A Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  I slowed the car at a congested intersection where directional signs had been nailed to telephone posts pointing to the site of the rally at a public park two blocks away. Many of the cars around us had yellow ribbons tied on their radio aerials and Bobby Earl stickers plastered on their bumpers.

  I felt Bootsie’s eyes on my face.

  “What?” I said.

  “Don’t be bothered by them,” she said. “It’s just Louisiana. Think about the Longs.”

  “It’s not the same thing, Boots. The Longs weren’t racists. They didn’t sponsor legislation that would make it a twenty-five-dollar fine to beat up flag burners.”

  “Well, I’m just not going to let a person like that affect me.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s why you told Alafair that Bobby Earl was a shit.”

  My window was down. So was the window of the pickup truck next to me. The man in the passenger seat, whose chewing tobacco in his jaw looked as stiff as a biscuit, glanced directly into my face.

  “You got a problem, partner?” I asked.

  He rolled up his window and looked directly ahead.

  “Dave . . .” Bootsie said.

  “All right, I’m sorry. Sometimes I’m just not sure that democracy is the right idea.”

  “Talk about narrow attitudes,” she said.

  “Hey, Dave, that man Bobby Earl ain’t been all bad,” Batist said from the backseat.

  “What?” I said.

  “Mais black folk wasn’t votin’ for a long time. Now they is. I bet you ain’t t’ought about that, no.”

  Bootsie smiled and punched me in one of my love handles, then reached across the seat and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. How do you argue with that kind of company?

  LYLE HAD TRIED to do it right. He had strung bunting in the trees, laid out a wonderful hors d’oeuvre and salad table, hired a professional bartender, piped music out onto the patio, and hung baskets of petunias from the ironwork on the upstairs veranda. The lawn had just been mowed, and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly cut grass and the wood smoke curling around the iron caldron on the brick barbecue pit.

  He wore a pair of cream-colored pleated slacks, shined brown loafers, and a Hawaiian shirt outside his belt; his hair was wet and combed back on his collar, his cheeks still glowing from a fresh shave. His smile was electric when he greeted us in the sideyard and shook hands and walked us to the patio, where Weldon, his wife Bama, Drew, and several people whom I didn’t know stood around the drink table. The deference, the unrelenting smile, the nervous light in Lyle’s eyes made me feel almost as though he were trying to rearrange all the elements in his life in front of a camera so he could freeze-frame the moment and correct the inadequacies of a past, a childhood, that would never be acceptable to him or finally to anyone who had had a similar one imposed upon him.

  But I didn’t see Vic Benson, and while we fixed paper plates of chilled shrimp and popcorn crawfish and tried to be convivial, as though we had not all been brought together by a violent event, my eyes kept wandering to the garage apartment where he lived. Clemmie, the black maid who had done time in St. Gabriel, picked up a washtub filled with live bluepoint crabs and poured them skittering into the caldron on the fire pit.

  “My, that surely smells good,” Bama said. Her ash-blond hair was brushed out thick on her shoulders, and she wore a yellow sundress, gold earrings, and a tiny gold cross and chain around her neck. I never saw anyone with skin so white. You could see her blue veins as though they had been painted on her with the fine point of a watercolor brush.

  “I’m real glad y’all could make it,” Weldon said. He had already put out a cigarette in his plate and was drinking a beer out of the bottle, his eyes, like mine, glancing sideways unconsciously at the garage apartment. “I’m glad you brought Batist, too. It looks like he’s making friends with Clemmie. I hope she doesn’t pull a razor on him.”

  “Lyle is very good to people of color,” Bama said.

  “Lyle’s known Batist since he was knee-high to a tree frog,” Weldon said.

  “I was speaking of Lyle’s kindness to the woman, Weldon.”

  “Oh.”

  She turned toward me. Her face was as small as a child’s. Her mouth made a red button before she spoke. There was a steady, serene blue light in her eyes, and I wondered how many downers she had dropped before her first highball.

  “Weldon is overly conscious about who my brother is,” she said.

  “Dave gets a little upset on the subject of Bobby’s politics,” Weldon said.

  “I don’t subscribe to everything my brother stands for, but I don’t deny that he’s my brother, either,” she said.

  “I see,” I said.

  “He has many fine qualities of which the press is not aware or which they seem to have no interest in writing about.”

  Weldon idly twirled a shrimp on a toothpick between his fingers.

  “Actually, today is Bobby’s birthday,” she continued. “We have to leave a bit early and drop off his present at the rally.”

  “Bama—” Weldon began.

  “It’ll take a few minutes. You can stay in the car,” she said to him.

  He made a face and looked away into the shadows. A moment later Clemmie passed our table.

  “Go up and ask Vic to join us, would you, Clemmie?” Lyle said.

  She began clearing paper plates off the glass-topped table as though she hadn’t heard him. Her breasts looked like watermelons inside her gray-and-white uniform.

  “Clemmie, would you please tell Vic all our guests are here?” Lyle said.

  “I got to live on the other side of the wall from that nasty old man. That don’t mean I got to talk to him,” she said.

  Lyle’s face reddened with embarrassment.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to come down. Leave him alone,” Weldon said.

  “No, he’s going to come down here and eat with us,” Lyle said. “He’s paid for whatever he did to us, Weldon.”

  “You don’t even know that it’s him,” Weldon said.

  “Do you want me to go up there?” Drew said.

  Good ole Drew, I thought. Always letter-high and right down the middle. She stood by the bar, her weight resting on one foot, her thick, round arms covered with tan and freckles.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Lyle said.

  “Why do you keep stirring up the past all the time?” Weldon said. “If it’s not moving, don’t poke it. Why don’t you learn that?”

  “Have another beer, Weldon,” Lyle said.

  “Lyle, this is your craziness. Don’t act like somebody else is responsible,” Weldon said.

  Lyle got up from his chair and walked across the lawn toward the garage apartment.

  “Lord h’ep me Jesus,” he said to no one in particular.

  Later, he came back down the stairs. Then, a few minutes later, the man who called himself Vic Benson stepped out the door and walked slowly down the stairs, a shaft of late sunlight breaking across his destroyed face.

  He wore a frayed white shirt that was gray with washing and creaseless shiny black trousers that were hitched tightly around his bony hips. People glanced once at his face, then focused intensely on their conversations with the people next to them. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth, and the paper was wet with saliva all the way down to the glowing ash. His eyes made you think he was being entertained by a private joke. He stopped by the edge of the patio, threw his cigarette into a flower bed, and picked up an empty glass off the bar. Then he knotted up a handful of mint from a silver bowl and bruised it around the inside of the glass.

  “What you having, suh?” the black bartender asked.

  Vic Benson didn’t reply. He simply reached over the bar, picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured four fingers straight up.

  Lyle rose from his chair and stood beside him awkwardly.

  “This is Vic,” he said to Bama and his brother and sister.
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  “Glad to meet you,” Vic said.

  Drew’s and Weldon’s eyes narrowed, and I saw Drew wet her lips. Weldon stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then took it out.

  “I’m Weldon Sonnier. Do you know me?” he said.

  “I don’t know you. But I heard about you,” Vic said.

  “What’d you hear?” Weldon asked.

  “You’re a big oil man here’bouts.”

  “I’ve got a record for dusters,” Weldon said.

  “You only got to hit a pay sand one in eight. Ain’t that right?”

  “You sound like you’ve been around the oil business, Vic,” Weldon said.

  “I roughnecked some. But I ain’t ever run acrost you, if that’s what you’re asking. I seen her though.” He lifted a shriveled forefinger at Drew.

  I saw the side of her face twitch. Then she recovered herself.

  “I’m afraid I don’t recall meeting you,” she said.

  “I didn’t say you’d met me. I seen you jogging on the street. In New Iberia. You was with some other people. But a man don’t forget a handsome woman.”

  Her eyes looked away. Bama stared down at her hands.

  “Lyle says you’re our old man, Vic,” Weldon said.

  “I ain’t. But I don’t argue with it. People abide the likes of me for different reasons. Mostly because they feel guilty about something. It don’t matter to me. What time we eat? There’s a TV show I want to watch.”

  “Yeah, those crabs ought to be good and red now,” Lyle said.

  “You cook them in slow water, they taste better,” Vic said. “There’s people don’t like to do it ’cause of the sound they make in the pot.”

  He took a long drink from his whiskey, his eyes roving over us as though he had just made a profound observation.

  Batist and Lyle began dipping the crabs out of the boiling water with tongs and dropping them in the empty washtub to cool. Vic filled half of a paper plate with dirty rice, walked to the fire pit ahead of everyone else, picked up two hot crabs from the tub with his bare hand, and began eating by himself on a folding chair under an oak tree.

  “Is that the man you saw at your window?” Drew said to Bama.

  Bama’s pulse was quivering like a severed muscle in her throat.

  “I’m not sure what I saw,” she said. “It was quite dark. Perhaps it was a man in a mask. To be frank, I’ve tried to put it out of my mind. I prefer not to talk about it, Drew. I don’t know why we should be talking about these things at a dinner party.”

  Weldon smoked a cigarette and watched Vic Benson with a whimsical look on his face.

  “Weldon?” Drew said.

  “What?”

  “Say something.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Is it him?”

  “Of course it’s him. I’d recognize that old sonofabitch if you melted him into glue.”

  BOOTSIE AND I got in the serving line, then tried to isolate ourselves from the Sonniers’ conversation. But Bama was having her troubles with it, too. She made a mess of shelling the crab on her plate, spraying her dress and face with juice when she squeezed a claw between the nutcrackers, then rushing from the table as though the deck of the Titanic had just tilted under her.

  When she returned from the bathroom, her face was fresh and composed and her eyes were rekindled with an ethereal blue light.

  “My, I didn’t realize it had gotten so late,” she said. “We must be running, Weldon.”

  “Give it a minute. Bobby’s not going anywhere,” he said. But he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were still on Vic Benson, who was hunkered forward on the folding chair under the oak tree, drinking another glass of whiskey as though it were Kool-Aid.

  “I don’t want him to think we’ve forgotten his birthday,” she said.

  “Maybe he’d like for you to forget it, Bama. Maybe that’s why he has the wrinkles chemically rinsed out of his face,” Weldon said.

  “I think that’s an unkind remark to make, Weldon,” she said.

  But he wasn’t listening to her.

  “You know, the old fart did a lot of bad things to us,” he said. “But there’s one that always stuck in my mind.” He shook his head back and forth. “He caught me whanging it when I was about thirteen, and he clipped a clothespin on my penis and made me stand out in the backyard like that for a half hour.”

  “Hey, ease up, Weldon,” Lyle said.

  “I insist that we not continue this,” Bama said.

  Bootsie was already excusing herself from the table, and I was looking at my watch.

  “You’re right, damn it,” Weldon said. “Let’s drive the nail in this bullshit, give Bobby his present, then come back for some serious drinking.”

  Weldon got up from his chair and walked toward the tree under which Vic Benson sat.

  “What are you going to do?” Lyle said. Then, “Weldon?”

  But he paid no attention. He was talking to Vic Benson now, his back to us, his big hands gesturing, while Benson looked up at him silently. Then Benson set his glass down and rose to his feet. Clemmie poured the water from the caldron into the fire pit, and steam billowed out of the bricks and drifted across Benson’s and Weldon’s bodies.

  We couldn’t hear what Weldon said, but the puckered skin of Benson’s face was pulled back from his mouth in a leer of teeth and blackened gums, and his thin shoulders were as rectangular and stiff as if they were made of wire. Then Weldon walked back to the bar, pulled a sweating bottle of Jax out of the ice bin, and cracked off the cap.

  “Quit staring at me like that, Lyle,” he said.

  “I ain’t here to judge you,” Lyle said.

  “What’d you think I was going to tell him?” Weldon said.

  “You got a lot of anger. Nobody can blame you for it.”

  “I offered him a job,” Weldon said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Roustabout, driving a truck, whatever he wants to do. I also told him no matter what he decides the past between him and us is quits.”

  “What’d he say?” Lyle asked.

  Weldon blew little puffs of air out his lips.

  “I already forgot it,” he said. “I tell you what, though. If I were you, I’d either buy that man an airplane ticket to Iraq or put bars over his doors and windows.”

  After Bama and Weldon were gone, Vic Benson stared at us for a long time from under the tree, then he turned and mounted the stairs to the garage apartment. The trees were deep in shadow, and down the street, against the lavender sky and amid the flights of swallows, you could see the sun’s last red light reflecting on the chrome-plated cross atop Lyle’s Bible college.

  We were leaving also when we heard someone start a car engine immediately below the garage apartment.

  “What’s he doing with Clemmie’s car?” Lyle said.

  We turned and saw Vic Benson backing an ancient, dented gas guzzler, with red cellophane taped over the broken taillights, out the driveway. Smoke poured from under the frame.

  “Oh, boy, I got a bad feeling,” Lyle said.

  He headed for the garage apartment, and I followed him.

  We found Clemmie in her small living room, sitting very still in a lopsided stuffed chair, her right hand balanced carefully in the palm of the other, as though any movement would put her in peril. Her rouge was streaked with tears, and her nostrils and mouth were smeared with blood and mucus. Two fingers of her right hand were as bulbous as balloons at the joints.

  “What happened?” Lyle said.

  “He say, ‘Gimme your car keys, you nigger bitch.’ I say, ‘You ain’t getting them. I work hard for my car. I ain’t giving it to no nasty white trash to drive round in.’ He hit me in the face with his belt, hard as he could. I tried to run and throw my keys out the do’, but he twisted them outta my hand, broke my fingers, Rev’end Lyle, just like twigs snapping. Then he spit in my hair.”

  Her shoulders were shaking. You could smell smoke, perfume, and dried sw
eat in her clothes. Lyle wet a towel and blotted her face with it. I lifted her hand and set it gingerly on the arm of the chair. A silver ring with a yellow stone was almost buried in the flesh below one knuckle.

  “We’ll take you to the hospital, Clemmie, then we’ll get your car back,” I said. “Don’t worry about Vic Benson, either. He’s going to be in the Baton Rouge city jail tonight. Do you know where he was going with your car?”

  “He axed where that park at,” she said.

  “Which park?” I said.

  “The place where Mr. Weldon gonna go see Bobby Earl. He got a pistol, Rev’end Lyle. He gone back in his room and come out with it, a little shiny pistol ain’t no bigger than yo’ hand. He say, ‘You go down there and tell them people ’bout this I’ll be back and cut off yo’ nose.’ That’s what he say to me.”

  Lyle stroked her hair and patted her shoulders. I told Lyle to take her to the hospital, and I used the phone to call the Baton Rouge police department.

  Outside, I asked Bootsie to wait for me, then I headed for the car. I didn’t expect Batist to follow me.

  But he did. And in so doing turned the two of us into a historical footnote.

  CHAPTER 17

  I TRIED TO DISSUADE HIM, too, as he stood with his huge hand on the door handle, about to get in the passenger’s seat.

  “It’s just not a good idea,” I said.

  “You t’ink I scared, Dave? That’s what you t’ink after all these years?”

  His flower-print tie was knotted wrong; the top button of his white short-sleeved shirt had popped off; his seersucker slacks were stretched as tight as cheesecloth on his muscular thighs and buttocks. I don’t think I ever loved a man more.

  “Batist, there’s some low-rent white people there,” I said.

  “There’s places I still cain’t go, huh? That’s what you tellin’ me, Dave, and I don’t like to hear that, me.”