I knew bars that closed their doors to the public at two a.m. but continued to serve their friends until dawn, and casinos that kept the tap flowing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as long as you stayed at the tables or the machines. If you want to get slop-bucket-deep in an alcoholic culture, there is no better place than the state of Louisiana. It’s a drunkard’s dream, a twenty-four-hour chemically induced orgasm, a slide down a rainbow that lands you with a soft bump in the Baths of Caracalla. Think I’m exaggerating? Ask any souse highballing out of Texas into Lake Charles.
I passed my house and turned at the Shadows and drove around the block to St. Peter Street and circled back to East Main, then parked in front of the old Burke home and walked down to the bayou and sat under a live oak on the water’s edge. I had sat under the same tree with my father, Big Aldous Robicheaux, on V-J Day in 1945. There were still slave cabins on the bayou, although they had been turned into corn and grain cribs for the carriage horses that some people still used to go to church on Sunday morning. I had never been fishing. My father bought a cane pole with a wooden bobber and a hook and a lead weight for twenty-five cents from a man of color. The weight was a perforated .36-caliber pistol ball that the colored man had found on a battle site farther down the bayou. I will never forget swinging the bobber and the lead ball and the baited hook into the current, then watching the line come taut and the backs of the alligator gars rolling on the edge of lily pads when the bobber disturbed them.
My father could not read or write and barely spoke English, but he understood the natural world and the culture of Bayou Teche. To us, the bayou was not simply a tidal stream that knitted together what we call Acadiana; it was part of a biblical epic and, because of its mists and fog-shrouded swamps, a magical place inhabited by lamias and leprechauns and medieval tricksters and voodoo women and the spirits of Confederate soldiers and cannibalistic Atakapa Indians. It was a grand place to grow up. The day I threw my line into the water, I knew I would never leave Bayou Teche, in part because of the event that occurred as a result of my father buying the cane pole from a colored man.
The bobber had been carved from a piece of balsa wood and drilled with a hole into which a shaved stick was inserted to secure the line. I saw the bobber tremble once, then plunge straight down into the silt. I jerked the pole so hard, I broke it in half, and the line and bobber and lead bullet and hook and worm and a big green-gold goggle-eyed perch went flying into a tree limb above us. My father went to the Burke house and borrowed a garden rake and combed the fish out of the tree for me. I still suspect this may be the only time in history that a fish has been caught in a live oak tree with a garden rake.
That postage stamp of a moment has always remained with me as a reminder of the innocent world in which I grew up. Or at least the innocent world in which we chose to live, perhaps to our regret. When I sat under the tree at three in the morning, an old man watching a barge and tug working its way upstream, I knew that I no longer had to reclaim the past, that the past was still with me, inextricably part of my soul and who I was; I could step through a hole in the dimension and be with my father and mother again, and I didn’t have to drink or mourn the dead or live on a cross for my misdeeds; I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.
I drove home and went inside just as the wind came up again and the clouds closed over the moon and white hail began pinging and bouncing on the roof. In minutes I was asleep and had to be shaken awake at dawn by Alafair so I could shower and shave and go to work.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
CORMAC WATTS WAS the best coroner we ever had, more cop than pathologist. I always liked him. He was gay and imaginative and happy and, like many gay people, at peace with the world even though the world had often not been kind to him. If he had any professional fault, it was his tendency to extrapolate an encyclopedic amount of information from a fingernail paring, which sometimes did not help his credibility. He called me at the office on Wednesday afternoon. “Ready for the breakdown on Frenchie Lautrec?”
“I thought death by strangulation was death by strangulation,” I said.
“That’s the cause of death, all right. But we’ve got some issues.”
“I can’t tell you how much I hate that word, Cormac. I rank it with ‘awesome’ and ‘amazing.’ ”
“You want to hear what I’ve got or not?”
The truth was, I didn’t want to hear it. The sun was shining while the rain was falling, and there was a huge rainbow that dipped out of the clouds into the middle of City Park.
“Yes, please tell me about Lautrec’s corpse,” I said.
“I think he faked his own murder.”
“His wrists were taped behind him.”
“Think back,” Cormac said. “When you found him, the roll was barely wrapped around the left wrist. He could have gotten loose.”
“Not if he was unconscious.”
“His blood was clean. There are no injection marks on the body. No fresh bruises or abrasions from somebody lifting him up. He kicked the chair into the wall.”
“How do you know?”
“His right loafer was on the floor. Part of a toenail was inside the sock. He was right-handed. He kicked the chair with his right foot and chipped the nail.”
“That could have happened if someone else kicked it out from under him,” I said.
“Nope, the weight would have been going away from him. It’s unlikely the blow would have broken the nail.”
I rubbed my temples. “Lautrec had no feelings about anything or anyone except himself. I don’t see him as a suicide.”
“About ten days ago I saw him in my insurance agent’s office. He was there with his daughter.”
“I didn’t know he had one.”
“She lives in Biloxi. My agent said Lautrec bought a life insurance policy. My agent wanted to sell me one, too.”
“Can we stay on the subject, Cormac?”
“Lautrec could be a menacing presence. My agent was about to have a coronary. I don’t think he wanted to insure Lautrec.”
“Why not?”
“Because Lautrec got his way or he made other people miserable?”
“I’ll give your insurance agent a ring,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Lautrec had a Maltese cross tattooed inside his calf.”
“That bothers me,” I said.
“You think we’re dealing with a cult?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this.”
I called Cormac’s insurance agent. Lautrec had bought a three-hundred-thousand-dollar policy that did not cover suicide. His daughter was the beneficiary.
• • •
I WENT INTO HELEN’S office. She was just about to go home. I told her everything I had just learned. She sat back down. “You buy Lautrec offing himself?”
“Maybe he was scared.”
“The only thing Lautrec feared was not getting laid.”
“Cormac is adamant,” I said.
“How about prints on the Sheetrock torn out of the ceiling?”
“None.”
Helen looked tired, older. “You know where this is going, don’t you?”
“Yep, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey time.”
• • •
IN ANY GIVEN situation, the majority of people believe whatever they need to: Up is down, black is white, dog shit tastes good with mashed potatoes. This is how the collective response to an unsolved series of killings works: Shock and anger are followed by fear and the purchase of weapons and security systems, arrest of a scapegoat, rumors that the killer
’s wealthy family has quietly committed him, or sometimes the mind-numbing statement by the investigators that the evidence they could not find proves the homicides are not related and that a serial killer is not at large in the community.
What does an intelligent investigator do? He doesn’t listen to any of it. The detail that stuck with me from my conversation with Cormac was the Maltese cross on Lautrec’s calf. I used the word “collective” regarding the response to killings. For me, the word is always a pejorative. My father spoke a form of English that was hardly a language, but in Cajun French he could speak insightfully. My favorite of his sayings was “Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed?”
My feelings were stronger than his. Hobnailed boots in unison never bode well for anyone, and the further down the food chain you get, the more heinous the agenda. The Maltese cross meant Lautrec was on board. But with what? He was neither a leader nor a follower; he was an opportunist, a walking gland, a genetic throwback trying to lure a primitive woman in animal skins away from the fire and into the darkness of the cave. What would frighten him so much that he would bail off a chair and swing back and forth on an electrical cord and not pull his wrists loose from the tape that barely restrained them?
Of course, there was another possibility. Maybe he was guilty. I believed then and I believe now that he was one of those made different in the womb. He enjoyed cruelty and visiting it upon women he couldn’t control. I suspected he was capable of inflicting the kind of damage that had been done to Hilary Bienville before she died. Or he could have been a secondary participant in the attack. He had worked in the parish prison during the previous administration, when inmates were badly abused. Once again, I had no answers. I heard the cops who nailed the Hillside Stranglers never had answers either. Or the ones who nailed BTK in Kansas or the Night Stalker in Los Angeles.
I went down to Bailey’s office, but she had left for the day. I drove to her house. The sun had gone out of the sky, and the rainbow arcing into City Park had evaporated, replaced by smoke from the sugar mill that drifted onto the trees and grass like black lint.
• • •
BAILEY WAS IN the backyard, playing with her calico cat, who had the male name of Maxwell Gato. She picked up Maxwell and bounced Maxwell’s rump in her palm and handed her to me. Maxwell was a longhair and must have had twenty pounds of fat on her. I bounced her up and down also. The cat closed her eyes. I could feel her purring.
“What’s going on, sailor?” Bailey said.
“Sailor?”
“You don’t like that?”
“That’s what my wife Bootsie used to call me. Did you eat?”
“No. How about I fix us something? Then we might mess around. How’s that?”
“That’s pretty nice.”
But I was hiding my feelings. I didn’t feel right about Bailey. She was an aging man’s wet dream. Beautiful, intelligent, loving, and full of laughter in bed. Pardon me if my remarks are too personal or if they violate good taste. She smelled like flowers and the ocean when she made love, and she moaned like one of Homer’s Sirens. In the last heart-twisting moment, I felt an electric current inside her that seemed to take control of both of us. Her body and mouth and hands and ragged breath and even her nails hooked in my back became a gift, a prayer rather than an erotic act, a moment so intense I wanted to die inside it and never leave. When I rose from her, I felt unworthy of what had just happened in my life.
I watched her at the stove. Her thick brown hair was piled on her head, spiked with two long wooden pins, the kind that women wore during the Victorian era. I had not noticed earlier that her stove was refashioned from one manufactured to burn wood. It had claw feet, and the porcelain was painted with green tendrils, as it would have been in an earlier time.
“Will you quit staring at me?” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Do I remind you of someone else? The wife you lost?”
“You remind me of everything that’s good.”
“No, I can see it in your eyes when you think I’m not looking. I’m someone else to you.”
“I don’t believe that time is sequential,” I said. “I believe the world belongs to the dead as well as the unborn. I’ve seen Confederate soldiers in the mist at Spanish Lake. I’ve wanted to join them.”
“Did you just say what I think you did?”
“I think I stole you from another time. I’m sure that’s what Desmond thinks. I fear someone may take revenge on me by hurting you or Clete or Alafair.”
“You’re talking about Desmond? He’s in jail.”
“For breaking and entering. It won’t stick.”
“I can take care of myself. You get these crazy ideas out of your head. You also need to forget about Confederates in the mist.”
“They’re there. I’ve talked with them. I put my hand through a drummer boy’s shoulder. He was killed at Shiloh.”
Her eyes were empty; I wondered if she was deciding whether to ignore me or to disengage from our relationship. She let in Maxwell Gato, then lifted her up and kissed the top of her head and put her in my arms. “The world belongs to the living, Dave. These things you’re telling me have nothing to do with reality. What’s really
on your mind is our relationship. You think you’re too old for me, and you think you’re doing something morally wrong.”
“That’s not true,” I lied.
“You’re in better shape than men who are thirty-five. You’re honest and kind and brave. You think I care about your age?”
“A few years down the road you will.”
“Let me worry about that. What did you mean when you said you stole me out of another time?”
“I think there’re doors in the dimensions.” Maxwell Gato began pushing her back feet into my arm so I would play with her. I gently tugged her tail and bounced her up and down. “I’ve always thought normalcy was overrated.”
Bailey was wearing moccasins. She took Maxwell Gato from me and set her on the floor, then stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the mouth and folded her arms behind my neck. “Do you love me, Dave?”
“Of course.”
“Like a daughter? Because that’s the way you’re talking to me.”
“I love you because you’re one of the best people I’ve ever known, and one of the most beautiful.”
She stood on my shoes and buried her head in my neck, her body shaking.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“I’m always all right. Just hold me.”
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Hold me. Tighter. Please.”
An hour later, she got up from the bed and showered and came back into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around her, her body damp and warm and glowing. She lay down next to me, then cupped her body into mine and held my hand with both of hers and told me what she said she had never told anyone, at least not in detail.
• • •
AT AGE SEVENTEEN, one year into her widowhood, she had a summer job as a ticket taker for a carnival and rodeo and Wild West show that was headquartered in Louisiana and traveled through the Great American Desert. In the fairgrounds of a small city in Utah rimmed with red cliffs and a green river flanged by cottonwoods, she was tearing tickets at the entrance when she saw three young men sitting on the back of a flatbed truck. They were sweaty and sunbrowned, with physiques as lean as lizards. They wore beat-up black cowboy hats and tight Wranglers and cowboy boots stippled with hay and manure. They grinned as though they knew her; they were drinking soda pop and eating handfuls of pork rinds from a bag. The tallest one pulled a bottle from a cooler and dropped off the flatbed and approached her.
“Want a Coca-Cola, darlin’?” he said. “Ice-cold.”
“No, thank you,” she said.
There was a shine in his eyes. He was shaved, his black hair trimmed, his face fine-boned and tanned and unwrinkled. “Bet you don’t remember me.”
“You don’t look familiar.”
“I knew Boyd. Your husband. I drove with him a couple of times. In Baton Rouge.”
She waited for him to offer his sympathies. Instead, he grinned. “I’m glad I run into you. I owed Boyd some money. Eighty dollars, to be exact. My name is Randy Armstrong. When I was driving, they called me the Bogalusa Flash.”
“That’s where you’re from?”
He seemed not to hear her. He took out his wallet. “Sorry about what happened. It’s part of the reason I gave up stock car driving. I’ve got thirty dollars here. I’ll have the rest tomorrow.”
“That’s very nice of you.” She took the money from his hand, her fingers touching his palm.
The next morning she went about her chores, feeding animals, serving food under the tent where the roustabouts and the operators of the rides ate. In two days they would be loading the animals onto a train and the carnival rides on trucks and heading for Grand Junction. Randy and his two friends were at one of the tables. He winked at her. “Payday today,” he said. “I ain’t forgot.”
She shared a small round-cornered aluminum trailer with an Indian woman named Greta who sold jewelry and T-shirts and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank half a bottle of cough syrup every night before going to sleep. That evening Bailey served the tables under the tent, then sat down and ate by herself and watched the sun set on the cliffs and the green river and the cottonwoods, the air filled with the music from the carousel and the shouts of teenagers on the rides, the evening sky turquoise and printed with the lights of the Ferris wheel and the Kamikaze.
She saw no sign of Randy and his friends. Not until late the next night, when the lights were clicking off on the rides and the game booths, and the roustabouts were starting to take down
the Kamikaze. Randy tapped on her trailer door and removed his hat when she opened it. He handed her a fifty-dollar bill. “I didn’t get my check cashed till today. Let’s get a taco before they give it to the hogs. I ain’t kidding. A pig farmer buys all this slop they been feeding people at five dollars a plate.”
“If it’s slop, why do you eat it?” she said.
The New Iberia Blues Page 30