She handed me the phone.
“Buford?” I said.
“Yes.” His voice sounded as though someone had just wrapped a strand of piano wire around his throat.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yes, I’m fine, thanks . . . You heard about Crown?” he said.
“A guard at the prison told me.”
“Does this give you some idea of his potential?”
“I hear they were cruising for it.”
“He broke one guy’s neck. He drowned the other one in a barrel of tractor oil,” he said.
“I couldn’t place your friend this morning. He’s Clay Mason, isn’t he? What are you doing with him, partner?”
“None of your business.”
“That guy was the P. T. Barnum of the acid culture.”
“As usual, your conclusions are as wrong as your information.”
He hung up the phone. I sat back down at the table.
“You really called Karyn LaRose?” I asked.
“Why? Do you object?” she said.
“No.”
She put a piece of chicken in her mouth and looked at me while she chewed. My stare broke.
“I wish I hadn’t gone out to see her, Boots.”
“He’s mixed up with that guru from the sixties?” she said.
“Who knows? The real problem is one nobody cares about.”
She waited.
“Aaron Crown had no motivation to kill Ely Dixon. I’m more and more convinced the wrong man’s in prison,” I said.
“He was in the Klan, Dave.”
“They kicked him out. He busted up a couple of them with a wood bench inside a Baptist church.”
But why, I thought.
It was a question that only a few people in the Louisiana of the 1990s could answer.
* * *
His name was Billy Odom and he ran a junkyard on a stretch of state highway west of Lafayette. Surrounded by a floodplain of emerald green rice fields, the junkyard seemed an almost deliberate eyesore that Billy had lovingly constructed over the decades from rusted and crushed car bodies, mountains of bald tires, and outbuildings festooned with silver hubcaps.
Like Aaron Crown, he was a north Louisiana transplant, surrounded by papists, blacks who could speak French, and a historical momentum that he had not been able to shape or influence or dent in any fashion. His face was as round as a moonpie under his cork sun helmet, split with an incongruous smile that allowed him to hide his thoughts while he probed for the secret meaning that lay in the speech of others. A Confederate flag, almost black with dirt, was nailed among the yellowed calendars on the wall of the shed where he kept his office. He kept licking his lips, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes squinting as though he were staring through smoke.
“A fight in a church? I don’t call it to mind,” he said.
“You and Aaron were in the same klavern, weren’t you?”
His eyes shifted off my face, studied the motes of dust spinning in a shaft of sunlight. He cocked his head philosophically but said nothing.
“Why’d y’all run him off?” I asked.
“’Cause the man don’t have the sense God give an earthworm.”
“Come on, Billy.”
“He used to make whiskey and put fertilizer in the mash. That’s where I think he got that stink at. His old woman left him for a one-legged blind man.”
“You want to help him, Billy, or see him hung out to dry at Angola?”
His hands draped over his thighs. He studied the backs of them.
“It was ’cause of the girl. His daughter, what’s her name, Sabelle, the one runs the bar down at the Underpass.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“The meeting was at a church house. She wasn’t but a girl then, waiting outside in the pickup truck. Two men was looking out the window at her. They didn’t know Crown was sitting right behind them.
“One goes, ‘I hear that’s prime.’
“The other one goes, ‘It ain’t bad. But you best carry a ball of string to find your way back out.’
“That’s when Crown put the wood to them. Then he tore into them with his boots. It taken four of us to hold him down.”
“You kicked him out of the Klan for defending his daughter?” I said.
Billy Odom pried a pale splinter out of his grease-darkened desk and scratched lines in his skin with it.
“When they’re young and cain’t keep their panties on, the old man’s in it somewhere,” he said.
“What?”
“Everybody had suspicioned it. Then a woman from the welfare caught him at it and told the whole goddamn town. That’s how come Crown moved down here.”
“Aaron and his daughter?” I said.
* * *
The man who had seen the accident did not report it for almost three days, not until his wife was overcome with guilt herself and went to a priest and then with her husband to the St. Martin Parish sheriff’s office.
Helen Soileau and I stood on the levee by a canal that rimmed Henderson Swamp and watched a diver in a wetsuit pull the steel hook and cable off the back of a wrecker, wade out into the water by a row of bridge pilings, sinking deeper into a balloon of silt, then disappear beneath the surface. The sky was blue overhead, the moss on the dead cypress lifting in the breeze, the sun dancing on the sandbars and the deep green of the willow islands. When a uniformed sheriff’s deputy kicked the winch into gear and the cable clanged tight on the car’s frame, a gray cloud of mud churned to the surface like a fat man’s fist.
Helen walked up on the wood bridge that spanned the canal, rubbed her shoe on one unrailed edge, and walked back down on the levee again. The front tires of the submerged car, which lay upside down, broke through a tangle of dead hyacinths.
The man who had seen the accident sat on the levee with his wife at his side. He wore a greasy cap, with the bill pulled low over his eyes.
“Go through it again,” I said.
He had to crane his head upward, into the sunlight, when he spoke.
“It was dark. I was walking back to the camp from that landing yonder. There wasn’t no moon. I didn’t see everything real good,” he replied. His wife looked at the steel cable straining against the automobile’s weight, her face vaguely ashamed, the muscles collapsed.
“Yes, you did,” I said.
“He fishtailed off the levee when he hit the bridge, and the car went in. The headlights was on, way down at the bottom of the canal.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
He flexed his lips back on his teeth, as though he were dealing with a profound idea.
“The man floated up in the headlights. Then he come up the levee, right up to the hard road where I was at. He was all wet and walking fast.” He turned his face out of the sunlight again, retreated back into the shade of his cap.
I tapped the edge of my shoe against his buttock.
“You didn’t report an accident. If we find anything in that car we shouldn’t, you’d better be in our good graces. You with me on this?” I said.
His wife, who wore a print-cotton dress that bagged on her wide shoulders, whispered close to his face while her hand tried to find his.
“He tole me to forget what I seen,” the man said. “He put his mout’ right up against mine when he said it. He grabbed me. In a private place, real hard.” The flush on the back of his neck spread into his hairline.
“What did he look like?” Helen said.
“He was a white man, that’s all I know. He’d been drinking whiskey. I could smell it on his mout’. I ain’t seen him good ’cause the moon was down.”
“You see that power pole there? There’s a light on it. It comes on every night,” I said.
The diver walked out of the shallows next to the overturned Lincoln as the winch slid it up on the mud bank. All the windows were closed, and the interior was filled from the roof to the floor with brown water. Then, through the passenger’s side, we s
aw a brief pink-white flash against the glass, like a molting fish brushing against the side of a dirty aquarium.
The diver tried to open the door, but it was wedged into the mud. He got a two-handed ball peen hammer, with a head the size of a brick, and smashed in the passenger window.
The water burst through the folded glass, peppering the levee with crawfish, leeches, a nest of ribbon-thin cottonmouths that danced in the grass as though their backs were broken. But those were not the images that defined the moment.
A woman’s hand, then arm, extended itself in the rushing stream, as though the person belted to the seat inside were pointing casually to an object in the grass. The fingers were ringed with costume jewelry, the nails painted with purple-polish, the skin eaten by a disease that had robbed the tissue of its color.
I squatted down next to the man who had seen the accident and extended my business card on two fingers.
“He didn’t try to pull her out. He didn’t call for help. He let her drown, alone in the darkness. Don’t let him get away with this, podna,” I said.
* * *
Clete called the bait shop Saturday morning, just as I was laying out a tray of chickens and links on the pit for our midday fishermen.
“You got a boat for rent?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Can you rent the guy with me some gear?”
“I have a rod he can borrow.”
“It’s a fine day for it, all right.”
“Where are you?”
“Right up the road at the little grocery store. The guy’s sitting out in my car. But he doesn’t like to go where he’s not invited, know what I’m saying, Dave? You want Mingo? Anytime I got to run down a skip, all I got to do is talk to the guy in my car. In this case, he feels a personal responsibility. Plus, y’all go back, right?”
“Clete, you didn’t bring Jerry Joe Plumb here?” I said.
* * *
He was notorious by the time he was expelled from high school his senior year—a kid who’d grin just before he hit you, a bouree player who won high stakes from grown men at the saloon downtown, the best dancer in three parishes, the hustler who cast aluminum replicas of brass knuckles in the metal shop foundry and sold them for one dollar apiece with the ragged edges unbuffed so they could stencil daisy chains of red flowers on an adversary’s face.
But all that happened after Jerry Joe’s mother died his sophomore year. My memory was of a different boy, from a different, earlier time.
In elementary school we heard his father had been killed at Wake Island, but no one was really sure. Jerry Joe was one of those boys who came to town and left, entered and withdrew from school as his mother found work wherever she could. They used to live in a shack on the edge of a brickyard in Lafayette, then for several years in a trailer behind a welding shop south of New Iberia. On Sundays and the first Fridays of the month we would see him and his mother walking long distances to church, in both freezing weather and on one-hundred-degree afternoons. She was a pale woman, with a pinched and fearful light in her face, and she made him walk on the inside, as though the passing traffic were about to bolt across the curb and kill them both.
For a time his mother and mine worked together in a laundry, and Jerry Joe would come home from school with me and play until my mother and his came down the dirt road in my father’s lopsided pickup. We owned a hand-crank phonograph, and Jerry Joe would root in a dusty pile of 78’s and pull out the old scratched recordings of the Hackberry Ramblers and Iry LeJeune and listen to them over and over again, dancing with himself, smiling elfishly, his shoulders and arms cocked like a miniature prizefighter’s.
One day after New Year’s my father came back unexpectedly from offshore, where he worked as a derrick man, up on the monkey board, high above the drilling platform and the long roll of the Gulf. He’d been fired after arguing with the driller, and as he always did when he lost his job, he’d spent his drag-up check on presents for us and whiskey at Provost’s Bar, as though new opportunity and prosperity were just around the corner.
But Jerry Joe had never seen my father before and wasn’t ready for him. My father stood silhouetted in the doorway, huge, grinning, irreverent, a man who fought in bars for fun, the black hair on his chest bursting out of the two flannel shirts he wore.
“You dance pretty good. But you too skinny, you. We gone have to fatten you up. Y” all come see what I brung,” he said.
At the kitchen table, he began unloading a canvas drawstring bag that was filled with smoked ducks, pickled okra and green tomatoes, a fruit cake, strawberry preserves, a jar of cracklings, and bottle after long-necked bottle of Jax beer.
“Your mama work at that laundry, too? . . . Then that’s why you ain’t eating right. You tell your mama like I tell his, the man own that place so tight he squeak when he walk,” my father said. “Don’t be looking at me like that, Davie. That man don’t hire white people lessen he can treat them just like he do his colored.”
Jerry Joe went back in the living room and sat in a stuffed chair by himself for a long time. The pecan trees by the house clattered with ice in the failing light. Then he came back in the kitchen and told us he was sick. My father put a jar of preserves and two smoked ducks in a paper bag for him and stuck it under his arm and we drove him home in the dark.
That night I couldn’t find the hand crank to the phonograph, but I thought Jerry Joe had simply misplaced it. The next day I had an early lesson about the nature of buried anger and hurt pride in a child who had no one in whom he could confide. When the school bus stopped on the rock road where Jerry Joe lived, I saw a torn paper bag by the ditch, the dog-chewed remains of the smoked ducks, the strawberry preserves congealed on the edges of the shattered mason jar.
He never asked to come to our house again, and whenever I saw him he always conveyed the feeling I had stolen something valuable from him rather than he from us.
* * *
Clete parked his dinged, chartreuse Cadillac convertible by the boat ramp and walked down the dock with Jerry Joe toward the bait shop. Jerry Joe was ebullient, enthused by the morning and the personal control he brought to it. His taut body looked made of whipcord, his hair thick and blond and wavy, combed in faint ducktails in back. He wore oxblood tasseled loafers, beige slacks, a loose-fitting navy blue sports shirt with silver thread in it. I said he walked down the dock. That’s not true. Jerry Joe rolled, a Panama hat spinning on his finger, his thighs flexing against his slacks, change and keys ringing in his pockets, the muscles in his shoulders as pronounced as oiled rope.
“Comment la vie, Dave? You still sell those ham-and-egg sandwiches?” he said, and went through the screen door without waiting for an answer.
“Why’d you do this, Clete?” I said.
“There’re worst guys in the life,” he replied.
“Which ones?”
Jerry Joe bought a can of beer and a paper plate of sliced white boudin at the counter and sat at a table in back.
“You’re sure full of sunshine, Dave,” he said.
“I’m off the clock. If this is about Mingo, you should take it to the office,” I said.
He studied me. At the corner of his right eye was a coiled white scar. He speared a piece of boudin with a toothpick and put it in his mouth.
“I’m bad for business here, I’m some kind of offensive presence?” he asked.
“We’re way down different roads, Jerry Joe.”
“Pull my jacket. Five busts, two convictions, both for operating illegal gambling equipment. This in a-state that allows cock fighting . . . You got a jukebox here?”
“No.”
“I heard about the drowned black girl. Mingo’s dirty on this?”
“That’s the name on the warrant.”
“He says his car got boosted.”
“We’ve got two witnesses who can put him together with the car and the girl.”
“They gotta stand up, though. Right?” he asked.
“Nobody
had better give them reason not to.”
He pushed his plate away with the heel of his hand, leaned forward on his elbows, rolling the toothpick across his teeth. Under the bronze hair of his right forearm was a tattoo of a red parachute and the words 101st Airborne.
“I hire guys like Mingo to avoid trouble, not to have it. But to give up one of my own people, even though maybe he’s a piece of shit, I got to have . . . what’s the term for it . . . compelling reasons, yeah, that’s it,” he said.
“How does aiding and abetting sound, or conspiracy after the fact?”
He scratched his face and glanced around the bait shop. His eyes crinkled at the corners. “You like my tattoo? Same outfit as Jimi Hendrix,” he said.
I pushed a napkin and a pencil stub toward him. “Write down an address, Jerry Joe. NOPD will pick him up. You won’t be connected with it.”
“Why don’t you get a jukebox? I’ll have one of my vendors come by and put one in. You don’t need no red quarters. You keep a hundred percent,” he said. “Hey, Dave, it’s all gonna work out. It’s a new day. I guarantee it. Don’t get tied up with this Aaron Crown stuff.”
“What?”
But he drank his beer, winked at me as he fitted on his Panama hat, then walked out to the Cadillac to wait for Clete.
CHAPTER
8
Monday morning, when I went into work, I walked past Karyn LaRose’s blue Mazda convertible in the parking lot. She sat behind the wheel, in dark glasses with a white scarf tied around her hair. When I glanced in her direction, she picked up a magazine from the seat and began reading it, a pout on her mouth.
“There’s a guy talks like a college professor waiting to see you, Dave,” Wally, the dispatcher, said. His great weight caused a perpetual flush in his neck and cheeks, as though he had just labored up a flight of stairs, and whenever he laughed, usually at his own jokes, his breath wheezed deep in his chest.