“Expecting the Union Army to come up the Teche?” I said.
“A bud inside NOPD called me and said I’m about to get picked up for destroying the casino. I rented a camp out in the Atchafalaya Basin. Time to do a survey on the goggle-eye perch population,” he replied.
Then I made a mistake. I told him about all the recent events involving the deaths of Yvonne Darbonne, Crustacean Man, and Tony and Bello Lujan. I told him about the scam Trish Klein and her crew had pulled on Whitey Bruxal. I also told him about Slim Bruxal’s implication that his father and Lefty Raguza might decide to take their pound of flesh.
Clete wiped the oil off the blue-black surfaces of his .38, then flipped the cylinder from the frame and began inserting cartridges one by one into the chambers, his blond eyelashes lowered so I could not read his eyes.
“I can hear your wheels turning, Clete. Forget about it,” I said.
“I’m glad I’ve finally heard the voice of God. You can actually go into people’s heads now and explain their own thoughts to them.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass. I’m trying to—”
He cut me off before I could continue. “We used to do business one way with these assholes—under a black flag. Why do you think Whitey Bruxal is here? It’s because he gets a free pass. In the old days, at least he would have been under the control of the Giacanos. Now he can kick the shit out of cerebral palsy victims and be on the Society page.”
“You don’t think NOPD can find you in a fishing camp? Use your brain,” I said.
He spun the cylinder on the .38, the butt end of the loaded cartridges glinting in the light. His green eyes were bright and happy, free of alcoholic influence or fatigue, and I realized when he didn’t reply that I hadn’t listened carefully to what he had said and I had once again misread the complexities of an antithetically mixed man.
“You were already planning to take out Whitey Bruxal, weren’t you?” I said.
“Not exactly. But if these guys make a move on us, we hunt them down and pitch the rule book. What’s to lose? We’re dinosaurs anyway. The only guys who haven’t figured that out are us. Pop me a beer, will you?”
He laid a clear line of oil along the side of the Beretta, then wiped all of its surfaces clean with a rag. He pulled back the slide on an empty magazine and ran the bore brush up and down the inside of the barrel, smiling at me while he did it. In the muted glow of the lamplight he looked like a young man again, one who still believed the world was a magical place full of adventure and goodness and intriguing encounters up every street. In moments like these I sometimes wondered if Clete had ever intended to age and grow old and change from the irresponsible man of his youth, if indeed he had not always courted death as a means of tearing off the hands on his own clock.
“Why you looking at me like that?” he asked.
“No reason.”
“You worry about all the wrong things, Streak. In this case, about me and Trish. All that stuff you told me about the Lujan murders and Crustacean Man and the Darbonne girl? There’s something missing. This character in the D.A.’s office, what’s his name?”
“Lonnie Marceaux.”
“This Marceaux guy is the one to worry about. It’s these white-collar cocksuckers who’d crank up the gas ovens if they had the chance. You’re really going bail for Yvonne Darbonne’s old man?”
“I put him in jail. He’s an innocent man. What should I do?” I replied.
“How many guys have you known inside who were actually innocent?”
“Some,” I said.
“But almost all of them were guilty of other crimes, usually worse ones. Right or wrong, noble mon?”
I poured my Dr Pepper into the sink and dropped the empty can into the trash basket. “See you later,” I said, trying to suppress the anger in my voice.
“Put it in neutral a minute and check those satellite pictures on the tube,” he said, nodding at the television screen. “The state of Florida must feel like a bowling pin. You were on the water when Audrey hit back in ’fifty-eight?”
“It was ’fifty-seven.”
“Think we’ll ever have one that bad again?”
“Don’t change the subject, Clete. Take Trish and go somewhere a long way from New Iberia. You keep hurting yourself in ways your worst enemies couldn’t think up.”
He reached under the bed and removed a pint of brandy. He unscrewed the cap and lifted the bottle at me. “Here’s to chaos and mayhem and blowing the bad guys out of their socks,” he said. He drank the brandy down like soda water, one eye cocked at me over the upended bottle.
I WENT TO AN A.A. meeting in the Episcopalian cottage across the street from old New Iberia High School. When I came out, the sky had turned yellow and purple and was full of dust blowing out of the cane fields. The oak trees in front of the school throbbed with birds, and when the wind changed, the air smelled like a lake that has gone dry. It was an evening when the colors of the sky and the earth and the trees seemed out of accordance with one another. The end of summer in South Louisiana is usually like sliding over the crest of a torpid season of heat and humidity into autumnal days that ring with the sounds of marching bands and smell of burning leaves and the damp, fecund odor of the bayous. But this year was different.
The skies were red at morning, and at night churning with clouds that looked like curds of smoke from giant oil fires. Afternoon showers turned into violent storms, with trees of lightning bursting across the entirety of the sky. I have never given credence to apocalyptical theology or prophecies, but this year I felt a sense of foreboding that I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t based on an intuitive knowledge about the future, either. I had seen the show before.
It is hard for someone who has not experienced a hurricane to understand the terror of being inside one. Perhaps the fear has its roots in the unconscious. Psychiatrists say the most terrifying moment in our lives occurs when we are delivered out of the birth canal from the safety of the womb—unable to breathe, shuddering against the light, knowing we will die unless we receive the slap of life. Supposedly that moment is sealed forever in a corner of the mind we wish never to reenter. Then one day the world of predictability, the earth itself, caves under our feet.
That moment came for me on a seismograph drill barge anchored by deep-water steel pilings in a bay west of Morgan City in the summer of 1957. On board were 160 pounds of canned dynamite and boxes of canned primers and spools of cap wire that were tipped with a vial of nitroglycerin gel that could be detonated with either an electrical spark or a hard knock against a steel surface.
No one anticipated the ferocity of Hurricane Audrey or the tidal wave it would push ahead of it. Our company chose to ride it out. That experience was one that will remain with me the rest of my life.
The tide dropped at sunset, and for miles there was hardly a ripple of wind on the water. The sky was lidded with clouds that were the color of scorched pewter, but the horizon was still blue, glowing with an iridescence that seemed trapped behind the earth’s rim. We went to bed on the quarterboat with a sense of peace about the storm, convinced it was passing far to the west, perhaps over in Texas, and that our fears had been unfounded.
At dawn, the miles of flooded cypress and gum trees surrounding us were thick with birds of every description, as though none of them could find a proper tree upon which to rest. At 9 a.m. my half brother Jimmie and I were building explosive charges for the driller, screwing six cans of dynamite end to end, then screwing on a primer that would attach to a second string of six cans, doing this three times until we had a charge of eighteen cans that we would slide down the drill pipe with the cap wire whipping off the spool behind it.
Without any transition, the sky erupted with lightning, the barometer dropped so fast our ears popped, a line of whitecaps shot from the mouth of the bay into the swamp, like skin wrinkling, and the miles of flooded trees surrounding us bent simultaneously toward the water.
I turned away from the drill and the win
d struck my face as hard as a fist. The tarp that was used to shade the drill deck, one that was made of heavy canvas and inset with metal rods and brass eyelets, ripped loose from the pilothouse and disappeared in the wind like a discarded Kleenex. What happened next was an event of such magnitude and intensity that neither Jimmie nor I nor anyone else on board would ever quite understand it or the natural causes that created it. Some thought it was a waterspout. Some believed a secondary system, one with its own eye, had passed over us. But whatever it was, it carried its own set of rules and they had nothing to do with the laws of physics, at least not as I understand them.
There was no sound at all. The wind stopped, the water around the drill barge flattened, then seemed to drop away from the steel pilings, as though all the water were being sucked out of the bay. The gum and cypress trees and willows along the shore straightened in the stillness, their leaves green and bright with sunshine, then the world came apart.
All the glass exploded from the windows in the pilothouse. The instrument shack, made of aluminum and bolted down on the stern, was shredded into confetti. The crew chief was shouting at everyone on the deck, pointing toward the hatch that led down to the engine room, but his words were lost in the roar of the wind. A curtain of rain slapped across the barge, then we were inside a vortex that looked exactly like millions of crystallized grass cuttings, except it was filled with objects and creatures that should not have been there. Fish of every kind and size, snakes, raccoons, blue herons, turkey buzzards, a pirogue, uprooted trees, possums and wood rabbits, a twisted tin roof, dozens of crab traps and conical fishnets packed with enormous carp, hundreds of frogs, clusters of tar paper and weathered boards—all these things were spinning around our barge, sometimes thudding against the handrails and ladders and bulkheads.
I got to my feet just as an avalanche of water and mud surged across the decks. It stank of oil sludge, seaweed encrusted with dead shellfish, sewage, and human feces. The driller, who had been huddled under a pipe rack, vomited in his lap.
Then the sky turned black with rain, and in the west we saw lightning striking the shoreline and in the wetlands and in fishing communities where our relatives lived and in small cities like Lafayette and Lake Charles, and we were glad that it was them and not us who were about to receive the brunt of the storm, even the tidal wave that would curl over Cameron and crush the entire town, drowning over five hundred people.
I USED WEE WILLIE BIMSTINE and Nig Rosewater’s agency in New Orleans to go bail for Cesaire Darbonne. Willie and Nig kept my name out of the court record, but Cesaire was released from jail on Wednesday morning and was at my house ten minutes after I arrived home for lunch with Molly.
He removed his straw hat before he knocked on the door. I invited him in but he shook his head. “I just come to t’ank you,” he said.
“It’s not a big deal, Mr. Darbonne,” I replied.
“Ain’t many people would do somet’ing like that.”
“More than you think.”
He looked out at the traffic on the street, his expression neutral, his turquoise eyes empty of any thoughts that I could see. He fitted on his hat, his skin darkening in the shadow it made on his face. In absentminded fashion, he scratched the chain of scars on his right forearm. “You ever want to go duck hunting, I got a camp and a blind. I know where the sac-a-lait is at on Whiskey Bay, too,” he said.
“I appreciate it, sir, but you don’t owe me anything,” I said.
He turned his eyes on me. They were almost luminous, full of portent, and for just a moment I was sure he was about to tell me something of enormous importance. But if that was his intention, he changed his mind and got in his truck without saying anything further and drove away.
“Who was that?” Molly said behind me.
“Mr. Darbonne. He wanted to thank us for getting him out of the can.”
“Your food is getting cold.”
“I’ll be there in a second,” I said, still looking down the street, where Cesaire’s truck was stopped at the traffic light in front of an 1831 antebellum home called the Shadows.
“What’s bothering you, Dave?” Molly said.
“I’ve never had a more perplexing case. It’s like trying to hold water in your fingers. The real problem is most of the people I keep looking at would probably have led normal lives if they hadn’t met one another.”
“Start over again.”
“I have. None of it goes anywhere.”
She kneaded the back of my neck, then ran her fingers up into my hair, her nails raking my scalp. “I’ll always be proud of you,” she said.
“What for?”
“Because you’re incapable of being anyone other than yourself.”
I closed the door and turned around. I wanted to hold her, to pull her against me, to whisper words to her that are embarrassing when they are spoken in a conventional situation. But she had already gone back into the kitchen.
AFTER LUNCH, I returned to the office and once again got out all my notes on Yvonne Darbonne’s death. Except this time I had something else to go on: Slim Bruxal’s firsthand account of how Yvonne had died. At 2 p.m. Helen came into my office. “Where’s Clete Purcel?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I replied.
“NOPD just tried to serve a warrant at his cottage. It’s empty. The owner says Clete left late last night with a young blond woman. You have no idea where he is?”
“Nothing specific,” I replied, squinting thoughtfully at the far wall.
She closed the door behind her so no one could hear her next words. “Don’t let them get their hands on him, Dave. They’re not talking about six months in Central Lockup. It’s Angola on this one. The insurance companies are tired of Clete destroying half of New Orleans.”
“Glad to know the city is looking out for the right interests,” I said.
She looked at the crime scene photos and case files spread on my desk. “Where are you doing?” she said.
“I think maybe I found the key in the murder of Tony Lujan.”
I DIDN’T TRY to explain it to her. Instead, I went looking for Monarch Little. His next-door neighbor told me Monarch was doing body-and-fender work for a man who ran a repair shop in St. Martinville.
“You know the repairman’s name?” I asked.
The neighbor was the same woman who had shown great irritation at Monarch for getting drunk with his friends and throwing beer cans in her yard after his mother died.
“Monarch done straightened up. Why don’t y’all leave him alone?” she said.
“I’m not here to hurt him, ma’am.”
Her eyes wandered over my face. “He’s working for that albino man on the bayou, the one always grinning when he ain’t got nothing to grin about,” she said.
A half hour later I parked by the side of the sagging, rust-streaked trailer of Prospect Desmoreau, the same albino man who had repaired the Buick that had run down Crustacean Man. Monarch Little was under the pole shed, pulling the door off a Honda that had evidently been broadsided.
“You’re looking good, Mon,” I said.
“My name is Monarch,” he said.
“I need your help.”
“That’s why you’re here? I’m shocked.”
“Lose the comic book dialogue. I’m looking for a black guy who rides a bicycle and salvages bottles and beer cans from the roadside. A black guy who might have seen what happened when Yvonne Darbonne died.”
“The girl who shot herself by the sugar mill?”
I nodded.
The sun was in the west, burning like a bronze flame on the bayou’s surface. Monarch was sweating heavily in the shade, his neck beaded with dirt rings.
“Is this guy on the bike gonna be jammed up over this?” he asked.
“No, I just want to know what he saw. I’m just excluding a possibility, that’s all.”
“There’s two or t’ree street people do that. But they’re white. They stay at a shelter.”
“Quit waltzing me around, Monarch.”
“There’s this one black guy, he’s retarded and got a li’l head. I mean a real li’l-bitty one. You see him digging trash out of Dumpsters or stopping his bike by rain ditches wit’ cars flying right past him. Know who I mean?”
“No,” I replied.
Monarch lifted up his shirt and smelled himself, then wiped the sweat off his upper lip onto the shirt. “He’s retarded and scared of people he don’t know. I better go wit’ you,” he said.
I started to thank him, then thought better of it. Monarch was not given to sentiment. He was also aware that, rightly or wrongly, I would probably never forget the fact he had been a dope dealer. We walked up the grassy slope toward my truck, his shadow merging with mine on the ground. I saw him smile.
“What’s funny?” I said.
“Ever see that old movie about this hunchback guy swinging on the catee’dral bells?” he asked.
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”
“Yeah, that’s it. The two of us together look like the guy swinging on the bells. See?” he said, pointing at our shadows. “Everybody t’ought the hunchback was a monster, but he had music inside his head nobody else could hear.”
“You never cease to surprise me, Monarch.”
If my remark held any significance for him, he didn’t show it.
We drove a few miles back down the bayou to a cluster of shacks behind a parking area for harvesting machines and cane wagons. I had not told Monarch the real reason for my interest in the black man Cesaire Darbonne’s neighbor had told us was collecting discarded bottles and cans from the roadside the day Yvonne died. I believed Slim Bruxal had told me the truth when he said Yvonne had deliberately turned the .22 Magnum into her face and had shot herself, and I needed no confirmation of that fact from a witness. But there was a detail in Slim’s story that I had overlooked. He claimed, and I had no reason to doubt him, that Tony Lujan had passed out in the backyard of the fraternity house and was incapable of driving Yvonne home. I had assumed Slim had driven her back to New Iberia in his SUV, but Slim had said Yvonne had taken the .22 out of the glove box. Her diary indicated she didn’t like Slim and had probably avoided him. If she had been riding in Slim’s vehicle, how would she have known a revolver was in the glove box?
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