A Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  “Read it like you want. I’m going to the head of the train, then I’ll be back and we’ll load you in my truck.”

  He twisted his head around at a sound inside the railroad car.

  “There’s fucking lions or tigers in there, man,” he said.

  “It’s part of a circus. They’re in cages. They can’t hurt you.”

  “What if they back up the fucking train while you’re taking a walk?”

  “You dealt the play, Eddy. Live with it. Keep that belt tight and don’t move your leg around.”

  “Hey, man, come here. Cuff me to that light over there.”

  “It’s too far to move you.”

  “What the fuck’s with you? You enjoy people’s pain or something?”

  “I’ll be back, Eddy.”

  “All right, man, I’ll trade. Jewel smoked the cop in the basement. But I didn’t have any part in it. We were just there to creep the joint. You saw me, I didn’t have a piece.”

  “That’s not much of a trade.”

  He waited a moment, then he said, “There’s a whack out. On Sonnier and the broad, both.”

  “Which broad?”

  “His sister.” He wet his lips. “I can’t swear it, but I think the whack’s out on you, too. You’re a hair in the wrong guy’s nose.”

  “Which guy?”

  “That’s all you get, motherfucker. I cut a deal, it’s in custody, with a lawyer and the prosecutor there.”

  “I think you’re a gasbag, Eddy, but I don’t want to see you die of fright.” I uncuffed one wrist, then locked both of his arms behind him. “Lie quietly. I’m going to ask a couple of those gandy walkers to help me put you in the truck.”

  “Hey, man, those animals smell my blood. Hey, man, come back here!”

  He lay on his side in the gravel and weeds, his face sallow and slick with sweat in the humid air. His manacled arms were ropy with muscle, as though he were being hung from a great height, as though his tattoos were about to pop from his skin. A breeze blew across the levee, and I could smell the moist odor of animal dung and almost taste Eddy Raintree’s fear of his own kind.

  I walked three hundred yards to the head of the train, showed my badge to the engineer, and told him to radio to Baton Rouge for an ambulance. Then I asked two black gandy walkers to help me with Eddy Raintree. They wore dirt-streaked undershirts, and their black skin was beaded with sweat in the red light of the track flares. They looked at their crew foreman, who was white.

  “Go ahead, boys,” he said.

  They walked behind me, back toward where Eddy Raintree lay on his side in the weeds and gravel. I heard the deep-throated sound of a tiger or lion in the wind. I turned to say something light to the black men, when one of them pointed into the distance.

  “You got somebody coming yonder on a motorcycle,” he said.

  I saw the headlight and the starlit silhouette of the bike and a small rider bounce down the side of the levee and come hard along the line of train cars. I could already see Eddy Raintree trying to rise to one knee, as he realized that he might still have another frolic in the funhouse.

  It was very quick after that.

  I pulled the .45 from my belt and broke into a run. The motorcycle passed Eddy Raintree, skidded in the gravel, and circled back in the direction it had come from, the headlight beam bouncing off the sides of the train. At first I thought the small rider was trying to swing Eddy up behind him, the way a rodeo pickup man scoops up a thrown cowboy. Then I saw a rigid object about two feet long in his hand, saw him extend it out beside him, and in my naïveté I thought it might be bolt cutters, that Raintree would lift up his manacled wrists, and the small rider would snap him free and I would be left breathless and exhausted while they disappeared over the levee into the darkness.

  But I was close enough now to see that it was a shotgun, with the barrel sawed off right in front of the pump. Eddy Raintree had made it to one knee and was frozen in the headlight’s radiance, like an armless man trying to genuflect in church, when the shotgun roared upward three inches from his chin.

  Then the small rider opened up his bike, one boot skipping along the rocks for balance, and wove the bike up the levee in a shower of dirt and divots of grass and buttercups. My chest was heaving, my arm shaking, when I let off two rounds at his toylike silhouette just before he hit it full-bore, his head bent low, and disappeared in a long roll of diminishing thunder between the levee and the willow islands.

  Eddy Raintree’s buttocks were collapsed on his heels. His head was turned away from me, as though he were trying to hide his facial expression or a secret that he wished to take with him to another place. The animals in the circus car crashed wildly about in their wire cages. I touched Eddy Raintree lightly on the shoulder, and his head rotated downward with gravity on the severed tendons in his neck.

  One of the gandy walkers vomited.

  “Oh Lord God, look what they done to that po’ man,” the other said. “His face hanging off the wrong side of his head.”

  CHAPTER 9

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT before I finished with the paramedics, local sheriff’s deputies, an angry detective who accused me of operating in his jurisdiction without first contacting his office, and the parish medical examiner, who, like many of his kind, had aspirations to be a comedian.

  “You could can that guy’s B.O. as a chemical weapon and bring the Iranians to their knees,” he said. “I’d consider rabies shots.”

  When I got into my truck I knew I should drive straight back to New Iberia. That would have been the reasonable thing to do. But my late-night hours had never been characterized by reason, neither as a practicing or as a recovering drunk.

  Less than an hour later I was on Highland Drive, west of the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, and I turned out of the long corridor of oaks into a brick-paved driveway lined with a rick fence and rosebushes. It led to an enormous white house with antebellum pretensions that might have been built five minutes ago on a Hollywood movie set. The trim on the front door was pink, the brass-work as bright and portentous as gold.

  When he opened the front door in his pajamas, the breeze made the chandelier over his head ring with sound and light.

  “Bootsie needs your help,” I said. “No, that’s not really true. I need it for her. I’m out there on the rim, Lyle.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday, and I should have been off for the day, but the dispatcher called at 9 A.M.

  “What do you want to do with these four guys Levy and Guillory brought in?” he asked.

  “What four guys?”

  “The bums Levy and Guillory brought in from the shelters. Levy said you were looking for guys who’d been in an ugly-man contest. You’ve got some beauts here, Dave.”

  I had completely forgotten.

  “Where are they now?” I said.

  “In the drunk tank.”

  “How long have they been there?”

  “Since yesterday.”

  “Get them out of there. I’ll be right down.”

  Fifteen minutes later I was at the office. I walked down a corridor to a holding cell, where the four men patiently waited for me on a single wood bench. In the center of the cell floor was a urine-streaked drain hole. The men all had the emaciated characteristics of people whose lives existed on a straight line between the blood bank and the wine store. Like most professional tramps, they had a strange chemical odor about them, as though their glands had long ago stopped functioning properly and now secreted only a synthetic substitute for natural body fluids. I opened up the barred door.

  One man’s head was misshapen, broken on one side like a dented walnut; the second’s face was eaten with a skin disease that looked like skin cancer; the third had a bad harelip and virtually no cartilage in his nose; but it was the face of the fourth man on the bench that made me wince inside.

  “Have you guys eaten?” I said.

  They nodded that they had, except the man on the end. His e
yes never blinked and never left my face.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” I said. “I didn’t mean for you to be locked up. I had just wanted to talk to you, but I went out of town and my orders got a little confused.”

  They made no reply. They shuffled their shoes on the concrete floor and looked at the backs of their hands. Then the man with the skin disease said, “It ain’t bad. They got TV.”

  “Anyway, I apologize to you guys,” I said. “A deputy will drive you back to wherever you want to go. He’ll also give you a voucher for a meal at a café in town. Here’s my business card. If you ever want to pick up a dollar or two sanding down some boats, call that number.”

  They rose as one to go out the open cell door.

  “Say, podna, would you stay a minute with me?” I said to the last man on the bench.

  He sat back down indifferently and began rolling a cigarette. I took a chair from the corridor and sat opposite him. His whole head looked like it had been put in a furnace. The ears were burnt into stubs; the hairless red scar tissue looked like it had been applied in layers to the bone with a putty knife; part of the lips had been surgically removed so that the teeth and gums were exposed in a permanent sneer.

  He rolled the tobacco into a tight cylinder, wet down the glued seam, and crimped the edges. He lifted his eyes up to mine. They looked as lidless, as reptilian and liquid as a chameleon’s. He popped a match aflame on his thumbnail. It was as thick and purple as tortoise shell.

  “You like my face?” he asked.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Vic.”

  “Vic what?”

  “Vic Who-gives-a-shit? One name’s as good as another, I figure.”

  “How about giving me your last name?”

  “Benson.”

  “How’d you get hurt, podna?”

  He put his cigarette in the hole where his lips were pared away at the corner of his mouth. He blew smoke out toward the bars. “In a tank,” he said.

  “You were in the service?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where’d you serve?”

  “Korea.”

  “Your tank got nailed?”

  “You got it.”

  “Where in Korea?”

  “Second day, at Heartbreak Ridge. What’s all this stuff about?”

  “There’re some people who say they’ve seen a man with your description looking through their windows.”

  “Yeah? Must be my twin brother.” He laughed, and saliva welled up on his gum.

  “There’s a preacher in Baton Rouge who thinks a man who looks like you might be his father.”

  “I had a son once. But I didn’t raise no preacher.”

  “You ever hear of a woman called Mattie?”

  He took his cigarette carefully off his lip and tipped the ashes between his knees.

  “Did you hear me, podna?” I said.

  His eyes regarded me quietly.

  “You guys got nothing else to do except this kind of stuff?” he asked.

  “Did you know a woman named Mattie?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He picked at a scab inside his wasted forearm.

  “How often do you go to the blood bank?” I asked.

  “Once or twice a week. Depends on how many is in town. They keep records.”

  “Where do you receive your VA checks?”

  “What?”

  “Your disability payments.”

  “I don’t get them no more. I ain’t gone in to certify in five or six years.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause I don’t like them sonsabitches.”

  “I see,” I said, then I spoke to him in French.

  “I don’t speak it,” he said.

  “I think you’re not telling me the truth, Vic.”

  He dropped his cigarette to the cement and mashed it out with his foot.

  “You interested in my life story, run my prints,” he said, and turned up his palms. “We were buttoned down when they put one up our snout. I was the only guy got out. The hatch burned me all the way to the bone when I pushed it open. I don’t know no preacher, except at the mission. You saying I look in people’s windows, you’re a goddamn liar.”

  His breath was stale, his eyes like heated marbles inside his red, manikin-like face.

  “Where are you staying?” I said.

  “At the Sally, in Lafayette.”

  “I don’t have anything to hold you on, Vic. But I’m going to ask you to stay out of Iberia Parish. If these same people are bothered by a man who looks like you, I want to know that you were somewhere else. Do we have an agreement on that?”

  “I go where I want.”

  I tapped my fountain pen on the back of my knuckles, then stood up and swung the door wide for him.

  “All right, podna. The deputy at the end of the corridor will drive you back to Lafayette,” I said. “But I’ll leave you with a thought. If you’re Verise Sonnier, don’t blame your children for your unhappiness. They’ve had their share of it, too. You might even learn to be a bit proud of them.”

  “Get out of my way,” he said, and walked past me, tucking in his shirt over his skinny hips.

  I WENT HOME, turned on the window fan in the bedroom, and slept for four hours. On the edge of my sleep I could hear Alafair and Bootsie weeding the flower beds under the windows, walking through the leaves, scraping ashes out of the barbecue pit. When I awoke, Bootsie was in the shower. Her figure was brown and softly muted through the frosted glass, and I could see her washing her arms and breasts with a rag and a bar of pink soap. I took off my underwear and stepped into the stall with her, rubbed the smooth muscles of her back and shoulders, worked my thumbs up and down her spine, kissed the dampness of her hair along her neck.

  Then I dried her off like she was a little girl, although it was I who often had the heart of a child while making love. We lay on top of the sheets, and the fan billowed the curtain and drew its breeze across us. I kissed her thighs and her stomach and put her nipples in my mouth. When I entered her, her body was so hot she felt like she was burning with a high fever.

  Later, I took Alafair to Saturday evening Mass at the cathedral, then attended an AA meeting. When it was my turn to talk, I did a partial fifth step before the group, which consists of admitting to ourselves, to another human being, and to God the exact nature of our wrongs.

  Why?

  Because I had gone to Lyle Sonnier’s house in Baton Rouge and compromised my faith in my Higher Power. I had let Him down, and by doing so—seeking out the help of a man whom I had considered a charlatan—I had let Bootsie down, too. Even Lyle had said so.

  When he had hit the light switch in his kitchen, the chrome, yellow plastic, white enamel, and flowered wallpaper leaped to life with the brilliance of a flashbulb. He took a bottle of milk and pecan pie from the icebox, set forks, plates, and crystal glasses on the table, then sat across from me, wan-faced, tired, obviously unsure of where he should begin.

  “We can talk a long time, Dave, but I guess I ought to tell you straight out I can’t give you what you want,” he said.

  “Then you are a fraud.”

  “That’s a tough word.”

  “You said you can heal, Lyle. I’m calling you on it.” I felt a bubble of saliva break in my throat.

  “No, you don’t understand. I was a fraud. I was strung out on rainbows and purple acid, black speed, you name it, street dealing, breaking into people’s cars, hanging in some of those gay places on South Los Angeles Street in L.A., you get my drift, when I met this boozehead scam artist named the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock.

  “Jimmy Bob and me went on the tent circuit all over the South. He’d whip up a crowd till they were hysterical, then he’d walk down that sawdust aisle in a white suit with the spotlight dancing on it and grab some poor fellow’s forehead in his hands and almost squeeze his brains out his ears. When he’d let go, the guy would be trembling all over and seeing visio
ns through the top of the tent.

  “Before the show he’d have me go to the rear of the line and ask some of the old folks if they wouldn’t like a wheelchair to sit in, and wouldn’t they like to be right down on the front row? I’d wheel them down there, and halfway into his sermon he’d jump off the stage, take them by the hands, and make them rise up and walk. Then he’d shout, ‘What time you got?’ And they’d shout back, ‘It’s time to run the devil around the block with the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock.’

  “Jimmy Bob was a pistol, son. On camera he’d grab a handful of somebody’s loose flesh and shake it like Jell-O and say he’d just cured it of cancer. He’d lift up somebody’s legs from a wheelchair and hold them at an angle so one looked shorter than the other, then he’d straighten them out, praying all the time with his eyes squeezed shut, and holler out that a man born lame could now walk without a limp.

  “Except they got Jimmy Bob on a check-writing rap in Hattiesburg, and I had to do the next show in Tupelo by myself. The tent was busting with people, and I was going to try to get through the night with the wheelchair scam and maybe curing somebody of deafness or back pain or something else that nobody can see, because if that crowd doesn’t get a miracle of some kind they’re not shelling out the bucks when the baskets go around. But right in the middle of the sermon this old black woman comes up the aisle on two canes and I know I’ve got a problem.

  “She started pulling on my pants leg and looking up at me with these blue cataracts, opening and closing her mouth like a baby bird in its nest. Then everybody in the tent was looking at her, and there wasn’t any way out of it, I had to do something.

  “I said, ‘What’s brought you here, auntie?’ And I held the microphone down to her.

  “She said, ‘My spine’s fused. They ain’t nothing for the pain. ’Lectric blanket don’t do it, chiropractor don’t do it, mo’phine don’t do it. I wants to die.’

  “She had on these big thick glasses that were glowing from the spots, and tears were running down her face. I said, ‘Don’t be talking like that, auntie.’

  “And she said, ‘You can cure this old woman. God done anointed you. It ain’t no different than touching the hem of His garment.’ And she dropped her canes and set her hands on the tops of my shoes.