A Stained White Radiance

  “It just wasn’t a day for business-as-usual.”

  “What’s Clete’s involvement with this?”

  “It was Gouza’s goons who put him in the hospital. That makes him involved, Boots.”

  She took the dishes off the table and put them in the sink. She gazed out the window into the backyard.

  “When you go to see Clete, it always means a shortcut,” she said.

  “You don’t know everything that’s happened.”

  “I’m not the problem, Dave. What bothers me is I think you’re hiding something from the people you work with.”

  “Joey Gouza ordered this man Gates to throw Gouza’s brother-in-law into an airplane propeller. Then he sent this same man to our house with a—”

  “What?”

  I caught my breath and pinched my temples with my fingers.

  “Gouza has a furnace instead of a brain,” I said. “He’s left his mark on our home, and I can’t touch him. Do you think I’m going to abide that?”

  She rinsed the plates in the sink and continued to look out the window.

  “Two of the men who murdered the deputy are dead,” she said. “One day it’ll be Joey Gouza’s turn. Can’t you just let events take their course? Or let other people handle things for a while?”

  “There’s another factor, Boots. Gouza’s a paranoid. Maybe today he feels wonderful, he’s hit the daily double, the dragons are dead. But next week, or maybe next month, he’ll start thinking again about the individuals who’ve hurt or humiliated him most, and he’ll be back in our lives. I’m not going to let that happen.”

  She dried her hands on a dish towel, then used it to mop off the counter. She brushed back her hair with her fingers, straightened the periwinkles in a vase. Her eyes never looked at mine. She turned on the radio on the windowsill, then turned it off and took a pair of scissors out of a drawer.

  “I’m going to cut some fresh flowers. Are you going to the office now?” she said.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “I’ll put your lunch in the icebox. I have to run some errands in town today.”

  “Boots, listen a minute—”

  She popped open a paper bag to place the cut flowers in and went out the back door.

  THAT AFTERNOON THE sheriff came into my office with my report on Gates’s shooting in his hands. He sat down in the chair across from me and put on his rimless glasses.

  “I’m still trying to puzzle a couple of things out here, Dave. It’s like there’s a blank space or two in your report,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m not criticizing it. You were pretty used up when you wrote this stuff down. But let me see if I understand everything here. You went down a little early to open up your bait shop?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s when you saw Gates?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You called the dispatcher, then you went after him in your truck?”

  “Yeah, that’s about it.”

  “So it was already first light when you saw him?”

  “It was getting there.”

  “It had to be, because the sun was up when you nailed him.”

  “I’m not following you, sheriff.”

  “Maybe it’s just me. But why would a pro like Gates come around your house at sunrise when he could have laid for you at night?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Unless he didn’t mean to hurt you, unless he was there for some other reason—”

  “Like Clete once told me, trying to figure out the greaseballs is like putting your hand in an unflushed toilet.”

  He looked down at the report again, then folded his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.

  “There’s something that really disturbs me about this, Dave. I know there’s an answer, but I can’t seem to put my hand on it.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to think about things too much. Just let events unfold.” I placed my hands behind my neck, yawned, and tried to look casually out the window.

  “No, what I mean is, Gouza just got off the hook in Iberia Parish. Is this guy crazy enough to send a hit man after another one of our people, right to his house, right at the break of day? It doesn’t fit, does it?”

  “I wish Gates were here to tell us. I don’t know what else to say, sheriff.”

  “Well, I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt out there. I’ll see you later. Maybe you ought to go home and get some sleep. You look like you haven’t slept since World War II.”

  He went out the door. I tried to complete the paperwork that was on my desk, but my eyes burned and I couldn’t concentrate or keep my thoughts straight in my head. Finally I shoved it all into a bottom drawer and fiddled absently with a chain of paper clips on top of my desk blotter.

  Had I lied to the sheriff? I asked myself. Not exactly. But then I hadn’t quite told the truth, either.

  Was my report dishonest? No, it was worse. It concealed the commission of a homicide.

  But some situations involve a trade-off. In this case the fulfillment of a professional obligation would require that my home and family become the center of a morbid story that would live in the community for decades, and Joey Gouza would succeed in inflicting a level of psychological damage on my daughter, in particular, that might never be undone. Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it’s not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.

  I LEFT THE OFFICE and drove home on the oak-lined dirt road that followed the bayou past my dock. The first raindrops were starting to fall out of a sunny sky, as they did almost every summer afternoon at three o’clock, and I could feel the air becoming close, suddenly cooler, as the barometric pressure dropped, and the bream and goggle-eye perch started feeding on the bayou’s surface by the edge of the lily pads. I passed the collapsed wire gate that Jack Gates had shredded when he had pointed the Trans Am into the sugarcane field, and I avoided looking at the trashed substation and the bullet-pocked car that a wrecker had winched loose from the transformers and left upside down amid a litter of broken cane stalks. But I wasn’t going to brood upon the death of Jack Gates; I had already turned over yesterday to my Higher Power, and I was determined not to relive it. My problems with Bootsie as well as the sheriff were sufficient to keep my mind occupied today. And if that was not enough, a man ahead of me in a pickup truck was stapling Bobby Earl posters on the tree trunks along the road.

  By the time I turned in to my drive, he had just smoothed one to the contours of a two-hundred-year-old live oak at the edge of my yard and hammered staples into each of the corners. I closed the truck door and walked over to him, my hands in my back pockets. I even tried to smile. He looked like an innocuous individual hired out of a labor office.

  “Say, podna, that tree’s on my property and I don’t want any nail holes in it.”

  A foot above my head was Bobby Earl’s chiseled face, with stage lights shining up into it so that his features had the messianic cast of a Billy Graham. Below was his most oft-quoted statement, LET ME BE YOUR VOICE, LET ME SPEAK YOUR THOUGHTS. Then farther down was some information about a rally and barbecue with Dixieland bands on Friday night in Baton Rouge.

  “Sorry,” the man with the hammer and staples said. “The guy just said to stick ’em up on all the trees.”

  “Which guy?”

  “The guy who give me the signs.”

  “Well, just don’t nail any more up till you get around that next corner, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  I tried to free the staples from the bark, then I simply tore the poster down the middle, handed it to him, and walked up to the house.

  Bootsie was in town and Alafair had not gotten home from her picnic yet. I undressed in the bedroom, turned on the window fan, lay down on top of the sheets with the pillow over my head, and tried to sleep. I could hear the rain hitt
ing the trees in large, flat drops now and tinking on the blades of the fan.

  But I couldn’t sleep, and I kept trying to sort through my thoughts in the same way that you pick at a scab you know you should leave alone.

  No matter how educated a southerner is, or how liberal or intellectual he might consider himself to be, I don’t believe you will meet many of my generation who do not still revere, although perhaps in a secret way, all the old southern myths that we’ve supposedly put aside as members of the New South. You cannot grow up in a place where the tractor’s plow can crack minié balls and grapeshot loose from the soil, even rake across a cannon wheel, and remain impervious to the past.

  As a child I had access to few books, but I knew all the stories about General Banks’s invasion of southwestern Louisiana, the burning of the parish courthouse, the stabling of horses in the Episcopalian church on Main Street, the union gunboats that came up the Teche and shelled the plantation on Nelson’s Canal west of town, and Louisiana’s boys in butternut brown who lived on dried peas and gave up ground a bloody foot at a time.

  Who cared if their cause was just or not? The stories made your blood sing; the grooved minié ball that you picked out of the freshly plowed row and rolled in your palm made you part of a moment that happened over a century ago. You looked away at the stand of trees by the bayou, and rather than the tractor engine idling beside you, you heard the ragged popping of small-arms fire and saw black plumes of smoke exploding out of the brush into the sunlight. And you realized that they died right here in this field, that they bled into this same dirt where the cane would grow eight feet tall by autumn and turn as scarlet as dried blood.

  But why did large numbers of people buy into a man like Bobby Earl? Were they that easily deceived? Would any group of reasonable people entrust the conduct of their government to an ex-American Nazi or Ku Klux Klansman? I had no answer.

  I wondered if any of them ever asked themselves what Robert Lee or Thomas Jackson might have to say about a man like this.

  I finally fell asleep. Then I heard the brakes on the church bus and a moment later the screen door slam. Other sounds followed: a lunch kit clattering on the drainboard, the icebox door opening, the back screen slamming. Tripod racing up and down on the chain that was attached to the clothesline, the screen slamming again, tennis shoes in the hallway outside the bedroom door, then a pause full of portent.

  Alafair hit the bed running and bounced up and down on her knees, lost her balance, and fell across my back. I raised my head up from under the pillow.

  “Hi, big guy. What you doing home early?” she said.

  “Taking a nap.”

  “Oh.” She started bouncing again, then looked at my face. “Maybe you should go back to sleep?”

  “Why would I want to do that, Alf?”

  “Are you mad about something?”

  I put on my trousers, then sat back down on the side of the bed and tried to rub the sleep out of my face.

  “Hop up on my back,” I said. “Let’s check out what Batist is doing. It’s not a day for lying around in bed.”

  She put her arms around my neck and clamped her legs around my ribcage, and we walked down through the wet leaves to the dock. It was raining lightly out of a gray sky now, the lily pads were bright green and beaded with water, and the bayou was covered with rain rings.

  Batist had slid the canvas awning out on wires over the dock, and several fishermen sat under it, drinking beer and eating boudin out of wax paper. He had also allowed someone to put Bobby Earl posters in the bait-shop windows and on the service counter.

  I let Alafair climb down off my back. Batist was taking some boudin out of the microwave. He wore canvas boat shoes without socks, a pair of ragged, white cutoffs whose top button had popped off, and a wash-faded denim shirt tied under his chest, which reminded me of black boilerplate. His shirt pocket was bursting with cigars.

  “Batist, who put these posters here?”

  “Some white man who come ax if he could leave them.”

  “Next time send the man up to the house.”

  “You was sleepin’, you.” He put a dry cigar in his mouth and began slicing the boudin on a paper plate and inserting matchsticks into each slice. “Why you worried about them signs, Dave? People leave them here all the time.”

  “Because they’re for Bobby Earl, and Bobby Earl’s a shit!” Alafair said.

  I looked down at her, stunned.

  “Put the cork in that language, Alf,” I said.

  “I heard Bootsie say it,” she answered. “He’s a shit. He hates black people.”

  Two men at the beer cooler were grinning at me.

  “Dave, that’s right. Them is for that fella Earl?” Batist said.

  “Yeah, but you didn’t know, Batist,” I said. “Here, I’ll throw them in the trash.”

  “I ain’t never seen him on TV, me, so I didn’t pay his picture no mind.”

  “It’s all right, podna.”

  The men at the cooler were still grinning in our direction.

  “Do you gentlemen need something?” I said.

  “Not a thing,” one of them said.

  “Good,” I said.

  I took Alafair by the hand, and we walked back up the slope to the gallery. The wind was cool blowing out of the marsh and smelled of wet leaves and moldy pecan husks and the purple four-o’clocks that were just opening in the shadows. Alafair’s hand felt hot and small in mine.

  “You mad, Dave?” she said.

  “No, I’m real proud of you, little guy. You’re what real soldiers are made of.”

  Her eyes squinted almost completely shut with her smile.

  THAT EVENING ALAFAIR went to a baseball game with the neighbors’ children, and Bootsie and I were left alone with each other. It had stopped raining, and the windows were open and you could hear the crickets and the cicadas from horizon to horizon. Our conversation, when it occurred, was spiritless and morose. At nine o’clock the phone rang in the kitchen.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hey, Streak, I thought I’d pass on some information in case you’re wondering about life down here in the Big Sleazy.”

  “Just a minute, Clete,” I said.

  I took the telephone on its extension wire out on the back steps and sat down.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “I found the perfect moment to drop the dime on our man. His dork just went into the electric socket big time.”

  In the background I could hear people talking loudly and dishes clattering.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m scarfing down a few on the half shell and chugging down a few brews at the Acme, noble mon. There’s also a French lady at my table who’s fascinated with my accent. I told her it’s Irish-coonass. She also says I’m a sensitive and entertaining conversationalist. She’s talking about painting me in the nude. . . . Hey, trust me, Dave, everything’s copacetic. I’ll never go down in a manual on police procedure, but when it’s time to mash on their scrots, you do it with hobnailed boots. Hang loose, partner, and come on down this weekend and let’s catch some green trout.”

  I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle and went back inside the house. Bootsie had just put away some dishes in the cabinet and was watching me.

  “That was Clete, wasn’t it?” she said. She wore a sundress printed with purple and green flowers. She had just brushed her hair, and it was full of small lights.

  “Yep.”

  “What have you two done, Dave?”

  I sat down at the breakfast table and looked at the tops of my hands. I thought about telling her all of it.

  “Back at the First District, we used to call it ‘salting the mine shaft.’ ”

  “What?”

  “The wiseguys have expensive lawyers. Sometimes cops fix it so two and two add up to five.”

  “What did you do?”

  I cleared my throat and thought about continuing, then I made my mind go empty.

&n
bsp; “Let’s talk about something else, Boots.”

  I gazed out the back screen at the fireflies lighting in the trees. I could feel her eyes looking at me. Then she walked out of the kitchen and began sorting canned goods in the hallway pantry. I thought about driving into town and reading the newspaper at the bar in Tee Neg’s poolroom. In my mind I already saw myself under the wood-bladed fan and smelled the talcum, the green sawdust on the floor, the flat beer, and the residue of ice and whiskey poured into the tin sinks.

  But Tee Neg’s was not a good place for me to be when I was tired and the bottles behind the bar became as seductive and inviting as a woman’s smile.

  I heard Bootsie stop stacking the canned goods and shut the pantry door. She walked up behind my chair and paused for a moment, then rested her hand lightly on the back of the chair.

  “It was for me and Alafair, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Whatever you did last night in New Orleans, it wasn’t for yourself. It was for me and Alafair, wasn’t it?”

  I put my arm behind her thigh and drew her hand down on my chest. She pressed her cheek against my hair and hugged me against her breasts.

  “Dave, we have such a wonderful family,” she said. “Let’s try to trust each other a little more.”

  I started to say something, but whatever it was, it was better forgotten. I could hear her heart beating against my ear. The sun-freckled tops of her breasts were hot, and her skin smelled like milk and flowers.

  BY NINE O’CLOCK the next morning I had heard nothing of particular interest out of New Orleans. But then again the local news often featured stories of such national importance as the following: the drawbridge over the Teche had opened with three cars on it; the school-board meeting had come to an end last night with a fistfight between two high school principals; several professional wrestlers had to be escorted by city police from the National Guard armory after they were spat upon and showered with garbage by the fans; the drawbridge tender had thrown a press photographer’s camera into the Teche because he didn’t believe anyone had the right to photograph his bridge.

  So I kept diddling with my paperwork, looking at my watch, and wondering if perhaps Clete hadn’t simply spent too much time at the draft beer spout in the Acme before he had decided to telephone me.