DR02 - Heaven's Prisoners

  "He and some nuns and other priests broke into a General Electric plant and vandalised some missile components."

  "And you think he was involved with drug smugglers?"

  He wadded up the paper airplane on his desk and dropped it into the wastebasket.

  "No, I don't," he said, his eyes focused on the clouds outside the window.

  "What does Immigration tell you?"

  He shrugged his shoulders and clicked his nails on the desk blotter. His fingers were so long and thin and his nails so pink and clean that his hands looked like those of a surgeon rather than of an ex-basketball player.

  "According to them, there was no Johnny Dartez on that plane," I said.

  "They have their areas of concern, we have ours."

  "They're stonewalling you, aren't they?"

  "Look, I'm not interested in Immigration's business. I want Bubba Rocque off the board. Johnny Dartez was a guy we spent a lot of money and time on, him and another dimwit from New Orleans named Victor Romero. Does that name mean anything to you?"

  "No."

  "They both disappeared from their usual haunts about two months ago, just before we were going to pick them up. Since Johnny has done the big gargle out at Southwest Pass, Victor's value has appreciated immensely."

  "You won't get Bubba by squeezing his people."

  He pushed his large shoe against the wall so that his chair spun around in a complete circle, like a child playing in the barber's chair.

  "How is it that you have this omniscient knowledge?" he said.

  "In high school he'd put on different kinds of shows for us. Sometimes he'd eat a lightbulb. Or he might open a bottle of RC Cola on his teeth or push thumbtacks into his kneecaps. It was always a memorable exhibition."

  "Yeah, we see a lot of that kind of psychotic charisma these days. I think it's in fashion with the wiseguys. That's why we have a special lockdown section in Atlanta where they can yodel to each other."

  "Good luck."

  "You don't think we can put him away?"

  "Who cares what I think? What's the National Transportation Safety Board say about the crash?"

  "A fire in the hold. They're not sure. It was murky when their divers went down. The plane slipped down a trench of some kind and it's half covered in mud now."

  "You believe it was just a fire?"

  "It happens."

  "You better send them down again. I dove that wreck twice. I think an explosion blew out the side."

  He looked at me carefully.

  "I think maybe I ought to caution you about involving yourself in a federal investigation," he said.

  "I'm not one of your problems, Mr. Dautrieve. You've got another federal agency trespassing on your turf, maybe tainting your witnesses, maybe stealing bodies. Anyway, they're jerking you around and for some reason you're not doing anything about it. I'd appreciate it if you didn't try to lay off your situation on me."

  I saw the bone flex against the clean line of his jaw. Then he began to play with a rubber band on his long fingers.

  "You'll have to make allowances for us government employees who have to labor with bureaucratic manacles on," he said. "We've never been able to use the simple, direct methods you people have been so good at. You remember a few years back when a New Orleans cop got killed and some of his friends squared it on their own? I think they went into the guy's house, it was a black guy, of course, and blew him and his wife away in the bathtub. Then there were those black revolutionaries that stuck up an armored car in Boston and killed a guard and hid out in Louisiana and Mississippi. We worked two years preparing that case, then your people grabbed one of them and tortured a statement out of him and flushed everything we'd done right down the shithole. You guys sure knew how to let everybody know you were in town."

  "I guess I'll go now. You want to ask me anything else?"

  "Not a thing," he said, and fired a paper clip at a file cabinet across the room.

  I stood up to leave. His attention was concentrated on finding another target for his rubber band and paper clip.

  "Does a white Corvette with the letters ELK on the door bring any of your clientele to mind?" I said.

  "Were these the guys out at your place?" His eyes still avoided me.

  "Yes."

  "How should I know? We're lucky to keep tabs on two or three of these assholes." He was looking straight at me now, his eyes flat, the skin of his face tight. "Maybe it's somebody you sold some bad fish to."

  I walked outside in the sunshine and the wind blowing through the mimosa trees on the lawn. A Negro gardener was sprinkling the flower beds and the freshly cut grass with a hose, and I could smell the damp earth and the green clippings that were raked in piles under the trees. I looked back up at the office window of Minos P. Dautrieve. I opened and closed my hands and took a breath and felt the anger go out of my chest.

  Well, you asked for it, I told myself. Why poke a stick at a man who's already in a cage? He probably gets one conviction out of ten arrests, spends half his time with his butt in a bureaucratic paper shredder, and on a good day negotiates a one-to-three possessions plea on a dealer who's probably robbed hundreds of people of their souls.

  Just as I was pulling out into the traffic, I saw him come out of the building waving his arm at me. He was almost hit by a car crossing the street.

  "Park it a minute. You want a snowcone? It's on me," he said.

  "I have to get back to work."

  "Park it," he said, and bought two snowcones from a Negro boy who operated a stand under an umbrella on the corner. He got in the passenger side of my truck, almost losing the door on a passing car whose horn reverberated down the street, and handed me one of the snowcones.

  "Maybe the Corvette is Eddie Keats's," he said. "He used to run a nickel-and-dime book in Brooklyn. Now he's a Sunbelter, he likes our climate so much. He lives here part of the time, part of the time in New Orleans. He's got a couple of bars, a few whores working for him, and he thinks he's a big button man. Is there any reason for a guy like that to be hanging around your place?"

  "You got me. I never heard of him."

  "Try this—Eddie Keats likes to do favors for important people. He jobs out for Bubba Rocque sometimes, for free or whatever Bubba wants to give him. He's that kind of swell guy. We heard he set fire to one of Bubba's hookers in New Orleans."

  He stopped and looked at me curiously.

  "What's the matter? You never got a case like that in homicide?" he said. "You know how their pimps keep them down on the farm."

  "I talked to a stripper in New Orleans about Johnny Dartez. She told me he worked for Bubba Rocque. I've got a bad feeling about her."

  "This disturbs me."

  "What?"

  "I'm serious when I warn you about fooling around in a federal investigation."

  "Listen, I reported four dead people in that plane. The wire service was told there were only three. That suggests that maybe I was drunk or that I'm a dumb shit or maybe both."

  "All right, for right now forget all that. We can pick her up and give her protective custody, if that's what you want."

  "That's not her style."

  "Getting the shit kicked out of her is?"

  "She's an alcoholic and an addict. She'd rather eat a bowl of spiders than disconnect from her source."

  "Okay, if you see that car around your place again, you call us. We handle it. You're not a player, you understand?"

  "I don't intend to be one."

  "Watch your ass, Robicheaux," he said. "If I see your name in the paper again, it had better be in the fishing news."

  I crossed the Vermilion River and took the old two-lane road through Broussard to New Iberia. At almost exactly three o'clock it started to rain. I watched it move in a gray, lighted sheet out of the south, the shadows racing ahead of the clouds as the first drops clicked across the new sugarcane and then clattered on the abandoned tin sugar factory outside of Broussard. In the middle of the shower, shafts of
sunlight cut through the clouds like the depictions of spiritual grace on a child's holy card. When the sun shone through the rain my father used to say, "That how God tell you it ain't for long, Him."

  When I got back home the rain was still dancing on the bayou, and Annie had walked Alafair down to the dock to help Batist take care of the fishermen who were drinking beer and eating boudin under the canvas awning. I went up to the house and called New Orleans information for Robin's number, but she had no listing. Then I called Smiling Jack's. The man who answered didn't identify himself, but the voice and the manner were unmistakable.

  "She isn't here. She don't come in till six," he said.

  "Do you have her home number?"

  "Are you kidding? Who is this?"

  "What's her number, Jerry?"

  "Oh yeah, I should have known. It's Fearless Fosdick, isn't it?" he said. "Guess what? She don't have a phone. Guess what again? This isn't an answering service."

  "When'd you see her last?"

  "Throwing up in the toilet at three o'clock this morning. I just got finished cleaning it up. Look, fun guy, you want to talk to that broad, come down and talk to her. Right now I got to wash out my mops. You two make a great couple."

  He hung up the phone, and I looked out into the rain on the bayou. Maybe she would be all right, I thought. She had survived all her life in a world in which male use of her body and male violence against it had been as natural to her as the vodka collins and speed on the half-shell that started each of her days. Maybe it was just a vanity that I felt a conversation with me could bring additional harm into her life. Also, I didn't know for sure that the driver of the Corvette was some Brooklyn character named Eddie Keats.

  Saints don't heed warnings because they consider them irrelevant. Fools don't heed them because they think the lightning dancing across the sky, the thunder rolling through the woods, are only there to enhance their lives in some mysterious way. I had been warned by both Robin and Minos P. Dautrieve. I saw a solitary streak of lightning tremble like a piece of heated wire on the southern horizon. But I didn't want to think anymore that day about dope runners and local wiseguys, federal agents and plane crashes. I listened to the rain dripping through the pecan trees, then walked down to the dock in the flicker of distant lightning to help Annie and Batist get ready for the late-afternoon fishermen.

  * * *

  3

  IF, AS A child, I had been asked to describe the world I lived in, I'm sure my response would have been in terms of images that in general left me with a sense of well-being about myself and my family. Because even though my mother died when I was young and we were poor and my father sometimes brawled in bars and got locked in the parish jail, he and my little brother and I had a home—actually a world—on the bayou that was always safe, warm in the winter from the woodstove, cool in the summer under the shade of the pecan trees, a place that was ours and had belonged to our people and a way of life since the Acadians came to Louisiana in 1755. In describing that world I would have told my questioner about my pet three-legged coon, my pirogue tied to a cypress into which was driven a rusty spike with a chain supposedly used by jean Lafitte, the big, black iron pot in the backyard where my father fried us sac-a-lait and bream almost every night in the summer, the orange and purple sunsets in the fall when the ducks would cover the sky from horizon to horizon, the red leaves spinning out of the trees onto the water in that peculiar gold October light that was both warm and cold at the same time, and the dark, wet layers of leaves deep in the woods where we dug for night-crawlers, the smokehouse in back that glistened in the morning frost and always smelled of pork dripping into smoldering ash, and most of all my father—a big, dark, laughing Cajun who could break boards into kindling with his bare hands, throw a washtub full of bricks over a fence, or pull a six-foot 'gator out of the water by his tail.

  But what images would you find if you unlocked the mind of a six-year-old child who had been flown out of a virtual Stone Age, a Central American village, where the twentieth century intruded itself in the form of the most sophisticated and destructive infantry weapons in the world?

  The only Spanish-speaking person I knew in New Iberia was a pari-mutuel window seller named Felix who worked at Evangeline Downs in Lafayette and the Fairgrounds in New Orleans. He had been a casino card dealer in Havana during the Batista era, and his lavender shirts and white French cuffs, crinkling seersucker suits and pomade-scented hair gave him the appearance of a man who still aspired to a jaded opulence in his life. But like most people I knew around the track, his chief defect was that he didn't like regular work or the world of ordinary people.

  The skies had cleared almost completely of rain clouds an hour after I had returned from Lafayette and my visit to the DEA, and now the western horizon was aflame with the sunset, cicadas droned in the trees, and fireflies were starting to light in the dusk. We sat in the living room while Felix spoke quietly to Alafair in Spanish about her parents, her village, the small geographic, tropical postage stamp that constituted the only world she had ever known but that sent my own mind back across the seas, back across two decades, to other villages that smelled of fish heads, animal dung, chicken yards, sour mud, stagnant water, human feces, ulcerated children with no pants on who urinated in the road; and then there was that other smell, the reek of soldiers who hadn't bathed for days, who lived enclosed in their own fetid envelope, whose fantasies vacillated from rut to dissolving their enemies and the source of their discomfort into a bloody mist.

  But I digress into my own historical myopia. Her story is more important than mine because I chose to be a participant and she did not. I chose to help bring the technology of napalm and the M-16 and AK-47 meat-cutters to people who harvested rice with their hands. Others elected Alafair and her family to be the recipients of our industrial gifts to the Third World.

  She spoke as though she were describing the contents of a bad picture show of which she understood only parts, and Annie and I had trouble looking at each other's eyes lest we see reflected there the recognition of the simian creature that was still alive and thriving in the human race. Felix translated:

  —The soldiers carry knives and pliers to steal the faces of the people in the village. My uncle ran away into the cane, and the next day we found him where they had left him. My mother tried to hide my eyes but I saw anyway. His thumbs were tied together with wire, and they had taken away his face. It was hot in the cane and we could hear the flies buzzing. Some of the people got sick because of the smell and vomited on themselves.

  —That was when my father ran away, too. My mother said he went into the hills with the other men from the village. The helicopters chased them sometimes, I think, because we saw the shadows go across our house and then across the road and the fields, then they would stop in the air and begin shooting. They had tubes on their sides that made puffs of smoke, and the rocks and trees on the hillside would fly in the air. The grass and bushes were dry and caught fire, and at night we could see them burning high up in the darkness and smell the smoke in the wind—

  "Ask her what happened to her father," I said to Felix. "Dondé está tu padre ahora?"

  —Maybe he went away with the trucks. The trucks went into the hills, then came back with many men from the village. They took them to a place where the soldiers live, and we did not see them again. My cousin said the soldiers have a prison far away and they keep many people there. Maybe my father is with them. The American priest said he would try to find out but that we had to leave the village. He said they would hurt my mother the way they hurt the other lady because of the clinic—

  She went silent on the couch and stared out the screen door at the fireflies' lightning in the dusk. Her tan face was now discolored with the same pale, bloodless spots it had had when I pulled her out of the water. Annie stroked her close-cropped hair with her palm and squeezed her around the shoulders.

  "Dave, maybe that's enough," she said.

  "No, she's got to t
ell it all. She's too little a kid to carry that kind of stuff around by herself," I said. Then, to Felix, "What other lady?"

  "Quién es la otra señora?" he asked.

  —She worked at the clinic with my mother. Her stomach was big and it made her walk like a duck. One day the soldiers came and pulled her out in the road by her arms. She was calling the names of her friends to help her, but the people were afraid and tried to hide. Then the soldiers made us go outside and watch the thing they did to her in the road—

  Her eyes were wide and had the empty, dry, glazed expression of someone who might be staring into a furnace. "Qué hicieron los soldados?" Felix said softly.

  —They went to the woodcutter's house and came back with his machete. They were chopping and the machete was wet and red in the sunlight. A soldier put his hands in her stomach and took out her baby. The people were crying now and covering their faces. The priest ran to us from the church, but they knocked him down and beat him in the road. The fat lady and her baby stayed out there by themselves in the sun. The smell was like the smell in the cane when we found my uncle. It was in all the houses, and when we woke up in the morning it was still there but worse—

  The cicadas were loud in the trees. There was nothing we could say. How do you explain evil to a child, particularly when the child's experience with it is perhaps greater than your own? I had seen children in a Saigon burn ward whose eyes rendered you mute before you could even attempt to apologise for the calamity that adults had imposed upon them. My condolence became a box of Hershey bars.

  We drove to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge for pecan pie and listened to the Acadian string band, then took a ride down Bayou Teche on the paddle-wheel pleasure boat that operated up and down the bayou for tourists. It was dark now, and the trees on some of the lawns were hung with Japanese lanterns, and you could smell barbecue fires and crabs boiling in the lighted and screened summerhouses beyond the cane that grew along the bayou's banks. The baseball diamond in the park looked as if it were lit by an enormous white flare, and people were cheering on an American Legion game that had all the innocent and provincial intensity of a scene clipped from the summer of 1941. Alafair sat on a wooden bench between Annie and me and watched the cypress trees and shadowy lawns and the scrolled nineteenth-century homes slip past us. Maybe it wasn't much to offer in recompense, but it was all we had.