* * *
The next morning I parked my truck on Decatur Street, on the edge of the French Quarter, and walked through Jackson Square, past St. Louis Cathedral, and on up St. Ann to the tan stucco building with the arched entrance and brick courtyard where Clete Purcel kept his office. It had rained before dawn, and the air was cool and bright, and bougainvillea hung through the grillwork on the balcony upstairs. I looked through his window and saw him reading from a manila folder on top of his desk, his shirt stretched tight across his back, his glasses as small as bifocals on his big face.
I opened the door and stuck my head inside.
“You still mad?” I said.
“Hey, what’s goin’ on, big mon?”
“I’ll buy you a beignet,” I said.
He thought about it, made a rolling, popping motion with his fingers and hands, then followed me outside.
“Just don’t talk to me about Aaron Crown and Buford LaRose,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“What are you doing in New Orleans?”
“I need to check out Jimmy Ray Dixon again. His office says he’s at his pool hall out by the Desire.”
He tilted his porkpie hat on his head, squinted at the sun above the rooftops.
“Did you ever spit on baseballs when you pitched American Legion?” he said.
We had beignets and coffee with hot milk at an outdoor table in the Cafe du Monde. Across the street, sidewalk artists were painting on easels by the iron fence that bordered the park, and you could hear boat horns out on the river, just the other side of the levee. I told him about Mingo Bloomberg’s death.
“It doesn’t surprise me. I think it’s what they all look for,” he said.
“What?”
“The Big Exit. If they can’t get somebody to do it for them, they do it themselves. Most of them would have been better off if their mothers had thrown them away and raised the afterbirth.”
“You want to take a ride?”
“That neighborhood’s a free-fire zone, Streak. Let Jimmy Ray slide. He’s a walking ad for enlistment in the Klan.”
“See you later, then.”
“Oh, your ass,” he said, and caught up with me on the sidewalk, pulling on his sports coat, a powdered beignet in his mouth.
The pool room was six blocks from the Desire welfare project. The windows were barred, the walls built of cinder blocks and scrolled with spray-painted graffiti. I parked by the curb and stepped up on the sidewalk, unconsciously looked up and down the street.
“We’re way up the Mekong, Dave. Hang your buzzer out,” Clete said.
I took out my badge holder and hooked it through the front of my belt, listened to somebody shatter a tight rack and slam the cue stick down on the table’s edge, then walked through the entrance into the darkness inside.
The low ceiling seemed to crush down on the pool shooters like a fist. The bar and the pool tables ran the length of the building, a tin-hooded lamp creating a pyramid of smoky light over each felt rectangle. No one looked directly at us; instead, our presence was noted almost by osmosis, the way schooled fish register and adjust to the proximity of a predator, except for one man, who came out of the rest room raking at his hair with a steel comb, glanced toward the front, then slammed out of a firedoor.
Jimmy Ray Dixon was at a card table in back, by himself, a ledger book, calculator, a filter-tipped cigar inside an ashtray, and a stack of receipts in front of him. He wore a blue suit and starched pink shirt with a high collar, a brown knit tie and gold tie pin with a red stone in it.
“I seen you on TV, still frontin’ points for the man killed my brother,” he said, without looking up from his work. He picked up a receipt with his steel hook and set it down again.
“I need your help,” I said. I waited but he went on with his work. “Sir?” I said.
“What?”
“Can we sit down?”
“Do what you want, man.”
Clete went to the bar and got a shot and a beer, then twisted a chair around and sat down next to me.
“Somebody put a hit on Mingo Bloomberg,” I said.
“I heard he hung himself from a water pipe in y’all’s jail,” Jimmy Ray said.
“Word gets around fast.”
“A dude like that catch the bus, people have parades.”
“He told me a black guy out of Miami had a contract on him. He said a guy who looks like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit.”
Clete scraped a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the next table, his eyes drifting down the bar.
“Maybe you ought to give some thought to where you’re at,” Jimmy Ray said.
“You heard about a mechanic out of Miami?” I said.
“I tell you how I read this sit’ation. You put a snitch jacket on a guy and jammed him up so he didn’t have no place to run. So maybe somebody’s conscience bothering him, know what I mean?” he said.
“I think the same hitter popped Lonnie Felton’s scriptwriter.”
“Could be. But ain’t my bidness.”
“What is your business?”
“Look, man, this is what it is. A smart man got his finger in lots of pies. Don’t mean none of them bad. ’Cause this guy’s a brother, you ax me if I know him. I don’t like to give you a short answer, but you got a problem with the way you think. It ain’t much different than that cracker up at Angola.”
Clete leaned forward in his chair, cracked the shell off a peanut, and threw the peanut in his mouth.
“You still pimp, Jimmy Ray?” he asked, his eyes looking at nothing.
“You starting to burn your ticket, Chuck.”
“I count eight bail skips in here. I count three who aren’t paying the vig to the Shylock who lent them the bail. The guy who went out the door with his hair on fire snuffed one of Dock Green’s hookers in Algiers,” Clete said.
“You want to use the phone, it’s a quarter,” Jimmy Ray said.
“No black hitter works the town without permission. Why let him get the rhythm while you got the blues?” Clete said.
“All my blues is on the jukebox, provided to me by Mr. Jerry Joe Plumb, boy you grew up with,” Jimmy Ray said to me.
“Crown has to stay down for Buford LaRose to go to Baton Rouge. Tell me you’re not part of this, Jimmy Ray,” I said.
He looked up at the clock over the bar. “The school kids gonna be out on the street. Y’all got anything in your car you want to keep? . . . Excuse me, I got to see how much collards I can buy tonight.”
He began tapping figures off a receipt onto his calculator.
* * *
That evening, under a gray sky, Alafair and I raked out the shed and railed horse lot where she kept her Appaloosa. Then we piled the straw and dried-out green manure in a wheelbarrow and buried it in the compost pile by our vegetable garden. The air was cool, flecked with rain, and smelled like gas and chrysanthemums.
“Who’s that man down on the dock, Dave?” Alafair said.
He was squatted down on his haunches, with his back to us. He wore a fedora, dark brown slacks, and a scuffed leather jacket. He was carving a stalk of sugarcane, notching thick plugs out of the stalk between his thumb and the knife blade, feeding them off the blade into his mouth.
“He was in the shop this afternoon. He has a red parachute tattooed on his arm,” she said.
I propped my foot on the shovel’s blade and rested my arm across the end of the shaft. “Jerry Joe Plumb,” I said.
“Is he a bad man?”
“I was never sure, Alf. Tell Bootsie I’ll be along in a minute.”
I walked down to the end of the dock and leaned my palms on the rail. Jerry Joe continued to look out at the brown current from under the brim of his fedora. He folded his pocketknife against the heel of his hand. The blade was the dull color of an old nickel.
“You figure I owe you?”
“What for?”
“I took something out of your house a long time ago”
“I don?
??t remember it.”
“Yeah, you do. I resented you for it.”
“What’s up, partner?”
The scar at the corner of his eye looked like bunched white string.
“My mom used to clean house for Buford LaRose’s parents . . . The old man could be a rotten bastard, but he gave me a job roughnecking in West Texas when I was just seventeen and later on got me into the airborne. It was the way the old man treated Buford that always bothered me, maybe because I was part responsible for it. You think they won’t take you off at the neck because they’re rich? It’s not enough they win; somebody’s got to lose. What I’m saying is, everybody’s shit flushes. You’re no exception, Dave.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“They’ll grind you up.”
What follows is my best reconstruction of Jerry Joe’s words.
CHAPTER
13
By San Antone I’d run out of bus and food money as well as confidence in dealing with the Texas highway patrol, who believed patching tar on a country road was a cure for almost anything. So I walked five miles of railroad track before I heard a doubleheader coming up the line and took off running along the gravel next to a string of empty flat wheelers, that’s boxcars with no springs, my duffle bag banging me in the back, the cars wobbling across the switches and a passenger train on the next track coming up fast, but I worked the door loose, running full-out, flung my duffle on the floor, and crawled up inside the warm smell of grain sacks and straw blowing in the wind and the whistle screaming down the line.
It was near dawn when I woke up, and I knew we were on a trestle because all you could hear was the wheels pinching and squealing on the rails and there wasn’t any echo off the ground or the hillsides. The air was cold and smelled like mesquite and blackjack and sage when it’s wet, like no one had ever been there before, no gas-driven machines, no drovers fording the river down below, not even Indians in the gorges that snaked down to the bottoms like broken fingers and were cluttered with yellow rocks as big as cars.
There were sand flats in the middle of the river, with pools of water in them that were as red as blood, and dead deer that turkey buzzards had eaten from the topside down so that the skeletons stuck out of the hides and the buzzards used the ribs for a perch. Then we were on a long plateau, inside an electric storm, and I begin to see cattle pens and loading chutes and busted windmills that were wrapped with tumbleweed, adobe houses with collapsed walls way off in the lightning, a single-track dirt road and wood bridge and a state sign that marked the Pecos, where the bottom was nothing but baked clay that would crack and spiderweb under your boots.
The old man, Jude LaRose, told me the name of the town but not how to get to it. That was his way. He drew lines in the dirt, and if you fit between them, he might be generous to you. Otherwise, you didn’t exist. The problem was you never knew where the lines were.
I hadn’t realized I’d climbed aboard a hotshot, a straight-through that doesn’t stop till it reaches its destination. I dropped off on an upgrade, just before another trestle, hit running, and slid all the way down a hill into a wet sand flat flanged with willows that had once been a riverbed and was pocked with horses’ hooves and deer tracks that were full of rainwater. I walked all day in the rain, crossed fences with warning signs on them in Spanish and English, saw wild horses flowing like shadows down the face of a ridge, worked my way barefoot across a green river with a soap-rock bottom and came out on a dirt road just as a flatbed truck boomed down with drill pipe and loaded with Mexicans sleeping under a tarp ground through a flooded dip in the road and stopped so the man leaning against the top of the cab with an M-l carbine could say, “Where you think you goin’, man?”
I guess I looked like a drowned cat. I hadn’t eaten in two days, and my boots were laced around my neck and the knees were tore out of my britches. He had on a blue raincoat and a straw hat, with water sluicing off the brim, and his beard was silky and black and pointed like a Chinaman’s.
“Jude LaRose’s place. It’s somewhere around here, ain’t it?” I said.
“You on it now, man.”
“Where’s he live at?”
“Why you want to know that?”
“I’m a friend of his. He told me to come out.”
He leaned down to the window of the cab and said to the Mexicans inside, “Dice que es amigo del Señor LaRose.” They laughed. The ones in back had the tarp pushed up over their heads so they could see me, and two of them were eating refried beans and tortillas they had folded into big squares between their fingers. But they were a different sort, not the kind to laugh at other people.
“You know where his house is at?” I said.
He’d already lost interest. He hit on the roof with his fist, and they drove off in the rain, with the drill pipe flopping off the back of the bed and the Mexicans in back looking out at me from under the tarp.
I found Jude LaRose’s town that evening. It was nothing more than a dirt crossroads set in a cup of hills that had gone purple and red in the sunset. It had a shutdown auction barn and slaughterhouse, a dried-out hog feeder lot next to a railroad bed with no track and a wood water tank that had rotted down on itself, and a shingle-front two-story saloon and cafe, where a little black girl was laying out steaks on a mesquite fire in back. The sidewalk was almost higher than the pickups and horses in front of it, iron-stained with the rusted cusps of tethering rings and pooled with the blood of a cougar someone had shot that day and had hung with wire around the neck from the stanchion of an electric Carta Blanca sign that was the same blue as the glow above the hills.
The inside of the saloon had a stamped tin ceiling, card and domino tables in back, a long bar with old-time towel rings and a wall mirror and brass rail and spittoons, and antlers nailed all over the support posts. A dozen cowboys and oil field roughnecks were playing five-card stud and sipping shots with Pearl and Grand Prize on the side.
The menu was on a chalkboard over the bar. The bartender wore a red chin beard, and his eyes were hollowed deep in his face and his arms were as thick as hams. A fat black woman set a platter of barbecue sandwiches in the service window and rang a bell. The bread was gold and brown with butter and grill marks and soft in the center from the barbecue sauce that had soaked through. The bartender put four bottles of Pearl on the tray and carried it to the card table.
“How much is just the lima bean soup without the sandwich?” I asked. I had to keep my hands flat on the bar when I said it, too, because there was a wood bowl full of crackers and pickles right at the end of my fingers.
“Twenty cents,” he said.
“How much for just a cup?”
“Where you from, boy?”
“Louisiana.”
“Go around back and I’ll tell the nigger to fix you something.”
“I ain’t ask for a handout.”
He pulled up his apron, took a lighter out of his blue jeans, and lit a cigarette. He smoked it and spit a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. He picked up the bowl of crackers and pickles and set it on the counter behind him with the bottles of whiskey and rum and tequila.
“You cain’t hang around here,” he said.
It had started to rain again, and I could see the water dripping off the Carta Blanca sign on the face of the dead cougar. Its eyes were seamed shut, like it had gone to sleep. A man opened the front door and the rain blew across the floor.
“How far is it to the LaRose house?” I said.
“What you want out there?”
“Mr. LaRose told me to come out.”
The cigarette smoke trailed out of the side of his mouth. A shadow had come into his face, like a man who’s caught between fear and suspicion and anger at himself and an even greater fear you’ll see all these things going on inside him.
He walked down the duckboards and used the phone on the counter. When he put the receiver back down his eyes wouldn’t stay fixed on mine.
“Mr. LaRose says f
or you to order up. He’ll be along when it quits raining,” he said. He set the bowl of pickles and crackers back in front of me, then pried off the top of a Barge’s root beer on a wall opener and set it next to the bowl.
“How about a steak and eggs and those stewed tomatoes?” I said.
“Anything else?”
“How about some fried potatoes?”
“What else?”
“How come a Mexican would carry a M-l carbine on a pipe truck?” I asked.
He leaned on the bar. I could smell soap and sweat in his clothes. “Where you seen it?” he asked.
“Coming north of the river.”
“You ever heard of no God or law west of the Pecos?”
“No.”
“It means you see wets, you forget it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a subject you’d best carry on the end of a shit fork,” he said.
An hour later the sky was empty and dry and pale behind the hills and you could see the sage for miles when Jude LaRose pulled up next to the sidewalk in a wood-paneled Ford station wagon, leaned over and popped open the passenger door and looked at me from under the brim of his Stetson with those blue eyes you didn’t ever forget. He was a handsome man in every respect—tall, with a flat stomach, his gray hair cropped GI, his skin sun-browned the shade of a cured tobacco leaf—but I never saw beautiful eyes like that on a man before or since. They were the dark blue you see in patches of water down in the Keys, when the day’s hot and bright before a storm and a cloud of perfect blue darkness floats across the reef, and you almost think you can dip your hand into the color and rub it on your skin, like you would ink, but for some reason, down below that perfect piece of color, down in those coral canyons, you know a school of hammerheads are shredding the bonito into pink thread.
I sat down next to him, with my duffle between my legs, and closed the door. The seats were made from rolled yellow leather, and the light from the mahogany dashboard shone on the leather and reflected up in Jude’s face.
“They want you?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“You know what I mean.”
“There’re ain’t any warrant.”