I asked Batist to watch the shop and drove to the lockup. Sherenda, whose male name was Claude Walker, was washing her underarms in the tin sink attached to the top of the commode. She blotted her face with a lavender handkerchief and stuck it down in her bra. She folded her hands around the bars, her pointed red nails clicking against the hardness of the steel.
“Legion give you a bad time?” I asked.
She buckled her knees and perched out her rump and started to grin, then gave up the act.
“Man talk shit all night. Couldn’t understand none of it. Ever hear a cat hissing inside a sewer pipe? Scare po’ Cheyenne to det’. Why Miss Helen and you done that to us?”
“He’s a Cajun. He was probably talking French,” I said.
“Darlin’, I know French when I hear it. I could have done ‘French’ for that boy on any level. But that ain’t what we talking ’bout,” Sherenda said.
Sherenda’s friend, whose female name was Cheyenne Prejean, took a deep breath in the back of the cell and lifted up her head. Her eyes were puffy with sleeplessness, red along the rims, her lipstick smeared like a broken flower on her mouth.
“My mother was a preacher. That man was calling out names from Scripture. He was talking to demons, Mr. Dave,” she said.
She stared into space, like a creature who heard sounds others did not.
CHAPTER 15
The sheriff lived in a rambling pale yellow house with steel-gray trim and a wide gallery up on Bayou Teche. The sky was rainwashed and blue when I pulled into his drive and he was raking leaves out of his coulee, stacking them in a black pile for burning. “The cross-dressers told you Legion Guidry talks to demons?” he said, his palms propped on the upended handle of his rake.
“Yeah, I guess that sums it up,” I replied.
“You drove out here on a Saturday to tell me this?”
“It’s not an everyday event.”
“Dave, you’re a toe-curlin’ delight. I never know when you’re going to drop one on me a sane person couldn’t think up in a lifetime. Let me call my mother-in-law out here. She’s in Eckankar. She teleports herself to Venus through a third eye in her head to check the records on her former lives. I’m not making this up.” His eyes were starting to brim with water. “Where you going?”
A moment of contrasts. That same afternoon a gumbo cook-off was in progress at City Park. The manicured and sloping lawns along the bayou were dark green in the shade, scattered with azalea bloom, the sky strung with strips of pink cloud. Three shrimp boats festooned with flags blew their horns near the drawbridge. The shouts of children and the twang of a diving board resonated from the park’s swimming pool like a collective announcement that this was indeed the first day of a verdant and joyous summer.
In the midst of the live oaks, the gaiety of the crowd, the smell of boudin and boiling shrimp and okra and pecan pie and keg beer swilled from paper cups, Tee Bobby Hulin mounted a knocked-together stage with his band, plugged the jack of his electric guitar into the sound system, and went into a re-created version of “Jolie Blon” I had never heard before.
It was like Charlie Barnet’s 1939 recording of “Cherokee,” a perfect moment in music that probably had no specific origin or plan, a deep rumbling of saxophones, a building percussion in the background, a melody and countermelody that were like a tongue-and-groove frame around the whole piece, and inside it all an innovative artist who took long rides on a score created extemporaneously in his own head without ever violating the musical intricacies at work around him.
Tee Bobby looked like a man back from the dead. Or maybe he was high again on meth or skag and had bought a temporary reprieve from the hunger that ate at his system twenty-four hours a day, but I couldn’t say. He wore shades and a purple fedora and a long-sleeved black shirt with garters on the arms and beige suede boots and lavender slacks flared and sewn with flowers at the bottom. After the first piece, he did two more numbers, conventional rock ’n’ roll pieces that he took no rides on and showed little interest in. Then he slipped off his guitar and went to the beer stand.
“What was that first piece you did?” I said behind him.
He turned around, lowering a beer cup from his mouth. “ ‘Jolie Blon’s Bounce.’ I just wrote it. Ain’t tried it on an audience before. Didn’t nobody seem real tuned in to it,” he said.
“It’s great.”
He nodded, his shades mirroring the crowd around us, the thick overhang of the live oaks.
“Jimmy Dean say he might take a demo out to L.A. for me. Soupedup zydeco’s hot in some clubs out there,” he said.
“Jimmy Dean is a parasite. He couldn’t shine your shoes.”
“Least he ain’t dumped me at a homeless shelter in the middle of the night.”
“Have a good life,” I said.
“Try to make me feel bad all you want. You don’t bother me no more. I passed the lie detector,” he said.
He faced the bandstand and upended his beer cup, the foam rilling down the sides of his mouth, the corner of his eye like a prosthetic implant. His self-satisfaction and stupidity made me want to hit him.
I started back through the crowd to find Bootsie and Alafair and bumped against the father of Amanda Boudreau. His body was hard, his feet planted solidly, his gaze unblinking behind his wire-rim glasses. His wife’s arm was tucked inside his, the two of them like an island of grief that no one saw.
“Excuse me. I wasn’t watching where I was going,” I said.
“That was Bobby Hulin you were talking to, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Boudreau said.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s correct,” I said.
“He’s here, playing at a concert, and the man who supposedly represents our daughter chats with him by the beer stand. I can’t quite express my feelings. You’ll have to forgive me,” she said, and pulled her arm from her husband’s and walked quickly toward the rim of the park, pulling a handkerchief from her purse.
“You got a daughter, Mr. Robicheaux?” her husband asked.
“Yes, sir. Her name’s Alafair,” I replied.
He fixed his glasses up on his nose with his thumb. “You have to pardon my wife. She’s not doing too good. I probably don’t make it any easier for her, either. I hope your daughter has a wonderful life. I truly do, sir.”
And he walked away, limping like a man whose gout gave him no peace.
That night I had drunk dreams and woke at two in the morning, wired, my mouth dry, my ears filled with sounds that had no origin. I could not remember the images in the dreams, only the nameless feeling they left me with. Like being slapped awake when no one else was in the room.
Like stepping unexpectedly off a ledge one hundred feet below the Gulf’s surface and plummeting into a chasm filled with coldness and rough-skinned finned creatures whose faces flared at you out of the silt.
I went to the kitchen and sat in the dark, the luminous numbers of my watch glowing on my wrist. A bottle of vanilla extract sat on the windowsill in the moonlight, the curtains blowing around it. In the distance I heard a train and I thought of the old Southern Pacific, its lounge car lit, the passengers sipping highballs at the bar as the locomotive pulled them safely across the dark land to an improbable country of blue mountains and palm trees and pink sunrises where no one ever died.
I wanted to get in my truck and bang down corrugated roads, grind gears, thunder across plank bridges. I wanted to drive deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp, past the confines of reason, into the past, into a world of lost dialects, gator hunters, busthead whiskey, moss harvesters, Jax beer, trotline runners, moonshiners, muskrat trappers, cockfights, bloodred boudin, a jigger of Jim Beam lowered into a frosted schooner of draft, outlaw shrimpers, dirty rice black from the pot, hogmeat cooked in rum, Pearl and Regal and Grand Prize and Lone Star iced down in washtubs, crawfish boiled with cob corn and artichokes, all of it on the tree-flooded, alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time.
All you
had to do was release yourself from the prison of restraint, just snip loose the stitches that sewed your skin to the hairshirt of normalcy.
I got in the truck and drove full-bore down the four-lane, the frame shaking in the Gulf wind, until I saw the bridge spanning the Atchafalaya River at Morgan City and the network of adjoining bayous and canals and the shrimp and pleasure boats moored in the moss-green, softly muted tropical ambience that defines almost every unimpaired waterway in southern Louisiana. I turned into a clapboard bar that looked like it had floated out of the mist onto the road, one window scrolled with a green and gold Dixie beer sign.
I sat for five minutes in the false dawn, my hand trembling on the floor stick, my upper lip beaded with sweat. Then I drove back down the highway, fifteen miles under the speed limit, cars whizzing by me, their horns blowing, all the way back to New Iberia and the apartment where Clete Purcel was now living, wondering how in the name of a merciful God I could have a Sunday morning hangover without touching a drop of alcohol.
. . .
I sat at the counter in his small kitchen while Clete fixed coffee and stirred a skillet filled almost to the brim with a half-dozen eggs, strips of bacon, chunks of sausage and yellow cheese, and a sprinkling of chopped scallions to disguise enough cholesterol to clog a sewer main. He wore clacks and his Marine Corps utility cap and a pair of boxer undershorts, printed with fire engines, that hung on his hips like women’s bloomers. “But you didn’t go in the bar?” he said, not looking at me.
“No.”
“Helen thinks you’re doing speed.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “You got a hearing problem this morning?”
“I ate a few of Bootsie’s diet pills.”
“What else?”
“A few whites.”
“Maybe you ought to go all out. Chop up some lines. Start hanging with the rag noses in north Lafayette,” he said.
He filled a plate for me and clattered it down on the counter.
We ate in silence. Outside, the morning was taking hold, wind blowing in a sugarcane field, buzzards circling over a grove of trees. I put four teaspoons of sugar in my coffee and drank it black, in one long swallow.
“I’d better get going,” I said.
“You’ve got a strange look on your face. Does Bootsie know where you are?”
“I called her from the highway.”
“We’re going to a meeting,” he said.
“We?”
“I think you’re figuring out ways to get loaded again. I’m not going to allow it. That’s just the way it is, big mon.” He cupped his huge hand on my neck and squeezed, his breath heavy with the booze he had drunk the night before.
I called the Alcoholics Anonymous hotline number and found a meeting in Lafayette. We drove up the old highway in Clete’s convertible, with the top down, past Spanish Lake, through Broussard and tree-lined streets dotted with Victorian homes, people crossing through the traffic to Sunday Mass. After I had almost convinced myself that perhaps Clete enjoyed levels of reason and control in his life that I should envy, he described some of his activities of the last week or so, the Clete Purcel version of ecoterrorism.
“This guy Legion’s not that smart. He hasn’t figured out where it’s coming from yet,” he said.
Clete had put in a change of address for Legion at the post office, forwarding his mail to General Delivery, Bangor, Maine; called the utility companies and ordered the cutoff of his water, electricity, telephone, and gas service; hired neighborhood black kids to throw firecrackers on his roof, shoot out his windows with BB guns, and shove a burning sack of dog shit under his bedroom floor.
Then, in a finale that would have made even No Duh Dolowitz, the Mob’s merry prankster, doff his hat, he got an exterminator to go to Legion’s house, while Legion was at work, and tent the whole building and fumigate it with termicide, so that the building stank of noxious chemicals for days.
Clete casually sipped on a beer while he drove and told me these things, his face handsome with windburn and his aviator’s sunglasses, his tropical shirt puffing, steering with two fingers at the bottom of the wheel, like an over-the-hill low rider cruising out of the 1950s.
“Have you lost your mind?” I said.
“You stoke ’em and smoke ’em, noble mon. I give this character about two weeks before he runs into a wrecking ball. Hey, I’m taking Barbara Shanahan to dinner tonight. You and Bootsie want to come along? Zerelda Calucci told me Perry LaSalle’s schlong looks like a fifteen-inch nozzle on a firehose. She’s exaggerating, right?”
I couldn’t even begin to track his train of thought. We were on University Avenue in Lafayette now, passing the old oak-shaded brick buildings and colonnaded walkways where I once attended college.
“Drop me in front of the meeting,” I said.
“I’m going in with you.”
“With a beer can?”
He pulled to the curb and tossed the can in an arc over his head, depositing it dead center in a trash barrel.
CHAPTER 16
A love affair with Louisiana is in some ways like falling in love with the biblical whore of Babylon. We try to smile at its carnival-like politics, its sweaty, whiskey-soaked demagogues, the ignorance bred by its poverty and the insularity of its Cajun and Afro-Caribbean culture. But our self-deprecating manner is a poor disguise for the realities that hover on the edges of one’s vision like dirty smudges on a family portrait. The state roadsides and parking lots of discount stores are strewn, if not actually layered, with mind-numbing amounts of litter, thrown there by the poor and the uneducated and the revelers for whom a self-congratulatory hedonism is a way of life. With regularity, land developers who are accountable to no one bulldoze out stands of virgin cypress and two-hundred-year-old live oaks, often at night, so the irrevocable nature of their work cannot be seen until daylight, when it is too late to stop it. The petrochemical industry poisons waterways with impunity and even trucks in waste from out of state and dumps it in open sludge pits, usually in rural black communities.
Rather than fight monied interests, most of the state’s politicians give their constituency casinos and Powerball lotteries and drive-by daiquiri windows, along with low income taxes for the wealthy and an eight and one quarter percent sales tax on food for the poor.
Why meditate upon a depressing subject?
Because on occasion an attempt at redress can come from an unexpected source.
On Monday afternoon Marvin Oates was pulling his suitcase on wheels down a rural road that traversed cattle acreage and pecan orchards, across a bridge that spanned a coulee lined with hardwoods and palmettos, past neat cottages with screened porches and shade trees. Up ahead was the Boom Boom Room, the dilapidated Iberia Parish bar owned by Jimmy Dean Styles. A red convertible, the top down, roared past him, the stereo blaring. A bag of fast-food trash and beer cans sailed out of the backseat and exploded against the trunk of a pecan tree, showering litter in a yard.
Marvin Oates labored down the road, the roller skate affixed to the bottom of his suitcase grating against the road surface with the unrelieved intensity of marbles rolling down a corrugated tin roof. When he reached the Boom Boom Room, three of Jimmy Styles’s rappers and two tattooed, peroxided white women in shorts were drinking long-necked beer and passing a joint by the side of the convertible.
A line of sweat leaked from Marvin’s hat down his cheek. He loosened his tie, craned his neck, blew out his breath, as though releasing the heat trapped inside his sports coat.
“Excuse me, but back yonder one of y’all threw a bag of trash out your car,” he said.
“Say what?” said a tall man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows.
“There’s some old colored folks living in that house where you flung your garbage. How’d you like it if you was them and you had to pick up lunch trash with mouth germs all over it?” Marvin said.
“Where you from, cracker?” the tall man with orange and purple hair said.
“Where folks ain’t so ashamed of what they are they got to pay a couple of fat whores to take their dick out of their pants for them,” Marvin said.
“Hey, Jimmy Sty, come out here! You got to check this out!” another black man called out. Then he turned back to Marvin. “Run all that by us again, man.”
“Ain’t my purpose to get nobody mad. I’m going back on my route now. Lessen one of y’all is interested in a magazine subscription or a discount Bible offer,” Marvin said.
“You believe this motherfucker?” the man with orange and purple hair said, then balanced his beer bottle on the oyster shells.
“You ask me a question, I give you a straight answer. The Bible is my road map, sir. You don’t like what you hear, that’s your dadburn problem,” Marvin said, and blotted his forehead on his coat sleeve. “It’s flat burning up, ain’t it?”
The group around the convertible was now joined by others from inside the bar, including Jimmy Dean Styles. They stared at Marvin in dismay.
“Somebody put you up to this? Or you just a dumb white motherfucker want to commit suicide?” said a man with a nylon stocking crimped down on his head.
Marvin looked innocuously at a cloud, his eyebrows raised. “Most of y’all got born ’cause your mama dint have money for an abortion. That’s why you call other people ‘motherfucker’ all the time. It’s ’cause y’all know everybody in town got in your mother’s drawers. So anytime you insult other folks with a bad name like that, it’s on your own self. I ain’t trying to hurt your feelings. It’s just a psychological fact.”
The tall man with rings in his eyebrows picked up his beer bottle from the oyster shells, tossed Marvin Oates’s hat into the crowd, and smashed the bottle across Marvin’s head. The crowd roared.
Marvin fell across his suitcase and took a kick in the ribs and another between his buttocks. He pushed himself up on the convertible’s bumper, his coat powdered with white dust, his eyes closing, then opening, as though a piece of sharp metal was buried deep in his bowels.