DR10 - Sunset Limited

  "You staring at me, Mr. Robicheaux?" he asked.

  "No, sir."

  "It's Buerger's Disease. Smoking worsens it. But I got diabetes and cancer of the prostate, too. I got diseases that'll outlive the one that kills me," he said, then laughed and wiped spittle off his lips with his wrist.

  "You were a gun bull at Angola with Harpo Scruggs?"

  "No, I was head of farm machinery. I didn't carry a weapon. Harpo was a tower guard, then a shotgun guard on horseback. That must have been forty years ago."

  "What kind of hack was he?"

  "Piss-poor in my opinion. How far back you go?"

  "You talking about the Red Hat gang and the men buried under the levee?"

  "There was this old fart used to come off a corn-whiskey drunk meaner than a razor in your shoe. He'd single out a boy from his gang and tell him to start running. Harpo asked to get in on it."

  "Asked to kill someone?"

  "It was a colored boy from Laurel Hill. He'd sassed the field boss at morning count. When the food truck come out to the levee at noon, Harpo pulled the colored boy out of the line and told him he wasn't eating no lunch till he finished sawing a stump out of the river bottom. Harpo walked him off into some gum trees by the water, then I seen the boy starting off on his own, looking back uncertain-like while Harpo was telling him something. Then I heard it, pow, pow, both barrels. Double-ought bucks, from not more than eight or ten feet."

  Maddux tossed his cigarette over the railing into the flower bed.

  "What happened to Scruggs?" I asked.

  "He done a little of this, a little of that, I guess."

  "That's a little vague, cap."

  "He road-ganged in Texas a while, then bought into a couple of whorehouses. What do you care anyway? The sonofabitch is probably squatting on the coals."

  "He's squatting—"

  "He got burned up with a Mexican chippy in Juarez fifteen years ago. Wasn't nothing left of him except a bag of ash and some teeth. Damn, son, y'all ought to update and get you some computers."

  * * *

  TWELVE

  TWO DAYS LATER I SAT at my desk, sifting through the Gypsy fortune-telling deck called the Tarot. I had bought the deck at a store in Lafayette, but the instruction book that accompanied it dealt more with the meaning of the cards than with the origins of their iconography. Regardless, it would be impossible for anyone educated in a traditional Catholic school not to recognize the historical associations of the imagery in the Hanged Man.

  The phone on my desk buzzed.

  "Clete Purcel and Megan Flynn just pulled up," the sheriff said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Get him out of here."

  "Skipper—"

  He hung up.

  A moment later Clete tapped on my glass and opened the door, then paused and looked back down the hall, his face perplexed.

  "What happened, the John overflow in the waiting room again?" he said.

  "Why's that?"

  "A pall is hanging over the place every time I walk in. What do those guys do for kicks, watch snuff films? In fact, I asked the dispatcher that. Definitely no sense of humor."

  He sat down and looked around my office, grinned at me for no reason, straightened his back, flexed his arms, bounced his palms up and down on the chair.

  "Megan's with you?" I said.

  "How'd you know that?"

  "Uh, I think the sheriff saw y'all from his window."

  "The sheriff? I get it. He told you to roll out the welcome wagon." His eyes roved merrily over my face. "How about we treat you to lunch at Lagniappe Too?"

  "I'm buried."

  "Megan gave you her drill instructor impersonation the other day?"

  "It's very convincing."

  He beat out a staccato with his hands on the chair arms.

  "Will you stop that and tell me what's on your mind?" I said.

  "This cat Billy Holtzner. I've seen him somewhere. Like from Vietnam."

  "Holtzner?"

  "So we had nasty little marshmallows over there, too. Anyway, I go, 'Were you in the Crotch?' He says, 'The Crotch?' I say, 'Yeah, the Marine Corps. Were you around Da Nang?' What kind of answer do I get? He sucks his teeth and goes back to his clipboard like I'm not there."

  He waited for me to speak. When I didn't he said, "What?"

  "I hate to see you mixed up with them."

  "See you later, Streak."

  "I'm coming with you," I said, and stuck the Hanged Man in my shirt pocket.

  WE ATE LUNCH AT Lagniappe Too, just down from The Shadows. Megan sat by the window with her hat on. Her hair was curved on her cheeks, and her mouth looked small and red when she took a piece of food off her fork. The light through the window seemed to frame her silhouette against the green wall of bamboo that grew in front of The Shadows. She saw me staring at her.

  "Is something troubling you, Dave?" she asked.

  "You know Lila Terrebonne?"

  "The senator's granddaughter?"

  "She comes to our attention on occasion. The other day we had to pick her up at the church, sitting by herself under a crucifix. Out of nowhere she asked me about the Hanged Man in the Tarot."

  I slipped the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the tablecloth by Megan's plate.

  "Why tell me?" she said.

  "Does it mean something to you?"

  I saw Clete lower his fork into his plate, felt his eyes fix on the side of my face.

  "A man hanging upside down from a tree. The tree forms a cross," Megan said.

  "The figure becomes Peter the Apostle, as well as Christ and St. Sebastian. Sebastian was tied to a tree and shot with darts by his fellow Roman soldiers. Peter asked to be executed upside down. You notice, the figure makes a cross with his legs in the act of dying?" I said.

  Megan had stopped eating. Her cheeks were freckled with discoloration, as though an invisible pool of frigid air had burned her face.

  "What is this, Dave?" Clete said.

  "Maybe nothing," I said.

  "Just lunch conversation?" he said.

  "The Terrebonnes have had their thumbs in lots of pies," I said.

  "Will you excuse me, please?" Megan said.

  She walked between the tables to the rest room, her purse under her arm, her funny straw hat crimped across the back of her red hair.

  "What the hell's the matter with you?" Clete said.

  THAT EVENING I DROVE to Red Lerille's Health & Racquet Club in Lafayette and worked out with free weights and on the Hammer-Strength machines, then ran two miles on the second-story track that overlooked the basketball courts.

  I hung my towel around my neck and did leg stretches on the handrail. Down below, some men were playing a pickup basketball game, thudding into one another clumsily, slapping one another's shoulders when they made a shot. But an Indonesian or Malaysian man at the end of the court, where the speed and heavy bags were hung, was involved in a much more intense and solitary activity. He wore sweats and tight red leather gloves, the kind with a metal dowel across the palm, and he ripped his fists into the heavy bag and sent it spinning on the chain, then speared it with his feet, hard enough to almost knock down a kid who was walking by.

  He grinned at the boy by way of apology, then moved over to the speed bag and began whacking it against the rebound board, without rhythm or timing, slashing it for the effect alone.

  "You were at Cisco's house. You're Mr. Robicheaux," a woman's voice said behind me.

  It was Billy Holtzner's daughter. But her soapy blue eyes were focused now, actually pleasant, like a person who has stepped out of one identity into another.

  "You remember me?" she asked.

  "Sure."

  "We didn't introduce ourselves the other day. I'm Geraldine Holtzner. The boxer down there is Anthony. He's an accountant for the studio. I'm sorry for our rudeness."

  "You weren't rude."

  "I know you don't like my father. Not many people do. We're not problem visitors here. If you h
ave one, it's Cisco Flynn," she said.

  "Cisco?"

  "He owes my father a lot of money. Cisco thinks he can avoid his responsibilities by bringing a person like Swede Boxleiter around."

  She gripped the handrail and extended one leg at a time behind her. Her wild, brownish-red hair shimmered with perspiration.

  "You let that guy down there shoot you up?" I asked.

  "I'm all right today. Sometimes I just have a bad day. You're a funny guy for a cop. You ever have a screen test?"

  "Why not get rid of the problem altogether?"

  But she wasn't listening now. "This area is full of violent people. It's the South. It lives in the woodwork down here. This black man who's coming after the Terrebonnes, why don't you do something about him?" she said.

  "Which black man? Are you talking about Cool Breeze Broussard?"

  "Which? Yeah, that's a good question. You know the story about the murdered slave woman, the children who were poisoned? If I had stuff like that in my family, I'd jump off a cliff. No wonder Lila Terrebonne's a drunk."

  "It was nice seeing you," I said.

  "Gee, why don't you just say fuck you and turn your back on people?"

  Her skin was the color of milk that has browned in a pan, her blue eyes dancing in her face. She wiped her hair and throat with a towel and threw it at me.

  "That kick-boxing stuff Anthony's doing? He learned it from me," she said.

  Then she raised her face up into mine, her lips slightly parted, speckled with saliva, her eyes filled with anticipation and need.

  ON THE WAY BACK home I stopped in the New Iberia city library and looked up a late-nineteenth-century reminiscence written about our area by a New England lady named Abigail Dowling, a nurse who came here during a yellow fever epidemic and was radicalized not by slavery itself and the misery it visited upon the black race but by what she called its dehumanizing effects on the white.

  One of the families about which she wrote in detail was the Terrebonnes of St. Mary Parish.

  Before the Civil War, Elijah Terrebonne had been a business partner in the slave trade with Nathan Bedford Forrest and later had ridden at Forrest's side during the battle of Brice's Crossing, where a minié shattered his arm and took him out of the war. But Elijah had also been below the bluffs at Fort Pillow when black troops who begged on their knees were executed at point-blank range in retaliation for a sixty-mile scorched-earth sweep by Federal troops into northern Mississippi.

  "He was of diminutive stature, with a hard, compact body. He sat his horse with the rigidity of a clothes pin," Abigail Dowling wrote in her journal. "His countenance was handsome, certainly, of a rosy hue, and it exuded a martial light when he talked of the War. In consideration of his physical stature I tried to overlook his imperious manner. In spite of his propensity for miscegenation, he loved his wife and their twin girls and was unduly possessive about them, perhaps in part because of his own romantic misdeeds.

  "Unfortunately for the poor black souls on his plantation, the lamps of charity and pity did not burn brightly in his heart. I have been told General Forrest tried to stop the slaughter of negro soldiers below the bluffs. I believe Elijah Terrebonne had no such redemptive memory for himself. I believe the fits of anger that made him draw human blood with a horse whip had their origins in the faces of dead black men who journeyed nightly to Elijah's bedside, vainly begging mercy from one who had murdered his soul."

  The miscegenation mentioned by Abigail Dowling involved a buxom slave woman named Lavonia, whose husband, Big Walter, had been killed by a falling tree. Periodically Elijah Terrebonne rode to the edge of the fields and called her away from her work, in view of the other slaves and the white overseer, and walked her ahead of his horse into the woods, where he copulated with her in an unused sweet potato cellar. Later, he heard that the overseer had been talking freely in the saloon, joking with a drink in his hand at the fireplace, stoking the buried resentment and latent contempt of other landless whites about the lust of his employer. Elijah laid open his face with a quirt and adjusted his situation by moving Lavonia up to the main house as a cook and a wet nurse for his children.

  But when he returned from Brice's Crossing, with pieces of bone still working their way out of the surgeon's incision in his arm, the Teche country was occupied, his house and barns looted, the orchards and fields reduced to soot blowing in the wind. The only meat on the plantation consisted of seven smoked hams Lavonia had buried in the woods before the Federal flotilla had come up the Teche.

  The Terrebonnes made coffee out of acorns and ate the same meager rations as the blacks. Some of the freed males on the plantation went to work on shares; others followed the Yankee soldiers marching north into the Red River campaign. When the food ran out, Lavonia was among a group of women and elderly folk who were assembled in front of their cabins by Elijah Terrebonne and then told they would have to leave.

  She went to Elijah's wife.

  Abigail Dowling wrote in the journal, "It was a wretched sight, this stout field woman without a husband, with no concept of historical events or geography, about to be cast out in a ruined land filled with night riders and drunken soldiers. Her simple entreaty could not have described her plight more adequately: 'I'se got fo' children, Missy. What's we gonna go? What's I gonna feed them with?'"

  Mrs. Terrebonne granted her a one-month reprieve, either to find a husband or to receive help from the Freedmen's Bureau.

  The journal continued: "But Lavonia was a sad and ignorant creature who thought guile could overcome the hardness of heart in her former masters. She put cyanide in the family's food, believing they would become ill and dependent upon her for their daily care.

  "Both of the Terrebonne girls died. Elijah would have never known the cause of their deaths, except for the careless words of Lavonia's youngest child, who came to him, the worst choice among men, to seek solace. The child blurted out, 'My mama been crying, Mas'er. She got poison in a bottle under her bed. She say the devil give it to her and made her hurt somebody with it. I think she gonna take it herself.'

  "By firelight Elijah dug up the coffins of his children from the wet clay and unwound the wrappings from their bodies. Their skin was covered with pustules the color and shape of pearls. He pressed his hand on their chests and breathed the air trapped in their lungs and swore it smelled of almonds.

  "His rage and madness could be heard all the way across the fields to the quarters. Lavonia tried to hide with her children in the swamp, but to no avail. Her own people found her, and in fear of Elijah's wrath, they hanged her with a man's belt from a persimmon tree."

  WHAT DID IT ALL mean? Why did Geraldine Holtzner allude to the story at Red's Gym in Lafayette? I didn't know. But in the morning Megan Flynn telephoned me at the dock. Clete Purcel had been booked on a DWI and a black man had started a fire on the movie set in the Terrebonnes' front yard.

  She wanted to talk.

  "Talk? Clete's in the bag and you want to talk?" I said.

  "I've done something terribly wrong. I'm just down the road. Will it bother you if I come by?"

  "Yes, it will."

  "Dave?"

  "What?"

  Then her voice broke.

  * * *

  THIRTEEN

  MEGAN SAT AT A BACK table in the bait shop with a cup of coffee and waited for me while I rang up the bill on two fishermen who had just finished eating at the counter. Her hat rested by her elbow and her hair blew in the wind from the fan, but there was a twisted light in her eyes, as though she could not concentrate on anything outside her skin.

  I sat down across from her.

  "Y'all had a fight?" I asked.

  "It was over the black man who started the fire," she said.

  "That doesn't make any sense," I said.

  "It's Cool Breeze Broussard. It has to be. He was going to set fire to the main house but something scared him off. So he poured gasoline under a trailer on the set."

  "Why should you and Clete
fight over that?"

  "I helped get Cool Breeze out of jail. I knew about all his trouble in St. Mary Parish and his wife's suicide and his problems with the Terrebonne family. I wanted the story. I pushed everything else out of my mind… Maybe I planted some ideas in him about revenge."

  "You still haven't told me why y'all fought."

  "Clete said people who set fires deserve to be human candles themselves. He started talking about some marines he saw trapped inside a burning tank."

  "Breeze has always had his own mind about things. He's not easily influenced, Megan."

  "Swede will kill him. He'll kill anybody he thinks is trying to hurt Cisco."

  "That's it, huh? You think you're responsible for getting a black man into it with a psychopath?"

  "Yes. And he's not a psychopath. You've got this guy all wrong."

  "How about getting Clete into the middle of it? You think that might be a problem, too?"

  "I feel very attached—"

  "Cut it out, Megan."

  "I have a deep—"

  "He was available and you made him your point man. Except he doesn't have any idea of what's going on."

  Her eyes drifted onto mine, then they began to film. I heard Batist come inside the shop, then go back out.

  "Why'd you want to put him on that movie set?" I said.

  "My brother. He's mixed up with bad people in the Orient. I think the Terrebonnes are in it, too."

  "What do you know about the Terrebonnes?"

  "My father hated them."

  A customer came in and picked a package of Red Man off the wire rack and left the money on the register. Megan straightened her back and touched at one eye with her finger.

  "I called the St. Mary Sheriffs Department. Clete will be arraigned at ten," I said.