Purple Cane Road

  “Excuse me,” I said, and followed Steve Andropolis into the men’s room and shot the dead bolt behind me. The room was small, the air fetid and warm, with a wood enclosure around the toilet. I reached under my seersucker coat and slipped my .45 from its clip-on holster. I pulled back the slide and released it, chambering the top round on the magazine.

  I stood back from the door on the toilet enclosure and kicked it open. Andropolis had been tucking his shirt into his trousers when the door hit him in the back and knocked him off balance against the wall. He tried to push the door back into my face, but I stomped it again, harder this time, ripping the top hinge and screws loose, pinning him in a half-crumpled position against the toilet bowl. I held on to the side of the stall with my left hand and drove my shoe through the door, again and again, splintering plywood into his face.

  Then I flung the door off him and pointed the .45 at his mouth. A twelve-inch strip of desiccated wood was affixed to his cheek with three rusty nails.

  “I wanted to apologize to you, Steve. I lied out there. I was bothered by the word ‘whore.’ When a subhuman sack of shit calls my dead mother a whore, that bothers me. Does that make sense to you, Steve?”

  He closed his eyes painfully and pulled loose the splintered board that was nailed to his cheek.

  “I’ve heard about you, you crazy sonofabitch. What do I know about your mother? I’m a spotter. I never capped anybody in my life.”

  “You tell me who killed her, Steve, or your brainpan is going to be emptied into that toilet bowl in ten seconds.”

  He began getting to his feet, blood draining in a long streak from his cheek.

  “Fuck you, Zeke,” he said, and drove his fist into my scrotum.

  My knees buckled, and a wave of pain rose like a gray, red-veined balloon out of my loins, took all the air from my lungs, and spread into my hands. I fell against the wall, the backs of my legs quivering, the .45 on the floor by my foot, the hammer on full cock.

  Andropolis kicked the screen out of the window, placed one foot on the jamb, and leaped outside.

  He stared back at me, the clouds etched with purple fire behind his head.

  “When your mother died? I hope it didn’t go like I think it probably did. I hope they hurt her,” he said.

  He ran through the shallow water across the mudflat toward a distant clump of willow trees. The water splashing from under the impact of his feet had the same amber brilliance in the sunlight as whiskey splashed in a thick beer glass. I sighted the .45 on the middle of his back and felt my finger begin to tighten inside the trigger guard.

  Clete Purcel exploded the dead bolt off the men’s room door frame with one thrust of his massive shoulder.

  “What are you doing, Dave?” he said incredulously.

  I lay my forehead down on my arms and closed my eyes, my heart thundering in my ears, a vinegar-like odor rising from my armpits.

  The next afternoon I drove out to the Labiche house on the bayou and was told by a black kid watering down the azaleas in front that Passion was at the café and nightclub she owned outside St. Martinville. I drove to the club, a flat-roofed, green building with rusty screens and a fan-ventilated, hardwood dance floor. The sun’s glare off the shale parking lot was blinding. I went in the side door and walked across the dance floor to the bar, where Passion was breaking rolls of quarters and dumping them into her cash drawer.

  In the far corner stood the ancient piano that Letty used to play nightly. The keys were yellow, the walnut edges of the casement burned by cigarettes. Letty was one of the best rhythm-and-blues and boogie-woogie piano players I had ever seen perform. You could hear Albert Ammons, Moon Mulligan, and Jerry Lee Lewis in her music, and whenever she did “Pine Top’s Boogie,” the dance floor erupted into levels of erotic behavior that would have received applause at the baths of Caracalla.

  Passion sometimes played in the house band as a bass guitarist, but she had never possessed her sister’s talent. To my knowledge, no one had sat seriously at the piano since Letty had been arrested for the murder of Vachel Carmouche. At least not until today.

  “You’re walking with a list, chief,” Passion said.

  “Really?” I said.

  “You get hurt or something?”

  “I’m doing fine. How about you, Passion?”

  I sat at the bar and looked at an empty, oversized beer mug in front of me. The near side of the mug was coated with a thick, orange residue of some kind.

  “The governor of Louisiana just drank out of that. I’m not sure if I should boil it for germs or not,” Passion said. She wore a white cotton dress printed with flowers. The light colors made her look even bigger than she was, and, in a peculiar way, more attractive and forceful.

  “Belmont Pugh was here?” I said.

  “He played Letty’s piano. He’s not bad.”

  “What did he want from you?”

  “What makes you think he wanted anything?” she asked.

  “Because I know Belmont Pugh.”

  Then she told me. It was vintage Belmont.

  His black Chrysler had braked to a stop in the shell parking lot, drifting a dry, white cloud of dust across the building, and Belmont had come through the front door, stooping under the door frame, moisture leaking out of his hat, his silver shirt glued to his skin, a sweaty aura of libidinal crudeness and physical power emanating from his body.

  “I’m in need of massive liquids, hon,” he said, and sat with his face in his hands while Passion drew a draft beer for him. “Sweetheart, that little-bitty glass ain’t gonna cut it. Give me that big’un yonder, bust three raw eggs in it, and tell my family I died in your arms.”

  She laughed, her arms folded across her chest.

  “I always heard you were unusual,” she said.

  “That’s why my wife throwed me out, God bless her. Now what am I gonna do heartbroken, hungover, too old to have a beautiful, young Creole thing like you in his life? It’s a misery, girl. Fill this up again, will you? Y’all got anything good to eat?”

  He played the piano while she fixed him a sandwich in the café. She put the sandwich on a plate and set the plate on the end of the bar. He sat down on the stool again and removed his hat and mopped his face with a handkerchief. The skin across the top of his forehead was as pale as a cue ball.

  “That record your sister cut in jail? She’s a major talent, if you ask me. The minister at my church says she’s a fine woman, too,” he said.

  Passion looked at him silently, her rump resting against the tin wash bin behind her.

  “You wondering why I’m here? I don’t want to see a good woman die. It’s that simple. But y’all gotta hep me and give me something I can use,” he said.

  “How?” Passion asked.

  “That story y’all told the jury didn’t do nothing but leave skid marks on the bowl. There wasn’t no evidence Carmouche ever molested anybody else. It’s hard to believe after all those years your sister would suddenly decide to take the man apart with a mattock. Like she was bored and it just come to mind as the thing to do.”

  “Would you like me to describe what he did to me and Letty?”

  “Lord, it’s hot in here. Why don’t you fix your air conditioner? No, I don’t want you to describe it. I suspect the man was everything you say he was. That’s why I want you to find somebody who can support your story. Round up a mess of black people, talk to ’em, you hear what I’m saying, sometimes folks shut out bad memories, you gotta remind them of what happened. They call it ‘recovered memory.’ People get rich suing over it.”

  “You want me to get some black people to lie for us?”

  “Girl, please don’t use that word. And I don’t care if they’re white or black. I’ll get state investigators down here to take their deposition. But y’all gotta understand my situation. I cain’t give clemency to a woman ’cause I like the way she plays the piano. People in the last election was already calling me the Silver Zipper.”

  “Letty wo
n’t go along with it.”

  “You better hear what I’m saying, Miss Passion, or it’s gonna be on y’all’s own self. Them sonsofbitches in Baton Rouge is serious.”

  “You want a refill, Governor?”

  His face was tired and poached-looking in the warm gloom of the bar. He pulled his shirt out from his chest with his fingers and shook the cloth, his mouth down-turned at the corners. “Damn if I can ever find the right words to use to people anymore,” he said, and pushed his Stetson on his head and walked back out of the club, the electric fan by the door flapping back his coat just before he stepped into the heated whiteness of the day outside.

  Passion walked to the door.

  “I’ll tell her,” she said as his car scoured dust out of the parking lot.

  But Belmont did not hear her.

  “Maybe Belmont’s a little corrupt, but he’s got his hand on it,” I said.

  “Meaning?” she said, her face in a pout.

  “Nobody bought y’all’s story. Vachel Carmouche had been gone from here for years. The very night he returned, your sister killed him. Over deeds done to her as a child?”

  “You came out here to put this in my face?”

  “No. Little Face Dautrieve inasmuch told me she was there that night. But that’s all she’ll say. What happened that night? Is Little Face protecting somebody?”

  “Ax her.”

  “You want it this way?” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “That I be your adversary? The guy you don’t trust, the guy who makes a nuisance of himself?”

  “I didn’t mean to make you mad,” she said.

  “Give me a Dr Pepper, will you?”

  “There isn’t no way out for us, Dave. My sister’s gonna die. Somebody got to pay for that nasty old piece of white trash.”

  She walked on the duckboards to the end of the bar, her back turned toward me so I couldn’t see her face. Her large body was framed against the white glare of the parking lot, her smoke-colored hair wispy with light. She picked a rose out of a green bottle on the liquor counter and stared at it dumbly. The petals were dead, the color of a bruise, and they fell off the stem of their own weight and drifted downward onto the duckboards.

  8

  I got home late from work that evening. Alafair had gone to the City Library and Bootsie had left a note on the kitchen blackboard that said she was shopping in town. I fixed a cup of coffee and stirred sugar in it and sat on the back steps in the twilight and watched the ducks wimpling the water on the pond at the foot of our property.

  But sometimes I did not do well in solitude, particularly inside the home where my original family had come apart.

  In the gathering shadows I could almost see the specters of my parents wounding each other daily, arguing bitterly in Cajun French, each accusing the other of their mutual sins.

  The day my mother had gone off to Morgan City with Mack, the bouree dealer, my father had been hammering a chicken coop together in the side yard. Mack’s Ford coupe was parked on the dirt road, the engine idling, and my mother had tried to talk to him before she left me in his care.

  My father was heedless of her words and his eyes kept lifting from his work to Mack’s car and the sunlight that reflected like a yellow flame off the front windows.

  “That li’l gun he carry? See what good it gonna do him he step his foot on my property,” he said.

  The day was boiling hot, the air acrid with a smell like fresh tar and dust blowing off a gravel road. My father’s skin was glazed with sweat, his veins swollen with blood, his size seeming to swell inside his overalls with the enormous range his anger was capable of when his pride had been injured.

  I sat on the front steps and wanted to cover my ears and not hear the things my parents said to each other. I wanted to not see Mack out there on the road, in his fedora and two-tone shoes and zoot slacks, not think about the pearl-handled, two-shot derringer I had seen once in his glove box.

  But my father looked from his work to me, then out at Mack and back at me again, and the moment went out of his face and he lay his ball peen hammer on a bench and picked up the side of the chicken coop and examined its squareness and felt its balance. I pushed my hands under my thighs to stop them from shaking.

  When my mother drove away with Mack, I thought there might still be hope for our family. My father, Big Aldous, the grinning, irresponsible derrick man and saloon brawler, was still my father. Even at that age I knew he had chosen me over an act of violence. And my mother, Mae, was still my mother. Her lust and her inability to deal with my father’s alcoholism made her the victim of bad men, but she was not bad herself. She loved me and she loved my father, or she would not have fought with him.

  But now there were people who called my mother a whore.

  I had never heard that word used in association with her. During my mother’s lifetime whores didn’t work in laundries for thirty cents an hour or wait tables in beer gardens and clapboard bars and hoe out victory gardens for a sack of string beans.

  Had it not been for Clete Purcel, I would have squeezed off my .45 on the back of the jigger named Steve Andropolis because he called my mother a whore. In my mind’s eye I still saw myself doing it. I saw a worthless, running, pitiful facsimile of a human being look back at me, his mouth round with a silent scream, his arms spread against a bloodred sky. I looked down at my hand, and it was tightened into a ball, the forefinger kneading against the thumb.

  I threw my coffee into the flower bed and tried to rub the fatigue out of my face.

  Bootsie’s car turned into the drive and stopped in front, then I heard the crinkle of paper bags as she unloaded the groceries and carried them across the gallery. Normally she would have driven to the back of the house to unload, but our conversations had been few since the night of her revelation about her affair with Jim Gable.

  Why had I demeaned him as Bootsie and I lay there in the dark? It had been the same as telling her she had somehow willingly shared her life and person with a degenerate. Her second husband, Ralph Giacano, had lied his way into her life, telling her he had a degree in accounting from Tulane, that he owned half of a vending machine company, that, in effect, he was an unexciting, ordinary but decent middle-class New Orleans businessman.

  He was an accountant, all right, but as a bean counter for the Mob; the other half of the vending machine operation was owned by Didi Gee.

  She had to fly to Miami to identify the body after the Colombians blew Ralph’s face off. She also found out his dead mistress had been the bank officer who had set up the second mortgage on her house in the Garden District and had helped Ralph drain her accounts and the equity portfolio the bank managed for her.

  She had been betrayed, degraded, and bankrupted. Was it any wonder a man like Gable, a police officer of detective grade, supposedly a man of integrity, could insinuate his way into her life?

  Bootsie opened the screen door behind me and stood on the top step. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her ankles and the tops of her feet inside the moccasins she wore.

  “Did you eat yet?” she said.

  “I had that potato salad in the icebox.”

  “You might have to do an extra mile on your run,” she replied.

  I leaned forward on my forearms and folded my hands between my knees. The ducks were turning in circles on the pond, their wings fluttering, sprinkling the water’s surface.

  “I think you’re a great lady, Boots. I don’t think any man deserves you. I know I don’t,” I said.

  The light had washed out of the sky; the wind blowing across my neighbor’s cane field was touched with rain and smelled of damp earth and the wildflowers that grew along the coulee. Bootsie sat down on the step behind me, then I felt her fingertips on the back of my neck and in my hair.

  “You want to go inside?” she asked.

  • • •

  Later that night the weather turned unseasonably cool and it started to rain, hard, sheets of it marchin
g across marshlands, cane fields, tin roofs, bayous, and oak-lined communities up the Teche. In the little town of Loreauville, a man parked his pickup truck outside a clapboard bar and walked through the rain to the entrance. He wore jeans low on his hips, exposing his midriff, and pointed boots and black-rimmed glasses and a straw cowboy hat.

  When he sat at the bar, which was deserted because of the bad weather, he removed his hat and set it crown-down on the stool next to him. He wiped his glasses with a paper napkin, then forgot they were dry and picked them up and wiped them again, his expression seemingly troubled by a concern or problem he couldn’t resolve. Later the bartender described the man as “handsome, with kind of a ducktail haircut … Likable, I guess, but I wouldn’t make him for no dishware man.”

  The man ordered a diet soda and opened a vinyl folder wrapped with rubber bands and filled with invoices of some kind.

  “You know a family named Grayson back in the quarters?” he said.

  “Cain’t say I do,” the bartender replied.

  The man looked down at his invoice folder, widening his eyes, as though bemused. “They live next door to the Dautrieve family,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. Go back up the road till you see some shotgun cabins. The Dautrieves are on the second row,” the bartender said.

  “They won a bunch of dishware.”

  “Who?”

  “The Graysons.” The man held up a brochure with pictures of dishes and cups on it to make his point.

  The bartender nodded vaguely. The man with the invoice folder stared into space, as though he saw meaning in the air, in the lightning that trembled in the trees along the bayou. He paid for his diet drink and thanked the bartender and drove up the road, in the opposite direction from the quarters.

  It was still raining the next night when Little Face Dautrieve’s aunt left for her janitorial job at the hospital in New Iberia and Little Face changed her baby’s diapers, put a pacifier in his mouth, and lay him down in his crib. The cabin had been built in the last century, but it stayed warm and dry and snug in bad weather. When it rained Little Face liked to open the bedroom window partway and let the breeze blow across the baby’s crib and her bed.