My life became as bland and unremarkable as the season was soft and warm and transitory.
Then, on a windblown afternoon, with leaves flying in the air, I drove to Lafayette in my truck to see Minos P. Dautrieve, an old friend and DEA agent who was now assigned to the Presidential Task Force on Drugs.
He loved to fish, and because I didn’t want to talk with him at his house, with his wife or children somewhere on the edge of the conversation, I asked him to bring his spinning rod and drive with me to the levee at Henderson Swamp.
I stopped at one of the bait and boat-rental shacks below the levee and bought two poor-boy shrimp sandwiches and a long-necked bottle of Jax for him and a Dr Pepper for me. We walked down to a grassy place on the bank, across from a row of willow islands that acted as a barrier between the channel along the levee and the swamp itself, which was actually an enormous wetlands area of bays, canals, bayous, oil platforms, and flooded stands of cypress and willow trees. He flipped his Rapala out to the edge of the willow pads that grew on the opposite side of the channel.
Minos had been All-American honorable mention when he played forward for LSU, and he still wore his hair in a college-boy crew cut, mowed so close that the scalp glowed. He was as lean, flat-stomached, and tapered-looking as he had been when sportswriters named him Dr. Dunkenstein. He had been a first lieutenant with army intelligence in Vietnam, and although he was often flippant and cynical and defensive about his role as a government agent, he had a good heart and a hard-nosed sense about right and wrong that sometimes got him in trouble with his own bureaucracy.
I sat down on the incline and tore a long-bladed stem of grass along the spine. I told him about the strange sense of ennui that characterized my days. “It’s like being in the middle of a dead zone. It’s like suddenly there’s no sound, like all movement has stopped.”
“It’ll pass,” he said.
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
“You got two Hearts in ‘Nam. You came out of it all right, didn’t you?”
“That was different. The first wound was superficial. The second time I didn’t see it coming. There’s a difference when you see it coming.”
“I never got hurt, so maybe you’re asking the wrong guy. But I’ve got a feeling that something else is bothering you.”
I dropped the torn grass blade between my knees and wiped my fingers on my pants.
“I feel like I begged,” I said.
“I don’t understand. You begged Boggs before he shot you?”
“No, when Tee Beau climbed down into the coulee and cocked the .38 in my face.” I had to swallow when I said it.
“It sounds to me like you did just fine. What were you supposed to do? You had a round through your chest, you had to lie there in the dark with your own thoughts while a couple of guys talked about killing you, then you had to depend on the mercy of a black kid who’d already been sentenced to the electric chair. I don’t think I would have come out of that altogether intact. In fact, I know I wouldn’t.”
He flipped his lure out again and retrieved it in a zigzag motion just below the water’s surface. Then he set the rod down on the bank, took our sandwiches and drinks out of the paper bag, and sat down beside me.
“Listen, podna,” he said. “You’re a brave man. You proved that a long time ago. Stop trying to convince yourself that you’re not. I think what we should be talking about here is nailing Boggs. Like cooling out his action, dig it, like blowing up his shit. How’d he get the gun in the can, anyway?”
“He had a girlfriend in Lafayette, a dancer. She blew town the same day he escaped, but she left her fingerprints all over the towel dispenser.”
“Where do y’all think he is now?”
“Who knows? He left the car in Algiers. Maybe he went back to Florida.”
“How about the black kid?”
“Disappeared. I thought he’d show up by now. He’s never been anywhere, and he’s always lived with his grandmother.”
“Catch him and he might give you a lead on Boggs.”
“He might be dead, too.”
Minos opened the bottle of Jax with his pocketknife, put the cap inside the paper bag, and drank out of the bottle, staring out at the long, flat expanse of gray water and dead cypress. The sun was red and low on the western horizon.
“I think it’s time to put your transmission into gear and start hunting these guys down,” he said. “The rules of the game are kick ass and take names.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s pretty damn boring to be a spectator in your own life. What do you think?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit. What do you think?” He hit me in the arm with his elbow.
I let out my breath.
“I’ll give it some thought,” I said.
“You want any help from our office, you’ve got it.”
“All right, Minos.”
“If the black kid’s alive, I bet you nail him in a week.”
“Okay.”
“You know Boggs’ll show up, too. A guy like that can’t get through a day without smearing shit on the furniture somewhere.”
“I think I’m getting your drift.”
“All right, I’m crowding the plate a little bit. But I don’t want to see you sitting on your hands anymore. The lowlifes are the losers. They get up every morning knowing that fact. Let’s don’t ever let them think they’re wrong, partner.”
He smiled and handed me a poor-boy sandwich. It felt thick and soft in my hand. Across the channel I could see the ridged and knobby head of an alligator, like a wet, brown rock, among the lily pads.
The next day I read all the paperwork on Tee Beau Latiolais and talked to the prosecutor’s office and the detective who did the investigation and made the arrest. Nobody seemed to have any doubt about Tee Beau’s guilt. He had worked for a redbone named Hipolyte Broussard, a migrant-labor contractor who had ferried his crews on rickety buses from northern Arizona to Dade County, Florida. I remembered him. He was a strange-looking man who had moved about in that nether society of people of color in southern Louisiana—blacks, quadroons, octoroons, and redbones. You would see him unloading his workers at dawn in the fields during the sugarcane harvest, and at night he would be in a Negro bar or poolroom on the south side of town or out in the parish, where he paid off the laborers or lent them money at high interest rates at a table in back. Like all redbones, people who are a mixture of Negro, white, and Indian blood, he had skin the color of burnt brick, and his eyes were turquoise. His arms and long legs were as thin as pipe cleaners, and he wore sideburns, a rust-colored pencil mustache, and a lacquered straw hat at a jaunty angle on his head. He worked his crews hard, and he had as many contracts with corporate farms as he wanted. I had heard stories that workers, or even a whole family, who gave him trouble might be put off the bus at night in the middle of nowhere.
Nobody doubted why Tee Beau had done it, either. In fact, people were sympathetic with his apparent motivation. For one reason or another, Hipolyte Broussard had made Tee Beau’s life as miserable as he could. It was the way in which Tee Beau had killed him that had caused the judge to sentence Tee Beau to the electric chair.
It was misting slightly when I drove down the dirt road into the community of Negro shacks out in the parish where Tante Lemon now lived. The shacks were gray and paintless, the galleries sagging, the privies knocked together from tar paper, scrap lumber, and roofing tin. Chickens pecked in the dirt yards, the ditches were littered with garbage, the air reeked of somebody cooking cracklins outside in an iron kettle, which produces an eye-watering stench like sewage. On the corner was a clapboard juke joint, with tape crisscrossed on the cracked windows, and because it was Friday afternoon the oyster-shell parking lot was already full of cars, and the roar of the jukebox inside was so loud it vibrated the front window.
Tante Lemon’s house was raised off the ground on short brick columns, and a yellow dog on a rope had dug a
depression under the edge of the house from which he looked up at me and flopped his tail in the dirt. Flies buzzed back in the damp shadows beneath the raised floor. I knocked on the screen door, then saw her ironing at a board in the corner of her small living room. She stopped her work, picked up a tin can, held it to her lips, and spit snuff in it.
“They think they send you, I’m gonna tell where that little boy at?” she said. “I ain’t seen him, I ain’t talk with him, I don’t even know Tee Beau alive. That’s what y’all done to us, Mr. Dave. Don’t be coming round here pretend you our friend, no.”
“Will you let me in, Tante Lemon?”
“I done tole them po-licemens, I tell you, I ain’t seen him, me, and I ain’t he’ping you, me.”
“Listen, Tante Lemon, I don’t want to hurt Tee Beau. He saved my life. It’s the white man I want. But they’re going to catch Tee Beau sooner or later. Wouldn’t you rather I find him first, so nobody hurts him?”
She walked to the screen and opened it. Her dress was wash-faded almost colorless, and it flapped on her body and withered breasts as shapelessly as rag.
“You going lie now ’cause I an old nigger?” she said. “You catch that boy, they gonna carry him up to the Red Hat, they gonna strap him down, put that tin cap on his little head, cover up his face with cloth so they ain’t got to look his eyes, let all them people watch my little boy suffer, watch the electricity burn up his body. I was on Camp I, Mr. Dave, when they use to keep womens there. I seen them take a white man to the Red Hat. They had to pull him along the ground from the car, pull him along like a dog wrapped up in chains. Then all them people sat down like they was at the ballpark, them, and watch that man die.”
She raised the tin can to her lips and spit snuff in it again, then picked up her iron and began pressing a starched white shirt. She smelled of dry sweat, Copenhagen, and the heat rising from the ironing board. The walls of her house had been pasted with pages from magazines, then overlaid with mismatched strips of water-streaked wallpaper. The floor was covered with a rug whose thread had split like crimped straw, and the few pieces of furniture she owned looked as though they’d been carted home a piece at a time from the junkyard where Tee Beau used to work.
I sat down on a straight-backed chair next to her ironing board.
“I can’t promise you anything,” I said, “but if I find Tee Beau, I’ll try to help him. Maybe we can get the governor to commute his sentence. Tee Beau saved the life of a police officer. That could mean a lot, Tante Lemon.”
“The life of that pimp mean a lot.”
“What?”
“Hipolyte Broussard a pimp, and he was gonna make Tee Beau do it, too.”
“I never heard that Broussard was involved with prostitution.”
“White people hear what they want to hear.”
“I didn’t see anything like that in the case record, either. Who’d you tell this to?”
“I ain’t tole nobody. Ain’t nobody ax me.”
“Where was he pimping, Tante Lemon?”
“Out of the juke, there on the four-corner,” she said, and nodded her head toward the outside of the house. “Out in them camps, where them farm worker stay at.”
“And he wanted Tee Beau to do it, too?”
“He make Tee Beau drive them girls from the juke down to the camp. Tee Beau say, ‘I cain’t do that no more, Hipolyte.’ Hipolyte say, ‘You gonna do it, ’cause you don’t, I gonna tell your P.O. you been stealing from me and you going back to jail.’ And it don’t matter Tee Beau do what he say or not. Hipolyte keep making him feel awful all the time, sticking his thumb in that little boy seat, in front of all them people, shame him till he come home and cry. If that man ain’t dead now, I go kill him myself, me.”
“Tante Lemon, why didn’t you tell this to somebody?”
“I tole you, they ain’t ax me. You think them people in that courtroom care what an old nigger woman say?”
“You didn’t tell anybody because you thought it would hurt Tee Beau, that people would be sure he did it.”
It started raining outside. The hinged flap on the side window was raised with a stick, and in the gray light her skin had the color of a dull penny. She mashed the iron up and down on the shirt she was ironing.
“I can tell lots of things ’bout that juke up the four-corner, ’bout the traiteur woman run that place with Hipolyte, ’bout them crib they got there. Ain’t nobody interested, Mr. Dave. Don’t be telling me they are, no. Just like when I up in Camp I in Angola. On the Red Hat gang they run them boys up and down the levee with they wheelbarrow, beat them every day with the Black Betty, shoot them and bury them right there in the Miss’sippi levee. Everybody knowed it, nobody care. Ain’t nobody care about Tee Beau or what I got to say now.”
“You should have talked to somebody. They didn’t give Tee Beau the chair because he killed Hipolyte. It was the way he did it.”
“Tee Beau in this house, shelling crawfish. Right here,” she said, and tapped her finger on the ironing board.
“All right. But somebody drove the bus off the jack on top of Hipolyte. Tee Beau’s fingerprints were all over the steering wheel. His muddy shoe prints were all over the floor pedals. Nobody else’s. Then while Hipolyte was lying under the brake drum with his back broken, somebody stuffed an oil rag in his mouth so he could spend two hours strangling to death.”
“It wasn’t long enough.”
“Where is Tee Beau?”
“I ain’t gonna tell you no more. Waste of time,” she said, took a cigarette from a pack on the ironing board, and lit it. She blew the smoke out in the humid air. “You a white man. Colored folk ain’t never gonna be your bidness. You come round now ’cause you need Tee Beau catch that white trash shot you. You just see a little colored boy can he’p you now. But you cain’t be knowing what he really like, how he hurt inside, how much he love his gran’maman, how much he care for Dorothea and what he willing to do for that little girl. You don’t be knowing none of these things, Mr. Dave.”
“Who’s Dorothea?”
“Go up the juke, ax her who she is. Ax her about Hipolyte, about what Tee Beau do for her. You, that’s gonna take him up to the Red Hat.”
I said good-bye to her, but she didn’t bother to answer. It was raining hard when I stepped off the gallery, and drops of mud danced in the dirt yard. Down the street at the four-corners, the clapboard facade of the juke joint glistened in the gray light, and the scroll of neon over the door, which read BIG MAMA GOULA’S, looked like purple smoke in the rain that blew back off the eaves.
The inside was crowded with Negroes, the air thick with cigarette smoke, the smell of dried sweat, muscat, talcum powder, chitlins, gumbo, flat beer, and bathroom disinfectant. The jukebox was deafening, and the pool players rifled the balls into side pockets, shouting and slamming the rack down on the table’s slate surface. Beyond the dance floor a zydeco band with an accordion, washboard, thimbles, and an electric bass was setting up on a small stage surrounded by orange lights and chicken wire. Behind the musicians a huge window fan sucked the cigarette smoke out into the rain, and their clothes fluttered in the breeze like bird’s feathers. Two deep at the bar, the customers ate boudin and pickled hog’s feet off paper plates, drank long-necked Jax and wine spotioti, a mixture of muscat and whiskey that can fry your head for a week.
I stood at the end of the bar, saw the eyes flick momentarily sideways, then heard the conversations resume as though I were not there. I waited for the bartender to reach that moment when he would decide to recognize me. He walked on the duckboards to within three feet of me and began lifting handfuls of beer bottles between his fingers from a cardboard carton, fitting them down into the ice bin. There was a thin, dead cigar in his mouth.
“What you want, man?” he asked, without looking up.
“I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux with the sheriff’s department,” I said, and opened my badge in my palm.
“What you want?” His eyes looked at me for
the first time. They were sullen and flecked with tiny red veins.
“I’d like to talk to Dorothea.”
“She’s working the tables. She’s real busy now.”
“I only want a couple of minutes of her time. Call her over, please.”
“Look, man, this ain’t the place. You understand what I’m talking about?”
“Not really.”
He raised up from his work and put his hands flat on the bar.
“That’s her out yonder by the band,” he said. “You want to go out there and get her? That what you want?”
“Ask her to come over here, please.”
“Listen, I ain’t did you nothing. Why you giving me this truck?”
The men next to me had stopped talking now and were smoking their cigarettes casually and looking at their own reflections in the bar mirror. One man wore a lavender porkpie hat with a feather in the brim. His sports coat hung heavy on one side.
“Look, man, you got a car outside?” the bartender asked.
“Yes.”
“Go sit in it. I’ll be sending her,” he said, then his voice changed. “Why you be bothering that girl? She ain’t did nothing.”
“I know she hasn’t.”
“Then why you bothering her?” he asked.
Before I turned to go outside, I saw a big black woman in a purple dress looking at me from the far end of the duckboards. Her hands were on her hips, her chin pointed upward; she took the cigarette out of her mouth and blew smoke in my direction, her eyes never leaving my face. In the dim light I thought I saw blue tattoos scrolled on the tops of her breasts.
The rain clattered on the roof of my car and streamed down the windows. At the back of the juke joint, beyond the oyster-shell parking lot covered with flattened beer cans, were two battered house trailers. Two men who looked like Latins, in denim work clothes and straw hats, drove up in a pickup truck and knocked at one of the trailers, their bodies pressed up against the door to stay out of the rain. A black woman opened the inside door and spoke to them through the screen. They got back in their truck and left. I saw one of them look back through the rear window as they pulled onto the dirt road.