DR02 - Heaven's Prisoners

  But my metabolism was on empty before I made it to the foot of Duval. I stopped in at Sloppy Joe's and had a drink at the bar and tried to examine all the vague thoughts and strange movements of my day. True, not everything I had done had been impetuous. Robin was still the best connection I had to the collection of brain-fried New Orleans people who served Bubba Rocque, and I had called my friend longdistance to make sure she was working at the restaurant, but I could have questioned her on the phone, or at least tried, before deciding I would have to fly to Key West.

  Which made me confront, at least temporarily, the real reason I was there: it's lousy to be alone, particularly when you're not handling anything properly. Particularly when you're drunk and starting to fuck up your life again on an enormous scale. And because somebody was playing "Baby Love" on the jukebox.

  "Why don't you put some records on that jukebox that aren't twenty years old?" I said to the bartender.

  "What?"

  "Put some new music on there. It's 1987."

  "The jukebox is broken, pal. You better slip your transmission into neutral."

  I walked back out onto the street, my face warm with bourbon in the wind blowing off the backside of the island. On the dock by the restaurant I watched the waves slide through pilings, small incandescent fish moving about like smoky green lights below the surface. The restaurant was crowded with customers, and the bar was a well-lighted and orderly place where people had two drinks before dinner. When I walked inside I felt like a diver stepping out of a bathysphere into a hostile and glaring brilliance.

  The maitre d' looked at me carefully. I had fixed my tie and tried to smooth the wrinkles in my seersucker coat, but I should have put on sunglasses.

  "Do you have a reservation, sir?" he said.

  "Tell Robin Dave Robicheaux's here. I'll wait in the bar."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Tell her Dave from New Orleans. The last name's hard to pronounce sometimes."

  "Sir, I think you'd better see her outside of working hours."

  "Say, you're probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I'm going away?"

  I ordered a drink at the bar, and five minutes later I saw her come through the door. She wore a short black dress with a white lace apron over it, and her figure and the way she walked, as though she were still on a burlesque runway, made every man at the bar glance sideways at her. She was smiling at me, but there was a perplexed light in her eyes, too.

  "Wow, you come a long way to check up on a girl," she said.

  "How you doing, kiddo?"

  "Not bad. It's turned out to be a pretty good gig. Hey, don't get up."

  "How long till you're off?"

  "Three hours. Come on and sit in the booth with me. You're listing pretty heavy to port."

  "A drunk front came through New Iberia this morning."

  "Well, walk over here with mommy and let's order something to eat."

  "I ate on the plane."

  "Yeah, I can tell," she said.

  We sat in a tan leather booth against the back wall of the bar. She blew out little puffs of air with her lips.

  "Dave, what are you doing?" she said.

  "What?"

  "Like, this." She flicked her fingernail against my highball glass.

  "Sometimes I clean out my head."

  "You bust up with your old lady or something?"

  "I'm going to get another Beam. You want a cup of coffee or a Coke?"

  "Do I want coffee? God, that's great, Dave. Look, after the dinner rush I can get off early. Take the key to my apartment and I'll meet you there in about an hour. It's right around the corner."

  "You got any hooch?"

  "Some beer is all. I've been doing good, Dave. No little white pills, no glug-glug before I go to work. I can't believe how good I feel in the mornings."

  "Pick me up at Sloppy Joe's."

  "What do you want to go there for? It's full of college dopes who think Ernest Hemingway wrote on the bathroom walls or something."

  "See you in an hour, kiddo. You're a sweet girl."

  "Yeah, the guys at Smiling Jack's used to tell me that all the time. While they were trying to cop a feel under the table. I think you got hit in the head by lightning this morning."

  When she came for me later at Sloppy Joe's, I was by myself at a table in the back, the breeze from a floor fan rising up my trouser leg, fluttering the wet sleeve of my seersucker coat that hung over the side of the table. The big sliding doors on two sides of the building were rolled wide open, and the neon light shone purple on the sidewalk. On the corner, two cops were rousting a drunk. They weren't cutting him any slack, either. He was going to the bag.

  "Let's go, Lieutenant," Robin said.

  "Wait till the Man leaves. My horizon keeps tilting. Key West is a bad town to have trouble in."

  "All I do is flex my boobs and they tip their hats. Such gentlemen. No more booze, honey pie."

  "I need to tell you some things. About my wife. Then you have to tell me some more about those people in New Orleans."

  "Tomorrow morning. Mommy's going to fix you a steak tonight."

  "They killed her."

  "What?"

  "They blew her to pieces with shotguns. That's what they did, all right."

  She stared at me with her mouth parted. I could see the edges of her nostrils discolor.

  "You mean Bubba Rocque killed your wife?" she said.

  "Maybe it was him. Maybe not. Ole Bubba's a hard guy to second-guess."

  "Dave, I'm sorry. Jesus Christ. Did it have something to do with me? God, I don't believe it."

  "No."

  "It does, though, because you're here."

  "I just want to see if you can remember some things, Maybe I just wanted to see you, too."

  "I guess that's why you had the hots for me when you were single. Tell me about it when your head's not ninety-proof." She looked around the bar. The floor fan ruffled her short black hair. "This place's a drag. The whole town's a drag. It's full of low-rent dykes and man-eaters that drift down from New York. Why'd you send me over here?"

  "You told me you were doing well here."

  "Who's doing well when people are out there killing a guy's wife? You messed with them, didn't you, Dave? You wouldn't listen to me."

  I didn't answer, but instead picked up my highball glass.

  "Forget it. Your milk cow has gone dry for tonight," she said, then took the glass out of my hand and poured it in a pool of whiskey and ice on the table.

  She lived on the first floor of an old two-story stucco building with a red tile roof just off Duval Street. A huge banyan tree had cracked one wall, and the tiny yard was overgrown with weeds and untrimmed banana trees. Her apartment had a small kitchen, a bedroom separated by a sliding curtain, and a couch, breakfast table, and chairs that looked like they had come from a Goodwill store.

  Robin had a good heart, and she wanted to be kind, but her cooking was truly a challenge, particularly to someone on a bender. She turned the steak black on one side, fried the potatoes in a half-inch of grease, and filled the apartment with smoke and the smell of burned onions. I tried to eat but couldn't. I'd reached the bottom of my drunk. The cogs on my wheels were sheared smooth, all my wiring was blown, and the skin of my face was thick and dead to the touch. I suddenly felt that I had aged a century, that someone had slipped a knife along my breastbone and scooped out all my vital organs.

  "Are you going to be sick?" she said.

  "No, I just need to go to bed."

  She looked at me a moment in the light of the unshaded bulb that hung from the ceiling. Her eyes were green, and unlike most of the strippers on Bourbon, she had never needed to wear false eyelashes. She brought two sheets from her dresser in the bedroom and spread them on the couch. I sat down heavily, took off my shoes, and rubbed my hand in my face. I was already starting to dehydrate, and I could smell the alcohol against my palm like an odor climbing out of a dark well. She carried a pillow back t
o the couch.

  "Robin?" I said.

  "What are you up to, Lieutenant?" She looked down at me with the light behind her head.

  I put my hand on her wrist. She sat down beside me and looked straight ahead. Her hands were folded, and her knees were close together under her black waitress uniform.

  "Are you sure this is what you want?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "Did you come all the way over here just to get laid? There must be somebody available closer to home."

  "You know that's not the way I feel about you."

  "No, I don't. I don't know anything of the sort, Dave. But you're a friend, and I wouldn't turn away from you. I just don't want you to lie about it."

  She turned off the light and undressed. Her breasts were round and soft against me, her skin tan and smooth in the dark. She hooked one leg in mine, ran her hands over my back, kissed my cheek and breathed in my ear and made love to me as she might to an emotional child. But I didn't care. I was used up, finished, as dead inside as I was the day they slid Annie's casket inside the crypt. The street light made shadows on the banyan and banana trees outside the window. Inside my head was a sound like the roar of the ocean in a conch shell.

  The next morning the early light was gray in the streets, then the sun came up red on the eastern horizon, and the banana leaves clicking against the screen window were beaded with humidity. I filled a quart jar with tap water, drank it down, then threw up in the toilet. My hands shook, the backs of my legs quivered, flashes of color popped like lesions behind my eyes. I stood in my underwear in front of the washbasin, cupped water into my face, brushed my teeth with toothpaste and my finger, then threw up again and went into a series of stomach spasms so severe that finally my saliva was pink with blood in the bottom of the basin. My eyes were watering uncontrollably, my face cold and twitching; there was a pressure band across one side of my head as though I had been slapped with a thick book, and my breath was sour and trembled in my throat each time I tried to breathe.

  I wiped the sweat and water off my face with a towel and headed for the icebox.

  "No help there, hon," Robin said from the stove, where she was soft-boiling eggs. "I poured the beer out at four this morning."

  "Have you got any ups?"

  "I told you mommy's clean." She was barefoot and wearing a pair of black shorts and a denim shirt that was unbuttoned over her bra.

  "Some of those PMS pills. Come on, Robin. I'm not a junkie. I've just got a hangover."

  "You shouldn't try to run a shuck on another juicer. I took your wallet, too. You got rolled, Lieutenant."

  It was going to be a long morning. And she was right about trying to con a pro. Normally an alcoholic can jerk just about anybody around except another drunk. And Robin knew every ploy that I might use to get another drink.

  "Get in the shower, Dave," she said. "I'll have breakfast ready when you come out. You like bacon with soft-boiled eggs?"

  I turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, pointed my face with my mouth open into the shower head, washed the cigarette smoke from the bar out of my hair, scrubbed my skin until it was red. Then I turned on the cold water full blast, propped my arms against the tin walls of the stall, and held on while I counted slowly to sixty.

  "The bacon's kind of crisp, I guess," she said after I had dressed and we were sitting at the table.

  The bacon looked like strips torn out of a rubber tire. And she had hard-boiled the eggs and mashed them up with a spoon.

  "You don't have to eat it," she said.

  "No, it's really good, Robin."

  "Do you feel a lot of remorse this morning? That's what your AA buddies call it, don't they?"

  "No, I don't feel remorse." But my eyes went away from her face.

  "I was turning tricks when I was seventeen. So you got a free one. Deal me out of your guilt, Dave."

  "Don't talk about yourself like that."

  "I don't like morning-after bullshit."

  "You listen to me, Robin. I came to you last night because I felt more alone than I've ever felt in my life."

  She drank from her coffee and set the cup in her saucer.

  "You're a sweet guy, but I've got too much experience at it. It's all right."

  "Why don't you give yourself some credit? I don't know another person in the world who would have taken me in the way you did last night."

  She put the dishes in the sink, then walked up behind me and kissed my hair.

  "Just get through your hangover, Streak. Mommy's been fighting her own dragons for a long time," she said.

  It wasn't simply a hangover, however. This slip had blown a year of sobriety for me, and in that year of health and sunshine and lifting weights and jogging for miles in the late evening, my system had lost all its tolerance for alcohol. It was similar to pouring a five-pound bag of sugar in an automobile gas tank and opening up the engine full-bore. In a short time your rings and valves are reduced to slag.

  "Can I have my wallet?" I said.

  "It's under the cushion on the couch."

  I found it and put it in my back pocket, then slipped on my loafers.

  "You headed for a beer joint?" she said.

  "It's a thought."

  "You're on your own, then. I'm not going to help you mess yourself up anymore."

  "That's because you're the best, Robin."

  "Save the baby oil for yourself. I don't need it."

  "You've got it wrong, kiddo. I'm going to buy a bathing suit and we're going down to the beach. Then I'm going to take you out to lunch."

  "It sounds like a good way to ease yourself back into the bar and keep mommy along."

  "No bars. I promise."

  Her eyes searched mine, and I saw her face brighten.

  "I can fix food for us here. You don't have to spend your money," she said.

  I smiled at her.

  "I would really like to take you to lunch," I said.

  It was a morning of abstinence in which I tried to think in terms of five minutes at a time. I felt like a piece of cracked ceramic. In the clothing store my hands were still trembling, and I saw the salesman step back from my breath. In an open-air food stand on the beach, I drank a glass of iced coffee and ate four aspirins. I squinted upward at the sunlight shining through the branches of the palm tree overhead. I would have swallowed a razor blade for a shuddering rush of Jim Beam through my system.

  The snakes were out of their baskets, but I hoped they would have only a light meal and be on their way. I paid a Cuban kid a dollar to borrow his mask and snorkel, then I waded through the warm waves of the lagoon and swam out to open deep water over a coral reef. The water was as clear as green Jell-O, and thirty feet down I could see the fire coral in the reef, schools of clown fish, bluepoint crabs drifting across the sand, a nurse shark as motionless as a log in the reef's shadow, gossamer plants that bent with the current, black sea urchins whose spikes could go all the way through your foot. I held my breath and dove as deep as I could, dropping into a layer of cold water where a barracuda looked directly into my mask with his bony, hooked snout, then zipped past my ear like a silver arrow fired from an archer's bow.

  I felt better when I swam back in and walked up on the sand where Robin was lying on a towel among a stand of coconut palms. Also, I had already invested too much of the day in my own misery. It was time to go to work again, although I knew she wasn't going to like it.

  "The New Orleans cops think Jerry's in the Islands," I said.

  She unsnapped her purse, took out a cigarette and lit it. She pulled her leg up in front of her and brushed sand off her knee.

  "Come on, Robin," I said.

  "I closed the door on all those dipshits."

  "No, I'm going to close the door on them. And like we used to say in the First District, 'weld it shut and burn their birth certificates.'"

  "You're a barrel of laughs, Dave."

  "Where is he?" I smiled at her and ticked some grains of sand off her k
nee with my fingernail.

  "I don't know. Forget the Islands, though. He used to have a mulatto chick in Bimini. That was the only reason he went over there. Then he got stoned on ganja and dropped her baby on its head. On concrete. He said they've got a coral-rock jail over there that's so black it'd turn a nigger into a white man."

  "Where's his mother go when she's not in New Orleans?"

  "She's got some relatives in north Louisiana. They used to come in the bar and ask for Styrofoam spit cups."

  "Where in north Louisiana?"

  "How should I know?"

  "I want you to tell me everything Eddie Keats and the Haitian said when they were in your apartment."

  Her face darkened, and she looked out toward the surf where some high school kids were sailing a frisbee back and forth over the waves. Out beyond the opening of the lagoon, pelicans were diving into a patch of blue water that was as dark as ink.

  "You think my head's a tape deck?" she asked. "Like I should be collecting what these people say while they break my finger in a door? You know what it feels like for a woman to have their hands on her?"

  Her face was still turned away from me, but I could see the shiny film on her eyes.

  "What do you care what they say, anyway?" she said. "It never makes any sense. They're morons that went to the ninth grade, and they try to act like wiseguys they see on TV. Like Jerry always saying, 'I ain't no swinging dick. I ain't no swinging dick.' Wow, what an understatement. I bet he was in the bridal suite every night at Angola."

  I waited for her to continue. She drew on the cigarette and held the smoke down as though she were taking a hit on a reefer.

  "The spade wanted to cut my face up," she said. "What's-his-name, Keats, says to him, 'The man don't want us throwing out his pork chops. You just give her a souvenir on her hand or her foot, and I'll bet she'll wear it to church. Under it all, Robin's a righteous girl.' Then the boogie says, 'You always talk with a mouth full of shit, man.'

  "What's-his-name thought that was funny. So he laughs and lights a Picayune and says, 'At least I don't live in a fucking slum so I can be next to a dead witch.'