Burning Angel

  Then in the middle of the night he sat naked on the side of the bed, his skin so white it almost glowed, his forearms on his thighs, his confession of betrayal and hypocrisy so spontaneous and devoid of ulterior motive that she knew she would have to forgive whatever injury he had done her or otherwise his sin would become her own.

  She rose to her knees, pressed him back on the pillow, then mounted him and kissed his face and throat, made love to him almost as though he were a child.

  When the light broke against the window curtains in the morning and she heard the sound of diesel trucks outside, car doors slamming, people talking loudly because they didn’t care if others slept or not, all the hot, busy noise of another day in the wrong part of town, she could feel the nocturnal intimacy of their time together slipping away from her, and she knew he would shower soon, drink coffee with her, be fond, even affectionate, while the attention in his eyes wandered, then begin to refocus on the world that awaited him with all the guarantees of his race and position as soon as he left the motel.

  But instead he drove them to Galveston, where they ate lunch at a hotel restaurant on the beach, rented a boat and fished for speckled trout in the deep drop-off beyond the third sandbar, walked barefoot along the edge of the surf by the old World War I fort at sunset, and on a whim flew to Monterrey to watch a bullfight the next afternoon.

  By the time they returned to Lafayette, Ruthie Jean believed her life had turned a corner she had not thought possible.

  “He’s leaving his wife?” I said.

  “He give his word. He cain’t stay with Miss Julia no more,” Luke said.

  I didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “You’re a smart man, Luke. Where’s he going to take his law practice?”

  “He sell the property, they ain’t gonna have to worry.”

  “I see.”

  I had an indescribably sad feeling inside that I could not translate into words. Then I saw Ruthie Jean come out of Bertie’s house and walk on her cane toward us. She looked beautiful. Her hair was brushed in thick swirls that curved on her high cheekbones, and the low-cut white knit dress she wore showed every undulation in her body. When she recognized me in the gloom, she went through the back door of the house.

  “Are y’all staying here now?” I asked Luke.

  “Yes, suh.”

  “But it was Julia Bertrand who evicted y’all, wasn’t it?”

  He studied the grove of gum trees at the end of the road.

  “So it must be with her knowledge y’all are back here. Does that make sense to you?” I said.

  “Talk to Aint Bertie, Mr. Dave.”

  “I have too much respect for her. No offense meant. I’ll see you, Luke.”

  “Moleen Bertrand gonna keep his word.”

  When I started my truck he was standing alone in his yard, a jail-wise hustler, pulled from the maw of our legal killing apparatus, who grieved over his elderly aunt and put his trust in white people, whom a behaviorist would expect him to fear and loathe.

  I wondered why historians had to look to the Roman arena for the seeming inexhaustible reservoirs of faith that can exist in the human soul.

  The next evening, after I had closed the bait shop and dock, I put on my running shoes and gym shorts and worked out with my weights in the backyard. I did three sets of curls, dead lifts, and military presses, then jogged through the tunnel of trees by the bayou’s edge. The sky was the color of gunmetal, the sun a crack of fire on the western horizon. I came out of the trees, the wind in my face, and headed for the drawbridge.

  For some reason I wasn’t even surprised when he came out of the shadows and fell in next to me, his tennis shoes powdering the dust in sync with mine, the granite head hunched down on his oily shoulders as though the neck had been surgically removed, his evenly measured breath warm with the smell of beer and tobacco.

  “I saw you working out on the speed bag at Red Lerille’s Gym,” he said. “The trick’s to do it without gloves.” He held out his square, blunt hands, his words bouncing up and down in his throat. “I used to wrap mine with gauze soaked in lye water. Puts a sheath of callus on the outside like dry fish scale. The problem today is, some faggot cuts his hand on the bag, then you skin your hand on the same bag and you got AIDS, that’s what these cocksuckers are doing to the country.”

  “What’s your problem, Pogue?”

  “You gonna dime me?”

  “I’m not a cop anymore, remember?”

  “So the bar’s open,” he said, and pointed toward a brown Nissan parked by the side of the road.

  “I’m tied up.”

  “I got the cooler on the backseat. Take a break, chief. Nobody’s after your cherry,” he said.

  Up ahead I could see the drawbridge and the bridge tender inside his little lighted house. Emile Pogue tugged his cooler out onto the road, stuck his corded forearm down into the water and melting ice, and pulled out two bottles of Coors.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  He twisted off the cap on one bottle and drank it half-empty. His torso looked as taut and knurled as the skin on a pumpkin, crisscrossed with stitched scars, webbed with sinew like huge cat’s whiskers above the rib cage. He worked his arms through a sleeveless, olive green shirt.

  “You don’t like me?” he said.

  “No.”

  He pinched his nostrils, flexed his lips back on his gums, looked up and down the road. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You put a stop to what’s happening, I’ll rat-fuck any grease ball you want, then I’m gone.”

  “Stop what?”

  “That demented guy, the one looks like a dildo you scrambled, Patsy Dapolito, he thinks Johnny Carp’s got a hit on him. It ain’t coming from Johnny, though.” His breath was like a slap, his body auraed with a fog of dried sweat and testosterone. He tapped me on the chest with his finger. “Look at me when I’m talking to you. Sonny killed my brother. So I had a personal and legitimate hard-on for the guy.”

  “I hear you.”

  “But that ain’t why Sonny’s back.”

  I stared at him, open-mouthed. His eyes had the dead quality of ball bearings. He breathed loudly through his nose.

  “Back?” I said.

  “Get you some Q-Tips, open up the wax. Don’t tell me what I seen. Look, chief, till you been down in the bush with the Indians, done a few mushrooms with these fuckers, I’m talking about on a stone altar where their ancestors used to tear out people’s hearts, don’t knock what somebody else tells you he sees.”

  “You lost me.”

  “I saw him at a camp I use out in the Atchafalaya. I looked out in the trees, inside all this hanging moss, there was a swarm of moths or butterflies, except they were on fire, then they formed a big cluster in the shape of a guy, and the guy walked right through the trunk of a tree into the water. It was Sonny Marsallus, he was burning like hundreds of little tongues of flame under the water. I ain’t the only one seen it, either.”

  His hand was squeezed like a huge paw around his beer bottle, his mouth an expressionless slit.

  “I think we’re talking about an overload of acid or steroids, Emile,” I said.

  “You get word to Sonny,” he said. “That Mennonite’s words ... they were a curse. I’m saying maybe I’m damned. I need time to get out of it.”

  His breath was rife with funk, his eyes jittering, riveted on mine.

  “What Mennonite?” I said.

  Sometimes you pull aside the veil and look into the Pit. What follows is my best reconstruction of his words.

  Chapter 26

  I HAD THIRTY guys strung out on the trail in the dark. It sounded like a traveling junkyard. I stopped them at the river, told the translator, Look, we got a problem here, two more klicks we’re in Pinkville South, know what I’m saying, we go in, make our statement, then boogie on back across the river, the beer is five hours colder and we let the dudes from Amnesty International count up the score. In and out, that’s the rhythm, none of our p
eople get hurt, even the volunteers we took out of the last ville don’t need to walk through any toe-poppers.

  I’m talking to guys here who think the manual of arms is a Nicaraguan baseball player.

  Look, ace, you got to understand, I didn’t target the ville, it targeted itself. They were giving food to the people who were killing us. We warned them, we warned the American priest running the orphanage. Nobody listened. I didn’t have no grief with the Mennonite broad. I saw her in the city once, I tipped my hat to her. I admired her. She was a homely little Dutch wisp of a thing working in a shithole most people wouldn’t take time to spit on. The trouble came from a couple of liaison guys, officers who spent some time at a special school for greasers at Benning, listen, chief, I was an adviser, got me, I didn’t get paid for interfering, you see these guys walk a dude into a tin shed that’s got a metal bed frame in it, they close the door behind them, you’ll hear the sounds way out in the jungle and pretend it’s just monkeys shrieking.

  Ellos! they’d yell when we came into the ville, and then try to hide. That was our name. As far as these poor bastards knew, I could have been Pancho Villa or Stonewall Jackson. Look, it got out of control. We were supposed to set up a perimeter, search for weapons, take one guy out in particular, this labor organizer, one object lesson, that’s all, they used to call it a Christmas tree, a few ornaments hanging off the branches in the morning, you with me, but the guy runs inside the church and the priest starts yelling at our people out on the steps, and pop pop pop, what was I supposed to do, man? Suddenly I got a feeding frenzy on my hands.

  You got to look at the overview to see my problem. It’s in a cup of mountains, with nobody to see what’s going on. That can be a big temptation. In the center of the ville is this stucco church with three little bell towers on it. The priest looks like a pool of black paint poured down the steps. The streets run off in all directions, like spokes on a wheel, and the guys did the priest are scared and start popping anybody in sight. Before I know it, they’re down all the spokes, deep in the ville, the circus tent’s on fire and I’m one fucking guy.

  Geese and chickens are exploding out of the yards, pigs squealing, women screaming, people getting pulled into the street by their hair. She comes around a corner, like she’s walking against a wind and it takes everything in her to keep walking toward the sounds that make most people cover their ears and hide. I ain’t ever going to forget the look in her face, she had these ice blue eyes and hair like white corn silk and blood on her blouse, like it was thrown from an ink pen, but she saw it all, man, just like that whole street and the dead people in it zoomed right through her eyes onto a piece of film. The problem got made right there.

  I pushed her hard. She had bones like a bird, you could hold her up against a candle and count them with your finger, I bet, and her face was a little pale triangle and I knew why she was a religious woman and I shoved her again. “This is an accident. It’s ending now. You haul your butt out of here, Dutchie,” I said.

  I squeezed her arm, twisted her in the other direction, scraped her against the wall and saw the pain jump in her face. But they’re hard to handle when they’re light; they don’t have any weight you can use against them. She pulled out of my hands, slipped past me, even cut me with her nails so she could keep looking at the things she wasn’t supposed to see, that were going to mess all of us up. Her lips moved but I couldn’t understand the words, the air between the buildings was sliced with muzzle flashes, like red scratches against the dark, and you could see empty shell casings shuttering across the lamplight in the windows. Then I heard the blades on the Huey before I felt the downdraft wash over us, and I watched it set down in a field at the end of this stone street and the two officers from the special school at Benning waiting for me, their cigars glowing inside the door, and I didn’t have any doubt how it was going to go.

  They said it in Spanish, then in English. Then in Spanish and English together. “It is sad, truly. But this one from Holland is communista.

  She is also very serio with friends in the left-wing press. Entiende, Señor Pogue?”

  It wasn’t a new kind of gig. You throw a dozen bodies out at high altitudes. Sometimes they come right through a roof. Maybe it saves lives down the line. But she was alive when they brought her onboard. Look, chief, I wasn’t controlling any of it. My choices were I finish the mission, clean up these guys’ shit and not think about what’s down below, because the sun was over the ridges now and you could see the tile roof of the church and the body of the labor organizer hanging against the wall and Indians running around like an ants’ nest that’s been stepped on, or stay behind and wait for some seriously pissed-off rebels to come back into the ville and see what we’d done.

  Two guys tried to lift her up and throw her out, but she fought with them. So they started hitting her, both of them, then kicking her with their boots. I couldn’t take it, man. It was like somebody opened a furnace door next to my head. This stuff had to end. She knew it, too, she saw it in my eyes even before I picked her up by her shoulders, almost like I was saving her, her hands resting on my cheeks, all the while staring into my eyes, even while I was carrying her to the door, even when she was framed against the sky, like she was inside a painting, her hair whipping in the wind, her face jerking back toward the valley floor and what was waiting for her, no stopping any of it now, chief, and I could see white lines in her scalp and taste the dryness and fear on her breath, but her lips were moving again while I squeezed her arms tighter and moved her farther out into a place where nobody had to make decisions anymore, her eyes like holes full of blue sky, and this time I didn’t need to hear the words, I could read them on her mouth, they hung there in front of me even while the wind tore her out of my hands and she became just a speck racing toward the earth: You must change your way.

  Chapter 27

  CLETE AND I had breakfast the next morning at Victor’s on Main. It was cool inside, and the overhead fans made shadows on the stamped tin ceiling.

  “What’d he do then?” Clete said.

  “Got in his car and drove away.”

  “He confesses to a murder, tells you he sees flames burning under the water, then just drives away?”

  “No, he repeated the Mennonite woman’s words, then said, “How’s that for a mind-fuck, chief?”

  The restaurant was almost empty, and a black woman was putting fresh flowers on the tables. Clete folded and unfolded his palms, bit down on the corner of his lip.

  “You think Sonny’s back?” I asked.

  “Back from what? You don’t come back. You’re either alive or you’re dead.”

  “What set you off?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Look, somebody took a shot at Patsy Dap. Maybe with a nine-millimeter. Pogue says it didn’t come from Johnny Carp,” I said.

  His green eyes lingered on mine.

  “You didn’t?”

  I said. “You said it a long time ago. They’re all head cases The object is to point them at each other,” he said. “You can’t orchestrate the behavior of psychopaths. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I did it when I had a few beers. I told you, nobody fucks my podjo.” He rolled his fork back and forth on the tablecloth, clicking it hard into the wood.

  “What’s worrying you?” I said.

  “Pogue’s a pro, he’s got ice water in his veins. When’s the last time a guy like that told you a dead man’s trying to cap him?”

  I went to a noon AA meeting and tried to turn over my problems to my Higher Power. I wasn’t doing a good job of it. I had stomped and degraded Johnny Giacano in front of his crew, his friends and family. Were I still a police officer, I would have a marginal chance of getting away with it. But because of my new status, there was no question about the choices Johnny had before him. He would either redeem himself in an unmistakable, dramatic way or be cannibalized by his underlings.

  As assassins, the Mafia has no peer. Their experience and sophis
tication go back to the Napoleonic wars; the level of physical violence imposed on their victims is usually grotesque and far beyond any practical need; the conviction rate of their button men is a joke.

  The hit itself almost always comes about in an insidious fashion. The assassin is trusted, always has access, extends an invitation for a quiet dinner with friends, an evening at the track, a fishing trip out on the salt. The victim never suspects the gravity of his situation until, in the blink of an eye, he’s looking into a face that’s branded with an ageless design, lighted with energies that are not easily satiated.

  I went to two meetings a day every day that week. When I got home Friday evening, Luke Fontenot was waiting for me in the bait shop.

  He sat at a table in the corner, in the gloom, a cup of coffee in front of him. Batist was mopping down the counter when I came in. He looked back at me and shrugged, then dropped his rag in a bucket and went outside and lit a cigar on the dock.

  “Aint Bertie got rid of her lawyer and signed a quit ... what d’ you call it?” Luke said.

  “A quitclaim?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  He looked smaller if I the weak light through the screened windows. His hair grew in small ringlets on the back of his neck.

  “They give her twenty-five t’ousand dollars,” he said.

  “Does she feel okay with that?”

  “She don’t want nothing to happen to me or Ruthie Jean.”

  His eyes didn’t meet mine. His face was empty, his mouth audibly dry when he spoke, like that of a person who’s just experienced a moment for which he has little preparation.