Drop the bottle case on the ground, he told himself. Let them ship you back to ’Gola. Do cain’t-see to cain’t-see on the Red Hat Gang, take the sweatbox treatment on Camp A, but don’t hep them to hurt Junior. Please, Lawd, make me be strong when I am weak, he prayed.
“Goddamn it, boy, move your ass!” Jackson Posey shouted.
“I’m coming, boss!” Woodrow said, running, the empty pop bottles rattling inside their wooden slots.
Junior sat down on the ground, pulled off his shoes and socks, and mounted the pop bottles, extending his arms out sideways for balance. The other men marched out the front gate, their eyes straight ahead, and began climbing into the trucks that waited for them. When the trucks drove away in the dust, Woodrow looked through the slats in the tailgate and saw his friend quivering like Jell-O atop the rows of R.C. Cola bottles, his pain sealed inside his closed eyelids.
Junior was still there when the trucks returned in the evening. Except he didn’t look like Junior anymore. There were skinned places on his face and knots on his head; one eye was swollen shut and his denims were dark with his own urine.
At sunset Junior was allowed to come off the box and sit in one corner of the yard. As the other men passed on their way to the mess shack, they saw the bottoms of Junior’s feet and had to look away. But Junior’s trial by ordeal was not over. Jackson Posey stood over him, thinking private thoughts, touching at the corner of his mouth with one finger. Posey looked up the slope toward the gouged hole in the landscape where a gas storage tank had been pried out of the ground.
“Get your shoes on, Junior. Woodrow, bring a spade from the shed and get my lunch bucket and a chair from my office,” Posey said.
The three of them walked together up the slope in the twilight, Junior limping like he had glass in his shoes, while purple martins darted through the haze of smoke in the air. A fat, thumb-buster .45 revolver creaked in a holster on Boss Posey’s hip. Woodrow set down the chair for Boss Posey to sit in and speared the spade into a huge mound of wet clay by the hole, then set down Posey’s lunch bucket on the ground by the chair. For just a moment he thought he smelled rain inside the wind.
“You don’t need me no more, huh, boss?” he said.
“Hunker down on the dirt pile and keep me company,” Posey replied, opening his lunch bucket and removing a pint of whiskey.
He wants you to attack him, Junior. Then he’s gonna kill you. He brung me to be a witness and cover his ass, Woodrow said to himself. Look at me, Junior. Can you hear the words I’m t’inking?
“Dozer man run out of gas today, Junior. So you got to fill up that hole for me. Better get on it,” Posey said.
“Stood all day on the bottles, boss. Ain’t got nothing left,” Junior said.
“You done this to yourself, boy.” Posey unscrewed the cap on his whiskey bottle and took a sip, rolling it in the corners of his mouth before he swallowed. Then he seemed to think a long time before he spoke again. “You believe you’re better than me, don’t you?”
“No, suh,” Junior replied.
“Smarter, been more places, slept with better-looking white women than I have. Been wrote up in northern magazines. A man like me don’t get his name in the paper lessen it’s in the obituary.”
Junior pulled the spade out of the clay mound and began shoveling into the hole, keeping his bruised feet stationary, swiveling his back to throw each spadeful. Boss Posey drank from the bottle again, then removed a piece of waxpaper-wrapped chocolate cake and a slapjack from his lunch bucket. The slapjack was perhaps eight inches long, thin, mounted on a spring, lead-weighted and swollen at the tip, like the head on a snake. He rested it on his thigh and ate part of the cake, then put both the slapjack and the remnant of the cake back in the lunch bucket.
The sun dipped over the rim of the earth and the fields went dark and nightbirds began calling to one another in the woods across the bayou. At first Woodrow tried to close his eyes and sleep on his feet. Then, without asking permission, he sat down on the back side of the pile Junior was spading into the hole. But Boss Posey didn’t seem to mind. He was drinking steadily from the bottle now, bent slightly forward in the chair, the cancer on his arms like small poisoned roses buried in his skin.
Off in the distance Woodrow heard the dry rumble of thunder and saw a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. Junior’s movements with the shovel became slower and slower, then it slipped out of his hands and clattered down into the darkness.
“I had it, boss. You gonna shoot me, go ’head on and do it,” he said. He stood erect, his face slick with sweat, his body glowing with stink, one eye swollen into a knot with a slit in it.
“I’m about to lose my job ’cause of you. My pension goes out the window with it. That’s what you done, you black sonofabitch. Now, you fill that goddamn hole.”
“Know what the problem is, boss?” Junior asked. “It ain’t Miss Andrea. It ain’t Mr. LeJeune, either. It’s ’cause you ain’t no different from us. You eat the same food, stack the same time, kiss the same pink ass the niggers do. Maybe it’s time you wise up.”
The first blow with the slapjack caught Junior across the temple, splitting the skin to the bone. Then Jackson Posey whipped him to the ground, just as though he were chopping on a piece of wood.
But Woodrow believed it was the first blow that killed Junior and that the others were visited upon the body of a dead man, because Junior made no sound as the slapjack whistled down on his head and neck and back, thudding to the ground on his knees, his eyes already rolled upward in his head.
And while his friend died Woodrow stood by impotently, his fists balled in front of him, a cry coming from his throat that sounded like a child’s and not his own.
Jackson Posey’s chest was heaving when he looked down at his work. He flung the slapjack aside. “Damn!” he said. He paced up and down, staring back at the camp, then at the lights burning in the LeJeune house. Woodrow was so frightened his teeth knocked together in the back of his mouth.
Posey steadied his foot against Junior’s shoulder and tried to shove his body over the edge of the hole. But Junior’s body fell sideways and Boss Posey couldn’t move it with his foot. In fact, Woodrow could not believe how weak Posey was.
“Get a holt of his feet,” Posey said.
“Suh?”
“Pick up his feet or join him. Which way you want it?”
Woodrow gathered up Junior’s ankles while Boss Posey lifted his arms, and the two of them flung Woodrow’s friend over the rim of the hole. The thump it made when it hit the bottom was a sound Woodrow would hear in his sleep the rest of his life.
“Go over there and set on the ground,” Posey said.
Posey mounted the bulldozer and started the engine. With the lights off he lowered the blade and pushed the huge pile of clay into the hole, backing off it, packing it down, scraping it flat, until the hole was only a dimple in the landscape. When he cut the engine Woodrow could hear the first drops of rain pinging on the steel roof over the driver’s seat.
“Junior transferred out of here tonight. Ain’t none of this happened. That’s right, ain’t it, Woodrow?”
“If you say so, boss.”
“There’s a half inch of whiskey left in that bottle. You want it?”
“No, suh.”
“Have a Camel,” Posey said, and shook two loose from his pack. “Go ahead and take it. It’s a new day tomorrow. Don’t never forget that. Sun gonna be breakin’ and a new day shakin’. That’s what my daddy always used to say.”
How’d you come by this little farm here?” I asked Woodrow.
“Mr. LeJeune sold it to me. Give me a good price wit’out no interest,” he replied.
“To shut you up?”
“He sent a black man to me wit’ the offer. Never saw Mr. LeJeune.” Woodrow stared at me with his flat, sightless eyes that could have been large painted buttons sewn on his face. Lightning jumped in the clouds over the Gulf.
I slipped my business car
d between his fingers. “Let me know if I can do anything for you,” I said.
His hand folded around the card. “Whatever happened to Mr. LeJeune’s li’l girl, the one named T’eo?” he asked.
“Theodosha? She’s around.”
“My cousin, the maid for Mr. and Miz LeJeune? She always worried about that li’l girl. She said t’ings wasn’t right in that house.”
I asked him what he meant but he refused to explain.
“How long were you inside?” I said as I was leaving.
“Five years.”
“What’d you go down for?”
“Fifty-t’ree-dol’ar bad check,” he replied.
Chapter 18
As I drove back toward New Iberia a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf and marched across the southern tip of Vermilion Parish, thrashing the sugarcane in the fields, the rain twisting in my headlights. I could not shake the tale told me by Woodrow Reed, nor the sense of needless death and cruelty and loss that it instilled in the listener. I turned on my radio and tried to find a station that was playing music, but my radio went dead, although it had been working fine earlier.
I tried to get Helen again on my cell phone, but I couldn’t raise the wireless service and gave it up and tossed the cell phone on the seat. I passed flooded rice fields wrinkled with wind and lighted farmhouses that looked like snug islands inside the storm. Then I passed a billboard on a curve and my lights flashed across a woman standing by the side of the road.
She wore blue jeans and an unbuttoned tan raincoat that whipped back in the wind. Her hair was honey colored, tapered on her neck, her skin almost luminous in the glare of headlights. Hey, G.I., give a girl a ride? I thought I heard a voice say.
I braked the truck to the side of the road, my heart beating, and looked through the back window. The woman stood on the shoulder of the road, silhouetted against a light that shone on the face of the billboard. Don’t buy into this, I told myself. It’s not her. Your wife is dead and all the delusions and misery you inject into your life will not change that inalterable fact.
Then I put the truck in reverse and began backing toward the figure on the side of the road.
She glanced back over her shoulder once and began running. I accelerated faster, swerving on and off the pavement, until I was abreast of her. Through the rain-streaked glass her face stared at me, beaded with water, eyeshadow running down her cheeks, her mouth glossy with lipstick. I closed and opened my eyes, like a man coming out of darkness into light, her face forming and reforming in the rain.
I shoved open the passenger door and held up my badge holder. “Get in,” I said.
She hesitated a moment, then sat down in the passenger seat and slammed the door behind her. She gave me a hard look in the glow of the dash panel. Her cheeks were pitted and heavily made up, her clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and booze. “Thanks for the ride. My old man threw me out,” she said.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked.
“First bar we pass,” she said. “For a minute you scared me. I had trouble with a couple of black guys last night. You stopped just ’cause you saw me in the rain?”
“I thought you were somebody else,” I said.
She gave me a look. “There’s a bar past the curve. Right by the motel,” she said.
I put on my turn indicator and began to slow the truck. I knew the bar. It was a ramshackle, sullen place owned by a man who ran dog fights.
“I left my purse at the house. The sonofabitch I live with has probably drunk it up by now,” she said.
I stopped in the parking lot and waited. She took a cigarette from her shirt pocket and lit it with a plastic butane lighter. She continued rubbing the striker wheel under her thumb. “Look, I can’t drink in there for free. You want some action or not?” she said.
“Get out,” I said.
“I can really pick them,” she said. She stepped out into the storm and slammed the truck door as hard as she could.
Lesson? Chasing a nighttime mirage on a rain-swept highway has no happy ending for either the quick or the dead.
The one-car fatality at West Cote Blanche Bay seemed to lack any plausible explanation. The witness, an elderly Cajun hired to pick litter out of the ditches along the roadside, had seen an expensive, large car parked next to a compact in a grove of pine trees. Children had been lighting fireworks all evening, shooting Roman candles and rockets over the bay. Then he had heard firecrackers in the trees, just before the compact had driven away. When he looked again at the grove of pines, the large car started up and drove out onto a pier, snapping the supports on the guardrail into sticks, finally plunging off the end of the pier into the water.
Helen Soileau had arrived at the bay only a few minutes before me. She walked with me up a shell ramp and introduced me to the witness. As with most elderly Cajun men, his handshake was as light as air. “How many firecrackers did you hear?” I asked him.
“Two, maybe t’ree,” he replied.
He was a tiny man, dressed in neat khakis, with cataracts and a supple face that resembled brown tallow. He seemed nervous and kept glancing over his shoulder at the bay and at the splintered guardrail on the pier and at the wrecker that so far had not been able to pull the sunken car off a submerged pipeline, all of it lit in the glare of searchlights mounted on a firetruck.
“Is anything wrong?” I asked.
“I seen a big man behind the wheel. Seen him go crashing right off the end of the pier there. I cain’t swim, me. I keep t’inking maybe there was air inside the car. Maybe if I’d brung hep sooner—”
“You have no reason to feel bad about anything, sir. Who was in the compact?”
“Just somebody driving a li’l car. It was an old one. I ain’t sure what kind.”
“Was a man or woman driving?”
His shook his head, his face blank.
“What color was the car?” I asked.
“I just ain’t paid it much mind, no.”
“You see a license tag?” I asked.
“No, suh.”
“The firecrackers you heard, those were in the pine trees? You’re sure about that?” I said.
“No, suh, I ain’t sure about none of it no more.”
I patted him on the shoulder and walked down to the water’s edge. The bay was black, dimpled with rain rings, and the tide was pushing small waves that glistened with gasoline up on the sand. Two scuba divers, both of them sheriff’s deputies, had already been down on the wrecked car. They were sitting on the running board of the firetruck in their wetsuits, sharing a thermos of coffee.
“What’s it look like down there?” I asked.
“The vehicle landed on its side. Driver’s face is down in the silt. The ignition is on and the gearshift in ‘Drive,’ ” one of them said. His name was Darbonne. He was unshaved and had curly black hair, his throat prickled with cold.
“Any chance air was trapped in there?” I asked.
“The front windows were down. The driver’s arm is tangled up in the seat belt, like he couldn’t find the release button. All that water probably hit him like a hammer,” Darbonne said.
“The witness blames himself for not getting back with help sooner. Tell him about the air situation, will you?” I said.
Darbonne nodded and yawned. “When they drive off bridges or piers, they’re drunks, nutcases, or suicides,” he said. “If a guy in a Caddy ices himself, he should have the courtesy to do it without inconveniencing people who make twenty-five grand a year.”
“Say again?”
“The whale who just offed himself. I wish he’d gone to a heated, indoor pool to do it,” the driver said, then looked at my expression. “What, I just spit on the floor in church?”
A few minutes later the divers went down again to reset the hook on the Cadillac’s frame so the car could be flipped over on its top and slid off the pipeline it partially rested on. Helen and I stood by the water’s edge and watched. The moon had broken through a slit in the cloud
s, and far out on the horizon there were whitecaps that looked like tiny bird’s wings.
“Castille LeJeune’s lawyer called again. He’s talking about a harassment suit against the department,” she said.
“He’d like my job?”
“What did you find out down at Pecan Island?” she said, ignoring my question.
“Castille LeJeune had Junior Crudup killed. He was beaten to death by a prison guard, a guy named Jackson Posey,” I replied.
She looked at the black surface of the bay and at the slickness of the wrecker cable as it extracted the submerged car from the water. Her face did not change expression. She wiped away a raindrop that had caught in her eyelash. “Where’s Crudup’s body?” she asked.
“Probably still buried on the LeJeune’s property,” I said.
“Get a search warrant,” she said.
The wrecker man winched the Cadillac upside-down out of the shallows and slid it up on the bank, the front windows gushing with water and oil-blackened silt. The body of a huge man hung against the safety strap, his shoulders and neck pressed against the roof, his face twisted toward the open window so he appeared to be staring at a bizarre event taking place outside his automobile.