Burning Angel

  “That lawyer from Lafayette, the one use to work for Sweet Pea Chaisson, Jason Darbonne, and some men from New Orleans come out to the place last night,” he said. “They was standing by the gum trees, where the graves use to be, pointing out toward the train track. I went outside and ax them what they want. They say we got to be gone in thirty days, that strip of houses ain’t gonna be nothing but broken bo’rds and tore-up water pipe.

  “I tole them I ain’t heard Moleen Bertrand tell me that, and the last I heard Moleen Bertrand own this plantation.

  “One of them men from New Orleans say, “We was gonna copy you on all the documents, boy, but we didn’t have your address.”

  “I said, ‘Moleen Bertrand tole my aunt she can stay on long as she likes.’

  “They didn’t even hear me. They went on talking like I wasn’t there, talking about pouring a foundation, cutting roads down to the train track, doing something with electric transformers. Then one guy stops the others and looks at me. “Here’s twenty dollars. Go down to the sto’ and get us some cold beer. Keep a six-pack for yourself.”

  “You know what I said? “I ain’t got my car.” That’s all the words I could find, like I didn’t have no other kind of words, except to make an excuse for not running their errands.

  “So the guy say, “Then go on in the house. You got no bidness out here.”

  “I said, “Moleen Bertrand done already talked to Aint Bertie. Tall wasn’t there, so maybe y’all don’t know about it.”

  “Then the same guy, he walked real close to me, right up in my face, he was a big, blond guy with hair tonic on and muscles about to bust out of his shirt, he say, like we was the only two people on the earth and he knew exactly who he was talking to, he say, “Listen, you dumb nigger, you open your mouth again and you’re gonna crawl back up those steps on your hands and knees.” “

  Luke raised his coffee cup, then set it back down without drinking from it. He looked through the screen window at the line of cypress trees across the bayou, at the sky above it that was like a crimson-streaked ink wash. His face had the lifeless quality of tallow.

  “But that’s not it, is it?” I asked.

  “What ain’t?”

  “You’ve known white men like that before. You were stand-up even in the death house, Luke.”

  “I called Moleen Bertrand at his office this morning. His secretary say he’s in conference. I waited till eleven o’clock and called again. This time she say let me get your number. At three o’clock he still ain’t called back. The next time I tried, she say he done gone for the day. I axed if he gone home. She waited a long time, then she say, No, he playing racquetball over in Lafayette.

  “I knew where he play at. I was going in the front door when him and three other men was coming out, carrying canvas bags on their shoulders, their hair wet and combed, all of them smiling and stepping aside to let a lady pass.

  “Moleen Bertrand shook hands with me and gone right on by. Just like that. Just like I was some black guy maybe he seen around once in a while.”

  I got up from the table and turned on the string of lights over the dock. I heard Batist folding up the Cinzano umbrellas over the spool tables. Luke opened and closed his hand on a fifty-cent piece in his palm. Its edges left a circular print almost like an incision in his gold skin. I sat back down across from him.

  “I don’t think Moleen is in control of his life,” I said.

  “He saved me from the electric chair. Didn’t have nothing to gain for it, either. How come he start lying now?”

  “He’s involved with evil men, Luke. Get away from him.”

  “I ain’t worried about me.”

  “I know you’re not,” I said. Then I said, “Where is she?”

  “Out at the house, packing her new clothes, talking about some place in the Islands they’re going to, pretending everything all right with Aint Bertie, pretending he fixing to come by anytime now.”

  “I wish I had an answer for you.”

  “I ain’t ax you for one. I just wanted you to know something befo’hand. It ain’t gonna end like Moleen want it to.”

  “You’d better explain that.”

  “You don’t know Ruthie Jean, suh. Nobody do. Specially not Moleen Bertrand.”

  He went out the screen door and walked down the dock under the string of light bulbs. I picked up the fifty-cent piece he had left for the coffee. It felt warm and moist from the pressure of his hand.

  Saturday morning I was reading the newspaper on the front steps when Helen Soileau’s cruiser came up the dirt road and turned in my drive.

  She closed the car door behind her and walked through the shade like a soldier on a mission, her dark blue slacks and starched white shirt, badge and black gunbelt and spit-shined black shoes and nickel-plated revolver as unmistakable a martial warning as the flat stare and the thick upper arms that rolled like a man’s.

  “Who’s the in-your-face bitch-woman at your office?” she said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me, the one with the mouth on her.”

  “Clete hired her. She didn’t strike me that way, though.”

  “Well, tell her to pull the splinters out of her ass or learn how to talk on the telephone.”

  “How’s life?” I said, hoping the subject would change.

  “I’m working a double homicide with Rufus Arceneaux. I never quite appreciated the expression ‘dirt sandwich’ before.”

  “It sounds like you really got a jump start on the day. You want breakfast?”

  She hooked one thumb in her gunbelt and thought about it. Then she winked. “You’re a sweetie,” she said.

  I fixed coffee and hot milk and bowls of Grape-Nuts and blueberries for us on the picnic table in the backyard.

  “There’s something weird going on with Fart, Barf, and Itch,” she said. “The RAG in New Orleans called me yesterday and asked if I’d heard anything about Sonny Boy Marsallus. I said, “Yeah, he’s dead.” He says, “We think that, too, but his body’s never washed up. The tide was coming in when he got it.”

  “I say, “Think?”

  “This guy is a real comedian. He says, “You remember that army-surplus character you bent out of round with your baton? Guy with a haircut like a white bowling ball, always chewing gum, Tommy Carrol? Somebody found him working late in his store last night and fried his mush.”

  “Sorry, I don’t remember a baton,” I say.

  “He thought that was real funny. He says, “Tommy Carrol did more than sell khaki underwear. He was mixed up with Noriega and some dope operations in Panama. After the ME dug him out of the ashes and opened him up, he found a nine-millimeter slug in what was left of his brain.”

  “I knew what was coming but I go, “So?”

  “He says, “I want to see if we got a match with the rounds from Marsallus’s Smith & Wesson. Y’all still have those in your evidence locker, don’t you?”

  “I say, Sure, no problem, glad to do it. But guess who the department just hired to catalog evidence? Kelso’s little brother threw them out.

  “I called the comedian back and told him he was out of luck, then asked why he thought Marsallus could be involved. It was strange, he was quiet a long time, then he said, “I guess I’d like to believe Sonny’s not dead. I met him years ago in Guatemala City. He was a good guy.”

  “He’s heard something,” I said. “Those ex-military guys believe Sonny’s still out there.” I told her about my encounter with Emile Pogue by the drawbridge.

  “Why do they want the Bertrand plantation?” she said.

  “One day the country is going to bottom out and get rid of the dope trade. The smart ones are putting their money somewhere else.”

  “In what?”

  “You got me,” I said.

  “Come back with the department.”

  “The sheriff’s the man.”

  She grinned and didn’t reply.

  “What’s that mean?” I said.

/>   “He needs you. With guys like Rufus and Kelso and his brother on the payroll, give me a break. Stop thinking with your penis, Dave.” She put a spoonful of cereal and milk in her mouth.

  That evening I drove past Spanish Lake and bought a Dr. Pepper at a convenience store by the four corners in Cade and drank it in the cab of my truck. It had rained hard that afternoon, and the air was bright and clear and the sugarcane on the Bertrand acreage rippled in the wind like prairie grass.

  I was convinced this was where the story would end, one way or another, just as it had started here when Jean Lafitte and his blackbirders had sailed up Bayou Teche under a veiled moon with their cargo of human grief.

  Moleen didn’t see it. His kind seldom did. They hanged Nat Turner and tanned his skin for wallets, and used their educations to feign a pragmatic cynicism and float above the hot toil of the poor whose fate they saw as unrelated to their own lives. The consequence was they passed down their conceit and arrogance like genetic heirlooms.

  I wondered what it would be like to step through a window in time, into another era, into an age of belief, and march alongside Granny Lee’s boys, most of them barefoot and emaciated as scarecrows, so devoted to their concept of honor and their bonnie blue flag they deliberately chose not to foresee the moment when their lives would be scattered by grapeshot like wildflowers blown from their stems.

  As I finished my cold drink, I looked again at the red-tinged light on the fields and wondered if history might not be waiting to have its way with all of us.

  Chapter 28

  MOST PEOPLE THINK it’s a romantic and intriguing business. The imagination calls to mind the wonderful radio shows of the forties, featuring private investigators who were as gallant as their female clients were beautiful and cunning.

  The reality is otherwise.

  When I went into the office Monday morning Clete was talking to two men in their twenties who were slumped forward in their metal chairs, tipping their cigarette ashes on the floor, looking at their watches, at the secretary, at the door. One of them had three slender blue teardrops tattooed by the corner of his eye; the second man was blade-faced, his skin the color and texture of the rind on a smoked ham.

  “So you guys got your bus tickets, your money for lunch, all the paperwork in case anybody stops you,” Clete said, his voice neutral, his eyes empty. “But y’all check in with Nig soon as you arrive in New Orleans. We’re clear on that, right?”

  “What if Nig ain’t in?” the man with the teardrops said.

  “He’s in,” Clete said.

  “What if he ain’t?”

  “Let me try it another way,” Clete said. He popped a crick out of his neck, laced his fingers on his desk blotter, stared through the front window rather than address his listener. “You’re probably going to skate, even though you raped a two-year-old girl. Primarily because the child is too young to testify and the mother, who is your girlfriend, was too wiped out on acid to remember what happened. But the big factor here is Nig wrote your bond because you’re willing to dime your brother, who skipped his court appearance and hung Nig out to dry for a hundred large.

  “What does that all mean to a mainline con and graduate of Camp J like yourself? It means we don’t have bars on the windows anymore. It also means you report in to Nig, you stay at the flop he’s got rented for you, or I hunt your skinny, worthless ass down with a baseball bat.” Clete opened his palm, held it out in the air. “Are we’re connecting here?”

  The man with the teardrops studied his shoes, worked an incisor tooth against his lip, his eyes slitted with private thoughts.

  “How about you, Troyce? Are you squared away on this?” Clete said to the second man.

  “Sure.” He drew in on his cigarette, and you could hear the fire gather heat and crawl up the dry paper.

  “If the woman you branded stands up, Nig will continue your bond on the appeal. But you got to get UA-ed every day. Don’t come back to the halfway house with dirty urine, you okay with that, Troyce?” Clete said.

  “She’s not gonna stand up.”

  “You boys need to catch your bus, check out the countryside between here and New Orleans,” Clete said.

  The blade-faced man rose from his chair, offered his hand to Clete. Clete took it, looked at nothing when he shook it. Later, he went into the lavatory and came back out, drying his hands hard with a paper towel, his breath loud in his nose. He wadded up the towel and flipped it sideways toward the wastebasket, the unshaved back of his neck stippled with roses, as swollen against his collar as a fireplug.

  An hour later I was walking toward my truck when Helen Soileau angled her cruiser out of the traffic and pulled to the curb. She leaned over and popped open the passenger door.

  “Get in,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The old man had a heart attack. He got up to fix a sandwich at four this morning, the next thing his wife heard him crash across the kitchen table.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “They had to use the electric paddles. They almost didn’t get him back.”

  I looked through the windshield at the quiet flow of traffic on the street, the people gazing in shop windows, and felt, almost with a sense of shame, my unacknowledged and harbored resentment lift like a film of ash from a dead coal. “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “Iberia General ... Hold on, that’s not where we’re going. He wants us to interview a guy in a county lockup in east Texas.”

  “Us?”

  “You got it, sweet cakes.”

  “I need to talk with him, Helen.”

  “Later, after we get back. This time we’re doing it his way. Come on, shake it, you’re on the clock, Streak.”

  The county prison was an old, white brick two-story building just across the Sabine River, north of Orange, Texas. From the second-story reception room Helen and I could look down onto the exercise yard, the outside brick wall spiraled with razor wire, and the surrounding fields that were a shimmering violent green from the spring rains. Two guards in khaki uniforms without guns crossed the yard and unlocked a cast-iron, slitted door that bled rust from the jamb, and snipped waist and leg chains on a barefoot leviathan of a man in jailhouse whites named Jerry Jeff Hooker who trudged between them as though a cannonball were hung from his scrotum.

  When the two guards, both of them narrow-eyed and cheerless piney woods crackers, brought him into the reception room and sat him down in front of a scarred wood table in front of us and slipped another chain around his belly and locked it behind the chair, which was bolted to the floor, I said it would be all right if they waited outside.

  “Tell that to the nigger trusty whose arm he busted backward on a toilet bowl,” one of them said, and took up his position five feet behind Hooker.

  “You want to run it by us, Jerry Jeff?” I said.

  His skin was as pale as dough, his massive arms scrolled with green dragons, his pale blond eyebrows ridged like a Neanderthal’s. “I was the wheel man on the Marsallus hit,” he said. “I testify against Emile Pogue, I walk on the vehicular homicide.”

  “Wheelman?” I said.

  “I drove. Emile chopped him.”

  “Witnesses say there were two shooters,” Helen said.

  “There was only one,” he said.

  “We have trouble buying your statement, Jerry Jeff,” I said.

  “That’s your problem,” he said.

  “You’re copping to a murder beef,” Helen said.

  “Marsallus ain’t dead.”

  I felt my heart quicken. He looked at my face, as though seeing it for the first time.

  “He was still flopping around in the waves when we left,” he said.

  “A guy in New Orleans, Tommy Carrol, got clipped the other night with a nine-Mike. That’s Marsallus’s trademark.”

  “You a military man?” I said.

  “Four-F,” he answered. He tried to straighten himself in his chains. His breath wheezed in his chest.
“Listen, these people here say I got to do a minimum two-bit in the Walls.”

  “That doesn’t sound bad for a guy who went through a red light drunk and killed a seventy-year-old woman,” I said.

  “That’s at Huntsville, my man, with the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerrilla Liberation Army. For white bread it’s the Aryan Brotherhood or lockdown. Fuck that.”

  Helen and I let our eyes meet.

  “You’re jail wise but you got no sheet. In fact, there’s no jacket of any kind on you anywhere,” I said.

  “Who gives a shit?” he said.

  “Who put out the hit?” I asked.

  “Give me a piece of paper and a pencil,” he answered.

  I placed my notebook and felt pen in front of him and looked at one of the guards. He shook his head.

  “We need this, sir,” I said.

  He snuffed down in his nose and unlocked Hooker’s right wrist from the waist chain, then stepped back with his palm centered on the butt of his baton. Hooker bent over the pad and in a surprisingly fluid calligraphy wrote a single sentence, You give me the name of the donkey you want and I’ll pin the tail on him.

  “Bad choice of words,” I said, tearing the page from the pad.

  “Emile used a .223 carbine. He had Marsallus trapped in a phone booth but he blew it,” he said.

  “You’ll rat-out Pogue to beat a two-year bounce?” I said.

  His free hand rolled into a big fist, the veins in his wrist cording with blood, as though he were pumping a small rubber ball. “I’m in the first stage of AIDS. I don’t want to do it inside,” he said.

  “What’s it gonna be?”

  “We’ll think about it,” Helen said.

  His nose was starting to run. He wiped it on the back of his wrist and laughed to himself.

  “What’s funny?” I said.

  “Think about it? That’s a kick. I’d do more than think, Muffy,” he said, his blue eyes threaded with light as they roved over her face.

  “You killed my animals and birds,” she said.

  He twisted his neck until he could see the guard behind him. “Hey, Abner, get me a snot rag or walk me back to my cell,” he said.