“You’re saying he’s a symbol? Something we turned loose on ourselves? So what?”
“I know who he is. I just can’t prove it. I can almost see him in my mind.”
“I think you’re slipping your mooring,” she said.
“I’m a detail or two away.”
“If you knew who our guy was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I didn’t answer. She looked into my eyes. “Don’t you dare, Dave.”
“Clete feels the same way.”
“I don’t care what you feel. Neither one of you is an executioner.”
I left her standing there and walked out of my own office.
“You hear me?” she called down the hallway.
I kept walking, down the stairs, through the foyer, and out the rear exit and into the brightness and the cold of the day and the tannic odor of late autumn on the wind.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, ALAFAIR came in late. I was reading under a lamp in the living room. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon were curled up with each other on the rug.
“I called you a couple of times,” I said. “Where were you?”
“With Desmond and some of the crew,” she replied. “We have to go back to Arizona and reshoot a couple of scenes.”
“Now is not a good time to be around Desmond.”
“I work for him.”
“Smiley Wimple is in the vicinity. He’s badly wounded. I think he’s going to paint the walls before he goes out.”
“What does that have to do with Desmond?”
“Everything.”
“You’re fixated, Dave. You don’t see it.”
“Fixated on what?”
“The destruction of the world you grew up in.”
“I’m supposed to ignore it?”
“You’re also fixated on Bailey Ribbons,” she said.
“She has nothing to do with this.”
“You got yourself into a relationship that you feel is wrong. You see her as a symbol rather than as a woman. You feel guilty about loving all the things you love. How fucked up is that?”
“Don’t use that language in our house.”
“Sorry, I’ll go across the street and send you semaphores through the window.”
I put down the book I was reading and went into the kitchen. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon followed me, probably thinking they would get a snack.
“I didn’t mean it, Dave,” Alafair said from the doorway.
“What was that about semaphores?”
“Nothing. I was just grabbing a word out of nowhere.”
“Do you work with anyone who knows sign language?”
“I’ve never seen anyone on the set use it.”
“The guy who almost killed Clete knows sign language. He was using it to communicate with Jaime O’Banion at the motel.”
“Why are you coming down on Desmond?”
“Because he’s dirty. Because he lies. Just like all the people who prey on us.”
“You’ll never change,” she said.
I spread newspaper on the floor and opened a can of sardines and put it down for Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon.
“Answer my question, Dave. In what way is Desmond dirty?”
She was leaning against the doorframe, her black hair auraed with lights from the streetlamps on Main, her weight slouched on one foot, her jeans hanging low on her lips. It was hard to believe that this tall beautiful woman was the little Salvadoran girl I’d pulled from an air bubble trapped inside a sunken airplane off Southwest Pass.
“Take care of yourself, Baby Squanto,” I said. “Don’t let this collection of motherfuckers fool you.”
“You make me want to weep,” she replied.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY was Saturday. I woke at four and fed the animals on the back steps, then drove in the coldness of the dawn to Clete’s motor court. I tapped lightly on the door. The oak trees were ticking with water in the darkness, the bayou swirling through the cattails and canebrakes along the bank. Clete opened the door in a strap undershirt and boxer shorts that went almost to his knees.
“Most noble mon,” he said, his eyes full of sleep.
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. He sat down in a stuffed chair, a blanket humped over his shoulders. A crack of light from the bathroom fell on his face. His cheeks were unshaved, his hair hanging on his forehead like a little boy’s. He tried to act attentive, then his head sank on his chest. I felt sorry for waking him and burdening him with my troubles; however, I knew no one else I could go to. I may have seemed the secular priest in his life, but the truth was otherwise. Yes, Clete was the trickster from medieval folklore, Sancho Panza with a badge, but these attributes were cosmetic and had little to do with the true nature of the man. Clete Purcel was the egalitarian knight, the real deal, his armor rusted, his sword unsheathed, his loyalties unfailing, with a heart as big as the world.
“They’re going to get away with it,” I said.
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Desmond Cormier and his entourage. They’re going back to Arizona and shutting down the circus while we lick our wounds.”
“I’m not copying, big mon. I need coffee and massive nutrients.”
“Stay where you are.”
I started a pot of chicory coffee and got out a skillet and loaded it with six eggs, eight strips of bacon, and a ring of buttered biscuits.
“Fix some for yourself, too,” he said.
“I did.”
“Oh.”
I broke two more eggs into the skillet, then set the table. I could feel his eyes on me.
“You’re thinking about doing it under a black flag?” he said.
“Call it what you want.”
“I can live with black flags,” he said. “You can’t.”
“The friends of Tillinger you met at the graveyard service told you he was mixed up in arms sales?”
“That’s what the preacher said. He visited Tillinger in jail.”
“That means he didn’t come here just to see Lucinda Arceneaux,” I said.
“Hard to say,” Clete replied. “The preacher said Tillinger wanted to get clean of his past.”
“Okay, think about it. We’ve got all kinds of information that doesn’t seem to connect with itself. Russians building nuclear reactors, money laundering in Malta, greaseballs out of Miami, Nicky Scarfo’s old crowd in Jersey. So what’s the common denominator?”
“Desmond Cormier doesn’t care where he gets his money,” Clete said. “What’s unusual about that? Casino owners and marijuana growers pay millions in taxes. The IRS doesn’t want that kind of money?”
“Except the issue is not the money,” I said. “The issue is about a guy who hates this area and hates the people in it and most of all hates women who are a challenge to him.”
Clete looked into space as though seeing the bodies of Bella Delahoussaye and Hilary Bienville. He came to the table and sat down but didn’t touch his food. “No, it goes deeper than that. The guy put a rose and a chalice in Bella’s hands?”
“That’s right.”
“How’s that fit with the guy who hates this area?”
“He was offering a sacrifice.”
“To what?”
“To himself, although he doesn’t know that.”
“And the only real evidence y’all have is the black gym bag from Cormier’s garage?”
“Yeah, with Lucinda Arceneaux’s shoe and blouse inside.”
“And Cormier still says he doesn’t know who owns the bag?”
“Yep.”
Clete started eating, his eyes lidless. “He’s got a Maltese cross tattooed on his ankle?”
I nodded.
“There’s another possibility in all this, Dave. You’re not going to like it.”
“What?”
“Smiley Wimple. This guy kills people like other people change their socks.”
“Wrong guy,” I said.
“A guy who fries people with
a flamethrower is the wrong guy?”
“He covered your back a couple of times, and now you feel guilty about it,” I said.
“You think Cormier is really behind all this?”
“I can’t get him out of my head,” I said.
Clete pushed away his plate and drank from his coffee. “How do you want to play it?”
“Dust ’em or bust ’em. The choice is theirs.”
“But that’s not what you’re thinking about, is it?” he said.
“Who wants to get to the barn wearing a drip bag?”
In the distance, somewhere beyond the watery rim of the place where I had been born, I thought I heard horns echoing off canyon walls. Or maybe that was just my grandiose disguise for what we in AA call self-will run riot.
• • •
SMILEY HAD USED a pair of sterilized tweezers to remove the .25-caliber piece of lead that one of the bad people at the motel had parked in his side. He had also packed the wound with gauze and medicine he had stolen from a pharmacy. The blood had coagulated and no longer leaked through the bandage, but he could see the inflammation around the edges of the tape, and when he touched it, it was as tender as an infected boil.
There was a doctor in Houston and another in New Orleans, both addicts, with malevolent eyes and fingers that were dirty and invasive. Smiley had almost shot one of them for the way he looked at Smiley’s wee-wee. In fact, if Smiley made it out of this one, he might visit the good doctor again, this time with a can of Liquid-Plumr.
The pain pills he had stolen allowed him to sleep and to walk without a limp and, most important, to think clearly. What was there to think about? Getting the people who were responsible for his pain, who had sent Jaime O’Banion after him, who had caused the killing of the innocent colored women and who wanted to kill his friend the fat man named Clete Purcel.
The movie people were part of it. They had to be. O’Banion must have been paid with Jersey or Miami money, the same source used by the movie people.
Outside an Opelousas bar, Smiley had boosted a Ford-150 pickup that a pair of rednecks had left the key in. The dash panel was like a spaceship’s. He loved diving into it and smelling the leather and feeling the power of the engine and the deep-throated rumble of the exhaust. If Smiley straightened out a few people in the next day or so, he could be on his way to Mexico with about thirty thousand in cash that he kept in a backpack, leaving behind his weapons and all the hateful people he had worked for. He’d check into a hospital, maybe in Monterrey, and watch the evening sun turn into a blue melt over the hills while he ate a bucket of ice cream with a spoon that had a head the size of a silver dollar.
On Saturday morning he drove to the movie set outside Morgan City and was told that the film company was shutting down and holding a wrap party at City Park in New Iberia. Everyone was invited as a thank-you and tribute to the city. He checked into a motel on the four-lane south of town, then showered and dressed in a white suit with a glittering blue vest and suede boots and a plum-colored tie and a planter’s straw hat that rested on his ears, his pain in containment. There was only one problem. A flicker was going on behind his eyes, as though someone were clicking a light switch on and off inside his head.
At the park, children were playing on the swings and seesaws and the jungle gym, running through the picnic shelters and the tables loaded with food and drinks. Where did all the children come from? He saw flowers, too, or swirls of color inside the deep greenness of the grass where there should have been no flowers or swirls of color. It was the end of autumn or even the beginning of winter, wasn’t it? Some of the children looked Hispanic, with elongated eyes and badly cropped hair. He was sure he knew them from years ago. Some had died at the orphanage, one of them so small and emaciated that his body was removed in a pillowcase.
The earth seemed to be moving under his feet. He sat down at a picnic table under one of the shelters and waited for his dizziness to pass. It didn’t. A Cajun band was playing a song he had heard over and over since he came to Acadiana.
Jolie blonde, regardez donc t’as fait,
Tu m’as quitte pour t’en aller,
Pour t’en aller avec an autre, qui, que moi,
Quel expoir et quell avenir, mais moi, je vais avoir?
Even though he spoke Spanish, Smiley could not understand the Acadian dialect. But somehow he knew the song was about loss. The musicians were sunbrowned and lean, the kind of Cajun men for whom privation had been a way of life during the days of the oligarchy. They played most of their songs with joy, but not this one. The cast in their eyes was funereal. Smiley felt a spasm in his side as though a lance had pierced it.
Two little girls were staring at him. They were wearing pinafores and had flowers in their hair. Their eyes seemed unnaturally sunken. “You all right, mister?” one of them said.
“I have a tummyache,” he said. “My name is Smiley. What’s yours?”
“I’m Felicity,” one said. She had red hair and was covered with freckles. “This is Perpetua. Your face don’t have no color, Smiley.”
He slipped his hand into his coat pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “There’s an ice cream truck by the street. Can you get me a Buster Bar and whatever y’all want?”
They walked away, looking back at him strangely. What bothered him about the girls? Their dresses were clean, but their skin looked powdered with dust. He felt the ground shift again and wondered if he was losing his mind. The oaks shook, and leaves as thin as gold scrapings filtered through the limbs and bands of sunlight. He reached down and picked up a handful of leaves. They fell apart and sifted and then disappeared between his fingers. For a moment he thought he saw Wonder Woman at the edge of his vision, her gold lariat dripping from her belt, her magic bracelets and her star-spangled bosom bathed in cold sunshine.
He knew there was a term for the affliction he had. What was it? Peritonitis? A septic intrusion working its way through his entrails, boring a hole in his stomach. He felt his colon constrict; his eyes went out of focus.
Help me, he said to Wonder Woman.
But she was lost in the crowd, maybe gone from the park entirely. His heart sank at the thought of being alone. He saw the little girls coming toward him. The girl with the freckles was carrying a cold bag. She put it in his palm. “Your Buster Bar and change are in the bag.”
“Where are yours?”
“We don’t need any. We’re here to take you home.”
“Home?” he said.
“We’re dead, Smiley,” the other girl said. “We’ve been that way a long time.”
He rose from the table, backing away from them. Then he turned and plunged into the crowd, past the platform where the Cajun band was playing “Allons à Lafayette.”
He continued walking through the trees to the other side of the park, deep into a clump of oaks where there were no tables or picnic shelters and the grass was uncut and strung with paper cups and napkins and plates blown from the recreational areas. It was cold in the shade. Or was he losing blood, causing his body temperature to drop? He saw a Subaru convertible parked farther down the slope, the top and windows up, the shadows of the trees black on the windows. He saw a black woman moving around in the back seat, as though trying to position herself on her knees and not finding adequate space.
Then he realized what he was watching.
The images filled him with embarrassment and shame; they were part of the unclean thoughts he’d been taught not to have. The man was spread-eagled, his shirt unbuttoned, his trousers down, his bronzed muscle-corded abdomen exposed. The woman’s head moved up and down above his body. The man’s eyes were closed, his face suffused with pleasure.
Smiley wanted to run away. But he recognized the man: He was one of the movie people. The men always looked the same—their bodies hard, their hair bleached at the tips, the sun’s warmth trapped inside their skin, their teeth perfect, their eyes sparkling as they stared into the faces of ordinary people, never blinking.
<
br /> No one else was around. Smiley pulled his small .22 semi-auto from his pants pocket and clicked off the safety. He curled his left hand inside the Subaru’s door handle. Neither the woman nor the man heard him ease the door open. Then the woman stopped what she was doing and turned around and held both of her hands in front of her face, her bottom lip quivering.
“No,” she said. “Please, suh. Please, please.”
Smiley pulled the trigger. The firing pin snapped on a dead round. The man came to life, his eyes opening, his teeth shiny with saliva.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
CLETE HAD TO pick up a bail skip in St. Martinville at nine a.m. I left him at the motor court and drove to Desmond’s home on Cypremort Point. My cut-down twelve-gauge was wrapped in a blanket behind the seat. I had no plan in mind. However, that statement is one I have always distrusted in other people, and I distrust it even more when I think it or say it myself. The unconscious always knows what the person is doing or planning. The agenda is to find the situation and the rationale that will allow the individual to commit deeds that are unconscionable.
No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It. I cannot praise the nuances of Fuck It enough, but you already know the drill. I ached to get back on that old-time rock and roll, this time not with the flak juice but with double-aught bucks and pumpkin balls at point-blank range.
Don’t mistake this for a paean to the gun culture. It’s my admission of the madness that has defined most of my adult life.
No one was home. A gardener was raking the yard. He said Mr. Cormier was at a picnic in New Iberia.
“How about Mr. Butterworth?” I said.
“I don’t have no truck wit’ Mr. Butterworth’s goings or comings, suh,” he said, his eyes downcast.
I drove back home and left the shotgun behind the seat and went inside. I heard Alafair clicking on her keyboard in her bedroom. I stood in the doorway until she reached a stopping place. Snuggs was sleeping inside her manuscript basket, his thick tail hanging through the wire. I didn’t know where Mon Tee Coon was. Alafair’s hands were still for a long time, as though she were coming out of a trance.
The New Iberia Blues Page 38