DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

  Amoment of contrasts. That same afternoon a gumbo cook-off was in progress at City Park. The manicured and sloping lawns along the bayou were dark green in the shade, scattered with azalea bloom, the sky strung with strips of pink cloud. Three shrimp boats festooned with flags blew their horns near the drawbridge. The shouts of children and the twang of a diving board resonated from the park's swimming pool like a collective announcement that this was indeed the first day of a verdant and joyous summer. In the midst of the live oaks, the gaiety of the crowd, the smell of boudin and boiling shrimp and okra and pecan pie and keg beer swilled from paper cups, Tee Bobby Hulin mounted a knocked-together stage with his band, plugged the jack of his electric guitar into the sound system, and went into a re-created version of "Jolie Blon" I had never heard before. It was like Charlie Barnet's 1939 recording of "Cherokee," a perfect moment in music that probably had no specific origin or plan, a deep rumbling of saxophones, a building percussion in the background, a melody and countermelody that were like a tongue-and-groove frame around the whole piece, and inside it all an innovative artist who took long rides on a score created extemporaneously in his own head without ever violating the musical intricacies at work around him. Tee Bobby looked like a man back from the dead. Or maybe he was high again on meth or skag and hadbought a temporary reprieve from the hunger that ate at his system twenty-four hours a day, but I couldn't say. He wore shades and a purple fedora and a long-sleeved black shirt with garters on the arms and beige suede boots and lavender slacks flared and sewn with flowers at the bottom. After the first piece, he did two more numbers, conventional rock 'n' roll pieces that he took no rides on and showed little interest in. Then he slipped off his guitar and went to the beer stand. "What was that first piece you did?" I said behind him. He turned around, lowering a beer cup from his mouth. " ']olie Blon's Bounce.' I just wrote it. Ain't tried it on an audience before. Didn't nobody seem real tuned in to it," he said. "It's great." He nodded, his shades mirroring the crowd around us, the thick overhang of the live oaks. "Jimmy Dean say he might take a demo out to L.A. for me. Souped-up zydeco's hot in some clubs out there," he said. "Jimmy Dean is a parasite. He couldn't shine your shoes." "Least he ain't dumped me at a homeless shelter in the middle of the night." "Have a good life," I said. "Try to make me feel bad all you want. You don't bother me no more. I passed the lie detector," he said. He faced the bandstand and upended his beer cup, the foam rilling down the sides of his mouth, the corner of his eye like a prosthetic implant. His self-satisfaction and stupidity made me want to hit him. I started back through the crowd to find Bootsie andAlafair and bumped against the father of Amanda Boudreau. His body was hard, his feet planted solidly, his gaze unblinking behind his wire-rim glasses. His wife's arm was tucked inside his, the two of them like an island of grief that no one saw. "Excuse me. I wasn't watching where I was going," I said. "That was Bobby Hulin you were talking to, wasn't it?" Mrs. Boudreau said. "Yes, ma'am. That's correct," I said. "He's here, playing at a concert, and the man who supposedly represents our daughter chats with him by the beer stand. I can't quite express my feelings. You'll have to forgive me," she said, and pulled her arm from her husband's and walked quickly toward the rim of the park, pulling a handkerchief from her purse. "You got a daughter, Mr. Robicheaux?" her husband asked. "Yes, sir. Her name's Alafair," I replied. He fixed his glasses up on his nose with his thumb. "You have to pardon my wife. She's not doing too good. I probably don't make it any easier for her, either. I hope your daughter has a wonderful life. I truly do, sir." And he walked away, limping like a man whose gout gave him no peace.

  That night I had drunk dreams and woke at two in the morning, wired, my mouth dry, my ears filled with sounds that had no origin. I could not remember the images in the dreams, only the nameless feeling they left me with. Like being slapped awake when no one else was in theroom. Like stepping unexpectedly off a ledge one hundred feet below the Gulfs surface and plummeting into a chasm filled with coldness and rough-skinned finned creatures whose faces flared at you out of the silt. I went to the kitchen and sat in the dark, the luminous numbers of my watch glowing on my wrist. A bottle of vanilla extract sat on the windowsill in the moonlight, the curtains blowing around it. In the distance I heard a train and I thought of the old Southern Pacific, its lounge car lit, the passengers sipping highballs at the bar as the locomotive pulled them safely across the dark land to an improbable country of blue mountains and palm trees and pink sunrises where no one ever died. I wanted to get in my truck and bang down corrugated roads, grind gears, thunder across plank bridges. I wanted to drive deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp, past the confines of reason, into the past, into a world of lost dialects, gator hunters, busthead whiskey, moss harvesters, Jax beer, trotline runners, moonshiners, muskrat trappers, cockfights, bloodred boudin, a jigger of Jim Beam lowered into a frosted schooner of draft, outlaw shrimpers, dirty rice black from the pot, hogmeat cooked in rum, Pearl and Regal and Grand Prize and Lone Star iced down in washtubs, crawfish boiled with cob corn and artichokes, all of it on the tree-flooded, alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time. All you had to do was release yourself from the prison of restraint, just snip loose the stitches that sewed your skin to the hairshirt of normalcy. Igot in the truck and drove full-bore down the four-lane, the frame shaking in the Gulf wind, until I saw the bridge spanning the Atchafalaya River at Morgan City and the network of adjoining bayous and canals and the shrimp and pleasure boats moored in the moss-green, softly muted tropical ambience that defines almost every unimpaired waterway in southern Louisiana. I turned into a clapboard bar that looked like it had floated out of the mist onto the road, one window scrolled with a green and gold Dixie beer sign. I sat for five minutes in the false dawn, my hand trembling on the floor stick, my upper lip beaded with sweat. Then I drove back down the highway, fifteen miles under the speed limit, cars whizzing by me, their horns blowing, all the way back to New Iberia and the apartment where Clete Purcel was now living, wondering how in the name of a merciful God I could have a Sunday morning hangover without touching a drop of alcohol.

  I sat at the counter in his small kitchen while Clete fixed coffee and stirred a skillet filled almost to the brim with a half-dozen eggs, strips of bacon, chunks of sausage and yellow cheese, and a sprinkling of chopped scallions to disguise enough cholesterol to clog a sewer main. He wore clacks and his Marine Corps utility cap and a pair of boxer undershorts, printed with fire engines, that hung on his hips like women's bloomers. "But you didn't go in the bar?" he said, not looking at me. "No." "Helen thinks you're doing speed." When I didn'treply, he said, "You got a hearing problem this morning?" "I ate a few of Bootsie's diet pills." "What else?" "A few whites." "Maybe you ought to go all out. Chop up some lines. Start hanging with the rag noses in north Lafayette," he said. He filled a plate for me and clattered it down on the counter. We ate in silence. Outside, the morning was taking hold, wind blowing in a sugarcane field, buzzards circling over a grove of trees. I put four teaspoons of sugar in my coffee and drank it black, in one long swallow. "I'd better get going," I said. "You've got a strange look on your face. Does Bootsie know where you are?" "I called her from the highway." "We're going to a meeting," he said. "We?" "I think you're figuring out ways to get loaded again. I'm not going to allow it. That's just the way it is, big mon." He cupped his huge hand on my neck and squeezed, his breath heavy with the booze he had drunk the night before. I called the Alcoholics Anonymous hotline number and found a meeting in Lafayette. We drove up the old highway in Clete's convertible, with the top down, past Spanish Lake, through Broussard and tree-lined streets dotted with Victorian homes, people crossing through the traffic to Sunday Mass. After I had almost convinced myself that perhaps Clete enjoyed levels of reason and control in his life that I should envy, he described someof his activities of the last week or so, the Clete Purcel version of eco-terrorism. "This guy Legion's not that smart. He hasn't figured out where it's co
ming from yet," he said. Clete had put in a change of address for Legion at the post office, forwarding his mail to General Delivery, Bangor, Maine; called the utility companies and ordered the cutoff of his water, electricity, telephone, and gas service; hired neighborhood black kids to throw firecrackers on his roof, shoot out his windows with BB guns, and shove a burning sack of dog shit under his bedroom floor. Then, in a finale that would have made even No Duh Dolowitz, the Mob's merry prankster, doff his hat, he got an exterminator to go to Legion's house, while Legion was at work, and tent the whole building and fumigate it with termicide, so that the building stank of noxious chemicals for days. Clete casually sipped on a beer while he drove and told me these things, his face handsome with windburn and his aviator's sunglasses, his tropical shirt puffing, steering with two fingers at the bottom of the wheel, like an over-the-hill low rider cruising out of the 1950s. "Have you lost your mind?" I said. "You stoke 'em and smoke 'em, noble mon. I give this character about two weeks before he runs into a wrecking ball. Hey, I'm taking Barbara Shanahan to dinner tonight. You and Bootsie want to come along? Zerelda Calucci told me Perry LaSalle's schlong looks like a fifteen-inch nozzle on a firehose. She's exaggerating, right?" I couldn't even begin to track his train of thought. Wewere on University Avenue in Lafayette now, passing the old oak-shaded brick buildings and colonnaded walkways where I once attended college. "Drop me in front of the meeting," I said. "I'm going in with you." "With a beer can?" He pulled to the curb and tossed the can in an arc over his head, depositing it dead center in a trash barrel.

  CHAPTER 16

  Alove affair with Louisiana is in some ways like falling in love with the biblical whore of Babylon. We try to smile at its carnival-like politics, its sweaty, whiskey-soaked demagogues, the ignorance bred by its poverty and the insularity of its Cajun and Afro-Caribbean culture. But our self-deprecating manner is a poor disguise for the realities that hover on the edges of one's vision like ditty smudges on a family portrait. The state roadsides and parking lots of discount stores are strewn, if not actually layered, with mind-numbing amounts of litter, thrown there by the poor and the uneducated and the revelers for whom a self-congratulatory hedonism is a way of life. With regularity, land developers who are accountable to no one bulldoze out stands of virgin cypress and two-hundred-year-old live oaks, often at night, so the irrevocable nature of their work cannot be seen until daylight, when it is too late to stop it. The petrochemical industry poisons waterways with impunity and even trucks in waste frdm out of state and dumps it in open sludge pits, usually in rural black communities. Rather than fight monied interests, most of the state's politicians give their constituency casinos and Powerball lotteries and drive-by daiquiri windows, along with low income taxes for the wealthy and an eight and one quarter percent sales tax on food for the poor. Why meditate upon a depressing subject? Because on occasion an attempt at redress can come from an unexpected source. On Monday afternoon Marvin Oates was pulling his suitcase on wheels down a rural road that traversed cattle acreage and pecan orchards, across a bridge that spanned a coulee lined with hardwoods and palmettos, past neat cottages with screened porches and shade trees. Up ahead was the Boom Boom Room, the dilapidated Iberia Parish bar owned by Jimmy Dean Styles. A red convertible, the top down, roared past him, the stereo blaring. A bag of fast-food trash and beer cans sailed out of the backseat and exploded against the trunk of a pecan tree, showering litter in a yard. Marvin Oates labored down the road, the roller skate affixed to the bottom of his suitcase grating against the road surface with the unrelieved intensity of marbles rolling down a corrugated tin roof. When he reached the Boom Boom Room, three of Jimmy Styles's rappers and two tattooed, peroxided white women in shorts were drinking long-necked beer and passing a joint by the side of the convertible. A line of sweat leaked from Marvin's hat down hischeek. He loosened his tie, craned his neck, blew out his breath, as though releasing the heat trapped inside his sports coat. "Excuse me, but back yonder one of y'all threw a bag of trash out your car," he said. "Say what?" said a tall man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows. "There's some old colored folks living in that house where you flung your garbage. How'd you like it if you was them and you had to pick up lunch trash with mouth germs all over it?" Marvin said. "Where you from, cracker?" the tall man with orange and purple hair said. "Where folks ain't so ashamed of what they are they got to pay a couple of fat whores to take their dick out of their pants for them," Marvin said. "Hey, Jimmy Sty, come out here! You got to check this out!" another black man called out. Then he turned back to Marvin. "Run all that by us again, man." "Ain't my purpose to get nobody mad. I'm going back on my route now. Lessen one of y'all is interested in a magazine subscription or a discount Bible offer," Marvin said. "You believe this motherfucker?" the man with orange and purple hair said, then balanced his beer bottle on the oyster shells. "You ask me a question, I give you a straight answer. The Bible is my road map, sir. You don't like what you hear, that's your dadburn problem," Marvin said, and blotted his forehead on his coat sleeve. "It's flat burning up, ain't it?" The group around the convertible was now joined byothers from inside the bar, including Jimmy Dean Styles. They stared at Marvin in dismay. "Somebody put you up to this? Or you just a dumb white motherfucker want to commit suicide?" said a man with a nylon stocking crimped down on his head. Marvin looked innocuously at a cloud, his eyebrows raised. "Most of y'all got born 'cause your mama dint have money for an abortion. That's why you call other people 'motherfucker' all the time. It's 'cause y'all know everybody in town got in your mother's drawers. So anytime you insult other folks with a bad name like that, it's on your own self. I ain't trying to hurt your feelings. It's just a psychological fact." The tall man with rings in his eyebrows picked up his beer bottle from the oyster shells, tossed Marvin Oates's hat into the crowd, and smashed the bottle across Marvin's head. The crowd roared. Marvin fell across his suitcase and took a kick in the ribs and another between his buttocks. He pushed himself up on the convertible's bumper, his coat powdered with white dust, his eyes closing, then opening, as though a piece of sharp metal was buried deep in his bowels. He felt the back of his head and swallowed, then walked unsteadily on the shells and found his hat and knocked it clean of dust on his leg. "You still ain't got the right to throw trash in old folks' yard," he said. The crowd surged forward, but Jimmy Dean Styles stepped between Marvin and his adversaries and leaned over and retrieved the tow strap of Marvin's suitcase from the dust and placed it in his hand. "Don't come around here no more," he said. Marvin stared into Styles's eyes, as though looking for an answer to an ancient question about the nature of evil. "Who are you?" Marvin asked. "The man who know a nigger when he see one. You better hoof it, bro," Styles replied.

  Helen and I were on our way back from an inter-agency law enforcement meeting in Jeanerette when we passed the situation in progress in front of the Boom Boom Room. We pulled to the side of the road and told Marvin to get in the backseat of the cruiser, behind the steel-mesh screen. He threw his suitcase on the seat and pulled the coned brim of his hat down on his brow as we roared away, looking back through the window like a Pony Express rider who had been saved by friends from Indians. "You crazy, Marvin?" Helen said, glancing in the rearview mirror. "What's the name of that guy, the one in charge back there?" Marvin asked. "Jimmy Dean Styles. Why do you ask?" I said. "I just feel sorry for them people, that's all." He sprayed his mouth with an atomizer. Helen and I dropped him off downtown, by the Shadows, his face freckled with the sunshine that fell through the oak limbs overhead. "He seems to have people of color on the mind," I said. "He should," Helen said. "Pardon?" "His mother took on all comers. I always heard Marvin's father was black," she said.

  That same afternoon Clete Purcel drove to the motor court on the bayou, where he used to live, and knocked on Joe Zeroski's cottage door. "What'd you want, Purcel?" one of Joe's men said. He was bald and wore slacks and a strap undershirt. Pieces of his sandwich were hanging from his mouth whi
le he ate. A television set blared in the background. "Where's Joe?" Clete asked. "He ain't here." Clete looked through oaks at the bayou, a tugboat passing, the sunlight breaking like glass on the water. "You want to tell me what I already know, or you want to clean the dog food out of your mouth and answer my question?" he said. Then Clete drove from the motor court, across the drawbridge, to a Catholic church on the other side of the bayou. He walked inside and saw Joe Zeroski seated in a pew, by a rack of burning candles, in an otherwise empty church. Clete went back outside and waited. Five minutes later Joe emerged in the sunlight, putting on his hat as he exited the vestibule. He stared at Clete. "You following me?" Joe asked. "I didn't know you went to church." "I burn a candle for my daughter. Why you here, Purcel?" Joe wore a gray suit and a gray and red tie, and the wind blew his tie over his shoulder. "The sheriffs department is looking at a guy by the name of Legion Guidry for Linda's murder. I thought you ought to know that," Clete said. "What, you owe me favors?" "You were always straight up with me. So was FrankieDogs. Who knows, maybe Frankie Dogs was on to the guy. Maybe that's why Frankie got clipped." Joe studied the trees along the bank of the bayou, popped a crick out of his neck, as though there were a thought behind his eyes he couldn't deal with. "I had her cremated. There wasn't no way to fix her face for the funeral," he said. "Guidry has a long history of violence against females, Joe. You said it yourself, how many guys like this are running around in one small town?" "Say this guy's name again."