Purple Cane Road

  Remeta’s breath came out in a ragged exhalation before he spoke.

  “I’ve used a trick to scare people so I wouldn’t have to hurt them. I’ll show you,” he said.

  He slipped a blue-black snub-nosed revolver from a holster that was attached to his ankle with a Velcro strap. He flipped the cylinder out of the frame and ejected all six rounds into his palm. They were thick and brass-cased and seemed too large for the size of the revolver. He inserted one back into a chamber and spun the cylinder, then flipped the cylinder back into the frame without looking at where the loaded chamber had landed.

  “Ever read about Doc Holliday? His edge was everybody knew he didn’t care if he lived or died. So I do this sometimes and it makes people dump in their drawers,” Remeta said.

  He cocked the revolver, pressed the barrel against the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

  “See, your face jumped. Just like it was you instead of me about to take the bullet. But I can tell by the weight where the round is,” he said.

  She pushed herself up on her hands so her back was against the headboard. She thought she was going to lose control of her bladder. She looked at her baby in the crib and at the glow of a television set inside the cabin of a neighbor who worked nights and at her plastic welfare charge card on the table and next to it the thirteen dollars she had to make last until the end of the week and at the cheap clothes that hung on hangers in her closet. She breathed the funk that rose from her armpits and a soapy odor that either came from her bedclothes or her pajama top, and her breasts seemed to hang like an old woman’s dugs from her skeleton. Her stomach had stretch marks on it and felt flaccid and like a water-filled balloon at the same time, and she realized she owned absolutely nothing of value in this world, not even in her own person, nor could she call upon one friend or resource, to bargain for her and her baby’s life, that if she was lucky the world would simply take what it needed from her and leave a piece of something behind.

  “I ain’t gonna fight you no more, Rain Man. I’m just a nigger.”

  She pulled the sheet off her and sat on the side of the bed, her feet not quite touching the floor, her eyes downcast.

  “You shouldn’t use racial words like that. It’s what whites have taught you people to do. To feel bad about yourself,” he said, and sat beside her. He moved his arm around her waist but did not look at her. Instead, his lips moved silently, as though he were talking to other people in the room.

  “You coming apart, Rain Man?” she said.

  “You couldn’t guess at what’s in my head, girl.”

  She unfastened his belt and unbuttoned the top of his trousers and pulled his zipper partway down. She placed one hand inside his underwear and looked into his eyes. They were black, then suddenly apprehensive in the flashes of light through the window, as though he were watching his own behavior from outside himself and was not sure which person he was.

  Her hand moved mechanically, as though it were disconnected from her. She watched the side of his face.

  She took her hand away and let it rest by his thigh.

  “It ain’t me you want,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “The one you want is the one you cain’t have.”

  He got up from the bed and stood in front of her, his legs slightly spread, his unbuttoned trousers exposing the top of his Jockey underwear. His stomach was as flat as a swimmer’s, smooth as tallow in the flashes of lightning through the window.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said.

  “Won’t do no good, Rain Man. Can kill me and my baby, both. But it ain’t gonna get you no satisfaction.”

  He made a sound that she could not interpret, like someone who knew his anger must always be called upon in increments and never allowed to have complete expression.

  He tucked in his shirt and worked the zipper up on his trousers and fastened the button at the top and began buckling his belt. But his fingers started shaking and he could not line up the hole in the leather with the metal tongue in the buckle.

  She reached out to help him. That’s when his fist exploded on the side of her face.

  She found Bootsie and me that Sunday evening at Jefferson Island while we were eating supper in the restaurant by the lake, the sun glowing through the oak trees and Spanish moss. I watched her come up the winding walkway through the flower gardens and groups of tourists, her diapered baby mounted on her arm, her blue-jeans shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face bruised like an overripe eggplant.

  She marched into the restaurant and stopped in front of our table.

  “Somebody shit in that white boy’s brain. It ain’t me done it, either. You better get him out of our lives, Sad Man. I mean now. ’Cause he come back around, I got me a gun now and I’m gonna blow his fucking head off,” she said.

  I walked outside with her into the gardens and we sat down on a scrolled-iron bench. Through the restaurant windows I could see Bootsie by herself at our table, staring out at the lake, her coffee cold and her dessert uneaten.

  “Did you file a report at the department?” I asked.

  “They was real hepful. Man kept looking down my top to make sure Johnny Remeta wasn’t hiding there.”

  “I doubt Remeta will bother you again.”

  “Where Fat Man at?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “ ’Cause he ain’t like you. ’Cause he don’t fool hisself. ’Cause people mess wit’ him only once.”

  “Remeta might try to kill my daughter, Little Face. I’m sorry about what happened to you. But I’m tired of your anger,” I said.

  I left her on the bench with her baby. When I went back inside the restaurant, Bootsie was gone.

  The sheriff was at the bait shop before dawn Monday morning, but he did not come inside the building right away. He propped his hands on the dock railing and stared across the bayou at the cypress trees inside the fog. In his cowboy boots and pinstripe suit and Stetson hat, he looked like a cattleman who had just watched his whole herd run off by dry lightning. He took off his hat and walked through the cone of light over the screen door and entered the shop.

  “You gave Jim Gable a concussion Friday night. Now you take a vacation day and don’t even have the courtesy to call me?” he said.

  “Johnny Remeta is stalking my daughter and leaving notes at my house. I don’t care what happens with Gable,” I replied.

  “Everything’s personal with you, Dave. You use the department the way a prizefighter uses a rosin box. You’re an employee of the parish. Which means I’m your supervisor, not a guy who follows you around with a dustpan and whisk broom. I don’t like coming out here to explain that.”

  “Did Gable press charges?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s a private matter.”

  “As of this moment you’re on suspension.”

  “That’s the breaks.”

  “That casual, huh?”

  “How’d you like Remeta creeping your place?”

  “Do what you’re thinking and I’ve got your cell already waiting for you.”

  “I didn’t call you because I can’t prove what Gable was doing behind my wife’s person in that pavilion. It would only bring her embarrassment.”

  “Behind her person? What the hell does that mean?”

  “End of conversation.”

  “You’re right. It does no good to talk to you. I wish I hadn’t come here,” he said. He tapped his Stetson against his leg and walked out into the mist, his mouth a tight seam.

  I worked with Batist at the dock all day, then drove to the Winn-Dixie in town, filled the back of the pickup with soda pop and loaded the ice chest with lunch meat for the bait shop cooler. Right down the street was the ancient motel where Clete was living. I had not seen him since Saturday afternoon, when I had left him bleary-eyed and alone with a scrap of paper in his hand that could have been torn from the Doomsday Book.

  I pulled into the motel entrance and drove under th
e canopy of oaks to the stucco cottage he rented at the end of the row. Leaves were drifting out of the oak branches overhead and he was dusting the exterior of his Cadillac with a rag, flicking the leaves off the finish as though no others would drop out of the tree, the hair on his bare shoulders glowing like a blond ape’s in a column of sunlight.

  “What’s the haps, Streak?” he said without looking up from his work.

  “You doing all right?” I said.

  “I used the medical dictionary at the City Library. From what it says, that stuff’s like going to hell without dying.”

  “There’re treatments.”

  “The victims look like they’re wrapped in sheets of plastic?”

  “How’s Passion?”

  “She doesn’t talk about it. At least not to me.” His voice was without tone or inflection. “It’s true, you tore up Jim Gable at the Shrimp Festival?”

  “I guess I have to lose it about every six months to remind myself I’m still a drunk.”

  “Save the dish rinse. You didn’t lose it. He took it from you.”

  “What?”

  “Gable never does anything without a reason. You’re trying to bring him down. Now nobody will believe anything you say about him.”

  I stared at him. I felt like the confidence game mark who realizes his gullibility has no bottom. Clete threw his dust rag through the open front window of the Cadillac onto the front seat and walked over to my truck.

  “You’re just like me, Streak. You never left the free-fire zone. You think aspirin and meetings and cold showers are going to clean out your head. What you want is God’s permission to paint the trees with the bad guys. That won’t happen, big mon,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about Passion.”

  “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” he replied.

  27

  Bed Check Charley still visited me in my dreams, crawling on his stomach through the rice fields, his black pajamas twisted like liquid silk on his dehydrated body. He used a French bolt-action rifle with iron sights, and Japanese potato mashers that he whacked on a banyan root, igniting the impact fuze prematurely, before he flung one into our midst. But even though his ordnance was antiquated, Bed Check was punctual and did his job well. We used him in our day as we would a clock.

  We were almost disappointed when a stray gunship caught him under a full moon, running across a rice paddy, and arbitrarily took him out.

  A predictable enemy is a valuable one.

  I knew Remeta would be back. And I knew where he would come from.

  He returned three nights after the sheriff put me on departmental suspension.

  I heard the outboard deep in the swamp, then the engine went dead. I slipped on my khakis and shoes and lifted the AR-15 from under the bed and went outside and crossed the lawn. The trees were dripping with night damp, and I could barely see the bait shop in the fog.

  But I could hear a boat paddle dipping into the water, knocking against a cypress root, scudding softly against the worn gunnel of a pirogue.

  I walked down the concrete boat ramp into the water and stepped under the dock and waited. The bayou was moving northward, rising with the tide, and I saw a dead nutria in the current with a bluepoint crab hooked onto its side.

  It was airless under the dock, the water warm inside my clothes, and I could smell dead fish among the pilings. Then the breeze came up and I saw the fog roll like puffs of cotton on the bayou’s surface and the bow of a pirogue emerge out of the swamp twenty yards down from the bait shop.

  I had inserted a thirty-round magazine in the rifle. The bow of the pirogue moved into the bayou and now I could see the outline of a kneeling man, drawing the paddle through the water in silent J-strokes. Farther down the bayou, at the four corners, the owner of the general store had left on a porch light, and the man in the pirogue was now lighted from behind, his features distorting like a figure moving about under the phosphorescent glow of a pistol flare.

  I steadied the rifle against a piling and sighted along the barrel, no longer seeing a silhouette but in my mind’s eye a human face, one with teeth, a hinged jawbone, an eye glinting in profile, a skull with skin stretched over its bladed surfaces.

  A line of sweat ran through my eyebrow. You just squeeze off and not think about it, I told myself. How many times did you do it before, to people you didn’t even know? You just step across the line into E-major rock ‘n’ roll and the concerns of conscience quickly disappear in the adrenaline rush of letting off one round after another. The only reality becomes the muzzle flashes in the darkness, the clean smell of smokeless powder, the deadness in the ears that allows you to disconnect from the crumpling figure in the distance.

  But I hadn’t yet actually seen the face of Johnny Remeta.

  I clicked on the electric switch mounted on the dock piling. Suddenly the bayou was flooded with light.

  “You must get mighty tired if you stay out here in the mosquitoes every night,” he said. He was grinning, his face bathed with white light, his mouth strangely discolored in the brilliance of the flood lamps, as though it were painted with purple lipstick.

  I could feel my finger tightening inside the trigger guard.

  “You’re a pisspot, Johnny,” I said.

  “I’ve heard it all before, Mr. Robicheaux. My father said my mother would have gotten rid of me when I was in the womb but she didn’t want to waste a coat hanger,” he replied.

  Then he opened his palms, as though accepting grace from above, his head tilted, taking my measure.

  “Use your left hand and drop your weapon overboard,” I said.

  “I don’t have one.”

  I waded out from under the dock so he could see me.

  “You’re under arrest. Pull the pirogue into shore,” I said.

  “You couldn’t pop me, could you?”

  I could hear myself breathing and feel the oil and moisture on my finger inside the trigger guard. He stood up in the pirogue, balancing himself, his hands extended outward. He stared at the muzzle of the rifle, his lips pursed, waiting.

  “So long, Mr. Robicheaux. Tell Alafair I said hello.”

  He hit the water in a long, flat dive, his weight flipping the pirogue over. With two strokes he was inside the cypress trees, running across sandspits and through the sloughs, cobwebs and air vines swinging behind him.

  I was trembling all over, as though I had malaria. My head thundered and my palms were wet on the plastic stock of the rifle. I leaned over and vomited into the water.

  I walked up the boat ramp, then onto the dock, and pulled off my T-shirt and sat down on the planks and pulled my knees up in front of me and rested my face on top of them.

  I stayed there until the sun rose, then got up and slung the AR-15 muzzle-down on my shoulder and walked up the slope through the trees with the knowledge I had deliberately set out to murder another human being and had simultaneously failed as both assassin and police officer.

  28

  That afternoon I got a call from Wally, our departmental comedian.

  “Enjoying your days off?” he asked.

  “I’m cleaning the grease trap right now. Come on over.”

  “I got a little problem. I’d like to finish my shift without being taken out of here in a box. My systolic is 190. I don’t need race riots. I don’t need black people shouting into the phone at me. I don’t need no white lesbian crazy woman firing up a mob over on Hopkins.”

  “You’re talking about Helen Soileau?”

  “I knew you could think it out. Way to go, Dave.”

  I drove into town, then over to the west side to Hopkins Street, which, along with Railroad, used to comprise New Iberia’s red-light district. Helen Soileau had just handcuffed two black kids, about age fifteen, through the cap chain on a fire hydrant.

  I parked the pickup in front of a liquor store and walked through the crowd that had formed on the sidewalk and the lawn of two houses. Helen was bent over at the waist, her hands on her hips, ven
ting her spleen at the two kids sitting on the cement. A city cop in a uniform was looking nervously up and down the street.

  Helen raised up and stared at me, her face still heated. Her slacks were torn at the thigh and mud was smeared on her white shirt. “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “I just happened by. What’d these guys do?”

  “Not much. One shot a BB into a passing car and hit a six-week-old baby. This other little fuck put an M-80 under an old woman’s bedroom floor.”

  “I think we need to turn the butane down.”

  “They’re going to tell me where that BB gun is or stay here till they have to eat the paint on that hydrant. You hear that, you little pukes?”

  “Walk over here with me, Helen,” I said.

  “You got no business telling me what to do,” she replied.

  “I can’t argue with that. But we’re on city turf. Let them handle it.”

  She lifted her face into mine. Her eyes were blazing, her thick arms pumped.

  “I’d like to punch you out, Dave. All the skipper needs is an apology and you’re back on the clock,” she said.

  “So let the city guy do his job and take the kids down.”

  “Yeah, I give a shit,” she said, and bent over and unlocked the handcuffs on the boys’ wrists, then cuffed them again and walked them to the city cruiser and shoved them inside and slammed the door behind them. Then she walked back to me and said, “Buy me coffee, Pops.”

  I expected one of Helen’s harangues, but I was wrong. We went to the McDonald’s on East Main and sat by the window. The sky had turned green and the wind was blowing the oaks on the street, and leaves were rising out of the crown of the trees high in the air.

  “I was in Lafayette this morning. You know that tattoo and fortune-telling place right off the four-lane?” she said.

  “An old cypress cabin with beads and colored lights hanging all over the gallery?”

  “I saw Passion Labiche go in there. That girl bothers me.”