DR08 - Burning Angel

  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.

  “No, I was just killing time. How you doing, Luke?”

  “Ain't doing bad .. . You just driving around?”

  “That's about it.”

  He inserted a thumbnail in his teeth, then folded his fingers and looked at the tops of his nails. “I need legal advice about something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Got to have your promise it ain't going nowhere.”

  “I'm a police officer, Luke.”

  “You a police officer when you feel like being one, Mr. Dave.”

  “I'd better get to the office.”

  He craned out over the railing, looked down the dirt road, measured the sun's height in the sky.

  “Come on out back,” he said.

  I followed him around the side of the house. He paused by the back porch, slipped a pair of toe less canvas shoes over his feet, and pulled a cane sickle out of a tree stump where chickens had been butchered.

  “See where the coulee go, out back of the old privy?” he said, walking ahead of me. “Yesterday they was running the grader along the edge of the coulee. The bank started caving, and the guy turned the grader out in the field and didn't do no more work here. Last night the moon was up and I seen something bright in the dirt.”

  The coulee ran like a ragged wound in the earth to the edge of a cane field, where it had been filled in years ago so the cultivated acreage would not be dissected by a water drainage. The sides were eaten and scrolled with crawfish holes, the bottom thick with cattails and reeds, webs of dead algae, cane husks, and through the cattails a chain of stagnant pools that trembled with insects.

  Luke looked back over his shoulder at the dirt road, then slid down the side of the coulee and stepped across a pool to the opposite bank.

  “See where the machine crushed down the dirt?” he said. “It look like a bottom lip hanging down, don't it?” He smiled up at me. “Mr. Dave, you gonna tell this to somebody?”

  I squatted down on my haunches and didn't answer. He smiled again, blew out his breath, as though he were making an irrevocable commitment for both of us, then began working the tip of the sickle into the bank, scaling it away, watching each dirt clod that rolled down to his feet.

  “What I found last night I stuck back in them holes,” he said. He sliced at the bank, and a curtain of dirt cascaded across his canvas shoes. “Lookie there,” he said, his fingers grabbing at three dull pieces of metal that toppled and bounced into the water.

  He stooped, his knees splayed wide, shoved his wrists into the reeds and the water that was clouding with gray puffs of mud, worked his fingers deeper into the silt, then held up an oblong, coin like piece of silver and dropped it into my palm.

  “What you call that?” he said.

  I rubbed my thumb across the slick surface, the embossed cross and archaic numbers and lettering on it.

  “It's Spanish or Portuguese, Luke. I think these were minted in Latin America, then shipped back to Europe,” I said.

  “Aint Bertie been right all along. Jean Lafitte buried his treasure here.”

  “Somebody did. What was the advice you wanted?”

  “The wall of this coulee's probably full of them coins. But we talked Aint Bertie into giving up her claim.”

  “This whole area is going to be covered with cement and buildings,”

  I said. “The guys doing it don't care about the dead people buried here. Why should they care about the coins?”

  “That's what I been thinking. No point bothering them.”

  “I couldn't argue with that. How about I buy you some breakfast up on the highway, Luke?”

  “I'd like that real fine. Yes, suh, I was fixing to ax you the same thing.”

  Clete came into the office right after lunch. He wore a pair of seersucker slacks low on his hips and a dark blue short-sleeve silk shirt. He kept glancing back toward the glass partition into the hallway.

  “Da I need a passport to get into this place?” he said. He got up, opened the door, and looked into a uniformed deputy's face. “Can I help you with something?”

  He returned to his chair, looked hard at the glass again, his face flushed.

  “Ease up, Clete,” I said.

  “I don't like people staring at me.” The soles of his loafers tapped up and down on the floor.

  “You want to tell me what it is?”

  “Erru'le Pogue's trying to set you up.”

  “Oh?”

  “You're going to step right into it, too.” He paced in front of my desk and kept snapping his fingers and hitting his hands together. “I shouldn't have come in here.”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  “He called my office. He said he wants to give himself up.”

  “Why didn't he call me?”

  “He thinks you're tapped.”

  “Where is he, Clete?”

  “I knew it.”

  Chapter 32

  WAS LATE afternoon when we put my boat into the Atchafalaya River and headed east into the basin and the huge network of bayous, bays, sandbars, and flooded stands of trees that constitute the alluvial system of the river. The sun was hot and bloodred above the willow islands behind us and you could see gray sheets of rain curving out of the sky in the south and waves starting to cap in the bay. I opened up both engines full throttle and felt the water split across the bow, hiss along the hull like wet string, then flatten behind us in a long bronze trough dimpled with flying fish that glided on the wind like birds.

  Clete sat on a cushioned locker behind me, his Marine Corps utility cap on the back of his head, pressing rounds from a box of .223 ammunition into a second magazine for my ARI5. Then he inverted the magazine and jungle-clipped it with electrician's tape to one that was already in the rifle. He saw me watching him.

  “Lose the attitude, big mon. You blink on this dude and he'll take your eyes out,” he said above the engine's noise.

  I cut back on the throttle on the east side of the bay and let the wake take us into a narrow bayou that snaked through a flooded woods.

  Cottonmouth moccasins lay coiled on top of dead logs and the lowest cypress branches along the banks, and ahead I saw a white crane lift from a tiny inlet matted with hyacinths and glide for a time above the bayou, then suddenly rise through a red-gold, sunlit break in the canopy and disappear.

 
Clete was standing beside me now. There was no wind inside the trees, and I could smell mosquito dope running in his sweat. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and swatted mosquitoes away from his hair.

  “It's like being up the Mekong. It's got to be a setup,” he said.

  “I think he's scared.”

  “My ass. This guy's been killing people all his life. We can go around a corner and he can chop us into horse meat.”

  “That's not it. He's had too many other chances.”

  Clete pointed a finger at me, his eyes hard and big in his face, then went out of the cabin and worked his way forward to the bow, where he knelt on one knee with the ARI5 propped on his thigh, the sling wrapped around his forearm.

  The sun fell through the canopy and illuminated a sunken houseboat and the pale, bloated carcass of a wild hog that had wedged under the porch roof. The metallic green backs of alligator gars rolled against the surface, then their long jaws and files of needlelike teeth parted as they went deep into the pocket where the hog's stomach used to be.

  Up ahead was a blind corner. I began to believe Clete had been right.

  Not only were the risks all ours, I had allowed myself to be convinced that an amoral, pathological man was more human, more capable of remorse, than he had ever shown himself to be previously. This bayou, shut off from light, filled with insects and gars and poisonous snakes, vaguely scented with the smells of decay and death, a place Joseph Conrad would have well understood, was Pogue's chosen environment, and so far we were operating on his terms.

  I cut the engines, and in the sudden quiet I heard our wake sliding back across the sandbars into the woods, a crescendo of birds' wings flapping in the trees, a 'gator slapping its tail in water. But I didn't hear the St. Mary Parish sheriff's boat, with Helen Soileau on it, that should have been closing the back door on Emile Pogue.

  I started to use the radio, then I saw Clete raise his hand in the air.

  Someone was running in the woods, crashing through brush, splashing across a slough. I felt the bow bite into a sandbar and the boat become motionless. I went forward with Clete and tried to see through the tree trunks, the tangle of air vines, the leaves that tumbled out of the canopy, the pools of mauve shadow that seemed to take the shape of animals.

  Then we heard the roar of an airboat out on the next bay.

  “How do you figure that?” Clete said.

  “Maybe he wants another season to run.”

  We dropped off the bow onto the sandbar and worked our way along the bank and through the shallows to the corner. The back of Clete's neck was oily with sweat, inflamed with insect bites. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, paused at the bend in the bayou, then stepped out in the open, his face blank, his eyes flicking from one object to the next.

  He pointed.

  An aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied with a chain to a cypress knee on the bank, and beyond it a shack was set back in the willows on pilings. The screens were webbed with rust, dead insects, and dirt, and the tin roof had long ago taken on the colors of a woods in winter. The base of the pilings glistened with a sheen like petroleum waste from the pools of stagnant water they sat in. Clete pressed a wadded handkerchief to his face. The dry ground behind the shack was blown with bottle flies and reeked of unburied excrement.

  I slipped my .45 from my holster, pulled back the slide on a hollow-point round, and moved through the trees toward the rear of the shack while Clete approached the front. The water had receded only recently, and the sand was wet and curled over my tennis shoes like soft cement. I heard sound inside the shack, then realized a radio was playing. It was Ravel's Bolero, compelling and incessant, building like a painful obsession you can't let go of.

  I came out of the trees ten feet from the rear of the shack and saw Clete poised by the front entrance, his face waiting. I held up my hand, then brought it down and we both went in at the same time.

  Except my foot punched through a plank on the back step that was as soft as rotted cork. I stumbled into the interior still limping, my .45 pointed straight out with both hands. Clete was silhouetted against the broken light beyond the front door, his rifle hanging from his right hand. He was looking at something on the floor.

  Then I saw him, amidst the litter of soiled clothes and fishing gear and barbells. He lay on his back by a small table with a shortwave radio on it, dressed in jeans, a sleeveless green T-shirt, suspenders, his bare feet like pale white blocks of wood. A dark pool shaped like a deformed three-leaf clover swelled from the back of his neck. I knelt beside him.

  He opened his mouth and coughed on an obstruction deep in his throat.

  His tongue was as red and bright as licorice. I started to turn him on his side.

  “Don't do it, chief,” he whispered. “He broke the shank off inside.”

  “Who did this to you, Emile?”

  “Never saw him. A pro. Maybe that cocksucker Marsallus.”

  His eyes came together like BB's, then refocused on my face.

  “We're going to put you on my boat, then get you out in the bay so a chopper can pick you up,” I said.

  But he was already shaking his head before I finished my words. His eyes slid off my face onto my shirt.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Lean close.”

  I lowered my ear toward his mouth, then realized that was not what he wanted. His hand lifted up and clenched around my religious medal and chain, knotted it across his knuckles, held me hovering above the shrunken pinpoints of his eyes.

  “I ain't got the right words. Too many bad gigs, chief. I apologize for the Dutchie,” he whispered.

  When his hand fell from my chain, his breath mushroomed out of his mouth and struck against my face like a fist. A bottle fly crawled across his eyes.

  Clete clicked off the dial on the shortwave set. The dead radio tubes crackled in the silence.

  Chapter 33

  NEXT MORNING Helen Soileau walked with me into Clete's office on Main.

  The front and back doors were open, and the papers in Clete's wire baskets lifted and ruffled in the breeze. Helen looked around the office.

  “Where's Avon's answer to the Beast of Buchenwald?” she said.

  “What's the problem?” Clete said from behind his desk, trying to smile.

  “They knew we were coming, that's the problem,” she said.

  “Terry? Come on,” he said.

  “Where is she?” Helen said.

  “Getting some stuff photocopied.”

  “Does she have any scratches on her?” I said.

  “You want me to strip-search my secretary?”

  “It's not funny, Clete,” I said.

  “She wasn't in the office when Pogue called,” he said.

  “You're sure?” I said.

  “She was across the street at the doughnut place.”

  “You didn't tell her about it?” I asked.

  “No .. .” His eyes looked into space. “No, I'm sure of it. I never mentioned Pogue's name, never mentioned a place.”

  Helen looked at me and made a sucking sound with her teeth. “Okay,”

  she said. “Maybe the hit was already on him. There's Marsal-his to think about, too.”

  “Not with a knife. We're talking about one of Pogue's buddies from the Phoenix Program,” Clete said. He leaned over in his chair and clicked on a floor fan, clamped his hand on top of a yellow legal pad by his telephone. The pages blew and rattled in the gust of air.

  “Why would anyone try to take a guy like Pogue with a knife? Unless the killer knew we were in the vicinity?” I said.

  Clete scratched at the scar that ran through his eyebrow, rested his chin on his knuckles.

  “I guess you're right, you got a leak. How about that butt wipe who was in the Crotch?” he said.

  “Rufus Arceneaux?” Helen said.

  Clete and I drove to New Orleans at dawn, turned off I-io onto St.

  Charles Avenue, and went uptown toward th
e Garden District, past the lovely old Pontchartrain Hotel and rows of antebellum and early Victorian homes with their narrow pillared galleries and oak-canopied yards that stayed black with shadow even in summer. We turned left across the neutral ground and the streetcar tracks and crossed Prytania, the street where Lillian Hellman grew up, then headed up Magazine, the old line of disembarkation into the Irish Channel, toward the levee and a different New Orleans, one of late-nineteenth-century paint less frame houses with ventilated shutters and hardpan dirt yards and tiny galleries propped up on bricks, clapboard corner bars that never closed or took down their Christmas lights, matchbox barbecue joints that smelled of hickory and ribs by 9 A.M.“ and graffiti-scrolled liquor stores whose windows were barred like jails.

  I parked in front of the address Luke Fontenot had given me. A thundershower had just passed through the neighborhood and the air was gray and wet and steam rose from the roofs like smoke in winter. Clete rolled down the window and squinted at the rows of almost identical, weathered, coffee-colored houses, a ramshackle tin-roofed juke joint overgrown with banana trees on the corner, an elderly black man in a frayed suit and sneakers and baseball cap riding a bicycle with fat tires aimlessly up and down the street. I could see shadows and lights in Clete's face, like reflections that cling inside frost on a window.

  ”They say if you're ever black on Saturday night, you'll never want to be white again,“ he said.

  ”You usually hear white people say that after they shortchange the yardman,“ I said.

  ”Our house was one block over.“

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn't.

  ”You want to come in?“ I said.

  ”No, it's your show. I'm going to get a cup of coffee.“

  ”Something on your mind?“

  He laughed down in his chest, rubbed a knuckle against his nose. ”My old man knocked me into next week because I dropped his bucket of beer in front of that juke joint. He was quite a guy. I was never big on nostalgia, Streak.“

  I watched him walk toward the levee, his porkpie hat slanted on the crown of his head, his face lifted into the breeze off the river, his feelings walled up inside a private place where I never transgressed.

  Ruthie Jean's address was a two-story house with a fire escape for an upstairs entrance and wash strung across the veranda and a single paint-blistered trellis that was spoked with red roses.