“It’s all right, Luke,” I said.
“I been in custody here. For killing a white man, back when things was a li’l different. You believe in the gris-gris, Mr. Dave?”
“No.”
“Aint Bertie do. She put the gris-gris on Moleen Bertrand, now she say she cain’t get it off.”
“That stuff’s superstition, partner.”
“Come out to the cafe where she work.”
“Bertie can take care of herself.”
“I ain’t worried about that old woman. It’s Ruthie Jean. Suh, ain’t it time you listen a li’l bit to what black folks got to say?”
Bertie Fontenot worked off and on in a black-owned clapboard cafe up Bayou Teche in Loreauville. She sat under a tarp extended on poles behind the building, next to a worktable and two stainless steel cauldrons that bubbled on a portable butane burner. The surrounding fields were glazed with sunlight, the shade under the tarp as stifling as a wool blanket on your skin.
Through the back screen I could hear the jukebox playing, I searched for you all night in vain, baby. But you was hid out wit’ another man.
“Tell him,” Luke said.
“What for? Some people always know what they know,” she said. She lifted her mammoth weight out of the chair and poured a wood basket filled with artichokes, whole onions, corn on the cob, and peeled potatoes into the cauldrons. Then she began feeding links of sausage into the steam, her eyes watering in the evaporation of salt and cayenne pepper. Stacked on the table were three swollen gunnysacks that moved and creaked with live crawfish.
“Aint Bertie, he took off from his work to come up here,” Luke said.
She wiped the perspiration off her neck with a tiny handkerchief and walked to her pickup truck, which was parked by an abandoned and partially collapsed privy, and came back into the shade with an old leather handbag drawn together at the top by a leather boot lace. She put her hand inside and removed a clutch of pig bones. They looked like long pieces of animal teeth against her coppery palm.
“It don’t matter when or where I trow them, they come up the same,” she said. “I ain’t got no power over what’s gonna happen. I gone along with Ruthie Jean, even though I knowed it was wrong. Now I cain’t undo any of it.”
She cast the bones from her hand onto the plank table. They seemed to bounce off the wood as lightly as sewing needles.
“See, all the sharp points is at the center,” she said. “Moleen Bertrand dragging a chain I cain’t take off. For something he done right here, it’s got to do wit’ a child, out on a dirt road, in the dark, when Moleen was drunk. There’s a bunch of other spirits following him around, too, soldiers in uniforms that ain’t nothing but rags now. Every morning he wake up, they sitting all around his room.”
“You told me you were worried about Ruthie Jean,” I said to Luke.
“She’s in a rooming house in New Orleans, off Magazine by the river. Waiting for Moleen to get his bid ness things together, take her to the Islands,” he said.
“Some people give they heart one time, keep believing when they ain’t suppose to believe no more,” Bertie said. She unfolded the curved blade of a banana knife from its case, pulled a gunnysack filled with crawfish across the table toward her. “Moleen gonna die. Except there’s two bones in the middle of the circle. Somebody going wit him.”
“Maybe Moleen thinks New Orleans is a better place for her right now.
Maybe he’s going to keep his word,” I said.
“You wasn’t listening, Mr. Dave,” Luke said. “We ain’t tole you Moleen Bertrand sent her to New Orleans. It was a police officer, he come down here at night, carried her on down to the airport in Lafayette.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You got him right down the hall from you, Mr. White Trash himself, Rufus Arceneaux, same man run errands for Julia Bertrand,” she said.
She ripped the sack along the seam with her banana knife, then shucked it empty into the cauldron, where the crawfish stiffened with shock, as though they had been struck with electricity, and then roiled up dead in the churning froth.
That night the air was breathless, moonlit, filled with birds, stale with dust and the heat of the day that lingered in the baked wood and tin roofing of the house. It was long after midnight when the phone rang in the kitchen.
“You got the wrong signal, ace,” the voice said.
“Pogue?”
“Your little girl misunderstood.”
“No, you did. I told you not to come through the wrong man’s perimeter.”
“I was there to help. They got a mechanic on you.”
“Come anywhere near my house, I’m going to take you off at the neck.”
“Don’t hang up ...” I could hear his breath rise and fall against the receiver. “The Dutchie don’t let me alone. I think I got only one way out. I cool out the hitter, I don’t let nobody hurt your family. The problem is, I got no idea who they sent in. I need time, man, that’s what you fucking don’t hear.”
“Do you know what ‘roid-induced psychosis is?” I said.
“No.”
“Too many injections in the butt. Then you drink a few beers and the snakes put on a special floor show. Don’t call here again.”
“You got cement around your head? I ain’t a bad guy. We went into Laos twice to get your friend back. You know anybody else who gave a shit about him?”
“You frightened my daughter. One way or another, that’s going to get squared, Emile.”
“Me? Marsallus was there. She didn’t tell you?”
“Your wheel man, Jerry Jeff Hooker, is in custody. He gave you up. Come in and maybe we can get you into a federal hospital.”
“I could smell Marsallus’s breath, it was like the stink when you pop a body bag. The Dutchie turned him loose on me. Laos, Guatemala, colored town out there on the highway, it’s all part of the same geography. Hell don’t have boundaries, man. Don’t you understand that?”
The phone was silent a long time. In the moonlight I saw an owl sink its razored beak into a wood rabbit in my neighbor’s field. Then Emile Pogue quietly hung up.
Chapter 31
THE SHERIFF HAD been moved out of Intensive Care into an ordinary room at Iberia General, one that was filled with flowers and slatted sunlight. But his new environment was a deception. His whiskers were white against his flaccid skin, and his eyes had a peculiar cast in them, what we used to call the thousand-yard stare, as though he could not quite detach himself from old events that were still aborning for him on frozen hilltops that rang with bugles.
“Can you hand me my orange juice, please?” he said.
I lifted the glass straw to his lips, watched him draw the juice and melting ice into his mouth.
“I dreamed about roses under the snow. But then I saw they weren’t roses. They were drops of blood where we marched out of the Chosin. It’s funny how your dreams mix up things,” he said.
“It’s better to let old wars go, skipper.”
“New Iberia is a good place.”
“It sure is.”
“We need to get these bastards out of here, Dave,” he said.
“We will.”
“Your daughter ID-ed Marsallus from his mug shot?”
“I shouldn’t have told you that story,” I said.
“They couldn’t pull him across the Styx. That’s a good story to hear ... Dave?”
“Yes?”
“I never told this to anyone except a marine chaplain. I sent three North Korean POW’s to the rear once with a BAR man who escorted them as far as one hill. In my heart I knew better, because the BAR man was one of those rare guys who enjoyed what he did ...”
I tried to interrupt, but he raised two fingers off the sheet to silence me.
“That’s why I always sit on you, always try to keep the net over all of us ... so we don’t take people off behind a hill.”
“That’s a good way to be,” I said.
“You don’t und
erstand. It’s the rules get us killed sometimes. You got too many bad people circling you.”
His voice became weaker, and I saw the light in his eyes change, his chest swell, as he breathed more deeply.
“I’d better go now. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“Don’t leave yet.” His hand moved across my wrist. “I don’t want to fall asleep. During the day I dream about trench rats. It was twenty below and they’d eat their way inside the dead. That’s how they live, Dave ... By eating their way inside us.”
I went home for lunch, then walked down to the dock to talk to Alafair, who had just gotten out of school for the summer. Sitting under an umbrella at one of the spool tables was Terry Serrett, Clete’s secretary. She wore pale blue shorts and a halter and her skin looked as white as a fish’s belly. She read a magazine behind a pair of dark glasses while she idly rubbed suntan lotion on her thighs. When she heard my footsteps, she looked up at me and smiled. Her cheeks were roughed with orange circles like makeup on a circus clown.
“You’re not working today?” I said.
“There’s not much to do, I’m afraid. It looks like Clete is going to move back to New Orleans in a couple of weeks.”
“Can I bring you something?”
“Well, no, but ... Can you sit down a moment?”
“Sure.”
The wind was warm off the water, and I was sweating inside my shirt even in the umbrella’s shade.
“Clete’s told me a little bit about this man Sonny Marsallus,” she said. “Is it true he knows something about POW’s in Southeast Asia?”
“It’s hard to say, Ms. Serrett.”
“It’s Terry ... We think my brother got left behind in Cambodia. But the government denies he was even there.”
“Sonny was never in the service. Anything he ... knew was conjecture, probably.”
“Oh ... I got the impression he had evidence of some kind.”
Her sunglasses were tinted almost black, and the rest of her face was like an orange and white mask.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said.
“Well, I hope I haven’t bothered you,” she said, and touched my elbow softly.
“No, not at all.”
“I guess I’d better go before I burn up in this sun.”
“It’s a hot one,” I said.
I watched her walk up the dock on her flats toward her car, a drawstring beach bag hanging from her wrist. The line of soft fat that protruded from her waistband was already pink with sunburn.
I went inside the bait shop. Alafair was stocking lunch meat and cold drinks in the wall cooler.
“Hi, Dave,” she said. “Who was that lady?”
“Clete s secretary.”
She made a face.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
She looked out the window screen. “Where’s Batist?” she said.
“Out on the ramp.”
“She was sitting inside a half hour ago, smoking one cigarette after another, smelling the whole place up. Batist gave me his Pepsi because he had to go put some man’s boat in. After he went out, she said, “Better bring that over here, honey.”
“I didn’t know what she meant. I walked over to her table and she took the can out of my hand and got a bunch of napkins out of the holder and started wiping the top. She said, “You shouldn’t drink after other people.” Then she put it back in my hand and said, “There ... Maybe now you won’t have to scrub your gums with disinfectant. But I’d still pour it down the drain if I were you.”
“What’s she doing here, Dave?”
Rufus Arceneaux lived in a wood frame house on Bayou Teche just outside St. Martinville. He had a gas light in his front yard, a new aluminum boat shed under his oak trees, an electric bug killer that snapped and hissed on his gallery. He did not resent his black neighbors because he considered himself superior to them and simply did not recognize their existence. Nor did he envy the rich, as he believed them the recipients of luck passed out by a society that was meant to be inequitable and often blessed the bumbling and the effete. His wary eye, instead, was directed at his peers and those among them who succeeded, he was sure, through stealth and design, and always at his expense.
He brought back a Japanese wife from Okinawa, a small, shy woman with bad teeth who worked briefly in a bakery and who lowered her eyes and covered her mouth when she grinned. One night the neighbors made a 911 call on Rufus’s house, but the wife told the responding sheriff’s deputies her television set had been tuned too loud, there was certainly no problem in the home.
One morning she did not report to work at the bakery. Rufus called the owner later and said she had mumps. When people saw her in town, her face was heavily made up, marbled with discolorations.
She left town on a Greyhound bus the following year. A Catholic priest who worked with Vietnamese refugees drove her to the depot in Lafayette and refused to tell anyone her destination.
For a while Rufus lived with a topless dancer from Morgan City, then a woman who had been fired from her position as a juvenile probation officer in Lake Charles. There were others, too, who came and went, all out of that seemingly endless supply of impaired or abused women who find temporary solace in the approval of a man who will eventually degrade and reject them. As an ex-NCO, Rufus was not one to argue with long-established systems. The only constants in Rufus’s life were his two hunting dogs and his squared-away, freshly painted frame house.
It was twilight when I drove up his dirt drive and parked my truck in the trees and walked behind his house. He was drinking bottled beer in his undershirt on the cement pad that served as a back porch, his knees crossed, a pork roast hissing on a rotisserie barbecue pit. Rufus’s shoulders were as smooth as stone, olive with tan, a gold and red Marine Corps emblem tattooed on his right arm. At the foot of his sloping yard a half-flooded pirogue lay in the shadows, its sides soft with green mold.
As was his way, he was neither friendly nor unfriendly. My presence in his life, off the clock, had no more significance than the whir of cars out on the state highway. A brunette woman with unbrushed hair, in cutoff blue jeans, came outside, set a small table with wood salad bowls and plates, and never looked at me. Nor did he attempt to introduce her.
He slid a metal chair toward me with his foot.
“There’s some cold drinks in the cooler,” he said.
“I understand you drove Ruthie Jean Fontenot to the airport.”
He put a cigarette in his mouth, worked his lighter out of the watch pocket of his Levi’s. It had a bronze globe and anchor soldered on its side.
“What’s the problem on that, Dave?” he said.
“Are you working for the Bertrands?” I tried to smile.
“Not really.”
“I got you.”
“Just doing somebody a favor,” he said.
“I see. You think Ruthie Jean’s getting set up?”
“For what?”
“The Bertrands have their own way of doing business.”
He drank from his beer, a slow, steady sip that showed neither need nor particular pleasure. He blew a cloud of cigarette smoke into the violet air. “We’re going to eat in a minute,” he said.
“I’m going to try to reopen the vehicular homicide case on Julia and Moleen.”
“Be my guest. They weren’t involved.”
I looked at his rugged profile, the blond crewcut, the lump of cartilage in the jaw, the green eyes that were often filled with the lights of envy, and felt the peculiar sensation I was looking at an innocent who had no awareness of the lines he had stepped across.
“Moleen’s mixed up with people who don’t take prisoners, Roof,” I said.
“Are you kidding? He’s a needle dick. His wife slides up and down the banister all morning to keep his lunch warm.”
“See you around,” I said.
I woke early the next morning and drove out to the Bertrand plantation.
Why?
I re
ally didn’t know. The cement trucks, graders, and bulldozers were all idle and unattended now, sitting quietly among the swaths of destruction they had cut from the highway back to the treeline. Why had a company called Blue Sky Electric chosen this spot for its location? Access to the railroad? That was part of it, obviously. But there were a lot of train tracks in the state of Louisiana.
Maybe the answer lay in who lived here.
They were by and large disenfranchised and uneducated, with no political or monetary power. You did not have to be a longtime resident of Louisiana to understand their historical relationship to corporate industries.
Those who worked in the canneries were laid off at the end of the season, then told at the state of employment office that their unemployment claims were invalid because their trade was exclusively that of professional canners; and since the canneries were closed for the season, the workers were not available for work, and hence ineligible for the benefits that had been paid into their fund.
This was the Orwellian language used to people who had to sign their names with an X.
For years the rice and sugar mills fired anyone who used the word union and paid minimum wage only because of their participation in interstate commerce. During the civil rights era, oil men used to joke about having “a jig on every rig.” But the racial invective was secondary to the real logos, which was to ensure the availability of a huge labor pool, both black and white, that would work for any wage that was offered them.
The stakes today, however, were geographical. The natural habitat’s worst enemies, the chemical plants and oil refineries, had located themselves in a corridor along the Mississippi known as Toxic Alley, running from Baton Rouge down to St. Gabriel.
Almost without exception the adjacent communities were made up of blacks and poor whites.
I drove down the dirt road and stopped in front of Luke Fontenot’s house. I saw his face at the window, then he opened the screen and walked out on the gallery, shirtless, barefoot, a jelly glass full of hot coffee in his hand.
“Something happen?” he said.