The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  A compact unshaved man was sleeping on his side in his underclothes on top of the covers, snoring spasmodically. Smiley removed a hypodermic needle from his bag and inserted it into the man’s carotid and pushed down the plunger. The sleeping man made one startled gasp, his eyes springing open, then he dropped into a well.

  Twenty minutes later, the man awoke and discovered the ligatures binding him leg and arm to the bedframe. A Brillo pad had been stuffed into his mouth, which was sealed with pipe tape. When he tried to talk, his face looked like a grape about to burst. Smiley sat in a chair by the bed, eating ice cream from the carton he had taken from the icebox. A container of Liquid-Plumr sat on the nightstand.

  “My friends call me Smiley,” he said. “You’re Hugo Tillinger, and you have been very bad. I do not like people who do what you have done. Can I use your bathroom. Blink your eyes for ‘yes.’ ”

  Tillinger stared at him like a statue. Smiley dropped his ice cream carton into the wastebasket and went to the bathroom to relieve himself and flushed the toilet and washed his hands and pulled on latex gloves, then returned to the bedside and gazed down at Tillinger. “This might hurt a little.” He peeled the tape loose from Tillinger’s face and lifted the steel wool from his mouth. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? Comfy now?”

  Tillinger twisted his head and spat soap and pieces of steel wool on the sheets. “What are you doing in my room?”

  “You killed your family.”

  “I did not.”

  “Lying will not help you.”

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “You called an uncle in Denver. Somebody was listening. You should have run far away and not made that call. Why do you remain in this area?”

  “Because I wanted to find a black woman who tried to help me. But somebody killed her. You’re a hit man?”

  “No. You’d better not call me that, either.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I get rid of people who hurt children or who hurt me. You burned up your family. I saw pictures of their bodies.”

  “You some kind of ghoul?”

  Smiley removed a funnel from his black bag and unscrewed the cap on the Liquid-Plumr. Tillinger pulled against the ligatures, his brow oily with sweat. “I don’t know who you are or why you’re after me, but I didn’t kill my family,” Tillinger said. “No matter what happens here, you get that straight, you little shit.”

  “You’re making me mad.”

  “See what happens if I catch up with you later, gerbil boy,” Tillinger said.

  Smiley stuffed the Brillo pad back into Tillinger’s mouth and stretched a strip of tape across his cheeks, letting the roll dangle on the pillow. He took a ballpoint from his shirt pocket and clenched it like a dagger. He stared down into Tillinger’s face. In his mind’s eye, he saw a female caretaker in a Mexico City orphanage strike him full across the face. He disconnected from the image in his head and went to the window and looked outside. The Gulf was black and roiling and strung with foam and moonlight. The waves on the jetty made a sound like someone shuffling a deck of cards. He felt tired, his sense of mission gone, his arms as flaccid and useless as rolls of dough. The release he sought in his work was becoming more and more elusive. Why couldn’t he be free?

  He walked back to the bed and ripped the tape loose from Tillinger’s mouth. “Call me names again and you’ll wish you were dead. You’re a cruel man. I want to do horrible things to you.”

  “It was an electrical short,” Tillinger said. “I tried to save them. You seem like you got a brain. Why do you think you turned out the way you did?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I was on death row with guys like you. They all got a bad story. Here’s the funny part. Their stories are true. That’s how they ended up freaks like you. It’s not y’all’s fault.”

  “You need a lesson.” Smiley removed an electric drill from his bag and hunted for the wall socket. He could hear Tillinger fighting against the ligatures. He inserted the plug into the wall and squeezed the trigger on the drill. It whined and vibrated in his palm. “Open wide.”

  “Don’t,” Tillinger said.

  “You killed the deputy sheriff, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “The colored lady on the cross?”

  “Anybody who says that is a damn liar.”

  “Let me put this closer to your eye. Don’t blink. Would you say that again? Want to call me a gerbil now? You want me to start on your eyes or your eardrums or your nose? Tell me what you want. What’s that sound I hear? Are you going wee-wee in your pants?”

  Tillinger’s eyes were bulging, his face quivering. “Kiss my ass.”

  Smiley grinned. “Bad boy. I just want a tiny nick. So I won’t feel guilty about not doing my job.” He touched the drill tip to Tillinger’s earlobe. “There. A little red flower on the pillowcase to remember me by.”

  Tillinger’s lungs seemed to collapse. Smiley clicked off the drill and pulled the plug from the wall, then wrapped the cord around it and placed it and the Liquid Plumr in his bag. He took a switchblade from his tennis shorts and pushed the release button on the blade.

  “What are you doing?” Tillinger said.

  Smiley sliced one of the ligatures in half. He stepped back from the bed and folded the blade into the case, all the while gazing at Tillinger.

  “I don’t get it,” Tillinger said.

  “Did you ever make your daughter cut a switch?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Make her participate in her own punishment. Make her hate herself.”

  “The man who does that isn’t a father.”

  “I need to talk to the people I work for. They will be angry with me when they hear what I have to say.”

  “What people? Angry about what?”

  “You get to live. That’s because somebody has lied about you. Don’t be here in the morning.”

  “You’re talking about wiseguys in New Jersey or Florida washing money, something like that?”

  “They’re from everywhere. Maybe I’ll see you again. You could be my friend. Most of my friends are colored people.”

  “Why colored?”

  “They accept you for what you are. They’re hated and made fun of, just like I am.”

  Smiley opened the door and filled his lungs with the salt in the wind. He gazed back into the room. His expression was vacuous, his eyes lit with a blue glow, as though the moon were shining through a hole in the back of his head. “You’re my friend now. Don’t betray me. Nobody had better ever betray me.”

  He pulled the door shut behind him and walked away, a mindless smile on his lips.

  • • •

  IF YOU’RE A real drunkard, you don’t need alcohol to mess up your life. A real drunkard knows his saloon is available inside his head twenty-four hours a day, and he can light up his viscera and give free rein to the gargoyles in the basement and access the whole drunkard’s menu—alcoholic psychosis, unprotected sex, messing with guns and knives and dangerous people, all of it as fast as you can snap the cap on a bottle of brew. Or let me use another metaphor. You simply turn yourself into a human pinball, bouncing pell-mell off the flippers and crashing into the bumpers while electrified thunder roars and bells jingle and jangle and all the colors of the rainbow flash in celebration of your self-destruction.

  Sunday afternoon Bailey Ribbons invited me to her house for a barbecue. I shined my loafers and put on a pair of gray slacks and a long-sleeve dress shirt and a tie and drove to her house in my truck. A pink balloon was tied with a ribbon to the mailbox by the road. The shale driveway leading to her cottage was an immaculate white against the freshly clipped deep green St. Augustine grass. Through the oak trees I could see the bayou glinting in the sunlight, the smoke from a barbecue pit rising into a hard blue sky that you could scratch a match on.

  I thought others had been invited, but the only vehicle on the property was her compact, parked in the
porte cochere. I twisted the bell. She answered the door almost immediately. She was wearing huaraches and khakis that accentuated her long legs and a purple blouse and an apron and light lip gloss. “You didn’t need to dress up,” she said.

  “I thought it was a formal lawn party,” I said, stepping inside.

  “Nothing so grand,” she said, closing the door behind me. “I thought we’d just hang out. I bowed out of my situation with Desmond.”

  “You’re not going to do the film?”

  “It was a bad idea. It seems like an intriguing world, but it’s not. It’s just like ours, except worse.”

  “I wouldn’t give up on it. It’s quite an opportunity.”

  “No, there’s something kinky about that whole bunch. Come in the kitchen and help me make the salad. I have two chickens on the grill and some lemonade and soft drinks on ice.”

  She walked ahead of me into the kitchen. Her hair was thick and brown and clean, and tiny strands hung like particles of light on her cheeks. I had a hard time separating her from Clementine Carter standing on a desert road that dipped into eternity.

  She turned and smiled but didn’t speak. Her eyes were mysterious and had a radiance that seemed to have no source.

  “Do you know you have a habit of staring?” she said.

  “I think you were born for the screen,” I said.

  “Not me.”

  “You don’t have to work with Desmond. Louisiana is full of movie people. The state subsidizes movies up to twenty-five percent.”

  “Let’s slice some apples.”

  I rolled my sleeves and went to work next to her. I could not help glancing at her profile. There was not a line on her face or throat. I know this may seem foolish to some, but I could not associate the image of her toking on a joint with the woman standing beside me. In fact, I hated the thought.

  “I know what you’re thinking about,” she said. “I’m sorry for taking the hit off that joint. My feelings are the same as yours. Fashionable vice is usually the mark of a self-important dilettante. Besides, I’m a cop.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” I said.

  She put her knife down and looked through the window at the smoke from the barbecue pit breaking apart in the wind. A cottontail rabbit was couched among the camellia bushes, brown and fat, ears folded back, eyes bright. “Want to go outside?” she said.

  “This is fine,” I replied.

  She dried her hands on a dish towel and hung it over the handle on the oven. “I was married when I was sixteen. My husband was killed one year later in a stock car race. Entertaining people who carry Styrofoam spit cups.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know about the loss of your wives,” she said. “I don’t know how you lived through all that.”

  I didn’t answer. She stood in the silence until my eyes found hers. “I don’t care about age differences,” she said.

  “The woman pays the price, Bailey. Men skate. The scarlet letter didn’t die out with the Puritans.”

  She looked up into my face. She touched my cheek. “You won’t give in, will you?” she said.

  “Give in to what?”

  “Principle, vanity, whatever you call it. You and your friend Clete pretend to be rebels, but you’re traditionalists. You know what a traditionalist is, don’t you? Someone who lets dead people control his life.”

  She turned on the cold water in the sink and put her hands and wrists under the faucet, her back rigid. I rested my hand on her shoulder. She turned off the water and looked at me. I thought I heard a sound like train-crossing bells clanging in my head.

  I placed my arms lightly around her back and spread my fingers between her shoulder blades and touched her hair with my cheek. I was afraid to pull her against me. “I love your name.”

  “That’s all you can say?” she asked.

  How could one not? I thought. But I couldn’t say the words.

  I went out the door and down the steps to the shale drive. She walked out on the gallery and lifted one hand by way of saying goodbye. There was a hurt in her face that made me want to paint my brains on a ceiling.

  • • •

  I WENT UP LOREAUVILLE Road, my windows down, the rain ditches and cane fields and horse farms and nineteenth-century shotgun houses flying by me, and a vision in my mind I could barely resist. I saw a cool dark saloon with a long foot-railed bar and wood-bladed fans hanging from a stamped-tin ceiling, and domino and bourree tables, maybe a blackboard chalked with racing results, pool balls clattering on green felt, football betting cards scattered on the floor. I saw myself sitting in the shadows, starting the afternoon with a double shot of Jack poured on shaved ice with a sprig of mint, an ice-caked mug of draft or a sweating bottle of Bud for a chaser. I even saw the aftermath, the awakening at dawn to a bloodred sun and a flaming thirst and the first drink of the day, vodka and Collins mix and cherries and orange slices and half-melted ice sliding down the pipe with a beneficence I can only compare to a hit of morphine in a battalion aide station after you’ve been blown to shit.

  There were any number of places in Iberia or St. Martin parish where I could get loaded with people who knew I shouldn’t be there but were wise enough to know that no power on earth can keep a drunk from drinking once he decides to take the asp in hand and twine it around his arm.

  The bar I found was not like the one I just described. It was a lounge in St. Martinville, one as dark as black satin whose refrigerated air was as cold and unforgiving as a tomb’s. I sat at one end of a horseshoe bar and drank a Barq’s Red Creme Soda in a mug and tried to finish a ham sandwich that had too much mustard on it. I had never seen the bartender before. I spat a bite of sandwich into a paper napkin and put it on my plate.

  “I got some chicken gumbo in the kitchen,” the bartender said.

  “I’m halfway to the cemetery as it is,” I replied.

  “It is what it is, Mac,” he said.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Dave. I really don’t like the name Mac. What’s that stink? You always leave the men’s room door open?”

  He walked away, knowing a losing situation when he saw one. I looked down a hallway and out the back window and saw the sky darkening and a streetlight come on and then the rain beginning to fall, followed by hail that bounced on the asphalt in a white mist. I called the bartender back. “Give me four fingers of Jack in a mug, straight up, no ice. A Budweiser back, with a raw egg in a glass.”

  “I think you’re in the wrong bar.”

  I opened my badge. “Will this earn me the stool I’m sitting on?”

  “We don’t serve eggs.”

  “So forget the egg.”

  “It’s your funeral.”

  I watched him fill two double-shot glasses to the brim and snap the cap off a Budweiser. He set the shots and the longneck and a beer glass in front of me. My head was thundering. I squeezed my temples. The outside world seemed drained of color, a palm tree whipping across the street, the hail bouncing and rolling like mothballs.

  “I asked for the Jack in a mug.”

  “Are you going to be a problem?” the bartender said.

  “Not me. You know what the Evangeline Oak is about?”

  “No clue. I’m from Big D. That’s in Texas, in case you haven’t checked recently.”

  “This is where the Acadians came by boat over two hundred years ago,” I said. “Evangeline lost her lover on the trip from Nova Scotia. She went insane and waited by that tree every afternoon the rest of her life.”

  “You finished with your sandwich?” he said.

  “Yeah. Why don’t you wrap it up and take it home for your dog?”

  “Anything else?”

  “For real, you never heard of Evangeline?”

  He leaned close enough for me to feel his breath on my face. “Badge or no badge, we don’t take shit in here.”

  I got off the stool and took my wallet from my back pocket. “What’s your name?”

  �
��Harvey.”

  I put twenty dollars on top of my half-eaten sandwich. “Tell you what, Harvey, give my drinks to the guy at the end of the bar. If there’s any change, it’s yours.” I winked at him.

  He looked over his shoulder. “There’s no one at the end of the bar, asshole.”

  I stared into the gloom. A faux-1950s Wurlitzer against the far wall glowed on the empty stools. “So you and your dog drink up for me,” I said. “If that’s not cool, maybe you and I can stroll outside and have a chat.”

  “You’d better get out of here, fuckball.”

  I felt as though something had pulled loose inside my head. In AA we call it a dry drunk. The room was tilting. I wanted to break Harvey up, stomp his face and break his teeth and leave him in a ball on the floor. I wanted to fill my hand with the heavy coldness and lethality of my 1911-model .45 auto. I walked unsteadily out of the lounge and kept going bareheaded in the rain to the town square and the great spreading live oak on Bayou Teche, where some claimed to have seen Evangeline waiting for her lover. The bayou was at high tide, the tops of the elephant ears floating like a green carpet at the edge of the banks. Above my head, the enormous sheltering limbs of the oak, scaled with lichen as coarse as a dragon’s hide, seemed to reach into the clouds and the stars and rain like a conduit into both the past and endless black space.

  It was under this tree, at age nineteen, that I first kissed Bootsie Mouton. Later that same evening, in a rain just like this one, we lost our virginity on top of an inflated rubber cushion in a boathouse on the bayou while hailstones clattered on the roof. After the murder of my wife, Annie, Bootsie and I married, but I lost her to lupus. Then Molly’s life was taken by a benighted, ignorant man who rounded a curve on squealing tires with the joy of a Visigoth smashing works of art in a cathedral.