchen sink, first pouring a glass of iced tea and a second later opening the bottle of painkillers the doctor had given me. One or two to get back to normal can’t hurt, I thought.
Right.
I poured the pills down the drain, then ran water on top of them and dropped the bottle in the garbage sack under the counter.
Bootsie and I ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. It was shady and cool in the yard, and a gust of wind ruffled the periwinkles and bamboo that grew along the coulee, but there was no hint of rain in the air and dust blew in brown clouds out of my neighbor’s cane field.
Bootsie was talking about a college baseball game scheduled for that night in Lafayette. I tried to follow what she was saying, but the whirring sound began again in my head.
“Do you?” she said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Do you want to go to the game tonight?”
“Tonight? Who did you say was playing?”
She set her fork down on her plate. “You have to get your mind off it. The sheriff will find this guy,” she said.
My eyes avoided hers. I felt her gaze sharpen and fix on the side of my face.
“Right?” she said.
“Not necessarily.”
“Take the marbles out of your mouth, Streak.”
“The sheriff doesn’t know what to look for. I didn’t tell him everything.”
“Oh?”
“It was the man called Legion, the overseer from Poinciana Island. He put his tongue in my mouth. He called me his bitch.”
She was quiet a long time.
“That’s why you kept the sheriff in the dark?”
“This guy Legion is seventy-four years old. Nobody would believe my story. Legion knew that. He really pushed the hook in deep.”
Bootsie got up from her bench and walked around the table and put her fingers in my hair and brushed her nails back and forth on my scalp. Then she kissed the top of my head.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.
“It wouldn’t change anything.”
“Come inside, soldier,” she said.
We went into the bedroom. She closed the curtains on the window that looked out on the front yard, then disconnected the telephone cord from the jack in the wall and removed her blouse.
“Unhook me, big guy,” she said, turning her back to me while she unbuttoned her blue jeans and let them drop to her ankles.
She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the mouth.
“You all right?” she said.
“Fine.”
“Then how about getting undressed?”
I took off my clothes and lay down gingerly on the bed. Bootsie slipped her fingers down inside the elastic of her panties and pushed them over her thighs and lay beside me, her head propped up on her elbow.
“You told Clete about all this?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Before you told me?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t trust me? You believed I’d think less of you?”
“It wasn’t my proudest moment out there.”
“Oh, Dave, you’re so crazy,” she said, and put her face close to mine and touched my sex with her fingers.
“The doc loaded me up on downers. I don’t know if I’m up to it, Boots,” I said.
“That’s what you think, bubba,” she replied.
She raised herself up and stroked my sex, then kissed it and placed it in her mouth.
“Boots, you don’t need to—” I began.
A moment later she spread her knees and sat on top of me and held me between her hands. As I looked up at her, the light from the side window woven in her hair, all the goodness and beauty in the world seemed to gather in her face. She placed me inside her, then leaned down and kissed me on the mouth again and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes.
I ran my hands over her back and pressed her down on top of me and kissed her hair and bit her neck. Then, for just a moment, all the pain and solitary rage, all the ugly images that the man called Legion had tried to leave forever in my memory, seemed to become as dross. The only sound in the room was the rise and fall of Bootsie’s breath against my chest and the squeak of the bedsprings under our weight and occasionally a small moist, popping noise when her stomach formed a suction against mine. Then her body began to stiffen, the muscles in her back hardening, her thighs tightening on mine. Her eyes were closed now, her face growing small and soft and tense at the same time. I held her as close as I could, as though we were both balanced on the tip of a precipice, then I felt my sex harden and swell and burn in a way it never had, to a degree that made me cry out involuntarily, more like a woman than a man, and the entirety of my life, my identity itself, seemed to dissolve and break and then burst from my loins in a white glow, and in that moment I was joined with her, the two of us locked inseparably together inside the heat of her thighs, the mystery of her womb, the beating of her heart, the sweat on her skin, the flush of blood in her cheeks, the odor of crushed gardenias that rose from her hair when I buried my face in it.
After I showered and put on a fresh pair of khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, I took my holstered 1911-model .45 automatic from the dresser and placed it on the rail of the gallery, then went into the kitchen and rubbed Bootsie on the back and kissed her neck. “You’re special, kid,” I said.
“I know,” she replied.
“I’ll be gone for a little while. But I’ll be back in time to go to the game.”
“What are you about to do, Dave?”
“There’s not a perp or lowlife or shitbag in Louisiana who would come after a cop with a blackjack unless he thought he was protected.”
“You and Clete are going to settle things on your own?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because Clete’s out of it,” I replied, and went out the front door and backed the truck down the drive. Through the windshield I saw Bootsie come out on the porch. I waved, but she didn’t respond.
I crossed the freshwater bay onto Poinciana Island and followed the winding paved road through red-dirt acreage and hummocks and oaks green with lichen to Ladice Hulin’s house, where she sat on the gallery, absorbed in a magazine, directly across from the scorched stucco shell of the place in which Julian LaSalle’s wife had burned to death like a bird caught inside a cage. I got out of my truck and limped toward her with my cane. “May I sit down?” I asked.
“Looks like you better. A train hit you?” she said.
I eased myself down on the top step and propped my cane across the inside of my leg and looked at the peacocks picking in the grass across the road. In the
distance I could see the sunlight on the bay, like thousands of coppery lights, and a boat with a sky-blue sail turning about in the wind. Neither of us spoke for a long time.
“I want to take Legion down. Maybe blow up his shit,” I said.
“You use that kind of language in front of white ladies?” she asked.
“Sometimes. With the ones I respect.”
Her eyes roved over my face. “Legion done this to you?” she asked.
I nodded, my gaze fixed across the road. I heard her close her magazine and set it down on the gallery.
“It ain’t just the beating that bother you, though, is it?” she said.
“I really don’t know what I feel right now, Ladice,” I lied.
“He done somet’ing to you right befo’ he finished, somet’ing that makes you feel dirty inside. You wash yourself all over, but it don’t do no good. Every place you go, you feel his hand on you. He always in your thoughts. That’s what Legion know how to do to people. Every black woman on this plantation learned that,” she said.
I snuffed down in my nose and cleared my throat. I put on my sunglasses, even though there was no glare in the yard, and rubbed my palms on my knees.
“Maybe I should go,” I said.
“Legion killed a man in Morgan City. A man from up Nort’ who was down here writin’ a book.”
“He was never arrested?”
“The people in the bar said the man threatened Legion with a gun and Legion took it from him and shot him. It ain’t true, though.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“A black man in the kitchen seen Legion get the gun from under the bar and follow him out in the parking lot. Legion shot the man so close his coat caught on fire. Then he shot him again on the ground. This was maybe t’urty or t’urty-five years ago.”
“Thanks for you help, Ladice.”
“Jimmy Dean Styles was out here.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. He axed about my granddaughter, Rosebud, how’s she doin’ and all. Why would he come out here axing about Rosebud?”
I remembered taking Rosebud’s sketch of the reclining nude to the Carousel, the nightclub half-owned by Styles, and Styles stealing a look at it, his head tilted curiously.
“Let me know if he comes around again,” I said.
I took off my sunglasses and folded them and replaced them in my shirt pocket and tried to seem casual.
“You tell me only what you feel like I should know, huh? That’s the way it’s always been, Mr. Dave. Ain’t changed. The little people ain’t got the same rights as everybody else. That’s how come Legion could take any black girl he wanted into the trees or the canebrake, make them carry his baby and never tell who the father was. When you talk down to me like you just done? You’re no different from Legion, no.”
Late that night a huge rental moving van lumbered down a state road outside town, followed by two big cars filled with men who looked straight ahead, somber, not talking to one another, their faces marked with purpose. The caravan passed through a black slum far out in the parish, crossed a bridge over a coulee, and turned down a shell road that led to a cluster of burial crypts in a cemetery by the bayou. The men piled out of the cars and unwound a firehose that had been stolen from an apartment building in Lafayette, then screwed the hose onto a fire hydrant by the side of the shell road. One man fitted a wrench on top of the hydrant and revolved it around and around until the hose was hard and stiff with pressurized water.
They unlocked the back doors of the van and threw them back on the hinges, and the high-beam headlights from the cars lit up ten terrified black men inside. Two of the men from the cars, all of whom were white, pushed open the valve on the firehose and directed a skin-blistering jet of water inside the van, skittering the black men across the floor, blowing them against the walls, knocking them back down when they tried to rise, bursting against their faces and groins with the force of huge fists.
The men from the cars gathered in a semicircle to watch, lighting up cigarettes now, laughing in the iridescent spray that floated in the headlights.
Then a man with a body as compact as a stack of bricks, with dead gray eyes and a haircut like a 1930s convict, walked into the light. He wore a suit with suspenders and only a formfitting, ribbed undershirt beneath the coat.
“Get ’em out of there and line ’em up,” he said.
“Hey, Joe, some fun, huh?” one of the men on the hose said, then looked at the man with dead eyes and went silent and shut off the valve on the nozzle.
The men who had ridden in the two cars pulled the black men tumbling out of the van and shoved them through the cemetery to the edge of the bayou. When a black man looked back over his shoulder, he was hit with either a sap or a baton or kicked so hard between his buttocks, he had to fight to gain control of his sphincter.
A few minutes later all of the black men stood in a row, most of them trembling uncontrollably now, looking across the water, their clothes molded wetly against their bodies, their fingers laced on top of their heads.
The man with dead eyes walked up and down behind the row, staring at the back of each black man’s head.
“My name is Joe Zeroski. I got nothing against you personally. But you’re pimps and rock dealers, and that means nobody cares what happens to you. You’re gonna tell me what I want to know about my little girl. Her name was Linda, Linda Zeroski,” he said.
He pointed at the back of a huge black kid nicknamed Baby Huey, who had played football at Grambling before he had gone to prison for statutory rape. One of Joe’s crew stepped forward with a stun gun cupped in his hand, an electrical thread of light crackling between the extended prongs. He touched the prongs to Baby Huey’s back, which left Baby Huey writhing in the grass, his eyes bulging with shock.
Joe looked down at him. “Who picked up my daughter on the corner?” he asked.
“Washington Trahan was her manager. I didn’t know nothing about her,” Baby Huey said.
“The piece of shit you call a manager blew town. That means you take his weight. You think about that the next time you see him,” Joe said, and nodded to the man with the stun gun.
When the man with the stun gun was finished, Baby Huey was curled in an embryonic ball, begging for his mother, shivering like a dog trying to pass glass.
Joe Zeroski walked farther down the line, then paused behind a slender, light-skinned man with moles on his face and a mustache and hair that was buzzed on the temples and cut long in back. Joe nodded to the man with the stun gun, but suddenly the intended victim dropped his arms and shook his head violently, his eyes squeezed shut, crying out, “It was Tee Bobby Hulin. He did at least one white chick already. He always lookin’ for white bread. Everybody on the corner know it. It’s him, man.”
“I already checked him out. Four people put him in a club in St. Martinville,” Joe said.
“I got a pacemaker. Please don’t do it, suh,” the light-skinned man said, his voice and accent reverting to a subservient identity he had probably thought was no longer part of his life.
The man with the stun gun waited. “Joe?” he said. He had an unshaved, morose face, with big jowls and eyebrows that were like shaggy hemp. His stomach was so large his shirt wouldn’t tuck into his belt.
“I’m thinking,” Joe replied.
“They’re niggers, Joe. They start lying the day they come out of the womb,” the man said.
Joe Zeroski shook his head. “They got no percentage in standing up for a guy is hurting their business. Y’all wait for me at the cars,” he said.
Joe Zeroski’s crew drifted back through the crypts to their cars and the rented moving van. Joe stepped out in front of the black men and pulled a .45 automatic from his belt. He racked a round into the chamber and set the safety.
“You guys kneel down. Don’t move your hands from your head,” he said.
Joe waited until they were all on their knees, their faces popping with sweat now, mosquitoes buz
zing about their ears and nostrils, their eyes avoiding any contact with his.
“You ever hear why some guys use a .22?” he said. “Because the bullet bounces around inside the skull and makes a mess in there. That story is shit. The guys use a .22 just don’t like noise. So they got to put one through the temple, one in the ear, and one through the mouth. That’s supposed to be a Mob hit. But it gets done that way just because some guys don’t like noise. No other reason.
“I carry ear plugs and use a gun that makes an exit hole like a half dollar. See?”
Joe screwed a rubber plug into his ear, then removed it and put it back in his coat pocket.
“There’s a building with a steeple on it across the bayou. You keep looking at it and don’t turn around till sunrise. If you want your brains running out your nose, turn around while I’m still here. Remember my name. Joe Zeroski. You want to make yourself some cash, come see me with the name of the man killed my daughter. You want to lose your life, fuck with me just once.”
Minutes later the moving van and the two cars drove away.
At dawn the pastor of a ramshackle fundamentalist church, with a wood cross and a facsimile of a bell tower nailed on the roof, walked down the sloping green lawn of his rectory to take his wash off the clothesline. He stopped in the mist drifting off the bayou and stared openmouthed at a row of black men kneeling on the opposite bank, their hands clasped on the crowns of their skulls like prisoners of war in a grainy black-and-white news film.
CHAPTER 11
The sheriff was surprisingly calm and reflective as he sat down in my office Monday morning. “For years I’ve been trying to put these pimps and drug dealers out of business. Then the goddamn Mafia comes in and does it in one night,” he said.
“They’ll be back,” I said.
“What do you know about this guy Zeroski?”
“He’s an old-time mechanic. Supposedly, he hung it up after he accidentally shot a child by the St. Thomas Project.”
“Eventually we’ve got to run him out of town. You know that, huh?”
“Easier said than done,” I replied.