The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  The sandspits were blanketed with egrets that rose clattering in the canopy while we tried to work our way silently through the sloughs and over logs and piles of organic debris that squished under our feet and smelled like fish roe.

  Air vines hung in our faces, and a bull gator slithered on its belly into a deep black pool six feet from us, and cottonmouths that had not gone into hibernation were coiled on cypress limbs just above the waterline. Behind us, out on the Gulf of Mexico, the sun was a giant dull-red orb that seemed to give no heat. Clete was ahead of me, his shoulders humped, his rifle in a sling position, a thirty-round magazine inserted in the well. He cocked his left arm, his fist clenched, signaling me to stop. Through the flooded trees and the late sunlight dancing on the water, I could see a dry mound and a cabin built of untreated pine that had turned black from lichen and water settlement and lack of sunlight. Wind chimes tinkled on the gallery, and smoke rose in the twilight from an ancient chimney and flattened in the trees. I could smell either crabs or crawfish boiling in a pot. The scene could have been lifted from 1942, just before a United States Coast Guard plane came in low over the water and dropped a single charge and broke the back of a Nazi sub.

  In back of the cabin were a privy and a stump that served as a butcher block with an ax embedded in it, the nearby ground scattered with turkey and chicken feathers; a boat shed containing a pirogue that hung on wires from the ceiling; and an unmaintained levee overgrown with willow saplings and palmettos. Through the trees, I could see a white cabin cruiser in a cove, rising and falling with the incoming tide. Clete eased down into a squat and scooped mud with his left hand and rubbed it on his face, around his eyes, and on the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder at me and pointed to the left, indicating that I should flank the cabin.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know why. For the second time that day, I didn’t trust what I was looking at. The silence, the lack of motion, and the rigidity of the cabin seemed to contain an intensity on the brink of tearing itself apart. I had only one precedent for the feeling. Imagine a village surrounded by rice fields, a fat harvest moon above the hooches, water buffalo snuffing in a pen, villagers nowhere in sight, a shiny strand of wire stretched across the trail leading into the ville.

  What do you do?

  Light it up, Loot, whispers a sweaty black kid from West Memphis, Arkansas, his hands knuckling on his blooker, his breath rife with fear. Light the motherfucker up.

  Clete gestured at me again. We were both on one knee now. I pointed two fingers at my eyes, then pointed at the front of the cabin. The sun was almost gone, the hummock sliding deeper into shadow. The cabin door was open. I could see a fire burning inside a woodstove, like liquid yellow-red lines sketched against the surrounding blackness. I also thought I saw the shapes of two figures, both motionless, but I couldn’t be sure. Even though we were on the cusp of winter, the air was dense with humidity, as though the environment itself were sweating. I pushed the moisture out of my eyes with the heel of my hand and tried to see clearly through the door. But as with anything you stare at too long in poor light, I could not determine where reality ended and fear and fantasy began.

  Charlie’s in there. Ain’t no time to be kind to animals. Time to bring the nape, Loot.

  But that was what someone wanted us to do. That’s what the bad guys always want us to do. I could hear the chop slapping against the hull of the cabin cruiser, a gator rolling in a channel and probably ripping through tangles of water hyacinths, flinging mud and water into the trees. I picked up a dirt clog and flung it to the left of the cabin.

  Nothing.

  Clete began working to the right. I can’t tell you how I knew something was wrong. Maybe it was Clete’s determination to mete out summary justice regardless of the attrition. Or maybe I remembered all the times he and I had gone in under a black flag and later had to deal with the specters that ask you why.

  Or maybe my angle of vision was better than his. I knew there were two silhouettes beyond the doorway. One was larger than the other. The smaller figure wore a hat. Both figures were as still as the oil paint on a canvas.

  I wished we had brought Bailey and backup. I tossed a piece of dirt at Clete, trying to get his attention. He kept moving in a crouch to the right, past the cabin door, then into the shadows of the trees, easing down into grass that was three feet high. I had to make a decision. I couldn’t communicate with Clete. I had no way of knowing whether he had seen the two figures. I also had no idea who they were. What if the cabin cruiser was not Wexler’s or Desmond’s but the property of a recreational fisherman who had decided to drop anchor and boil a load of crabs?

  I stepped back into the overhang of the trees and worked my way around the left side of the cabin. Then I realized I had not seen everything that was behind it. Desmond’s Humvee was parked below the levee, black leaves stuck to the windows, a bullet hole pocked through the windshield on the driver’s side.

  I took a chance. I was ready to eat a bullet rather than let the situation go south, which I believed was about to happen at any moment. I stood up, the breeze suddenly cool on my face. My finger was curled through the trigger guard on the twelve-gauge, my left hand on the fore-end.

  “Iberia Sheriff’s Department!” I said. “We don’t care who you are or what you’re doing, but it’s going to stop! Nobody needs to get hurt! We’ll work it out!”

  There was no response. The last sunlight on the Gulf had turned to pewter. The air was dense with a cold smell like waves bursting on a beach, like piled kelp, like coupling and birth, like a disinterred grave.

  “You’ve got my daughter, you sons of bitches!” I said. “You’ll give her back to me or I’ll stake you out and send you into the next world one limb at a time!”

  I would like to say my words were theatrical. They were not; I meant them. The problem was not ethical. The problem was they did no good.

  I saw Clete rise from the grass, the bump-fire stock of his rifle pressed against his shoulder.

  The next images were like stained glass breaking on a stone floor and to this day difficult to reconstruct. The first sound I heard was the popping of shells, like a string of firecrackers thrown carelessly from an automobile. At the same time I saw flashes inside the doorway of the cabin. I also thought I saw a tracer round streak from either the levee or the cove and float out over the water like a piece of broken neon.

  I saw Clete begin firing into the cabin, the spent cartridges flying from the ejector port of the AR-15, the rounds whanging off the woodstove. I also heard popping from somewhere else, but I didn’t know where. I began running at Clete, yelling incoherently, waving my arms. I smashed into him and knocked him to the ground. He stared up at me, his eyes like green Life Savers inside the mud on his face. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and shouted, “You wouldn’t listen! You never listen!”

  His face dilated with the implication of my words. “Oh, God! Oh, God, Dave! Tell me I didn’t do that.”

  I dropped my cut-down in the grass and pulled the rifle from his hands and threw away the half-spent magazine and inserted the fresh one from my coat pocket into the well. I started running for the cabin door, keeping the cabin between me and the cove and the levee. The flames in the woodstove were blazing brightly because of the holes Clete had drilled in the iron plate. The hatted figure was slumped forward in a chair. The figure next to it had fallen to the floor. I stepped inside the doorway, indifferent to whatever harm might befall me at the hands of Desmond Cormier or Lou Wexler.

  The head rolled loose from the figure in the hat. The figures were mannequins. Shell casings were scattered on the floor and the top of the stove. Two were still unfired and inside the skillet that had probably been filled with them. I felt my eyes fill with water, my lungs swell with air that was dense with salt and the coldness of the Gulf.

  I turned and went back through the door onto the gallery. “It’s not Alafair, Clete!”

  He was on his feet now. He grinned at me, my
cut-down hanging from his hand. Then there were pops and slashes of light from the darkness, and he went down on both knees, two red flowers blooming on his windbreaker, his jaw dropping, his arms dead at his sides.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  I WENT OUT THE back door just as the headlights of the Humvee came on and shone directly into my eyes. I raised my hand against the glare and saw Lou Wexler by the side of the Humvee. He had a semi-automatic rifle aimed at the center of my face. Desmond Cormier lay on the ground, his hands wrapped with wire behind him and tied to his ankles, a blue rubber ball strapped in his mouth.

  “Lay your piece aside or never see your daughter again,” Wexler said.

  My eyes were watering in the headlights.

  “I’ll pop both her and Des right now,” he said.

  I let the AR-15 drop.

  “Back away,” he said.

  I did as he said. He reached down and picked up the AR-15 by the barrel and flung it into the darkness. “The whore gave me away, did she?”

  “Which whore?” I asked.

  “The one I had a romp with in City Park,” he said.

  “Where’s Alafair?”

  “Snug as a bug in a rug.”

  “What do you get out of this, Wexler?”

  “Tons of fun, and a bit of payback for what you and your ignorant kind did to my uncle in your parish prison.”

  “Helen Soileau and our friends and I had no part in that.”

  “Oh, yes, you did, laddie. You pretend to be the knight errant, but you’re an ill-bred wog, just like Cormier. I kept his little three-penny opera afloat for years, and bankrupted both myself and that poor sod Butterworth, while the Golden Globes and Academy nominations went to this pitiful puke on the ground.”

  “Why did you kill Lucinda Arceneaux?”

  “I saved her.”

  “What?”

  “She could have been my queen bee. She opted for a life of mediocrity. So I eased her into a role no one around here will ever forget. You have to admit, it’s been pretty good theater.”

  I had no doubt he was mad. But that didn’t make his cruelty any the less. Desmond twitched on the ground. Wexler placed his foot on Desmond’s neck and squeezed. I could hear the waves starting to hit the cabin cruiser’s hull, a steady slap that threw salt spray higher and higher in the air.

  “Alafair isn’t a player in this,” I said. “If you really believe in the ethos of the Templar knight, you have to let her go, Lou.”

  “On a first-name basis, are we? Get on your knees.”

  “Is she on the boat?”

  “Could be. But let’s get back to our biblical lesson. You remember the biblical quotation, don’t you? ‘Before me every knee shall bow’?”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Maybe this will help.”

  He fired a round through the top of my foot. I felt a moment of intense pain, as though the bones between ankle and toes had been struck with a ballpeen hammer, then nothing, my shoe filling with blood. I wanted to say something brave or clever, but I could not. My best friend was down and maybe dead, and Alafair might have already suffered the same fate as Hilary Bienville. If she and Clete were gone, I was ready to go also.

  “Put the next one between my eyes,” I said.

  “What was that?”

  “Now is your chance. I want you to do it.”

  “Don’t tempt the devil.”

  “The devil wouldn’t let you clean his chamber pot.”

  He butt-stroked me with his rifle, knocking me to the ground. He pointed the muzzle into my face. “Kiss it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I had to keep him talking. Once he was gone, Alafair would be gone also, probably forever. Where are you, Bailey? Where are you, Helen? I held my holy medal, my eyes shut. I was completely powerless and knew that whatever happened next was out of my hands.

  I heard Wexler walk away. When I opened my eyes, I saw him step off a small dock onto a boarding plank that hung from the entry port of the cabin cruiser. The hull was dipping deeply into the waves, rocking and hitting the dock and the cypress knees along the bank. He clicked on the cabin light and pulled Alafair from the deck and held her so I could see her face. Blood was leaking from her hair.

  I got up from the ground and began limping toward the dock as though half of me had melted. I thought I heard a helicopter droning over water, and I wondered if I had gone back in time to Southeast Asia and the sounds and images from which I had never freed myself. The thropping of the blades was unmistakable.

  “You’re not going anywhere, bub,” I said.

  “I’m honoring your war record,” he said. “Be humble enough to recognize and accept an act of clemency by a brother-in-arms.”

  “You taped Bella Delahoussaye’s eyes because you couldn’t look her in the face while you killed her, you yellow-bellied, sorry sack of shit.”

  He knotted Alafair’s hair in his fist. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. I was within fifteen feet of the cruiser now. The waves were bursting against the dock, drenching my hat and face. I saw lights coming in low over the surf in the distance.

  “Hear that sound?” I said. “That’s the cavalry. They’re going to spike your cannon, Wexler. And after they do that, I’m going to kick it up your ass.”

  “You won’t be here to see it. Neither will she.”

  Alafair’s face was white with exhaustion or shock or blood loss; she looked like she had been beaten. Her bottom lip was cut and puffed, her hair matted with blood. I bet she had fought back. No, I knew she had fought back. And I was determined to be no less brave than she. Then, just to the south of the cabin cruiser, I saw a shadow moving through the trees, humped, off balance, leviathan, and unstoppable in its course and purpose.

  “Pop me if you want,” I said. “I’m no big loss. But before I check out, tell me one thing, will you?”

  “I’d be delighted,” he replied.

  “How’d you get the information about Bailey Ribbons’s background?”

  “I worked for three government intelligence agencies. But maybe I porked her a couple of times, too. Take your pick.”

  I came closer and closer to him. He was standing just outside the cabin hatch, holding Alafair by the hair, his rifle butt propped on his hip, the waves swelling under the hull. The boarding plank was hooked to the stern, pulling loose from the bank, half underwater.

  “Look at me,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “Sheriff Soileau is in that chopper. She doesn’t take prisoners. Make the smart choice. Give me back my daughter and beat feet.”

  He pulled her to him and kissed the top of her hair. “I might do that. Not tonight. But some night. She’ll come around. You’ll see. The victors write the history books.”

  He dropped her and pulled the anchor, sliding it covered with mud over the bow, dropping it hard on the deck. He went back into the cabin and started the engine, looking at me through the glass. My left leg was giving out, my foot squishing inside my shoe. I started toward the boarding plank, although I knew I would not make it. Then I saw Clete Purcel come lumbering out of the trees, the holes in his shoulders or chest draining down his shirt, my cut-down twelve-gauge pump in one hand.

  Wexler either didn’t care about the boarding plank or had forgotten about it; he was concentrating on backing the cruiser at an angle that prevented the waves from smacking it into the dock or onto the cypress knees.

  The aluminum plank bent under Clete’s weight, and his shoes clanked on the metal, and the waves sloshed over his ankles as he stumbled up the plank and through the entry port onto the stern.

  Wexler turned, at first shocked, then smiling. “You still hanging around? How about another one in the brisket?”

  I had seen the two bloody holes in Clete’s windbreaker, but I had not realized how badly he was hurt. His left arm hung from the socket like a twisted water-soaked towel. He was trying to lift the cut-down with his right, and having no luck, as though his gy
roscope were broken, his mojo gone, his motors in full meltdown. But he kept coming, like a dedicated drunk careening toward the bar, seeking one final sip of his nemesis.

  Wexler raised his rifle. “Good try, blimpo. I hope you find a shady place.”

  Then something happened that was perhaps coincidental, perhaps not. A large bubble of light seemed to surround us all. A tremendous black swell dipped under the cruiser and raised it atop a wave that tilted it at least thirty degrees. Maybe someone in the helicopter had shone a searchlight on us. Maybe a tidal surge from the Gulf was about to strike the coast. Or maybe the ghost of the pilot who’d nailed that Nazi sub wanted to score one more for the good guys.

  Wexler was thrown off balance, the wheel spinning as he tried to get his weapon in Clete’s face. Clete crashed into him with his full weight, pressing him against the instrument panel. Wexler had his finger inside the trigger guard and was trying to push the barrel down on Clete’s feet to get off a crippling shot. Clete shoved my cut-down inside Wexler’s trousers.

  “This is for Smiley Wimple and Hilary Bienville, asshole,” he said. He pulled the trigger.

  The number of rents in the cloth left no doubt that the shell in the chamber had been loaded with buckshot. Wexler seemed to be looking straight at me when he realized what had just happened to him. His mouth was puckered like a guppy’s, his face shrinking as though it had been miniaturized, his voice locked in his throat as if no sound could adequately express what he was experiencing.

  The Plexiglas-like bubble disappeared, and the cruiser settled against the dock, and the waves that had rocked it so violently turned to foam and trailed away in the darkness.

  It’s funny how your anger goes away when you see a man die, even one who was demonically evil. I adjusted the boarding plank and walked onto the stern and picked up Alafair. I held her against me, and the heat in her body radiated through her clothes. I smelled her hair and the salt on her skin and felt her heart beating when I pressed my hands against her back. Her face was buried in my chest. She didn’t speak. She was the same five-year-old Salvadoran girl I had pulled from a submerged plane many years ago. The years between then and now meant absolutely nothing, and I knew that she was my little girl and I was her father and that was the way it would always be, and that Clete Purcel would remain our guardian angel forever, and that we would never change the world, but by the same token, the world would never change us.