The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

“It’s finger-licking-good slop.”

  She went with him to the taco stand, and he got two plates free from the concession operator, and they sat on a wood bench and ate the tacos.

  “Ever been to Grand Junction?” he said.

  “No,” she replied.

  “I know the hot spots. Dancing and all.” He grinned with innocent self-satisfaction. “Eat up. I got to check on them two boys I live with. Then we’ll take a walk up in them cliffs, catch the last of the sunset.”

  They went to his trailer, a big one that had curtains on the windows and an air cooler on top. His friends were sitting in folding chairs outside, enjoying the breeze.

  “I got to get something,” Randy said.

  “What?” she said.

  “An ice-cold root beer.” He stepped inside, then motioned her in as though wanting to share a secret. He closed the door behind her. “I got some chocolate cake in here that’ll break your heart, if them two out there ain’t ate it all.”

  “We’d better be going if we’re going to see the sun set,” she said.

  He took the cake out of the refrigerator. The shelves were almost empty except for a bottle of bulk wine. The cake was small and had not been cut. He sliced it in half and pared off a thick chunk and put it on a paper plate with a plastic fork and handed the plate to her. “Give it a try. They got twelve-step programs for people that take just one bite. I got to wash my hands.” He held them up as though that proved what he planned to do.

  She put a small piece on the fork and eased it onto her tongue. It was good. Minutes later, she heard the toilet flush and the faucet squeaking. He came out of the bathroom wiping his hands on a paper towel. “I’m ready for a chunk of that my own self. But first—” He opened the refrigerator again and lifted out the bottle of bulk wine. “I have one glass a night. Just one. To prove I control it, that it don’t control me.”

  “You had a problem with it?” she said.

  “Not no more. I’m my own man, not like them sobriety people always whining about it, know what I mean?”

  “Not quite,” she said.

  He looked at her empty plate. “You munched it down. Want some more?”

  “No, thank you. Could I use your bathroom?”

  “You betcha. I just douched it with a little air freshener.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Don’t pay me no mind.”

  She stepped inside the narrow confines of the bathroom. After she relieved herself, she tried to rise from the toilet seat and seemed to melt inside. She felt as though the tendons in the backs of her knees had been severed. Her hands and arms and vocal cords were useless. Spittle ran in a string off the corner of her lip.

  Randy opened the door. “You all right, little lady? Here, get up. That’s it. Walk with me. That’s right, baby. Everything is gonna be all right. Lie down on my bed and let me get your shoes off. Relax, the Bogalusa Flash is on the job.”

  Through a haze, she saw his two friends appear behind him. He shoved them back out the door. “Wait your turn,” he said.

  • • •

  SHE WOKE AT dawn, rolled up in a ball by her trailer, shivering in the dew. She pulled herself up on her knees. The strap of her hand-tooled leather purse was tangled around her neck. Her clothes and skin and hair stank of the wine she remembered someone forcing over her teeth and down her throat. She stumbled into the trailer and got sick in the bathroom.

  “What happened to you?” said Greta, the woman she lived with.

  Bailey sat in a chair and wiped her face with a washcloth, then opened her purse and took out her wallet. The thirty loose bills Randy had given her earlier and the fifty-dollar bill he had given her later were gone. She pulled aside the curtain on the back window and gazed at the empty spot where Randy’s trailer and diesel truck had been parked. “I think I need to go to a hospital.”

  “Hospital?” Greta said. “ ’Cause you got drunk?”

  A dog with mange was defecating in the bare spot. After it scratched dirt over its feces, it limped away, one of its back legs obviously injured.

  “That’s what they’ll say, won’t they? That I got drunk.”

  “We’re carnival people, girl. It ain’t an easy life.”

  • • •

  HER HEAD LAY sideways on the pillow, her eyes looking into mine.

  “What’s the rest?” I asked.

  “The show went to Grand Junction that same day,” she said. “Randy and his friends weren’t there.”

  “You didn’t call the cops?”

  “Seventeen, drenched in wine, smelling of vomit? That would have given Bubba and Joe Bob a good laugh.”

  “What happened down the track?”

  “It was August, the end of the season. We were up by the Indian res in western Montana, at the foot of the Mission Mountains. I remember ice in a waterfall high up on the mountain. The ice looked like teeth.”

  “Those guys showed up?”

  “They were already there. Greta parked us about a hundred yards from them. I had almost made my peace with what they did.”

  “Greta didn’t give you any advice?”

  “She was a Lakota. She said, ‘The way of the world ain’t the way of Wakan Tanka.’ That meant you were on your own.”

  “What happened to those guys, Bailey?”

  Her eyes went past me to a photo on the wall. In it were her grandfather with his crew in front of a B-17. “I ended up serving them at the table under the tent. Outside, Randy said, ‘Glad you put it behind you, little lady. Truth is, Boyd owed me eighty dollars, not the other way around. I guess I figured Boyd still owed me. Sorry about that.’ ”

  “What’d you say to him?”

  “Nothing. I went back to the trailer and cried.”

  I sat on the side of the bed. I was in my skivvies. Maxwell Gato jumped on the bed and got between us and flipped on her back. I picked her up and set her on the floor. “You did something, Bailey. What was it?”

  “It happened that night,” Bailey said. “The rides and fairways had all shut down. I went to their trailer and knocked. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted them to hurt me so somebody would call the police and arrest them. Or maybe I simply wanted them to look me in the face. If I’d had a gun, I would have scared them. There was no sound inside. I think they were stoned. It’s funny how I felt. I wasn’t thinking about them. I kept an empty spot in my head, like I didn’t want to know what I was planning to do. Snow was blowing off the tops of the mountains in the moonlight, and I thought about how beautiful the earth was.”

  She sat on the side of the bed and took her shirt off the bedpost and began putting it on.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  She buttoned her shirt slowly, staring at the wall as though it were a movie screen. Her back was cold when I touched it. “I don’t want to do this to you, Dave.”

  “You’re not doing anything to me.”

  “There was an orange crate full of butcher paper by a Dumpster not far away, and a five-gallon can of diesel in the back of their pickup truck. I put the crate under the propane tank on the trailer and poured the diesel on it and set it on fire.”

  I stared at her. She had been right. I wasn’t ready for it. “Tell me the rest.”

  “The fire was very fast. I could feel the heat on my skin, even while I was running away. They died. All of them. I didn’t see them die, but I heard them. I put my fingers in my ears.”

  “This didn’t happen from a burning propane tank.”

  “The trailer was a meth lab.”

  “Nobody questioned you?”

  “No one had reason to. I started to tell Greta. She put her hand over my mouth. So now you know.”

  There are moments when you realize that our greatest vanity lies in the belief that we have control of our lives and that reason holds sway in human affairs. Hugo Tillinger was probably wrongly convicted for the arson murder of his family and now lay in a coma, put there by a young deputy consumed by guilt. My homicide p
artner had burned three men to death, and no one knew about it except me and an Indian woman who was probably dead. As Stephen Crane suggested long ago, most of us are adverbs, never nouns, not even the pitiful degenerates who gang-raped a trusting seventeen-year-old girl.

  “Those guys dealt it,” I said. “You didn’t intend to kill them. I think they got what they deserved. That’s it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “They wrote their fate before they ever met you. How many lives did they destroy with meth? How many other girls would they have raped? Don’t stack the time of evil people, Bailey.”

  She sat down next to me and rested her head on my shoulder. “Have I made a burden for you?”

  “Want to know the truth? When guys like that buy it, I’m glad.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “My mother and my second wife died at the hands of guys like that. I say fuck all of them.”

  I felt her body jerk with the coarseness of my language. “I’m sorry,” I said. But my words were gibberish. There are images you never get out of your head, and we both knew it.

  Chapter Thirty

  THURSDAY HAD BEEN a long day for Clete. He had to pry a bail skip out of a chimney in Abbeville. The skip’s hysterical girlfriend tore Clete’s new sport coat with a butcher knife. A disbarred lawyer stuck him with a bad check for a two-month investigation, and his Caddy got towed from a yellow zone. That evening he ate downtown and took a walk onto the drawbridge by Burke Street. He leaned on the rail and looked down at the long bronze ribbon of Bayou Teche unspooling beneath his feet, its banks lined with live oaks and lily pads. It seemed to dip off the edge of the earth.

  He could see the fireflies in the trees and smell gas on the wind, and he felt a sense of mortality that was as cold and damp as the grave. The light was shrinking on the horizon, and an island of dead leaves was floating under the bridge, undulating with the current. He had a package of cigarettes in his pocket and wanted to light one up. He tore up the package and dropped the pieces down a sewer drain.

  It was almost dark when he got back to the motor court. He parked the Caddy in the cul-de-sac and went inside his cottage and turned on the television, not caring which channel came on. He cracked a Budweiser and was tempted to pour a shot in it but instead sat down in his stuffed chair and tried to concentrate on the television and forget the morbid sensations that had flooded him on the drawbridge. Then he realized he was watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

  He turned off the set, returned his unfinished beer to the refrigerator, chain-locked the door, showered, and put on his pajamas. The time was 9:17. The rest of the world might have its troubles, but Clete Purcel was going to bed early, safe and sound in his cottage that was always squared away and meticulously clean. If he was lucky, he would sleep through the night without dreaming and rise to a better day, one in which he did not feel the pull of the earth.

  An hour later, deep inside his sleep, he felt a squeeze on his wrist. He opened his eyes in the blackness. His right hand jerked tight against a handcuff that was hooked to the bed frame. Four feet away, a diminutive man with the complexion and muscle tone of liquid soap was seated in a chair, illuminated by the glow of the bathroom night-light.

  “Hi, hi,” the man said. “Guess who came to see you.”

  Clete pinched his eyes and waited for them to adjust. “How’d you get in?”

  “The cleaning lady left the door open,” the man said. “I’ve been under your bed since this afternoon. Your carpet is smelly.”

  The man wore pink tennis shoes and tight shorts and a boxlike white hat with a starched brim and had a smile that made Clete think of red licorice. A small semi-automatic rested on his thigh.

  “You hooked me up with my own cuffs,” Clete said. “Pretty impressive.”

  “I could have done something else to you. I have the chemicals to do it.”

  “Listen, Wimple—”

  “No! No! No! It is rude to call people by their last names. Do. Not. Do. That.”

  “Sorry,” Clete said. “Let me start over. Listen. Guy. Who. Burns. People. Alive. With. A. Flamethrower, what the fuck are you doing in my cottage?”

  “The people I used to work for are after me.”

  “Just because you lit up a couple of their guys? I’m shocked.”

  “They violated me. With a tree branch.”

  “How about unhooking me and we’ll talk about it? You want some ice cream? That’s a big favorite of yours, right?”

  “Don’t try to trick me.”

  “You know my daughter is Gretchen Horowitz, don’t you?”

  “She kills for hire.”

  “That’s what she did, past tense. She’s a documentary filmmaker now. But don’t get her pissed off, know what I mean?”

  “You mean, don’t hurt you?”

  “What I’m saying to you is don’t fuck with the wrong people, Smiley whatever-the-fuck-your-last-name-is.”

  “I didn’t give you permission to call me Smiley.”

  “Then shove it up your ass.”

  “The deputy who shot my friend Hugo Tillinger is named Sean McClain.”

  “Tillinger is your friend?”

  “Why did the deputy kill him?”

  “Tillinger pointed a Luger at McClain. At Dave Robicheaux, too. Dave’s on the square. You know that. I’m going to turn on my side, okay?”

  “I took the gun from under your mattress.”

  “I’m still going to turn on my side. Look, you got a rotten deal as a child. I can relate to that. But you’re coming down on the wrong people. Diggez-vous on that, noble mon?”

  “Dig what?”

  “Sean McClain is a good kid. He’s going through a bad time over what happened. Like you said, the Mob is your problem. They’re assholes, not interesting guys who look like Marlon Brando and James Caan. What do you know about the Jersey crowd?”

  “They lent a lot of money to a movie company here.”

  “You hear anything about Russians?”

  “They’re building atomic reactors. They launder money in a place called Malta.”

  “How do you know this shit?”

  “I hear people in Miami and New Or-yuns talk.”

  “Unhook me. I’ll give you a free pass. You got my word.”

  “Do you want to be my friend?”

  “I think you’re a righteous dude. Everybody has a few character defects.”

  “You know what I’ll do if you lie, don’t you?”

  “I got a sense of your potential when you poured Drano down Tony Nemo’s throat.”

  Smiley got up and stuck the semi-auto into his pants pocket. His stomach was pouched over his waistband. He leaned down, pausing long enough to search Clete’s eyes. He popped the manacle with Clete’s key and stepped back.

  Clete pushed himself up in bed, his hands in full view. “What’d you do with my piece?”

  “Your thirty-eight?”

  “Yeah, my thirty-eight.”

  “You’ll find it when you go wee-wee.”

  “You dropped my thirty-eight in the bowl?”

  “I flushed first.”

  “Can I dress?”

  “No.”

  “This is getting to be a drag. Will you tell me what you want and get out of my life?”

  “I want to hire you to cover my back. I’ll be your friend.”

  “I appreciate the compliment, but you’ve killed too many people. I think you enjoy it. That’s not a good sign.”

  “The people I killed hurt children.”

  “I don’t think that one will wash, Wimple. Sorry. Smiley.”

  “If they didn’t hurt children, they protected people who did. Are you calling me a liar?”

  “Look, you did me a solid once. You took out a former gunbull who was two seconds from snuffing my wick. But you started a gunfight that killed a female detective. She was my lady for a while. That one won’t go away.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Te
ll her that.”

  Smiley’s teeth looked like rows of tiny white pearls, the gums barely holding them in place. His nostrils were slits. “In or out?”

  “Out,” Clete replied, his eyes flat. He waited, his mouth dry.

  “You’re making me mad,” Smiley said.

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  Smiley stood up from the chair. “Sometimes I do bad things when I get mad.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I didn’t. You took on the Mob. Nobody has ever done that. You’ve probably got them dumping in their drawers. But don’t let them take you alive. You copy on that? Go out smoking.”

  A gust of rain and wind swept across the roof; lightning that made no sound bloomed around the edges of the curtains.

  “Will you try to follow me?” Smiley said.

  “No.”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “No, you do not know what I’m thinking,” Clete said.

  “We’re alike.”

  “Time to beat feet, podjo.”

  “We’re two of a kind. I like you. I want you to be my friend.”

  “You’re getting weird on me, little mon. Are you hearing me? Hello, Mars.”

  “Little mon?”

  “Take it as a compliment.”

  “I’ll be in touch. So will she.”

  “Who is ‘she’?”

  “Wonder Woman. She looks over me.”

  Clete sat on the edge of the bed, his hands cupped on his knees. He stared at the floor. “I’ve really enjoyed this. But I’m going in the bathroom now.”

  “You took care of an orphan boy.”

  “You can’t win on the game you pitched last week,” Clete said.

  Clete continued to gaze at the floor, his head bowed. He heard the door open and felt the rain rush inside, then heard the door close. He got up from the bed and looked through the curtains. The driveway was black and shiny and empty. He went into the bathroom and retrieved his snub-nose from the toilet bowl and washed it, then dried it and oiled it and put it into its holster and lay back down and stared at the ceiling and listened to rain pattering on the roof, his eyelids stitched to his forehead.

  • • •

  HE WAS AT my back door early the next morning. Alafair and I were at the breakfast table. This was an old routine with Clete. At sunset he would begin deconstructing the world and himself, then at sunrise be at my door, forlorn and stinking of rut and weed and beer sweat and in need of my absolution, as though I had any such power.