Helen got up from the table and stood at the window, her back to us. She was silent a long time, the heel of her hand resting on the windowsill, her fingers tapping without sound on the wood. In the distance, I heard the whine of the speedboat fading, disappearing around a bend in the bayou. Without turning around, Helen said, “Make sure he gets back to his car all right.”
CHAPTER
7
WHEN HERMAN STANGA returned home from St. Martinville, the night sky was smoky with stars and moon glow, the underwater lights burning beneath the surface of his swimming pool, the wind ruffling the canopy of the trees along the bayou. While he undressed down to his white silk boxer shorts at his wet bar, kicking his trousers onto the rug, he called the home of his lawyer. The lawyer’s message machine clicked on.
“Monroe, it’s me. Pick up the phone,” Herman said. “I got an update for you. I know you’re there, man, so stop pretending you ain’t. Dave Robicheaux ran me in this afternoon. He was talking in the car about niggers selling out niggers during the Civil War or some shit. He put me in a room wit’ Amazon Woman. She was trying to make me admit I knew somet’ing about them girls that was killed in Jeff Davis Parish. She was calling my mother a whore. She didn’t have a lot of nice t’ings to say about you, either. I’m telling you, Monroe, if I find out you’re home and deliberately ain’t picking up, your ass is grass. A couple of photos Doreen took of you wit’ her sister are gonna be on the Internet. I’ll be up late. Call me. I ain’t just blowing gas here.”
Herman slipped his feet into a pair of flip-flops and chopped up two white lines on a mirror, rolled a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill into a tube, and vacuumed up each line. He used the remote to turn on his giant flat-screen TV and flipped from channel to channel before he became bored and irritated and clicked off the set. He wiped the residue off the mirror with his finger and rubbed his gums with it and licked his finger clean.
The night was alive with sound. Leaves puffed out of the trees on the bayou. The neighbors’ kids were playing tag in the dark. In the center of it all, his swimming pool glowed with an electrified blue clarity that seemed to answer all the mysteries about life and death, at least as far as Herman ever thought about them. He opened the sliding glass door and let in the night air and the smell of the flowers. Maybe he should relax and have Doreen over for a swim. Her sister, too. But Herman’s spring was wound too tight to think very long about the recreational end of his profession.
He hit the speed dial on his cordless phone and got Monroe’s message machine again. “Don’t make me drive over there, Monroe,” he said. “They messed wit’ the wrong nigger. I’m gonna stick it to them, and you’re gonna he’p me do it. You hearing me on this? You pull your dick out of wherever it is and pick up that phone! My tolerance for your lazy-ass behavior is wearing thin.”
He opened his Sub-Zero freezer and took out a gallon container of French-vanilla ice cream and began digging chunks from it with a butcher knife, clunking each rock-hard piece into a bowl. His hand was wet and slick, his thumb hooked over the top of the knife handle, the coke singing in his blood, his ears thundering with the Herman Stanga national anthem, the latter a musical composition of angry self-righteousness that could blow windows out of buildings. Then he felt his hand slip and a sensation like an icicle slicing through his palm. The butcher knife clattered to the bottom of the sink in a rain of blood drops. He grabbed a dish towel and twisted it around his hand and cradled his arm against his chest. He picked up the phone and punched in 911 with his thumb, then thought about the consequences of his call and hung up. Coke on his wet bar, coke in his bedroom, coke in his bloodstream, paramedics and cops stomping around in his house with no need for a warrant because he had made the 911 call voluntarily. No way, offay. He sat down in a chair and stared at the towel cinched around his hand. The bleeding had stopped. Give it a few minutes and he could drive himself to Iberia General, he told himself.
Time to coolerate his emotions, put things into perspective, and send another snow-white marching band up his nose. His hand was numb, the bloodstained towel a testimony to the dominion he could exert not only over pain but over the issuance of blood from a knife wound. Herman had taken control of the night. He was back in Chez Stanga, his Dobermans protecting him, his presence in the neighborhood a constant source of unhappiness to his neighbors, his power to upset and depress them always at the tips of his fingers.
He removed the cover from a silver cigarette box where he kept a small cake of virgin coke, the high-grade stuff the Colombians in Miami reserved for themselves. Herman’s supplier said it lit the rain forests like summer heat lightning and cleansed the souls of unbaptized pagans. Right. That was why they all looked like overweight tomato pickers and thought the good life was hanging at the dog track and eating nachos and chili with their fingers. He lifted the spoon to one nostril and snarfed up the virgin flake and felt the hit all the way down to the soles of his feet, like an orgasm that had no erogenous boundaries.
But whether he was coked to the eyes or not, Herman’s source of agitation would not go away. The problem was not his lawyer, nor the wetbrain detective who had run him in, or even that bucket of whale sperm Purcel. It was the hermaphrodite Amazon Woman and the things she had said about his mother and about him and the shack where he had grown up in New Iberia’s old red-light district. How did she know Herman’s mother had turned tricks behind Broussard’s bar? How did she know his job had been to carry out the whores’ pails to the rain ditch early Sunday mornings? Did his mother tell the dyke that, or was it common knowledge? Which was worse? Did his mother really say he looked like a squirrel when he was born in a hallway at Charity Hospital in Lafayette? His own mother said that of him?
How had Amazon Woman described him? A raggedy colored boy? That was what he’d been, his knees and feet filmed with dust, lice nits in his hair, stink in his clothes, and skid marks in his underwear when a health official at the school made him pull down his pants to be checked for ringworm.
Herman tried to think of the words he should have said to the dyke, something that would have hurt her and made her feel ashamed and guilty about what she was. Words that would have made her feel like he felt, not only now but secretly every day of his life since he was a little boy.
The cut in his hand began to throb. Through the open sliding doors, he could hear the sounds of children playing tag in the dark and music from the lawn party down the bayou. But something was wrong. His Dobermans were easily agitated by music, sirens, or the noise of airplanes and usually made howling sounds when they heard them. In fact, when children were about, the Dobermans ran against their chains, sometimes almost snapping their necks.
Herman got up from the divan and opened the front door and looked outside. Except for the glistening piles of dog feces, the yard was empty. But the dogs had long chains and could have been around the side of the house. He started to walk outside and check, then hesitated and instead closed and deadbolted the door. He went back through the kitchen and through the wet bar area and looked out at the pool and at the shadows the potted orchid and bottlebrush trees made on the flagstones. The wind gusted across the pool, wrinkling the water, smudging the brilliance of the underwater lamps, sending a peculiar chill through Herman’s body. He realized he was still wearing only his silk shorts, that either the night had turned cooler or his air-conditioning was set too low and the ceiling duct was blowing directly on his head and shoulders.
He thought he saw a shadow move between one of the banana trees and the brick wall that separated him from the neighbors’ property. Were the neighbors’ kids in his yard again? They knew better than that. “Get out of there!” he shouted into the darkness.
Then the moon came out from behind a cloud, and the shadows by the wall disappeared and all he saw were flowers in his beds and the paleness of the moon glow on the banana fronds. He cradled his wounded hand against his stomach and went back to the wet bar. The pain in his hand had come back with a vengeance,
and his heart was tripping as though it were tilted against a sharp object. He took a pitcher of orange juice from the refrigerator and drank directly from it, his breath coming short. His system felt poisoned. Was it the high-octane coke? Did one of the Colombians put a chemical surprise in his stash? Or was the odor rising from his armpits the old familiar stench of fear that his swagger and rebop and cynicism at the expense of others had tried to mask for a lifetime?
He sat down on one of the elevated stools at the wet bar and hit the speed dial on his cordless. Monroe’s message machine kicked on, but this time, before the recording finished, Monroe picked up and started talking. “I was cutting the grass. I was just gonna call you,” he said.
“So you listened to my message, then went back out and mowed the lawn ’cause you wanted to call me?”
“What?”
“Don’t give me your trash, Monroe. I need you to drive me to the hospital.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I got a butcher-knife cut across my hand is what’s wrong. Now get your sorry black ass over here.”
“Who cut you?”
“That’s what we’re gonna talk about. You getting the implication? I been beat up, I been run in, I been threatened, I been racially humiliated, and now I been cut. Got the picture, Negro?”
“My recorder is still running. Hang on.”
“Stop fucking with your machine and listen to me. We’re gonna file a civil rights suit against the sheriff’s department. They’re gonna pay for what they done to me.”
“I hear you, Herman, but who cut you?”
Herman’s level of frustration and anger with Monroe was such that he could barely speak. Then he looked through the sliding doors and thought he saw a silhouette standing just to the side of an orchid tree. “I t’ink somebody is outside. I t’ink it’s probably them kids from next door. Stay wit’ me. If I tell you to call 911, that means get the Eighty-second Airborne out here, you got me, Monroe?”
Herman walked to the open glass doors, the cordless gripped in his left hand, a fist thudding inside his chest. “You in trouble?” he heard Monroe say.
“Hang on,” Herman said.
He stepped outside and felt the wind blow on his face, drying the sheen of sweat on his forehead. The trees were rustling loudly, leaves drifting down on the brightness of the pool. He stared hard at a barrel-potted bottlebrush tree that in the shadows seemed fatter and denser than it should have been.
“I can’t take this anxiety,” Monroe said. “You all right, Herman? Tell me what’s happening, man.”
“Shut up, Monroe,” Herman said, staring at a silhouette that disconnected itself from the bottlebrush tree and now stood framed against the moonlight that shimmered like a white flame on the bayou.
“Herman? You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. There’s somebody by the pool.”
“Who?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you.” Herman could hear a creaking sound in his ears, like water pressure at a great depth. “Monroe, stay wit’ me and call the cops on your cell. Don’t break the connection, you reading me on this?”
“I’m your cousin, man, I’m wit’ you all the way. You got anything in your house you shouldn’t have, get rid of it. Flush the bowl two or three times. Don’t use the drains, either.”
“Make the call and come over here, Monroe.”
“I’m coordinating everything from right here. It’s under control. I got your back, man. This is the command center.”
But Herman had removed the cordless from his ear and was no longer listening. “What are you doing here?” he said to the silhouette. He paused, but there was no reply. “I ain’t big on this silent-treatment stuff. You got somet’ing to say that cain’t wait till business hours, do it. But you’re on my property, and I wasn’t expecting no callers, except maybe a lady friend and her sister that’s coming t’rew the door any minute now.”
Again there was no response.
“How about saying what you got to say so I can go back inside and get dressed, ’cause I ain’t comfortable walking around outdoors in my underwear talking to myself,” Herman said.
“Herman, who you talking to?” Monroe’s voice said.
But Herman was no longer thinking about Monroe or the cordless phone that hung uselessly from his hand. He wanted the children who had been playing tag in the dark to appear at his piked gate; he wanted someone from the lawn party to arrive by boat at the back of his property and invite him over; he wanted clothes on his body to take away the sense of nakedness and vulnerability that turned the backs of his legs to pudding.
He made a chugging sound when he cleared the clot in his throat. “Maybe it’s my accent that ain’t working here, ’cause you don’t seem to understand what the focus is in our sit’ation. See, the focus is getting everyt’ing out on the table so we can look at it and resolve it and so it don’t be a problem to nobody. But we cain’t do that when we get inside this silent-treatment groove and try to scare the shit out of everybody. See, that’s what John Wayne do in the movies, but in the real world, it gives everybody anxiety and the wrong idea about how t’ings are gonna work out.
“’Cause look, this ain’t funny no more. I ain’t saying I necessarily got a weak heart, but I wasn’t planning to get ’jacked in my own yard, I mean by my own pool, where I’m fixing to entertain these ladies that’s coming over. ’Cause you’re here to ’jack me, ain’t you? Not nothing else? You can have my stash and my cash, it ain’t a lot, but what more can I say, I ain’t in this world to argue or give nobody trouble. I was just telling my attorney, he’s on the line now if he ain’t already on his way over, I’m a bidnessman and put deals together and ain’t never been greedy about it and piece off the action and he’p as many people as I can if they want in on it, but I’m axing you not to point that t’ing at my face no more.
“Hey, I appreciate it. That’s better. We just got to be a li’l more serene on some of this shit. I ain’t no shrinking violet, but I t’ought my heart was gonna give out. No, wait a minute. No, no, hold on. There’s another way to do this. What do you want? Just tell me and you got it. I’m here to please. We can always— Hey, fuck me, I’ll get out of town, you want this place, it’s yours. Don’t do it. Please.”
Later, the pathologist would say the first entry wound, under the left armpit, probably occurred when Herman spun away from the shooter, raising his arm defensively across his face. Even though the exit hole was the size of a quarter, the pathologist would report that the wound in itself was not a mortal one. In fact, the blood pattern on the flagstones indicated that Herman had tried to walk toward the far side of his pool, where his white ironwork chairs were positioned around a table centered with a beach umbrella. His movements were probably slow and precise, like those of a man trying to walk on a wire strung over an abyss, his gold-ebony skin glowing in the electric aura that rose from the pool. But his profile probably had the vulnerability of a cartoon cutout pasted on a target. The second round struck him in the mouth and took away most of his jaw. When he fell into the pool, he floated high above the columns of light that lit the deep end, his arms straight out, as though he were searching for something he had lost and could not find.
I CAME IN late that night. A bank of thunderheads had moved in from the Gulf, and the beginnings of a downpour had started to sprinkle on the trees in the yard and the tin roof of our house. To me, the rain in Louisiana has always worked as a kind of baptism. It seems to have the same kind of restorative properties, washing the dust from trees and sidewalks, rinsing the pollutants out of our streams, giving new life to the grass and flowers, thickening the stalks of sugarcane in the fields. When it rains at night in Louisiana, I remember the world in which I grew up, one that came to us each morning with a resilience and clarity that was like a divine hand offering a person a freshly picked orange.
I hung my raincoat in the hall closet. Molly was reading a book under a lamp in the living room. “Catch any fish?” she asked.
“One or two that I put back.”
“Where’s Clete?”
“I went by myself.”
“Helen was trying to find you. You didn’t have your cell phone on?”
“I left it in the truck. What did she want?”
“Someone murdered Herman Stanga.”
I stared at her blankly. I could hear rain clicking against the window glass. “Stanga is dead?”
“At nine-thirty he was.” Her eyes didn’t leave my face. I could feel her trying to read my thoughts. “Helen asked where Clete was. I told her I thought he had gone fishing with you.”
“I rousted Stanga this afternoon. Helen thought we could turn some dials on him.”
“Why is she asking about Clete?”
“I’ll talk to her in the morning.”
“Does she think Clete—”
“No, that’s ridiculous.”
“How did you know what I was going to say?”
I didn’t have an answer. “Did Helen want me to call her?”
“She didn’t say. Dave, you never go off by yourself like that. Why tonight? Were you thinking about—”
“Drinking? Why would you think that?” I replied.
Her book was open on her lap, her reading glasses down on her nose. She took off her glasses and folded them and placed them in a case. Her face looked youthful and powdered with freckles under the lamp, her dark red hair touched with tiny lights. “I fixed some stuffed eggs and ham-and-onion sandwiches and a pitcher of sun tea,” she said. “I haven’t eaten yet. Did you eat at the landing?”