Except his wife had now become a willing participant. Last night she had ironed her jeans and shirt and laid them out on the bed, put perfume in her bathwater, washed and dried her hair and rouged her cheekbones to accentuate the angular beauty of her face. Her skin had seemed to glow when she dried herself in front of the mirror, a tune humming in her throat. He tried to confront her, force the issue, but her eyes were veiled with secret expectations and private meaning that made him ball his hands into fists. When he refused to drive her to the nightclub, she called a cab.
The fire wouldn't catch. An acrid smoke, as yellow as rope, laced with a stench of rags or chemically treated wood, billowed into his face. He opened all the windows, and frost speckled on the wallpaper and kitchen table. In the morning, the house smelled like a smoldering garbage dump.
She dressed in a robe, closed the windows, opened the air lock in the stove by holding a burning newspaper inside the draft, then began preparing breakfast for herself at the drainboard. He sat at the table and stared at her back stupidly, hoping she would reach into the cabinet, pull down a bowl or cup for him, indicate in some way they were still the people they once were.
"He tole me, you shake me again, you going away, Willie," she said.
"Who say that?"
She walked out of the room and didn't answer.
"Who?" he called after her.
IT WAS THE LETTER that did it.
Or the letter that he didn't read in its entirety, at least not until later.
He had driven the truck back from the store, turned into his yard, and seen her behind the house, pulling her undergarments, jeans, work shirts, socks, and dresses, her whole wardrobe, off the wash line.
A letter written with a pencil stub on a sheet of lined paper, torn from a notebook, lay on the coffee table in the living room.
He could hear his breath rising and falling in his mouth when he picked it up, his huge hand squeezing involuntarily on the bottom of the childlike scrawl.
Dear Willie,
You wanted to know who the man was I been sleeping with. I am telling you his name not out of meaness but because you will find out anyway and I dont want you to go back to prison. Alex Guidry was good to me when you were willing to turn me over to Mr. Harpo because of some moonshine whisky. You cant know what it is like to have that old man put his hand on you and tell you to come into the shed with him and make you do the things I had to do. Alex wouldnt let Mr. Harpo bother me any more and I slept with him because I wanted to and—
He crumpled up the paper in his palm and flung it into the corner. In his mind's eye he saw Alex Guidry's fish camp, Guidry's corduroy suit and western hat hung on deer anders, and Guidry himself mounted between Ida's legs, his muscled buttocks thrusting his phallus into her, her fingers and ankles biting for purchase into his white skin.
Cool Breeze hurled the back screen open and attacked her in the yard. He slapped her face and knocked her into the dust, then picked her up and shook her and shoved her backward onto the wood steps. When she tried to straighten her body with the heels of her hands, pushing herself away from him simultaneously, he saw the smear of blood on her mouth and the terror in her eyes, and realized, for the first time in his life, the murderous potential and level of self-hatred that had always dwelled inside him.
He tore down the wash line and kicked over the basket that was draped with her clothes. The leafless branches of the pecan tree overhead exploded with the cawing of crows. He didn't hear the truck engine start in the front and did not realize she was gone, that he was alone in the yard with his rage, until he saw the truck speeding into the distance, the detritus of the sugarcane harvest spinning in its vacuum.
TWO DUCK HUNTERS FOUND her body at dawn, in a bay off the Atchafalaya River. Her fingers were coated with ice and extended just above the water's surface, the current silvering across the tips. A ship's anchor chain, one with links as big as bricks, was coiled around her torso like a fat serpent. The hunters tied a Budweiser carton to her wrist to mark the spot for the sheriffs department.
A week later Cool Breeze found the crumpled paper he had flung in the corner. He spread it flat on the table and began reading where he had left off before he had burst into the back yard and struck her across the face.
I slept with him because I wanted to and because I was so mad at you and hurt over what you did to the wife that has always loved you.
But Alex Guidry dont want a blakgirl in his life, at least not on the street in the day lite. I know that now and I dont care and I tole him that. I will leave if you want me to and not blame you for it. I just want to say I am sorry for treating you so bad but it was like you had thrown me away forever.
Your wife,
Ida Broussard
COOL BREEZE LAY ON a row of air cushions inside the cabin cruiser, his arm in a sling, his face sweating. When he had finished speaking, Megan looked at me sadly, her eyes prescient with the knowledge that a man's best explanation for his life can be one that will never satisfy him or anybody else.
"Y'all ain't gonna say nothing?" he asked.
"Let go of it, partner," I said.
"The Man always got the answer," he replied.
"Your daddy is an honest and decent person. If you're still ashamed of him because he shined shoes, yeah, I think that's a problem, Breeze," I said.
"Dave…"Megan said.
"Give it a break, Megan," I said.
"No… Behind us. The G sent us an escort," she said.
I turned and looked back through the hatch at our wake. Coming hard right up the trough was a large powerboat, its enamel-white bow painted with the blue-and-red insignia of the United States Coast Guard. A helicopter dipped out of the sky behind the Coast Guard boat, yawing, its downdraft hammering the water.
I entered a channel that led to the boat ramp where my truck and boat trailer were parked. The helicopter swept past us and landed in the shell parking area below the levee. The right-hand door opened and the FBI agent named Adrien Glazier stepped out and walked toward us while the helicopter's blades were still spinning.
I waded through the shallows onto the concrete ramp.
"You're out of your jurisdiction, so I'm going to save you a lot of paperwork," she said.
"Oh?"
"We're taking Mr. William Broussard into our custody. Interstate transportation of stolen property. You want to argue about it, we can talk about interference with a federal law officer in the performance of her duty."
Then I saw her eyes focus over my shoulder on Megan, who stood on the bow of my boat, her hair blowing under her straw hat.
"You take one picture out here and I'll have you in handcuffs," Adrien Glazier said.
"Broussard's been snakebit. He needs to be in a hospital," I said.
But she wasn't listening. She and Megan stared at each other with the bright and intimate recognition of old adversaries who might have come aborning from another time.
* * *
FIVE
THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCHTIME Clete Purcel picked me up at the office in the chartreuse Cadillac convertible that he had bought from a member of the Giacano crime family in New Orleans, a third-generation miscreant by the name of Stevie Gee who decided to spot-weld a leak in the gas tank but got drunk first and forgot to fill the tank with water before he fired up the welding machine. The scorch marks had faded now and looked like smoky gray tentacles on the back fenders.
The back seat was loaded with fishing rods, a tackle box that was three feet long, an ice chest, air cushions, crushed beer cans, life preservers, crab traps, a hoop net that had been ground up in a boat propeller, and a tangled trot line whose hooks were ringed with dried smelt.
Clete wore baggy white pants without a shirt and a powder-blue porkpie hat, and his skin looked bronzed and oily in the sun. He had been the best cop I ever knew until his career went south, literally, all the way to Central America, because of marriage trouble, pills, booze, hookers, indebtedness to shylocks, and finally a mur
der warrant that his fellow officers barely missed serving on him at the New Orleans airport.
I went inside Victor's on Main Street for a take-out order, then we crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove past the live oaks on the lawn of the gray and boarded-up buildings that used to be Mount Carmel Academy, then through the residential section into City Park. We sat at a picnic table under a tree, not far from the swimming pool, where children were cannonballing off the diving board. The sun had gone behind the clouds and rain rings appeared soundlessly on the bayou's surface, like bream rising to feed.
"That execution in St. Mary Parish… the two brothers who got clipped after they raped the black girl? How bad you want the perps?" he said.
"What do you think?"
"I see it as another parish's grief. As a couple of guys who got what they had coming."
"The shooters had one of our uniforms."
He set down the pork-chop sandwich he was eating and scratched the scar that ran through his left eyebrow.
"I'm still running down skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. Nig went bail for a couple of chippies who work a regular Murphy game in the Quarter. They're both junkies, runny noses, scabs on their thighs, mainlining six and seven balloons a day, sound familiar, scared shitless of detoxing in City Prison, except they're even more scared of their pimp, who's the guy they have to give up if they're going to beat the Murphy beef.
"So they ask Nig if they should go to the prosecutor's office with this story they got off a couple of Johns who acted like over-the-hill cops. These guys were talking to each other about capping some brothers out in the Basin. One of the chippies asks if they're talking about black guys. One duffer laughs and says, 'No, just some boys who should have kept practicing on colored girls and left white bread alone.'"
"Where are these guys out of?"
"They said San Antone. But Johns usually lie."
"What else do the girls know?"
"They're airheads, Dave. The intellectual one reads the shopping guide on the toilet. Besides, they're not interested in dealing anymore. Their pimp decided to plea out, so they're off the hook."
"Write down their names, will you?"
He took a piece of folded paper from his pants pocket, with the names of the two women and their addresses already written on it, and set it on the plank table. He started eating again, his green eyes smiling at nothing.
"Old lesson from the First District, big mon. When somebody wastes a couple of shit bags…" He realized I wasn't listening, that my gaze was focused over his shoulder on the swimming pool. He turned and stared through the tree trunks, his gaze roving across the swimmers in the pool, the parents who were walking their children by the hand to an instruction class a female lifeguard was putting together in the shallow end. Then his eyes focused on a man who stood between the wire enclosure and the bathhouse.
The man had a peroxided flattop, a large cranium, like a person with water on the brain, cheekbones that tapered in an inverted triangle to his chin, a small mouth full of teeth. He wore white shoes and pale orange slacks and a beige shirt with the short sleeves rolled in neat cuffs and the collar turned up on the neck. He pumped a blue rubber ball in his right palm.
"You know that dude?" Clete said.
"His name's Swede Boxleiter."
"A graduate?"
"Canon City, Colorado. The FBI showed me some photos of a yard job he did on a guy."
"What's he doing around here?"
Boxleiter wore shades instead of the granny glasses I had seen in the photos. But there was no doubt about the object of his attention. The children taking swim lessons were lined up along the edge of the pool, their swimsuits clinging wetly to their bodies. Boxleiter snapped the rubber ball off the pavement, ricocheting it against the bathhouse wall, retrieving it back into his palm as though it were attached to a magic string.
"Excuse me a minute," I said to Clete.
I walked through the oaks to the pool. The air smelled of leaves and chlorine and the rain that was sprinkling on the heated cement. I stood two feet behind Boxleiter, who hung on to the wire mesh of the fence with one hand while the other kneaded the rubber ball. The green veins in his forearm were pumped with blood. He chewed gum, and a lump of cartilage expanded and contracted against the bright slickness of his jaw.
He felt my eyes on the back of his neck.
"You want something?" he asked.
"We thought we'd welcome you to town. Have you drop by the department. Maybe meet the sheriff."
He grinned at the corner of his mouth.
"You think you seen me somewhere?"
I continued to stare into his face, not speaking. He removed his shades, his eyes askance.
"Soooo, what kind of gig are we trying to build here?" he asked.
"I don't like the way you look at children."
"I'm looking at a swimming pool. But I'll move."
"We nail you on a short-eyes here, we'll flag your jacket and put you in lockdown with some interesting company. This is Louisiana, Swede."
He rolled the rubber ball down the back of his forearm, off his elbow, and caught it in his palm, all in one motion. Then he rolled it back and forth across the top of his fingers, the gum snapping in his jaw all the while.
"I went out max time. You got no handle. I got a job, too. In the movies. I'm not shitting you on that," he said.
"Watch your language, please."
"My language? Wow, I love this town already." Then his face tilted, disconcerted, his breath drawing through his nose like an animal catching a scent. "Why's Blimpo staring at me like that?"
I turned and saw Clete Purcel standing behind me. He grinned and took out his comb and ran it through his sandy hair with both hands. The skin under his arms was pink with sunburn.
"You think I got a weight problem?" he asked.
"No. 'Cause I don't know you. I don't know what kind of problem you got."
"Then why'd you call me Blimpo?"
"So maybe I didn't mean anything by it."
"I think you did."
But Boxleiter turned his back on us, his attention fixed on the deep end of the pool, his right hand opening and closing on the blue rubber ball. The wind blew lines in his peroxided hair, and his scalp had the dead gray color of putty. His lips moved silently.
"What'd you say?" Clete asked. When Boxleiter didn't reply, Clete fitted his hand under Boxleiter's arm and turned him away from the fence. "You said, 'Blow me, Fatso'?"
Boxleiter slipped the ball in his pocket and looked out into the trees, his hands on his hips.
"It's a nice day. I'm gonna buy me a sno'ball. I love the spearmint sno'balls they sell in this park. You guys want one?" he said.
We watched him walk away through the trees, the leaves crunching under his feet like pecan shells, toward a cold drink stand and ice machine a black man had set up under a candy-striped umbrella.
"Like the boy says, he doesn't come with handles," Clete said.
THAT AFTERNOON THE SHERIFF called me into his office. He was watering his window plants with a hand-painted teakettle, smoking his pipe at the same time. His body was slatted with light through the blinds, and beyond the blinds I could see the whitewashed crypts in the old Catholic cemetery.
"I got a call from Alex Guidry. You reported him to the Humane Society?" he said.
"He keeps his dogs penned on a filthy concrete slab without shade."
"He claims you're harassing him."
"What did the Humane Society say?"
"They gave him a warning and told him they'd be back. Watch your back with this character, Dave."
"That's it?"
"No. The other problem is your calls to the FBI in New Orleans. They're off our backs for a while. Why stir them up?"
"Cool Breeze should be in our custody. We're letting the Feds twist him to avoid a civil suit over the abuse of prisoners in our jail."
"He's a four-time loser, Dave. He's not a victim. He fed a guy into
an electric saw."
"I don't think it's right."
"Tell that to people when we have to pass a parish sales tax to pay off a class action suit, particularly one that will make a bunch of convicts rich. I take that back. Tell it to that female FBI agent. She was here while you were out to lunch. I really enjoyed the half hour I spent listening to her."
"Adrien Glazier was here?"
IT WAS FRIDAY, AND when I drove home that evening I should have been beginning a fine weekend. Instead, she was waiting for me on the dock, a cardboard satchel balanced on the railing under her hand. I parked the car in the drive and walked down to meet her. She looked hot in her pink suit, her ice-blue eyes filmed from the heat or the dust on the road.
"You've got Breeze in lockdown and everybody around here scared. What else do you want, Ms. Glazier?"
"It's Special Agent Gla—"
"Yeah, I know."
"You and Megan Flynn are taking this to the media, aren't you?"
"No. At least I'm not."
"Then why do both of you keep calling the Bureau?"
"Because I'm being denied access to a prisoner who escaped from our jail, that's why."
She stared hard into my face, as though searching for the right dials, her back teeth grinding softly, then said, "I want you to look at a few more photos."
"No."
"What's the matter, you don't want to see the wreckage your gal leaves in her wake?"
She pulled the elastic cord loose from the cardboard satchel and spilled half the contents on a spool table. She lifted up a glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of Megan addressing a crowd of Latin peasants from the bed of a produce truck. Megan was leaning forward, her small hands balled into fists, her mouth wide with her oration.
"Here's another picture taken a few days later. If you look closely, you'll recognize some of the dead people in the ditch. They were in the crowd that listened to Megan Flynn. Where was she when this happened? At the Hilton in Mexico City."