Burning Angel

  Luke pulls the trigger and the hammer snaps dryly on a defective cartridge. This time he cocks the hammer, feels the spring and cylinder and cogs lock into place, but the rage has gone, like a bird with hooked talons that has suddenly freed itself from its own prey and flown away, and he drops the pistol in the toilet bowl and walks into the larger room and the collective stare of people who realize they never really knew Luke Fontenot.

  But the man he leaves behind closes and opens his eyes one more time, then expels a red bubble of saliva from his mouth and stares sightlessly at an obscene word scrawled in pencil on the wall.

  “What happened to Wirtz’s gun?” I said.

  “Moleen found witnesses who saw Wirtz pull a gun.”

  “Mr. Moleen got money. You got money, you find anybody, anything you need.”

  “I see,” I said. It was starting to sprinkle on the bayou. A mother opened an umbrella over her child, and the two of them ran for the cover of the trees. “You mentioned a baby,” I said.

  “I done tole you, he ain’t want it.” Then his face became indescribably sad, unmasked, devoid of any defense or agenda. “What they call that, ‘trimester,” yeah, that’s it, third trimester, she went did it wit’ some man in Beaumont, cut up the baby inside her, cut her up, leave her walking on a cane, leave her with that baby crying in her head.”

  He cleaned off his place and walked in the rain toward his car.

  Chapter 17

  AFTER LUKE DROPPED me off at the department, I found a phone message from Clete Purcel in my mailbox. I called him at his office in New Orleans.

  “You still got Marsallus in the bag?” he said.

  “Yeah, he’s on a hunger strike now.”

  “The word’s out Johnny Carp doesn’t want anybody writing his bond.”

  “I was right, then. Johnny’s been after him from the jump.”

  “He’s probably already got somebody inside, or he’ll get a local guy to bail him out. Any way you cut it, I think Sonny’s floated into deep shit.”

  “How do you figure Johnny’s stake?” I said.

  “Something to do with money. I hear his toilet seats are inset with gold pesos. He owned a lot with a thirty-foot Indian mound on it and sold it for landfill. It’s a great life, isn’t it, mon?”

  Later, I gazed through the window at a rainbow arching across the sky into a bank of steel-colored clouds that were hung with wisps of rain. Sonny Boy was trussed and tagged and on the conveyor belt, like a pig about to be gutted, and the man who had kicked the machinery into gear was a police officer.

  I crumpled up a letter inviting me to speak to the Rotary Club and threw it against the wall.

  Moleen’s law office was in a refurbished white-columned Victorian home, shaded by oaks, down the street from the Shadows on East Main.

  I had to wait a half hour to see him. When the door opened, rather, when it burst back on its hinges, Julia Bertrand came through it as though she were emerging from the dry heat of a bake oven.

  “Why, Dave,” she said, her makeup stretching on her features as though it had been painted there by a blind man. “It’s so appropriate for you to be here. You fellows can kick the war around. Moleen has all this guilt but he never got to kill anybody. How unfair of the gods.”

  She brushed past me before I could answer.

  I picked up the paper bag by my feet and closed Moleen’s office door behind me. He sat behind a huge, dark red oak desk, his knitted brown tie pulled loose at the throat. His face was flushed, as though he had a fever.

  “How’s life, Moleen?”

  “What do you want?”

  “She’s still in jail.”

  He bit his thumbnail.

  “Moleen?”

  “I can’t do anything.”

  “She lives on your plantation. Bail her out. Nobody’ll question your motivation.”

  “Where the hell do you get off talking to me like that?” he said.

  I sat down without being asked. I set the paper bag containing the leg iron on his desk. The manacle yawned out of the bag like a rusty mouth.

  “Luke owned up to putting this in my truck. He said he doesn’t care if I tell you about it or not.”

  “I think you should see a therapist. I don’t mean that unkindly, either,” he said.

  “Luke’s pretty sharp for a guy who didn’t finish high school. He read a story in a magazine about a construction site that was shut down because there was an Indian mound on it. He thought he’d given me the means to put you out of business, whatever it is.”

  “It’s been a long day, Dave.”

  “Is it a gambling casino?”

  “Good-bye.”

  “That’s why you got rid of the cemetery.”

  “Is there anything else you want to say before you leave?”

  “Yeah. It’s quarter to five on Friday afternoon and she’s still in jail.”

  He looked at me distractedly, breathing with his mouth open, his chest sunken, his stomach protruding over his belt like a roll of bread dough. When I got up to go, three buttons were flashing hot pink on his telephone, as though disembodied and cacophonous voices were waiting to converge and shout at him simultaneously.

  After supper that night I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou, then I did three sets of military presses, dead lifts, and arm curls with my barbells in the backyard. The western sky was streaked with fire, the air warm and close and alive with insects. I tried to rethink the day, the week, the month, my involvement with Sonny Boy Marsallus and Ruthie Jean and Luke and Bertie Fontenot and Moleen Bertrand, until each of my thoughts was like a snapping dog.

  “What’s bothering you, Dave?” Alafair said behind me.

  “I didn’t see you there, Alf.”

  She held Tripod on her shoulder. He tilted his head at me and yawned.

  “Why you worrying?” she asked.

  “A guy’s in jail I don’t think belongs there.”

  “Why’s he in there then?”

  “It’s that fellow Marsallus.”

  “The one who shot the—“

  “That’s right. The guy who was looking out for me. Actually, looking out for all of us.”

  “Oh,” she said, and sat down on the bench, her hand motionless on Tripod’s back, an unspoken question in the middle of her face.

  “The man he shot died, Alf,” I said. “So Sonny’s down on a homicide beef. Things don’t always work out right.”

  Her eyes avoided mine. I could smell my own odor, hear my breathing in the stillness.

  “It’s not something I had a choice about, little guy,” I said.

  “You said you wouldn’t call me that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, then picked up Tripod in her arms and walked away.

  “Alafair?”

  She didn’t answer.

  I put on a T-shirt without showering and began hoeing weeds out of the vegetable garden by the coulee. The air was humid and mauve colored and filled with angry birds.

  “Time for an iced tea break,” Bootsie said.

  “I’ll be inside in a minute.”

  “Cool your jets, Streak.”

  “What’s with Alf?”

  “You’re her father. She associates you with perfection.”

  I chipped at the weeds with the corner of the hoe. The shaft felt hard and dry and full of sharp edges in my hands.

  “Moleen’s the problem, Dave. Not Sonny,” Bootsie said.

  “What?”

  “You think he’s a hypocrite because he left the black woman in jail. Now maybe you’re wondering about yourself and Sonny Boy.”

  I looked up at her, squinted through the sweat in my eyes. I wanted to keep thudding the hoe into the dirt, let her words go by me as though they were illogical and unworthy of recognition. But there was a sick feeling in my stomach.

  I propped my hands on the hoe handle, blotted my eyes on my forearm.
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  “I’m a police officer,” I said. “I can’t revise what happened. Sonny killed a man, Boots. He says he’s killed others.”

  “Then put it out of your mind,” she said, and went back inside the house.

  Across the fence in my neighbor’s field, I saw an owl swoop low out of the sun’s last red light and, in a flurry of wings, trap and then scissor a field mouse in its beak. I could hear the mouse’s voice squeaking helplessly as the owl flew into the sun.

  Saturday morning I worked until noon at the bait shop, counting change twice to get it right, feigning interest in conversations I hardly heard. Then I put a Dr. Pepper and two bottles of beer in a paper bag, with two ham and onion sandwiches, called the sheriff, and asked him to meet me up the road by the four corners.

  He walked down the bank in a pair of floppy khaki shorts with zipper pockets, a white straw cowboy hat, and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off at the armpits. He carried a spinning rod that looked like it belonged to a child.

  “Beautiful day for it,” he said, lifting his face in the breeze.

  The boat dipped heavily when he got into the bow. The tops of his arms were red with sunburn and unusually big for a man who did administrative work.

  I took us through a narrow channel into the swamp, cut the engine, and let the boat drift on its wake into a small black lagoon surrounded with flooded cypress. A deserted cabin, built on pilings, was set back in the trees. A rowboat that was grayish blue with rot was tied to the porch and half-submerged in the water.

  The sheriff bit into a ham sandwich. “I got to admit this beats hitting golf balls in sand traps,” he said.

  But he was an intelligent and perceptive man whose weekend humor served poorly the concern in his eyes.

  Then I said it all, the way as a child I took my confused and labored thoughts into the confessional and tried to explain what both my vocabulary and loneliness made unexplainable. Except now, in order to undo a wrong, I was—

  He said the word for me.

  “Lying, Dave. We’ve never had that problem between us. I have a hard time dealing with this, podna.”

  “The guy’s grandiose, he’s a huckster, he’s got electrodes in his temples. But he’s down on the wrong beef.”

  “I don’t give a goddamn what he is. You’re violating your oath as a police officer. You’re walking on the edges of perjury as well.”

  I looked into the diffused green and yellow light on the rim of the lagoon. “The eye remembers after the fact sometimes,” I said.

  “You saw the cut-down twelve-gauge under the guy’s coat? You felt you were in danger?”

  “I’ll put my revised statement in your mailbox this afternoon.”

  “You missed your calling over in Vietnam. You remember those monks who used to set themselves on fire? You were born for it, Dave.”

  “Marsallus doesn’t belong in prison. At least not for popping the guy in front of my house.”

  The sheriff set his fishing rod across his thighs and pulled up the anchor without my asking him. He stared into the water and the black silt that swirled out of the bottom, then wiped his face with his hand as though he were temporarily erasing an inevitable conclusion from his thoughts.

  Monday morning I was suspended from the department without pay.

  Monday night I drove out to the Bertrand plantation and returned the spoon Bertie Fontenot had given me. She fanned herself with a ragged magazine in the swing, her breasts hanging like watermelons inside her cotton dress.

  “It’s the right time period, but I don’t think pirates buried those spoons in your garden,” I said.

  “They growed there with my radish seeds?”

  “The S on those spoons makes me think they’re from the Segura plantation on the lake. During the Civil War, a lot of people buried their silverware and coins to keep them from the Yankees, Bertie.”

  “They should have buried themselves while they was at it.”

  I looked at the lights inside the house next door. Two shadows moved across the shades.

  “A lawyer come down from Lafayette and got her out of jail this morning,” she said.

  “Which lawyer?”

  “I ain’t ax his name. I seen him out here with Moleen once. The one look like he got grease on his bald head.”

  “Jason Darbonne.”

  “I’m going inside now. The mosquitoes is eating me up.” She paused in the square of light the door made, the white ends of her hair shiny with oil. “They gonna run us off, ain’t they?”

  I had a half dozen answers, but all of them would have been self-serving and ultimately demeaning. So I simply said good night and walked to my truck by the grove of gum trees.

  The moon was down, and in the darkness the waving cane looked like a sea of grass on the ocean’s floor. In my mind’s eye I saw the stubble burning in the late fall, the smoke roiling out of the fire in sulphurous yellow plumes, and I wanted to believe that all those nameless people who may have lain buried in the field—African and West Indian slaves, convicts leased from the penitentiary, Negro laborers whose lives were used up for someone else’s profit-would rise with the smoke and force us to acknowledge their humanity and its inextricable involvement and kinship with our own.

  But they were dead, their teeth scattered by plowshares, their bones ground by harrow and dozer blade into detritus, and all the fury and mire that had constricted their hearts and tolled their days were now reduced to a chip of vertebrae tangled in the roots of a sugarcane stalk.

  Chapter 18

  SONNY BOY WAS sprung and I was now the full-time operator of a bait shop and boat-rental business that, on a good year, cleared fifteen thousand dollars.

  He found me at Red Lerille’s Gym in Lafayette.

  “Jail wasn’t that bad on you, Sonny. You look sharp,” I said.

  “Get out of my face with that patronizing attitude, Dave.” He chewed gum and wore a tailored gray suit with zoot slacks and a blue suede belt and a T-shirt.

  “I’m off the case, off the job, out of your problems, Sonny.”

  I’d forgotten my speed bag gloves at home, but I began working the bag anyway, creating a circular motion with each fist, throbbing the bag harder and harder against the circular board it was suspended from.

  “Who appointed you my caretaker?” he asked.

  I skinned my knuckles on the bag, hit it harder, faster. He grabbed it with both hands.

  “Lose the attitude. I’m talking to you. Who the fuck says you got to quit your job because of me?” he said.

  “I didn’t quit, I’m suspended. The big problem here is somebody pulled you down from your cross and you can’t stand it.”

  “I got certain beliefs and I don’t like that kind of talk, Dave.”

  I opened and closed my palms at my sides. My knuckles stung, my wrists pounded with blood. The gym echoed with the smack of gloves on leather, the ring of basketballs against the hardwood floor. Sonny’s face was inches from mine, his breath hot on my skin.

  “Would you step back, please? I don’t want to hit you with the bag,” I said.

  “I don’t let anybody take my bounce, Dave.”

  “That’s copacetic, Sonny. I can relate to it. Hey, I don’t want to offend you, but you’re not supposed to be in here with street shoes on. They mark up the floors.”

  “You can be a wiseass all you want, Dave. Emile Pogue is a guy who once put a flamethrower down a spider hole full of civilians. You think you’re on suspension? In whose world?”

  He walked across the gym floor, through a group of sweating basketball players who looked like their muscles were pumped full of hardening concrete.

  I hit the speed bag one more time and felt a strip of skin flay back off my knuckle.

  It rained hard the next morning. Lightning struck in the field behind my house and my neighbor’s cows had bunched in the coulee and were lowing inside the sound of the rain. I read the paper on the gallery, then went back inside to answer the phone.


  “You got to hear me, Dave,” Sonny said. “Once they take me out, it’ll be your turn, then the woman cop, what’s-her-name, Helen Soileau, then maybe Purcel, then maybe your wife. They don’t leave loose ends.”

  “All right, Sonny, you made your point.”

  “Another thing, this is personal, I’m no guy on a cross. In medieval times, I would have been one of those guys selling pigs’ bones for saints’ relics. The reality is I got innocent people’s blood on my hands.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, partner.”

  “I’m not going away, Dave. You’ll see me around.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. He didn’t answer. For some reason I imagined him on a long, empty beach where the waves were lashed by wind but made no sound. “Good-bye, Sonny,” I said, and replaced the receiver in the cradle.

  An hour later the thunder had stopped and the rain was falling steadily on the gallery’s tin roof. Clete’s chartreuse Cadillac convertible, with fins and grillwork like a torn mouth, bounced through the chuckholes in the road and turned into my drive. He ran through the puddles under the trees, his keys and change jingling in his slacks, one hand pressed on top of his porkpie hat.

  “They gave you the deep six, huh, big mon?” he said. He sat in the swing and wiped his face on his sleeve.

  “Who told you?”

  “Helen.”

  “You’re on a first-name basis now?”

  “She met me at my office last night. She doesn’t like seeing her partner get reamed. I don’t either.” He looked at his watch.

  “Don’t put your hand in it, Clete.”

  “You afraid your ole podjo’s going to leave gorilla shit on the furniture?”

  I made a pocket of air in my cheek.

  “You want to go partners in my agency?” he said. “Hey, I need the company. I’m a grunt for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater. My temp’s an ex-nun. My best friends are mutts in the city prison. The desk sergeant at First District wouldn’t spit in my mouth.”