Burning Angel

  “What’s the matter, there’s something wrong with the words I use you don’t understand?” he said.

  His webbed, birdlike eyes focused earnestly on my face.

  “I had nothing to do with damaging your car. Stay away from me, Sweet Pea,” I said.

  He pressed the few stands of hair on his head flat with the palm of his hand and squinted at me as though he were looking through a dense haze, his mouth flexing in disbelief. Darbonne put his hand on Sweet Pea’s arm.

  “Is that a threat, sir?” he asked.

  “No, it’s just a request.”

  “If you didn’t do it, that fat fuck did,” Sweet Pea said.

  “I’ll pass on your remarks to Purcel,” I said.

  “You’re a public menace hiding behind a badge,” Darbonne said. “If you come near my client again, you’re going to wish your name was Job.”

  Two women and a man passing by turned and looked at us, then glanced away. Darbonne and Sweet Pea walked out to a white Chrysler parked by the curb. The sun reflected hotly off the tinted back window like a cluster of gold needles. Darbonne was poised by the driver’s door, waiting for an opportunity to open it in the traffic, his nostrils dilating at something in the breeze.

  I walked toward him, looked across the Chrysler’s roof into his surprised face.

  “When I was a patrolman in New Orleans, you were a prosecutor for the United States attorney’s office,” I said.

  His hand was poised in midair, his sunglasses hanging from his fingers.

  “What happened to you, sir?” I said.

  He turned his face away from me and slipped his sunglasses on his nose, but not before I saw a level of injury in his eyes that I had not anticipated.

  Helen Soileau sat on the corner of my desk. She wore a pair of tan slacks and a pink short-sleeve shirt.

  “I took Marsallus’s diary home last night and read it till two this morning,” she said. “He’s pretty good with words.”

  “Sonny’s not easy to put in one shoe box,” I said.

  “Have you got all the paperwork on him?”

  “Pretty much. None of it’s very helpful, though. I got his family’s welfare file if you want to look at it.”

  “What for?”

  “No reason, really.”

  She picked up the folder from my blotter and began glancing through it.

  “His mother was a prostitute?” she said.

  “Yeah, she died of tuberculosis when he was a kid. His father was a blind man who sharpened knives and scissors on a grinder he used to wheel up and down Villere Street.”

  Helen put the folder down.

  “In the diary he talks about some songwriters. He quotes a bunch of their lyrics,” she said. “Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie. Is Woody Guthrie related to Arlo?”

  “Woody was his dad. Woody and Joe Hill wrote songs about farm migrants, the early unions, that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “What?”

  “Marsallus, he’s not a wise guy He doesn’t think like one. The stuff in that diary, it bothers me.”

  “You mean the massacres in those villages?”

  “Was that really going on down there?” she said. “Everyone who was there tells the same story.”

  “Marsallus said something about the nature of memory that I couldn’t stop thinking about. ‘My cell partner told me today my head’s like a bad neighborhood that I shouldn’t go into by myself.’ There was a time in my life when I was the same way. I just didn’t know how to say it.”

  “I see,” I said, focusing my eyes at a point mid distance between us. She bounced her fingertips on the file folder.

  “You want to go to lunch?” I said.

  “No, thanks. Say, where’s the portable cluster fuck these days?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Clete Purcel.”

  “Oh, he’s around ... Did you want me to tell him something?”

  “I was just curious.” I nodded, my face empty. She stood up from the corner of the desk, straightened her shoulders and flattened her stomach, tucked her shirt under her gunbelt with her thumbs.

  “You looking at something?” she said.

  “Not me.”

  “I was too hard on the guy, that’s all. I mean when he was in your office that time,” she said.

  “He’s probably forgotten about it, Helen.”

  “Y’all go fishing a lot?”

  “Once in a while. Would you like to join us?”

  “I’m not much on it. But you’re a cutie,” she said, walked her fingers across my shoulders, and went out the door.

  Moleen Bertrand’s camp was located down in the wetlands on a chenier, a plateau of dry ground formed like a barrier island by the tides from water-pulverized seashells. Except for the site of his camp, a four-bedroom frame building with a tin roof and screened-in gallery, the chenier was pristine, the black topsoil bursting with mushrooms and buttercups and blue bonnets, no different than it had been when the first Spanish and French explorers came to Louisiana. The woods were park like the trees widely spaced, the branches and trunks hung and wrapped with vines that had the girth of boa constrictors, the moss-covered canopy of live oaks hundreds of feet above the ground, which was dotted with palmettos and layered with rotting pecan husks. At the edge of the chenier were bogs and alligator grass and blue herons lifting above the gum trees and acres of blooming hyacinths that were impassable with a boat, and, to the south, you could see the long, slate green, wind-capped roll of the Gulf and the lightning that danced over the water like electricity trapped in a steel box.

  Moleen and his wife, Julia, were flawless hosts. Their guests were all congenial people, attorneys, the owner of a sugar mill, an executive from a hot sauce company, their wives and children. Moleen fixed drinks at a bar on the gallery, kept a huge ice chest filled with soda and imported beer, barbecued a pig on a spit under a tin shed and roasted trays of wild ducks from the freezer. We busted skeet with his shotguns; the children played volleyball and sailed Frisbees; the air smelled of wildflowers and salt spray and the hot brassy odor of a distant storm. It was a perfect spring day for friends to gather on an untouched strip of the Old South that somehow had eluded the twentieth century.

  Except for the unnatural brightness and confidence in Julia’s face, the wired click in her eyes when she did not assimilate words or meaning right away, and Moleen’s ongoing anecdotal rhetoric that seemed intended to distract from his wife’s affliction. Each time she returned to the bar she poured four fingers of Jack Daniel’s into her glass, with no water or soda, added a half cup of ice, a teaspoon of sugar, and a sprig of mint. We were eating in the main room when she said, out of no apparent context, “Can any of y’all explain to me why this black congresswoman got away with refusing the Daughters of the Confederacy the renewal of their logo?”

  “She didn’t do it by herself,” Moleen said quietly, and touched his lips with his napkin.

  “They went along with her”, but she was behind it. That’s what I meant, Moleen. I think it’s ridiculous,” Julia said.

  The other people at the table smiled, unsure of what was being said, perhaps faintly remembering a news article.

  “Julia’s talking about the Daughters of the Confederacy trying to renew the patent on their emblem,” Moleen said. “The application was denied because the emblem has the Confederate flag on it.”

  “That woman’s a demagogue. I don’t know why people can’t see that,” Julia said.

  “I think it’s our fault,” a woman down the table said, leaning out over her plate to speak. “We’ve let the Confederate flag become identified with all kinds of vile groups. I can’t blame people of color for their feelings.”

  “I didn’t say I blamed people of color,” Julia said. “I was talking about this particular black woman.”

  “Julia makes a point,” Moleen said. “The DOC’s hardly a Fifth Column.”

  “Well, I think we should do something about i
t,” Julia said. She drank from her glass, and the light intensified behind her chemical-green contact lenses.

  “Oh, it gives them something to do in Washington,” Moleen said.

  “It’s not a joke, Moleen,” Julia said.

  “Let me tell you something she did once,” Moleen said, spreading his napkin and replacing it on his lap. “When she was a cheerleader at LSU. She and these other kids, they hooked up Mike the Tiger’s empty cage to a pickup truck, with the back door flopping open, and drove all over nigger town on Saturday afternoon.” He blew a laugh out of his mouth. “They’d stop in front of a bar or barbecue stand and say, “Excuse me, we don’t want to alarm anyone but have y’all seen a tiger around here?” There were darkies climbing trees all over Baton Rouge.”

  I stared at him.

  “Don’t tell that story. I didn’t have anything to do with that,” Julia said, obviously pleased at the account.

  “It’s a campus legend. People make too much about race today,” he said.

  “Moleen, that doesn’t change what that woman has done. That’s what I’m trying to say, which y’all don’t seem to understand,” she said.

  “For God’s sakes, Julia, let’s change the subject,” he said.

  The table was quiet. Someone coughed, a knife scraped against a plate. The whites of Julia’s eyes were threaded with tiny red veins, the lashes stuck together with mascara. I thought of a face painted on a wind-blown pink balloon that was quivering against its string, about to burst.

  Later, outside, Moleen asked me to walk with him to the edge of the marsh, where his shotguns and skeet trap rested on top of a weathered picnic table. He wore laced boots, khaki trousers with snap pockets up and down the legs, a shooter’s vest with twelve-gauge shells inserted in the cloth loops. He cracked open his double-barrel and plopped two shells in the chambers.

  “Were you ever stationed in Thailand, Moleen?” I said.

  “For a little while. Why do you ask?”

  “A lot of intelligence people were there. I was just curious.”

  He scratched at the corner of his mouth with a fingernail. “You want to bust a couple?” he said.

  “No thanks.”

  “You looked a little steely-eyed at the table.”

  I watched a nutria drop off a log and swim into a cluster of hyacinths.

  “That little anecdote about Julia’s cheerleading days bother you?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Come on, Dave, I was talking about a college prank. It’s innocent stuff.”

  “Not from you it isn’t.”

  “You have an irritating habit. You’re always suggesting an unstated conclusion for other people to guess at,” he said. He waited. “Would you care to explain yourself, Dave?”

  “The problem isn’t mine to explain, sir.” In the distance, out by the access road, I could see a heavyset man jogging in shorts and a T-shirt, a towel looped around his glistening neck.

  “I think the role of human enigma would become kind of tiresome,” he said. He raised his shotgun to his shoulder, tracked the flight of a seagull with it, then at the last second blew the head off a clump of pampas grass. He cracked open the breech, picked the empty casing out, and flung it smoking into the mud.

  “I believe I’ll go back inside,” I said.

  “I think you’ve made an unpleasant implication, Dave. I insist we clear it up.”

  “I went back out to your plantation this week. I’m not sure what’s going on out there, but part of it has to do with Ruthie Jean Fontenot.”

  He looked into my eyes. “You want to spell that out?” he said.

  “You know damn well what I’m talking about. If you want to hide a personal relationship, that’s your business. But you’re hiding something else, too, Moleen, about that plantation. I just don’t know what it is.”

  He fitted the shotgun’s stock to his shoulder, fired at a nutria that was swimming behind a half-submerged log, and blew a pattern of bird shot all over the pond. The nutria ducked under the water and surfaced again but it was hurt and swimming erratically. Moleen snapped open the breech and flung the casing out into the water.

  “I don’t take kindly to people insulting me on my own property,” he said.

  “The insult is to that woman on the plantation. You didn’t even have the decency to inscribe her name on the photograph you gave her.”

  “You’re beyond your limits, my friend.”

  “And you’re cruel to animals as well as to people. Fuck you,” I said, and walked back toward the camp.

  I found Bootsie on the gallery.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  “Dave, we just ate.”

  “I already said our good-byes. I have some work to do at the dock.”

  “No! It’s rude.”

  Three women drinking coffee nearby tried not to hear our conversation.

  “Okay, I’m going to put on my gym shorts and tennis shoes and jog a couple of miles. Pick me up out on the road.” She looked at me with a strangled expression on her face. “I’ll explain it later.”

  We had come in Bootsie’s Toyota. I unlocked the trunk, took out my running shoes and gym shorts, and changed in the lee of the car. Then I jogged across a glade full of buttercups, past a stand of persimmon trees that fringed the woods, and out onto the hard-packed dirt road that led off the chenier.

  The wind was warm and the afternoon sky marbled with yellow and maroon clouds. I turned my face into the breeze, kept a steady pace for a quarter mile, then poured it on, the sweat popping on my forehead, the blood singing in my chest until Moleen Bertrand’s words, his supercilious arrogance, became more and more distant in my mind.

  I passed a clump of pecan trees that were in deep shadow, the ground under them thick with palmettos. Then in the corner of my vision I saw another jogger step out into the spangled light and fall in beside me.

  I smelled him before I saw him. His odor was like a fog, gray, visceral, secreted out of glands that could have been transplanted from animals. His head was a tan cannonball, the shoulders ax-handle wide, the hips tapering down to a small butt that a woman could probably cover with both her hands. His T-shirt was rotted into cheesecloth, the armpits dark and sopping, the flat chest a nest of wet black hair.

  His teeth were like tombstones when he grinned.

  “You do it in bursts, don’t you?” he said. His voice was low, full of grit, like a man with throat cancer. “Me, too.”

  His shoulder was inches away, the steady pat-pat-pat-pat of his tennis shoes in rhythm with mine, even the steady intake and exhalation of his breath now part of mine. He wrapped his towel over his head and knotted it under his chin.

  “How you doin’?” I said.

  “Great. You ever run on the grinder at Quantico?” He turned his face to me. The eyes were cavernous, like chunks of lead shot.

  “No, I wasn’t in the Corps,” I said.

  “I knew a guy looked like you. That’s why I asked.”

  I didn’t answer. Out over the salt a single-engine plane was flying out of the sun, its wings tilting and bouncing hard in the wind.

  “Were you at Benning?” the man said.

  “Nope.”

  “I know you from somewhere.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe it was Bragg. No, I remember you now. Saigon, sixty-five. Bring Cash Alley. You could get on the pipe and laid for twenty bucks. Fucking A, I never forget a face.”

  I slowed to a walk, breathing hard, my chest running with sweat. He slowed with me.

  “What’s the game, partner?” I said.

  “It’s a small club. No game. A guy with two Hearts is a charter member in my view.” He pulled his towel off his head and mopped his face with it, then offered it to me. I saw Bootsie’s Toyota headed down the road toward us.

  I backed away from him, my eyes locked on his.

  “You take it easy, now,” I said.

  “You too, chief. Try a liquid prote
in malt. It’s like wrapping copper wire around your nuts, really puts an edge on your run.”

  I heard Bootsie brake behind me. I got in the passenger seat beside her. My bare back left a dark wet stain on the seat.

  “Dave, put on your shirt,” she said.

  “Let’s go.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  She glanced in the rearview mirror. The man with the tan cannon-ball head was mopping the inside of his thighs with the towel.

  “Yuck,” she said. “Who’s that?”

  “I have a feeling I just met Mr. Emile Pogue,” I answered.

  Chapter 13

  “THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN,” the sheriff said, his hands on his hips, looking at the manila folders and papers on my floor, the prise marks where a screwdriver had sprung the locks on the drawers in my desk and file cabinet. “We have to investigate the burglary of our own department.”

  It was 8 A.M. Monday morning and raining hard outside. The sheriff had just come into the office. I’d been there since seven.

  “What’s missing?” he asked.

  “Nothing that I can see. The files on Marsallus and Delia Landry are all over the floor, but they didn’t take anything.”

  “What about Helen’s files?”

  “She can’t find her spare house key. She’s going to have her locks changed today,” I said.

  He sat down in my swivel chair.

  “Do you mind?” he said.

  “Not at all.” I began picking up the scattered papers and photographs from the floor and arranging them in their case folders.

  He took a breath. “All right, Wally says the cleaning crew came in about eleven last night. They vacuumed, waxed the floors, dusted, did the rest rooms, and left around two A.M. He’s sure it was the regular bunch.”

  “It probably was.”

  “Then who got in here?”

  “My guess is somebody else wearing the same kind of uniform came in and picked the locks, probably right after the cleaning crew left. Nobody pays much attention to these guys, so the only people who might have recognized the impostors were gone.”