Crusader's Cross

by James Lee Burke

  He lifted a beer out of a wire holder on the dashboard and drank it while he steered with one hand, his sunglasses patterned with the reflected images of trees, sky, and asphalt, all of it rushing at him, like a film strip out of control, as he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  THAT EVENING Jimmie went off with Ida in the car, supposedly to confront Lou Kale about the one hundred twelve dollars Kale had obviously stolen. I walked down on the amusement pier and ate a burrito for supper. The thunderheads in the south rippled with electricity and I could see the lights of freighters on the horizon and I wondered if Jimmie was actually serious about going to Mexico with Ida Durbin. In three weeks the fall term would be starting at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, in Lafayette, where we were both enrolled. We were three weeks away from normalcy and football games on crisp Saturday afternoons, the booming sounds of marching bands, the innocence of the freshman sock hop in the school gym, the smell of leaves burning and barbecues in the city park across the street from the campus. In my mind’s eye I saw my self-deluded half brother sinking in quicksand, while Ida Durbin sat astride his shoulders.

  My own mother had long ago disappeared into a world of low-rent bars and lower-rent men. Big Aldous, our father, had died in an oil well blowout when I was eighteen. Jimmie’d had little or no parental authority in his life, and I had obviously proved a poor substitute for one. I threw my burrito into a trash can, went to a beer joint down the beach, and drank until 2:00 a.m. while hailstones the size of mothballs pelted the surf.

  I WOKE BEFORE DAWN, trembling all over, the distorted voices and faces of the people from the bar more real than the room around me. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten back to the motel. Water was leaking through the ceiling, and a garbage can was tumbling end over end past the empty carport. I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands shaking, my throat so dry I couldn’t swallow. The window curtains were open, and a network of lightning bloomed over the Gulf, all the way to the top of the sky. Inside the momentary white brilliance that lit the clouds and waves I thought I saw a green-black lake where the naked bodies of the damned were submerged to their chests, their mouths crying out to any who would hear.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just booked my first passage on the SS Delirium Tremens.

  I buried my head under a pillow and fell into a sweaty dream. Thunder shook the walls and sheets of rain whipped against the windows. I thought I heard the door open and wind and a sudden infusion of dampness blow into the room. Maybe Jimmie had returned, safe and sound, and all my fears about him had been unjustified, I told myself in my sleep. But when I looked up, the room was quiet, his bed made, the carport empty. I felt myself descending into a vortex of nausea and fear, accompanied by a dilation of blood vessels in the brain that was like a strand of piano wire being slowly tightened around my head with a stick.

  When I woke a second time, I could hear no sound except the rain hitting on the roof. The thunder had stopped, the power in the motel was out, and the room was absolutely black. Then a tree of lightning crackled over the Gulf and I saw a man seated in a chair, no more than two feet from me. He wore sideburns and a striped western shirt, with pearl-colored snap buttons. His cheeks were sunken, pooled with shadow, his mouth small, filled with tiny teeth. A nickel-plated automatic with white grips rested on his thigh.

  He leaned forward, his eyes examining me, his breath moving across my face. “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Dave,” I said. “Dave Robicheaux.”

  “If you ain’t Jimmie, you’re his twin. Which is it?” he said.

  “Tell me who you are,” I said.

  He touched the pistol barrel to the center of my forehead. “I ask the questions, hoss. Lay back down,” he said.

  I saw a swelling above his left eye, a cut in his lip, a clot of blood in one nostril. He pulled back the receiver on the pistol and snicked a round into the chamber. “Put your hands on top of the covers,” he said.

  With one hand he felt my knuckles and the tops of my fingers, his eyes fastened on my face. Then he stood up, dropped the magazine from the butt of the automatic, and ejected the round in the chamber. He reached over, picked up the cartridge from the rug, and snugged it in his watch pocket. “You got a lot of luck, kid. When you get a break, real slack, like you’re getting now, don’t waste it. You heard it from the butter and egg man,” he said.

  Then he was gone. When I looked out the window I saw no sign of him, no automobile, not even footprints in the muddy area around the room’s entrance. I lay in bed, a bilious fluid rising from my stomach, my skin crawling with a sense of violation and the stale odor of copulation from the bedcovers.

  Unbelievably, I closed my eyes and fell asleep again, almost like entering an alcoholic blackout. When I woke it was midmorning, the sun shining, and I could hear children playing outside. Jimmie was packing an open suitcase on top of his bed. “Thought you were going to sleep all day,” he said.

  “A guy was looking for you. I think it was that pimp from Post Office Street,” I said.

  “Lou Kale? I don’t think so,” Jimmie replied.

  “He had a gun,” I said. “What do you mean you don’t think so?”

  “He didn’t want to pay back the hundred and twelve bucks he stole. He pulled a shiv on me. So I cleaned his clock. I took the money off him, too,” he said. He dropped his folded underwear in the suitcase and flattened it down, his eyes concentrated on his work. I couldn’t believe what he had just said.

  “Where’s Ida?” I asked.

  “Waiting for me at the bus depot. Get dressed, you got to drive me down there. We’ll be eating Mexican food in ole Monterrey tonight. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” he said. He touched at the tops of his swollen hands, then grinned at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Quit worrying. Guys like Kale are all bluff.”

  BUT IDA WAS NOT at the bus depot, nor, when the cops checked, was she at the brothel on Post Office Street. In fact, she had disappeared as though she had been vacuumed off the face of the earth. We didn’t know the name of the town she came from, nor could we even be sure her real name was Ida Durbin. The cops treated our visits to the police station as a nuisance and said Lou Kale had no criminal record, that he denied having a confrontation with Jimmie and denied ever knowing a woman by the name of Ida Durbin. The prostitutes in the house where she had worked said a cleaning girl named Connie had been around there for a while, but that she had gone back home to either Arkansas or Northeast Texas.

  The years passed and I tried not to think about Ida Durbin and her fate. As I began my long odyssey through low-bottom bars and drunk tanks and skin joints of every stripe—in the Deep South, the Philippines, and Vietnam—I would sometimes hear a voice on the jukebox that reminded me of Kitty Wells. I wanted to believe the voice was Ida’s, that somehow the four-dollar discs she and Jimmie had sent to Sun Records had worked a special magic in her life and opened a career for her in Nashville and that she was out there now, under another name, singing in roadhouses where a sunburst guitar and a sequined western costume were proof enough of one’s celebrity.

  But I knew better, and when my booze-induced fantasy faded, I saw Ida in the backseat of a car, a man on either side of her, speeding down a dirt road at night, toward a destination where no human being ever wishes to go.

  CHAPTER

  3

  I WOULD ALMOST FORGET about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that’s what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree—it eventually finds the teeth of a whirling saw blade.

  Troy Bordelon was a bully when I knew him at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette. SLI, as it was called, had been the first integrated college in the South. As far as I knew, there were no incidents when the first black students enrolled, and by and large the students, both white and black, treated one another respectfully. Except for Troy Bordelon. His name was French, but he came from a sawmill town north of Alexandria, an area where the deeds of
the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia were burned into Reconstruction history with a hot iron.

  Troy kept the tradition alive and well.

  A black kid from Abbeville by the name of Simon Labiche was the only person of color in my ROTC unit. Troy did everything in his power to make Simon’s life miserable. During drill he stepped on Simon’s heels, throwing him off-step, constantly murmuring racial and sexual insults in his ear. When Simon made the drill team and was scheduled to perform at the halftime ceremonies during the homecoming game, Troy brought him a goodwill offering of a cold drink from the refreshment stand. It was loaded with a high-powered laxative that can cause the red scours in cattle.

  Simon, dressed in chrome-plated helmet, white scarf, and white leggings, fouled himself in front of twenty thousand people, dropped his M-1 in the mud, and fled the field in shame.

  But Troy did not confine his abuse to minorities. He bullied anyone who exposed a chink in his armor, and most often these were people who reminded Troy of himself. Nor did the passage of time bring him the wisdom that would allow him to understand the origins of his sadistic inclinations. He returned to his hometown, where he was related to the sheriff and the president of the parish police jury, and went to work for a finance company, one that was owned by the same family who owned the cotton gin and the lumberyards in town.

  His power over poor whites and people of color was enormous. He was loud, imperious, and unflagging in his ridicule of the vulnerable and the weak. For Troy, an act of mercy was an act of identification with his victim.

  Oddly, when traveling through New Iberia, he would always call me up for coffee or to share a meal. I suspected I belonged in Troy’s mind to a self-manufactured memory about his college days in Lafayette, a time he evidently looked back upon with nostalgia. Or maybe because I was a police officer, he enjoyed being in the company of someone who represented power and authority.

  “We had some real fun back then, didn’t we?” he’d say, and slap me hard on the arm. “Dances and all that. Playing jokes on each other in the dorm. Hey, you remember when—”

  I’d try to smile and avoid looking at my watch.

  Then one fine day in early June, after I had hung it up with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, I got a call from Troy’s estranged wife, a schoolteacher named Zerelda. Years ago, at age thirty-five, she had looked sixty. I couldn’t even imagine what she probably looked like today. “He wants to see you. Can you drive up this afternoon?” she said.

  “He doesn’t have a telephone?” I said.

  “He’s at Baptist Hospital. As far as I’m concerned, you can rip out his life-support system. But the poor fuck is scared shitless of dying. So what’s a Christian girl to do?” she said.

  Evidently, Troy’s denouement began with the new waitress in the Blue Fish Café—an overweight, big-boned country girl whose mouth was painted bright red, her hair shampooed and blow-dried for her first day on the job. She was eager to please and thought of her new situation as an opportunity to be a cashier or a hostess, a big jump up from her old job at the Wal-Mart. When Troy came in for his breakfast he lit up a cigarette in the non-smoking section, sent his coffee back because it was not hot enough, and told the waitress there were dishwater spots on his silverware. When his food was served, he complained his steak was pink in the middle, his eggs runny, and he had been given whole wheat rather than rye toast.

  When the girl spilled his water, he asked if she was an outpatient at the epileptic rehabilitation center. By the end of his meal she was a nervous wreck. While she was bent over his table, clearing his dishes, he told others a loud joke about a big-breasted woman and a farm equipment salesman who sold milking machines. The girl’s face burned like a red lightbulb.

  Then one of those moments occurred that no one in a small town ever expects. The owner of the restaurant was a hard-packed, rotund Lebanese man who attended the Assembly of God Church and whose taciturn manner seldom drew attention to him. Without saying a word, he picked up a Silex of scalding hot coffee and poured it over the crown of Troy Bordelon’s head.

  After Troy stopped screaming, he attacked the owner with his fists and the fight cascaded through the dining area into the kitchen. It should have ended there, with two over-the-hill men walking away in shame and embarrassment at their behavior. Instead, when they had stopped fighting and a peacemaker asked both men to apologize, Troy gathered the blood and spittle in his mouth and spat it in the owner’s face. The owner responded by plunging a razor-edged butcher knife four times through Troy’s chest.

  It was dusk when I arrived at the hospital in the little town where Troy had spent most of his life. It was a beautiful evening, the summer light high in the sky, the moon rising over red cotton land and a long bank of green trees on the western horizon. The air smelled of chemical fertilizer, distant rain, night-blooming flowers, and the fecund odor of the ponds on a catfish farm. I didn’t want to go into the hospital. I was never good at deathbed visits, nor at funerals, and now, with age, I resented more and more the selfish claims the dead and dying laid on the quick.

  Troy was spread out on his bed in the intensive-care unit like a pregnant whale that had been dropped from a high altitude, his blond hair still cut in a 1950s flattop, now stiff with burn ointment. What his wife had referred to as his life-support system was a tangle of translucent tubes, oxygen bottles, IV sacs, a catheter, and electronic monitors that, upon first glance, made me think that perhaps technology might give Troy another season to run.

  Then he took a breath and a sucking noise came from inside his chest that I never wanted to hear again.

  He had vomited into his oxygen mask, and a nurse was wiping off his face and throat. He wrapped a meaty hand around mine, squeezing with a power and strength I didn’t think him capable of.

  “Sir, you’ll need to lean down to hear your friend,” the nurse said.

  I put my ear close to Troy’s mouth. His breath rose against my skin like a puff of gas from a sewer grate. “’Member that colored . . . that black kid, the one we played the joke on with the laxative?” he whispered.

  “I do,” I said, although the word “we” had not been part of what happened.

  “I feel bad about that. But that’s the way it was back then, huh? You reckon he knows I’m sorry?”

  “Sure he does,” I replied.

  I heard him swallowing, the saliva clicking in his windpipe.

  “Years ago, you knew a girl who was a whore,” he said. “They snatched her up. My uncle was a cop in Galveston. He was one of the guys who snatched her. I saw where they took her. I saw the room she was in.”

  I looked down at him. His eyes were wide-set, round, his youthful haircut and porcine face like a grotesque caricature of the decade he never allowed himself to grow out of. “What was the name of the girl?” I said.

  He wet his lips, his hand knotting my shirt. “I don’t know. She burned some people for a lot of money. You and your brother took her out of a cathouse. So they snatched her up.”

  I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. “Your uncle and who?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Cops and a pimp. She had a mandolin. They busted it up.”

  “Did they kill her?”

  “I don’t know. I saw blood on a chair. I was just a kid. Just like you and Jimmie. What’s a kid s’pposed to do? I took off. My uncle’s dead now. Nobody probably even remembers that girl now ’cept me.”

  He was the saddest-looking human being I think I had ever seen. His eyes were liquid, receded in his face. His body was encased in beer fat that seemed to be squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He let go of my shirt and waited for me to speak, as though my words could exorcise the succubus that had probably fed at his heart all his life.

  “That’s right, we were all just kids back then, Troy,” I said, and winked at him.

  He tried to smile, his skin puckering around his mouth. Without his consent, the nurse fitted the oxygen mask back on his fa
ce. Through the window I saw a TV news van in the parking lot, with the call letters and logo of an aggressive Shreveport television station painted on the side. But if the news crew was there to cover some element in the passing of Troy Bordelon, it was of little import to Troy. He looked out the window at the sun’s last red ember on the horizon. A flock of crows rose from the limbs of cypress trees in a lake, lifting into the sky like ashes off a dead fire. The look in his eyes made me think of a drowning man whose voice cannot reach a would-be rescuer.

  OUTSIDE, I WALKED toward my truck, my head filled with nightmarish images about what may have been Ida Durbin’s last moments. How had Troy put it? He had seen “blood on a chair.”

  “Hold on there, Robo,” a voice called out behind me.

  Robo?

  There were two of them, angular in build, squared away, military in bearing, their uniforms starched and creased, wearing shades, even though it was almost dark, their gold badges and name tags buffed, their shoes spit-shined into mirrors. I had seen them at various times at law enforcement gatherings in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I didn’t remember their names, but I remembered their manner. It was of a kind every career lawman or military officer recognizes. These were men you never place in situations where they have unsupervised authority over others.

  I nodded hello but didn’t speak.

  “On the job?” one of them said. His name tag read Shockly, J. W. He tilted his head slightly with his question.

  “Not me. I hung it up,” I replied.

  “I saw you go into Troy Bordelon’s room. You guys were buds?” he said.

  “I went to school with him,” I said.

  The second deputy was grinning from behind his shades, as though the three of us were in a private club and the inappropriateness of his expression was acceptable. The name engraved on his tag was Pitts, B. J. “Poor bastard was a real pistol, wasn’t he? Half the blacks in the parish are probably drunk right now,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.