“Forget it. You guys have one on me. I think I fried my mush,” Clete said, and put a five-dollar bill on the bar.
He walked outside, slightly off balance, the wind suddenly cool and fresh in his face, the stars arching across a black sky. He didn’t bother to see if Gribble was still in the camper’s shell; he didn’t care if Gribble was there or not. He opened the driver’s door to Albert’s truck, pulling the keys out of his pocket, and bent over to get in. That was when he saw a shadow break across the corner of his vision.
The blow was as hard as a blow can be before a person loses consciousness. The weapon itself seemed to come out of the sky, whistling as it whipped across the back of Clete’s skull. Inside a secluded place where Clete often lived, he knew he had been hit with a blackjack, one that had been manufactured in the classic design of a lead weight sewn inside an elongated sheath, mounted on a spring, balanced perfectly on a leather-woven grip that allowed the assailant to deliver a crushing, even fatal, blow with little effort.
Clete crashed across the seat and fell into a heap on the opposite side of the cab. With his blood running from his scalp into his collar, he felt himself being driven to a place and a final act that he had avoided for years — in Irish Channel street rumbles and on night trails strung with toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds and in firefights with the death squads in El Salvador and up against the Mob in Reno and during Katrina when the levees collapsed and he had watched his first and only love, the Great Whore of Babylon, drown under the waves.
CHAPTER 13
FOR AN INDETERMINATE period Clete lay in the bottom of a dark well that was filled with memories and sensations that he thought he’d forgotten long ago. He saw himself stripping away a brick wall in an old house on Tchoupitoulas, where a corpse dancing with maggots had been entombed. He saw himself prying open the trunk of a car inside which a mobster had been locked before it was driven into Lake Pontchartrain. He felt his weight bounce tight inside a parachute harness when he was in Force Recon, the breath whooshing from his chest, his steel pot razoring down on his nose.
He wanted to get out of the dark well, away from memories that somehow were associated with confinement and suffocation and bondage. Where was he? Why wouldn’t light enter his eyes when he opened them? All he could remember was the blow against the back of his head and tumbling into a great blackness that seemed to have no bottom.
When Clete actually awoke, to the degree that he knew he was still alive, he realized his eyes were wrapped with tape, his wrists locked behind a tree trunk with ligatures. He could smell pine needles on the forest floor and hear the wind blowing through the canopy. Above him, perhaps up a slope, he heard a heavy machine clanking and grinding over rocks and rough ground, then a sound like a steel bucket thudding into the earth, scraping up dirt and small boulders, unloading it all in a rasping downpour from a steel bucket.
The ground was hard under Clete’s buttocks, the bark of the tree cutting into his back. He pulled against the ligatures, then tried to get to his feet, but the circumference of the trunk was such that he couldn’t negotiate enough space to push himself into an upright position. His immobility was like that of a man prematurely sealed inside a coffin.
He scraped the tape back and forth against the tree bark, hoping to pull it loose from his eyes. But his abductor had wrapped it several times around Clete’s head, winding it tightly into the scalp and hair and the bloody wound where Clete had been hit with the blackjack. Then it had been wound around the eye sockets and eyebrows, molding the layers so that they probably could not be removed except with scissors or a knife. Clete pushed his heels into the dirt and tried to bend the tree backward against its root system, but to no avail. Up above, the earth-grader or bulldozer or whatever it was continued to grind and clank and dump large loads of dirt in a pile, the stench of burnt diesel drifting off its smokestack.
Why was somebody excavating on the hillside? What was he digging?
A grave, Clete thought. Or a place to bury someone alive. He could feel sweat breaking on his forehead. “Who the hell are you?” he said.
But his words were lost in the engine’s roar and the scrape of steel against dirt and rock. He tried to think. Was it the bikers from the club? Were they twisted on meth? Would they take a barroom beef this far?
It was possible. They nailed women’s hands to trees. If he could work one wrist loose. If he only had a weapon. His twenty-five auto, his switchblade, even a can of Mace. Why had he messed with those guys?
But he knew the answer. Clete had spent a lifetime wading across the wrong Rubicon, provoking the skells and meltdowns, defying authority, ridiculing convention and normalcy. Women loved him for his vulnerability, and each one of them thought she was the cure for the great hole inside him that he tried to fill with food and booze and the adrenaline high that he got from dismantling his own life. But one by one they had all abandoned him, just as his father had, and Clete had immediately gone back on the dirty boogie, once more postponing the day he would round a corner and enter a street where all the windows were painted over and there was no sign of a living person.
The operator of the heavy machine cut the engine. In the silence, Clete heard someone drop to the ground and walk toward him. The footsteps stopped, and Clete realized his abductor was standing above him, perhaps savoring the moment, perhaps positioning himself to inflict injury that Clete could not anticipate or protect himself from.
“Whatever you’re going to do, just do it,” Clete said. “But you’d better punch my whole ticket, because I’m going to hunt you down and—”
Before Clete could complete his sentence, the abductor crouched next to him and made a shushing noise, as though speaking to a troubled child. Clete turned toward the abductor, his scalp drawing tight, waiting for the blow or the instrument of torment to violate his body. He jerked at the ligatures on his wrists. “You motherfucker,” he said.
He heard the abductor click open the top of a cigarette lighter and rotate the emery wheel with his thumb. The abductor lit a cigarette and drew in on it, the paper crisping audibly as the ash grew hotter. Clete felt the exhaled smoke separate across his nose and mouth.
“Fuck you,” Clete said, his big heart thumping in his chest.
The abductor made no response and continued to blow his cigarette smoke on Clete’s cheek and neck.
“Dave Robicheaux leaves hair on the walls, bub. Ole Streak is a mean motor scooter. You don’t put the glide on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said, the words starting to break nonsensically from his mouth. “Streak dumped a guy’s whole brainpan in a toilet once. That’s no jive, Jack. Think of me when you eat a forty-five hollow-point.”
The abductor got to his feet, dropped his cigarette into the pine needles, and ground it under the sole of his shoe.
“Who are you? Tell me who you are and why you’re doing this,” Clete said.
Instead of a reply, Clete heard liquid sloshing inside a container and the pop of a plug being pulled from an airtight spout on the container. A second later, gasoline rained down on his head, soaking his hair, burning the wound inside the tape around his eyes, drenching his shirt and skin, pooling in his lap. The abductor even pulled off Clete’s shoes and soaked his feet and socks and drew the line of delivery up and down his legs.
“You sonofabitch, you cowardly piece of shit,” Clete said, his voice cracking for the first time.
The abductor began to pile twigs and decayed tree branches and pinecones and handfuls of pine needles on Clete’s head and torso and legs, whistling a tune, journeying back into the underbrush to gather more fuel for his enterprise. Clete struggled again against the ligatures, then tried to stretch his body forward so he could work one foot under a haunch and raise himself erect. All his efforts were futile, and he felt a sense of remorse and irrevocable loss he had not experienced since his fifteenth birthday, when he had torn the hands off a windup clock his father had given him.
He couldn’t stop the tap
es that kept playing themselves over and over in his head. The Big Exit should have come from a Bouncing Betty or at the hands of diminutive figures in black pajamas and conical straw hats threading their way through elephant grass that reminded him of Kansas wheat. But blood expander and a heroic navy corpsman who had dragged Clete down a hillside on a poncho liner had cheated Sir Charles out of another kill, and Clete had returned to the Big Sleazy and a battlefield of another kind.
The Mob had tried to kill him, and so had members of the NOPD. Whores had rolled him, and a sniper had put two twenty-two rounds in his back while he carried his patrol partner down a fire escape. He had skipped the country on a homicide beef and joined the leftists in El Sal, where he got to see up close and personal the handiwork of M16 rifles and death squads in Stone Age villages. But the real enemy always lived in his own chest, and like the gambler who hangs at the end of the craps table, bouncing the dice down the felt again and again, watching everything he owns raked away by the croupier’s stick, Clete had finally wended his way to a dark hillside in western Montana where he now lay powerless and defeated, waiting for a degenerate to roll the emery wheel on a cigarette lighter and turn his body into a funeral pyre.
How do you shut down a tape like that? How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?
LESS THAN FIFTY feet away, Albert Hollister’s pickup truck was parked in a grove of pine trees, the camper bladed with moonlight. Inside the camper, J. D. Gribble was sleeping in a fetal position, a blanket wrapped around his head, his dreams peopled with images that he could not dispel or extract himself from. He heard the night sounds of a jail — the count man clicking his baton against the bars, somebody yelling in the max unit, a kid being wrestled down on a bunk, a rolled towel jerked back against his mouth. But the dream and the images in his head, brought on by the mixture of alcohol and cold medicine, were not just about stacking time.
He saw a dark corridor with bars set in the middle, and on the other side of the bars, a lighted world where a gold-haired woman in a sequined blue evening dress was playing an HD-28 Martin guitar. Her mouth was red, her expression plaintive, her dress as tight on her body as the skin on a seal. Behind her was a backdrop of alkali wasteland and low purple mountains that rimmed the entire horizon. She curved her palm around the guitar’s neck to chord the frets and seemed to purse her lips at Gribble as she sang.
In the dream, he walked down the corridor toward her until he reached the bars and had to stop and rest with his hands clinging to them. From out of the glare, a man in a linen suit approached the woman and opened a parasol, lifting it above her head, shading her from the sun. For the first time, Gribble noticed the woman’s belly was swollen with child. The man’s face was disfigured and did not look quite human, even though he was grinning at the corner of his mouth. The woman wore blue contact lenses, and both she and the disfigured man were staring oddly at Gribble, as though wondering why he did not recognize the inevitability of his rejection.
Was it so hard for him to understand that a woman carrying an unborn child must find ways to survive? Did he want the child aborted? Was she supposed to live on welfare while the father of her child spent his most productive years in a contract prison?
Actually, he understood those questions and would not argue with the answers they implied. The real question was one nobody had asked. Was her choice of a disfigured rich man driven by her need to survive or the need to sustain her celebrity? No one who has ever been sprinkled with stardust walks away from it easily. In fact, no one of his own volition ever walks away from it. Like youth, fame and adulation are not surrendered, they’re taken away from you.
It was cold inside the camper shell when the man who called himself Gribble woke from his dream. He pulled the blanket from his head and sat up in the darkness. He could feel the wind blowing against the camper, and through the tinted glass in the side panel, he thought he could see pine needles sifting through the air and the shadows of the trees changing shape on the ground. Then he realized the shadows were not just those of trees.
He rubbed his hand on the glass and saw a humped figure at the base of a ponderosa with his wrists fastened behind the trunk. He saw a second figure walk out of the darkness, carrying an armload of organic debris from the undergrowth. The figure stood above the man fastened to the base of the tree trunk and poured the load of twigs and dead branches and leaves on the man’s head and shoulders.
The man wore work boots and a dark suit and dark shirt. His hands and wrists were covered by rawhide gloves with cuffs that extended back over the wrists. He wore a full mask, one that was molded from thick plastic, bone-colored, hard-edged, and incised with slits to cool the skin. He seemed encased in his own darkness, his movements simian, his ritual one that he had learned and refined and fed in a private world that only his victims were allowed to witness.
Gribble could not understand how he had gotten where he was or what was going on by the pine tree. Through the back window of the camper, he could see a long wooded slope and part of a log road that zigzagged through the trees. He could see stars over the Bitterroot Valley and a creek full of white water notched deeply in earth that was soft with lichen and layers of damp pine needles. Had Mr. Purcel gotten into it with the bikers at the saloon? Had they followed the truck and forced it off the road? But there were no motorcycles here, nor any other vehicle that he could see.
The man in the mask was examining the ground as though he had lost something. He picked up a cigarette butt and put it in his pocket, then brushed his foot across the spot where the cigarette had been.
A pinecone fell from overhead and pinged on the pickup’s hood. Suddenly the man in the mask was staring at the truck, his body motionless, a red gas container in his hand. Gribble froze, staring back at the man in the mask, afraid to move, afraid not to. His hand touched the barrel of the Remington pump.
What should he do? This wasn’t his business. The worst trouble in his life had always come from messing in other people’s business. He hadn’t made the world. Why was it his job to change it? Why didn’t people deal with their own damn grief? A good deed had sent him to the pen, on the hard road, spreading tar under a white sun that gave even black men heatstroke. It wasn’t fair. He had just wanted to listen to music, to drink one or two beers and not think about the catastrophe he had made of his life.
Another pinecone toppled from the tree, hitting the camper’s roof. The man in the mask looked upward and seemed to relax and lose curiosity about the truck, turning his attention to the figure sitting on the ground.
CLETE PURCEL TILTED up his head, listening, trying to sense the movements of the man who had covered him with debris from the woods. “Tell my why you’re doing this? I know I’m not walking out of here. What’s to lose?” he said.
A long time seemed to pass. Then the man got down on one knee, his breath echoing inside a hard surface of some kind. When he spoke, his voice was thick and ropy, hardly more than a whisper, like that of someone in the throes of sexual passion: “It’s fun. Particularly when I do it to somebody like you.”
Had Clete heard the voice before? There was no inflection or accent in it that he could detect. But all whispers sound alike, and the tonality of one has almost the same tonality as another.
The only life preserver available was time. Make him keep talking, Clete thought. Keep him occupied with his own sick head. The sicker they are, the more they want to talk. Inside every sadist is a self-pitying titty baby. “But I know you, right? Somehow I got in your space, jammed you up, maybe, not even knowing I was doing it?” Clete said.
No answer.
“I remind you of somebody,” Clete said. “Maybe somebody who knocked you around when you were a kid. Ever do any reformatory time? It’s a bitch in those places. You know what the Midnight Express is, right? A skinhead with Gothic-letter tats all over him holds a knife at your throat while he drives a locomotive up your ass. Is that what we’re talking about her
e? The whole country is turning into The Jerry Springer Show, and the jails are worse. Someone make you pull a train when you were a kid?”
He heard the man chuckle and get to his feet. For a moment there was no sound at all, then the man kicked Clete in the ribs, waited a second, and kicked him again, harder.
“I was in ’Nam,” Clete said, eating his pain. “I saw psychopaths do stuff that made me ashamed I was a human being. I always wanted to believe some of them got help when they came back. But the truth is, they probably didn’t. Know why? Because nobody cares what they did. They did it to Zips, and we were in the business of killing Zips. ‘How do you shoot women and children? Easy, you just don’t lead them as much.’ Ever hear that one? What I’m saying is, you’re not as different as you think you are. You ever see a ville full of straw hooches naped? Nobody gave a shit then, they don’t give a shit now. Somebody screwed you over when you were a kid. You got a legitimate beef. When I say ‘screwed over,’ you dig exactly what I’m talking about, right? I smoked a federal informant. That was in Louisiana. I could have ridden the bolt on that one. Instead, I’ve got a PI license and a permit to carry a piece.”
“No cigar, fat man,” the voice whispered.
The man standing above Clete was breathing deep in his chest, as though oxygenating his blood. Then he poured the rest of the gasoline on Clete’s body and on the dried wood and leaves and pine needles, saving out a little to trail off of Clete’s shoes so he could use it as a liquid fuse without exposing himself to the whoosh of flame that was about to burst from the base of the tree.
GRIBBLE WATCHED THE man in the mask set down his gas can and take his cigarette lighter out of his pocket again. Gribble’s pulse was pounding in his ears. The man in the mask removed a piece of paper from his coat pocket, twisted it into a tight wrap, then flipped open the top of his cigarette lighter. He lit the tip of the paper and watched the flame curl along the edges toward his fingers.