* * *
When Batist woke up, he was on his side, in the middle of the living room floor, his knees drawn up before him. The house was quiet, and he could see rain blowing through the screen, wetting the cypress planks in the floor, and he thought the hatted man in the rubber coat was gone.
Then he felt the intruder’s gloved hand close on the bottom of his chin and tilt his face toward him, as though the intruder were arranging the anatomical parts on a store dummy.
“You went to sleep on me, old man. That’s ’cause I shut off the big vein that goes up to your brain,” the intruder said. He was squatted on his haunches, sipping from a half-pint bottle of apricot brandy. His eyes were turquoise, the scalp above his ears shaved bare, the color of putty.
“You best get out of here, nigger, while you still can,” Batist said.
The intruder drank from the bottle, let the brandy roll on his tongue, settle in his teeth, as though he were trying to kill an abscess in his gum.
Batist raised himself into a sitting position, waiting for the intruder to react. But he didn’t. He sipped again from the brandy, nestled one buttock more comfortably against the heel of his boot. His shirt and the top of his coat were unbuttoned, and a necklace of blue shark’s teeth was tattooed across his collarbones and around his upper chest. Cupped in his right hand was a banana knife, hooked at the tip, the edge filed into a long silver thread.
“Fishing any good here?” he asked.
He reached out with one finger and touched Batist on the end of his nose, then tilted the brandy again, his eyes closing with the pleasure the liquor gave him.
Batist drove the bottle into the intruder’s mouth with the flat of his hand, shattering the glass against the teeth, bursting the lips into a torn purple flower.
The intruder’s face stiffened with shock, glistened with droplets of brandy and saliva and blood. But instead of reeling from the room in pain and rage, he rose to his feet and his right foot exploded against the side of Batist’s head. He cleaned bits of glass out of his mouth with his fingers, spitting, as though there were peanut brittle on his” tongue, his gashed lips finally reforming into a smile.
He bent over, the hooked point of the banana knife an inch from Batist’s eye. He started to speak, then paused, pressed his mouth against his palm, looked at it, and wiped his hand on his raincoat.
“Now you made me work for free. You ain’t got nowhere to go for a while, do you?” he said, and thumbed the buttons loose on his coat.
CHAPTER
29
Forty miles away, in the Atchafalaya Basin, the same night the intruder came to my house, Aaron Crown threaded an outboard through a nest of canals until he reached a shallow inlet off the river, where a steel-bottomed oyster boat lay half-sunk in the silt. The decks and hull were the color of a scab, the cabin eaten to the density of aged cork by termites and worms. The entrance to the inlet was narrow, the willows on each side as thick as hedges, the river beyond it running hard and fast and yellow with foam.
He sat on a wood stool inside the cabin, his skin slathered with mud, the stolen Enfield rifle propped between his legs, his eyes fixed on the river, which they would have to cross. The light was perfect. He could see far into the distance, like a creature staring out of a cave, but they in turn could not see him. He had told them no helicopters, not even for the news people. If he heard helicopters, he would be gone deep into the canopy of the swamp before anyone could reach the entrance to the inlet.
The state police administrator had said it was all a simple matter. Aaron only had to wade into the sunlight, his rifle over his head. No one would harm him. Television cameras would record the moment, and that night millions of people would be forced to acknowledge the struggle of one man against an entire state.
He remembered his original arrest for the murder of the NAACP leader and the national attention it brought him. How many men were allowed to step into history twice?
The state policeman had confirmed the arrangement, two or three years in a federal old folks facility, no heavy work, no lockdown, good food, a miniature golf course, a television and card room, long-distance access to news reporters whenever he wanted.
But what if it went down wrong tonight? Even that could be an acceptable trade-off. Buford LaRose would be out there somewhere. Aaron squeezed the stock of the Enfield a little tighter in his palms, the dried mud on his palms scraping softly on the wood, his loins stirring at the thought.
He opened a can of potted meat and dipped a saltine cracker into it and chewed the cracker and meat slowly and then drank from a hot can of Coca-Cola. When the potted meat was almost gone, he split a cracker in half and furrowed out the meat from the seams at the bottom of the can, not missing a morsel, and lay the cracker on his tongue and drank the last of his Coca-Cola. He started to roll a cigarette, then saw a curtain of rain moving across the river’s surface toward him, and inside the rain he saw three large powerboats with canvas tarps behind the cabins and the faces of uniformed men behind the water-beaded windows.
But where was the boat with the news people on it?
He rose to his feet and let the tobacco roll off his cupped cigarette paper and stick to his pants legs and prison work boots. The wind was blowing harder now, whipping the willow and cypress trees, capping the river’s surface. The uniformed men in the boats hadn’t seen him yet and had cut back their throttles and were drifting in the chop, the canvas tarps flapping atop the decks.
South of the squall, the sky was filled with purple and yellow clouds, like smoke ballooning out of an industrial fire. He squinted into the rain to see more clearly. What were they doing? The state police administrator, what was his name, Tauzin, should have been out on the deck with a bullhorn, to tell him what to do, to take control, to make sure the news people filmed Aaron wading out of the swamp, his rifle held high above his head, a defiant hill-country man whose surrender had been personally negotiated by the governor of the state.
Something was wrong. One, two, three, then a total of four men had come out the cabin doors onto the decks of their boats, cautious not to expose themselves, the bills of their caps turned backward on their heads.
It couldn’t be what he thought. The offer had come through a man he trusted in the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. The state policeman had given his word, also. And where was that damn Buford LaRose? Aaron knew Buford would never miss an opportunity like this one, to stand before the cameras, with a wetlands background, his aristocratic face softened by the lights of humanity and conscience.
Then a terrible thought appeared in a bright, clear space in the center of his mind with such vividness that his face burned once again with a memory that was sixty years out of his past, a little boy in rent overalls being shoved into a school yard puddle by a boy whose father owned the cotton gin, the words hurled down at him, Aaron, you’re dumber than a nigger trying to hide in a snowbank. It was the old recognition that his best efforts always turned out the same: he was the natural-born victim of his betters. In this case the simple fact was that Buford LaRose had already been elected. He didn’t have to prove anything to anybody. Aaron Crown was nothing more than a minor nuisance of whom the world had finally tired and was about to dispose of as you would an insect with a Flit can.
Aaron saw this thought as clearly as he saw the face of the man with the inverted cap working his way forward on the lead boat, between the gunnel and cabin. They were like two bookends facing each other now. But Aaron refused to wince or cower, to let them see the fear that made his bowels turn to water. You’d like to do it, yessiree Bob, blow hair and bone all over the trees, but you’re one of them kind won’t drop his britches and take a country squat till somebody tells you it’s all right. Aaron’s hand crushed the aluminum soda can in his palm, the bottom glinting like a heliograph.
He was wrong.
The muzzle of the M-16 rifle flashed in the rain just as the boat’s bow rose in the chop, and the .223 round thropped past Aaron?
??s ear, punching a neat hole in the wall behind him, its trajectory fading deep in the swamp. A second later the other uniformed men cut loose in unison, firing tear gas and M-16’s on full automatic and twelve-gauge pump Remingtons loaded with double-ought buckshot.
But Aaron was running now, and not where they thought he would. While gas shells hissed on the deck and buckshot and .223 rounds perforated the oyster boat’s cabin, crisscrossing the gloomy interior with tubular rays of light, he slid down the ladder inside the ship’s steel hull, his rifle inverted on its sling, then exited the boat through the far side, where the plates had been stripped from a spar by a salvager. As he ran through a chain of sandbars and stagnant pools of water, he could hear the steady dissection of the cabin, glass breaking, bullets whanging off metal surfaces, shattered boards spinning out into the trees like sticks blown from a forest fire.
He glanced once over his shoulder after he kicked over the outboard. Fire. He hadn’t imagined it. Their magazines “had been loaded with tracers, and the oyster boat’s cabin was liquid with flames.
Inside the caked patina of mud on Aaron’s face, his eyes were as pink as Mercurochrome, filmed with the reflected glow of what he knew now had been the final demonstrable evidence of the lifetime conspiracy directed at him and his family. Somehow that gave him a satisfaction and feeling of confirmation that was like being submerged and bathed in warm water. He bit down on his molars with an almost sexual pleasure but could not tell himself why.
Late that same night, a voice with a peckerwood accent that did not identify itself left a message on my recording machine: “Buford got to you. I don’t know how. But I’d just as lief cut the equipment off two shithogs as one.”
CHAPTER
30
The account of Aaron Crown’s escape from the state police is my re-creation of the story as it was related to me by a St. Martin Parish deputy in the waiting room down the hall from Batist’s room at Iberia General. Clete Purcel and I watched the deputy get into the elevator and look back at us blank-faced while the doors closed behind him.
“What are you thinking?” Clete asked.
“It’s no accident Mookie Zerrang came to my house the same night Crown was set up for a whack.”
Clete leaned forward in his chair and rubbed one hand on the other, picked at a callus, his green eyes filled with thought. He had driven from New Orleans in two and a half hours, steam rising from the hood of his Cadillac like vapor off dry ice when he pulled under the electric arc lamps in the hospital parking lot.
“Zerrang’s got to go off-planet, Streak,” he said.
“He will.”
“It won’t happen. Not unless you or I do it. This guy’s juice is heavy-voltage, mon.”
I didn’t answer.
“You know I’m right. When they deal it down and dirty, we take it back to them under a black flag,” he said.
“Wrong discussion, wrong place.”
“There’s a geek in Jefferson Parish. A real sicko. Even the wiseguys cross the street when they see him coming. But he owes five large to Nig. I can square the debt. Mookie Zerrang will be walking on stumps . . . Are you listening?”
I went to the cold drink machine, then put my change back in my pocket and kept on walking to the nurses’ station.
“I have to talk to my friend,” I said.
“Sorry, not until the doctor comes back,” the nurse said. She smiled and did not mean to be impolite.
“I apologize, then,” I said, and went past her and into Batist’s room.
He was turned on his side, facing the opposite wall, his back layered with bandages. The intruder had used a type of ASP, a steel bludgeon, sold in police supply stores, that telescopes out of a handle. The one used by the intruder was modified with an extension that operated like a spring or whip, with a steel ball the size of a small marble attached to the tip. The paramedics had to cut away Batist’s overalls and T-shirt with scissors and peel the cloth off his skin like cobweb.
His head jerked on the pillow when he heard me behind him.
“It’s okay, partner,” I said, and walked around the foot of the bed.
His right eye was swollen shut, his nose broken and X-ed with tape.
“I ain’t felt a lot of it, Dave. He hit me upside the head first, ’cause I raised up and caught him another one in the mout’,” he said.
I sat down on a chair by his bedside.
“I promise we’ll get this guy,” I said.
“It ain’t your fault, no.”
“I helped set up Aaron Crown, Batist. I didn’t know it, but I was giving somebody permission to wipe me off the slate, too.”
“Who been doing all this, Dave? What we done to them?”
“They’re right up there on the Teche. Buford and Karyn LaRose.”
His eyes closed and opened as though he were on the edge of sleep or looking at a thought inside his mind.
“It ain’t their way,” he said.
“Why?”
“Their kind don’t never see bad t’ings, Dave. Any black folk on a plantation tell you that. The white folk up in the big house don’t ever want to know what happen out in the field or down in the quarters. They got people to take care of that for them.”
The nurse and the doctor came through the door and looked at us silently.
“You going to be all right for a while?” I said.
“Sure. They been treating me good,” Batist said.
“I’m sorry for this,” I said.
He moved his fingers slightly on the sheet and patted the top of my hand as my father might have done.
* * *
Clete followed me home and went to sleep in our guest room. I lay in the dark next to Bootsie, with my arm over my eyes, and heard rain-water ticking out of the trees into the beds of leaves that tapered away from the tree trunks. I tried to organize my thoughts, then gave it up and fell asleep when the stars were still out. I didn’t wake until after sunrise. The room, the morning itself, seemed empty and stark, devoid of memory, as it used to be when I’d wake from alcoholic blackouts. Then the events of the previous night came back like a slap.
Batist’s first reaction when he had seen me in the hospital had been to prevent me from worrying about his pain. He’d had no thought of himself, no desire for revenge, no sense of recrimination toward me or the circumstances that placed him in the path of a sadist like Mookie Zerrang.
I spent ten months in Vietnam and never saw a deliberate atrocity, at least not one committed by Americans. Maybe that was because most of my tour was over before the war really warmed up. I saw a ville after the local chieftain had called in the 105’s on his own people, and I saw some Kit Carsons bind the wrists of captured Viet Cong and wrap towels around their faces and pour water onto the cloth a canteen at a time until they were willing to trade their own families for a teaspoon of air. Someone always had an explanation for these moments, one that allowed you to push the images out of your mind temporarily. It was the unnecessary cruelty, the kind that was not even recognized as such, that hung in the mind like an unhealed lesion.
A mental picture postcard that I could never find a proper postage stamp for: The mamasan is probably over seventy. Her dugs are withered, her skin as shriveled as a dried apple’s. She and her granddaughter clean hooches for a bunch of marines, wash their clothes, burn the shit barrels at the latrine. Two enlisted men fashion a sign from cardboard and hang it around her neck and pose sweaty and barechested with her while a third marine snaps their photo with a Polaroid camera. The sign says MISS NORTH DAKOTA. If the mamasan comprehends the nature of the insult, it does not show in the cracked parchment of her face. The marines are grinning broadly in the photo.
Voltaire wrote about the cruelty he saw in his neighbor who was the torturer at the Bastille. He described the impulse as insatiable, possessing all the characteristics of both lust and addiction to a drug. Had he not been hired by the state, the neighbor would have paid to continue his tasks in those stone ro
oms beneath the streets of Paris.
Mookie Zerrang was not simply a hit man on somebody’s payroll. He was one of those who operated on the edges of the human family, waiting for the halt and the lame or those who had no voice, his eyes smiling with anticipation when he knew his moment was at hand.
I couldn’t swallow my food at breakfast. I went into the living room and finished cleaning the spot on the floor where we had found Batist. I stuffed the throw rug he had lain on and the paper towels I had used to scrub the cypress planks-into a vinyl garbage bag
“I’m going down to the bait shop,” I said to Bootsie.
“Close it up for today,” she replied.
“It’s Saturday. There might be a few customers by.”
“No, you want to make a private phone call. Do it here. I’ll leave,” she said.
“We didn’t get much sleep, Boots. It’s not a day to hurt each other.”
“Tell it to yourself.”
There was nothing for it. I unlocked the bait shop and dialed Buford LaRose’s home number.
“Hello?” Karyn said.
“Where’s Buford?”
“In the shower.”
“Put him on the phone.”
“Leave him alone, Dave. Go away from us.”
“Maybe I should catch him another time. Would the inauguration ball be okay?”
“It’s by invitation. You won’t be attending . . .” She paused, as though she were enjoying a sliver of ice on her tongue. “By the way, since you’re a conservationist, you’ll enjoy this. I talked to someone about the swamp area around your bait shop being turned into a wilderness preserve. Of course, that will mean commercial property like yours will be acquired by the state or federal government. Oh, Buford’s toweling off now. Have a nice day, Dave.”
She set the phone down on a table and called out in a lilting voice, “Guess who?”
I heard Buford scrape the receiver up in his hand.
“Don’t tell me,” he said.
“Shut up, Buford—”