DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

by James Lee Burke

  Late that evening Clete sat with me at the redwood table under the mimosa in my backyard and told me the story of his conversation with Joe Zeroski. When he finished, he took off his Marine Corps utility cap and refitted it on his head and looked at the purple light in the sky and the wind blowing across my neighbor's cane field, his green eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. "I thought the drought was over. Two days of dry weather and it's the dust bowl again," he said. "You bothered about taking Zeroski over the hurdles?" I asked. "Joe will probably eat his gun one day. But he never tried to jam anybody who wasn't in the life. I guess if I could feel sorry for a gumball, I do for him," Clete said. "We don't have any influence over these guys. Stop trying to orchestrate them, Clete." "I think I ought to call him up," he said. I squeezed Clete's bicep, hard, my fingers biting deep into the muscle. "Once and for all and forever, leaveZeroski and especially Legion Guidry alone." I tightened my grasp when Clete tried to pull away from me. "Did you hear me? Legion Guidry comes from someplace the rest of us don't. That's a theological statement." "Sometimes I wish you didn't share all your thoughts, big mon."

  Iawoke before sunrise on Tuesday and walked down the slope through the oaks and pecan trees to the bait shop. The fog was a bluish gray in the fjalse dawn, then the sun broke on the horizon and the fog turned the color of cotton candy and I could see snow egrets rising like confetti above the cypress trees in the swamp. Batist and I scrubbed down the spool tables, popped opened the umbrellas above them, picked up beer cans and bait cups from the boat ramp, and used a boat hook to gather floating trash from the pilings under the dock. All of this was done under the supervision of Tripod, Alafair's fat, three-legged, silver-ringed pet coon. Then Batist took a break and poured a cup of coffee for himself from a drip pot on the gas burner and dropped a red quarter into the jukebox and played Guitar Slim's "I Done Got Over It." The haunting sounds of Slim's music reverberated across the water and into the trees like electronic echoes inside a stone pipe. "Why'd you play that particular song?" I asked. "The man talking about getting over it. You don't never get ahead of it. You just get over it. I t'ink he figured out what it was all about." "You think Tee Bobby Hulin murdered that white girl?" I asked. Batist picked up Tripod from a shelf, where he wassniffing a glass jar filled with candy bars. Batist opened the screen and dropped him with a thump on the dock. "That boy ain't no good, Dave. You don't believe I'm right, ax yourself who he hang around wit'. Jimmy Dean Styles say jump, Tee Bobby say 'How high?'" Then, as irony would have it, just as I was about to go up to the house and change clothes for work, the phone on the counter rang. It was Sister Helen Bienvenu, the nun who gave art lessons at the public library. "I did something I think I shouldn't have," she said. "What's that, Sister?" I said. "Rosebud Hulin did a lovely drawing of Amanda Boudreau with her parents. I think the photo was in the Daily Iberian about a week ago. When she finished it, she pressed it into my hands, as though she wanted me to give it to someone. There was a kind of sadness in her I can't adequately describe." "I don't understand. What did you do that was improper?" I said. "I gave the drawing to the Boudreau family. I didn't tell them who drew it, but last night Mrs. Boudreau was at the library and saw Rosebud in my drawing class. It was obvious she made the connection. I feel like I've exacerbated an already very bad situation." "Did you ask Rosebud why she wanted to draw the Boudreau family?" "Yes. She ran away from me. What are you going to do, Mr. Robicheaux?" she said. "Did you tell anybody else about this?" "No. But there was a black man who saw the drawing. He came to the class one night to drive Rosebud home. She wouldn't go with him. He owns a bar." "Jimmy Dean Styles?" "Yes, I think that's his name." "Styles is a bad guy, Sister. Don't have anything to do with him." "This upsets me, Mr. Robicheaux," she said. "You didn't do anything wrong." "Did Rosebud witness a murder? Please don't lie to me," she said.

  Iwent up to the house and changed clothes and fixed coffee and a pan of hot milk and ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and blueberries at the kitchen table. Bootsie came out of the bedroom in her terry-cloth bathrobe and took the medication that kept her lupus, what we called the red wolf, in abeyance. Then she sat down across from me and wrapped the inflatable tourniquet of her blood pressure monitor around her upper arm. She waited for the digital numerals to stop flashing on the monitor, then pushed the button on the air release valve and puffed out her cheeks, exasperated at not being able to change a condition that seemed both unfair and without origin. "You've eaten salt and fried food every day of your life and your systolic is ten points above a cadaver's. What's your secret, Streak?" she said. "Picture of Dorian Gray syndrome." "Let me take your blood pressure," she said. "I'd better get on the road." "No, I want to see if my monitor's accurate," she said. She wrapped my arm and pumped the rubber ball in her hand. She looked at the numbers on the monitor and punched the air release, her expression neutral. "Your systolic is 165 over 90," she said. I turned the page on the newspaper and tried to shine her on. "That's almost forty points above your normal," she said. "Maybe I'm off my feed this morning." She put the monitor back in its box and began fixingcereal for herself at the drainboard. When she spokeagain, her back was still turned to me. "All my diet pills are gone. So is the aspirin. So are allthe megavitamins I bought in Lafayette. What the hellare you doing, Dave?" she said.

  I went to the office and tried to concentrate on a back-load of paperwork in my intake basket, A dozen messages were on my voice mail, a dozen more in my mailbox. A homeless man, who daily walked the length of the city with all his belongings rolled inside a yellow tent that he carried draped over his neck and shoulders like a gigantic cross, wandered in off the street and demanded to see me. His eyes were filled with madness, his skin grimed almost black, his yellow hair glued together with his own body grease, his odor so offensive that people left the room with handkerchiefs over their mouths. He said he had known me in Vietnam, that he'd been a medic who had loaded me with blood-expander and shot me up with morphine and pulled me onboard a slick and held me in his arms while the air frame rang with AK-47 rounds from the canopy sweeping by below us. I looked into his seamed, wretched face and saw no one there I recognized.

  "What was your outfit, Doc?" I asked. "Who gives a shit?" he replied. "I've got twenty bucks here. Sorry it's not more." He balled his hand on the bill I gave him. His nails were as thick as tortoiseshell, gray through the tops with the amounts of dirt impacted under them. "I had a rosary wrapped around my steel pot. I gave it to you. Don't let them get behind you, motherfucker," he said. After he was gone we opened the windows and Wally the dispatcher had the janitor wipe down the chair the deranged man had sat in. "You knew that guy?" Wally said. "Maybe." "You want me to have him picked up, take him to a shelter?" "The war's over," I said, and went back to my office. At ten o'clock my skin was coming off. I drank water at the cooler, chewed two packs of gum, went to Baron's Health Club and pounded the heavy bag, then returned to the office, sweating inside my clothes, burning with irritability. I checked but a cruiser and drove out to the home of Amanda Boudreau's parents. I found Mr. Boudreau at the back of his property, under shade trees by the coulee, uncrating and assembling an irrigation pump. It was a large, expensive machine, the most sophisticated one on the market. But he had no well or water lines to attach it to, no network of ditches to carry the water it would draw from the aquifer. He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt and new strap overalls, dark blue and still stiff from the box. His facewas flushed, his knuckles skinned where his hand had slipped on a wrench. "I ain't gonna get caught by drought again," he said. "Last year almost all my cane dried up. Ain't gonna allow it to happen again. No, sir." "I think the drought is pretty well busted," I said, looking at a bank of black clouds in the south. "I'm gonna be ready, me. That's the way my father always talked. Im gonna be ready, me,'" he said. I squatted down next to him. "I know you and Mrs. Boudreau don't think well of me, but I lost both my mother and my wife, Annie, to violent people. I wanted to find those people and kill them. There's nothing wrong in feeling that way. But
I don't want to see a good man like yourself take matters into his own hands. You're not going to do that, are you, sir?" He clapped his broad hand on a mosquito that had landed on the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm. "Lou'sana's been drying up. Gonna dig me a well. Gonna have ditches and lines all through those fields. It can get dry as a brick in a stove, but I'm gonna have all the water I want," he said. He went back to his work, twisting a wrench on a nut, his meaty, skinned hand shining with sweat.

  Istopped at a phone booth and called Clete's apartment. "You still have flashbacks?" I asked. "About 'Nam? Not much. Sometimes I dream about it. But not much." "A guy came off the street today. He said he was the medic who took care of me when I was hit." "Was he?" "He was deranged. His hair was blond. The kid who got me to battalion aid was Italian, from Staten Island." "So shit-can it." "The homeless man had a New York accent. What's a New York street person doing around here?" I said. "Where are you, big mon?"

  Idrove to Jimmy Dean Styles's New Iberia bar and was told by his bartender that Jimmy Dean was at his other club, the one he owned jointly with a bondsman in St. Martinville. I was there in twenty minutes. Styles was at the bar, reading a newspaper while he dipped cracklings into a bowl of red sauce and ate them, wiping his fingers on a moist towel, his eyes never leaving the page he was reading. "You follow the market?" I asked. "High-yield municipals, Lou'sana Chuck. Pay twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Like a girl got her groove with the right people, it always working, know what I'm sayin'? I can help you with something?" Styles replied. "I don't know if you can or not, but hold that thought. Where's your rest room?" I said. He nodded his head toward the rear of the building and dipped a crackling into his bowl and inserted it in his mouth, an amused light in his eyes. His entourage of rappers and whores were at tables by the dance floor. They paid no attention to me as I passed. Inside the rest room I washed my face with cold water and looked in the mirror. I could hear a sound in my ears, like wind whistling inside a tin can, feel a pressure band alongthe side of my head, as though I were wearing a tight hat. A jukebox began playing by the dance floor, and I would have sworn the voice on the recording was Guitar Slim's. I washed my face again. When I closed my eyes against the coldness of the water, I saw faces from my platoon, kids who had been out too long, their legs pocked with jungle ulcers, the smell of trench foot rising from their socks, scared shitless of night-trail toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105's, nobody in touch with who they used to be. A San Bernardino hot-rodder with a juju bag tied under his throat and a scalp lock to his rifle. A black kid from West Memphis, Arkansas, zoned on uppers and too many firefights, a green sweat towel draped over his head like a monk's cowl, the barrel of his blooker painted with tiger stripes. I could hear them marching, blade-faced, their uniforms stiff with salt, feeding off one another's anger, their boots thudding across a wooden bridge. I spit in the lavatory and dried my face on my shirt rather than touch the cloth towel on the roller, then went out the door, the breeze from a fan suddenly cool on my skin, my heart racing. Jimmy Dean Styles closed his newspaper and lifted a demitasse of coffee to his lips. "Marse Charlie not wit' you today?" he said. "You were at Rosebud Hulin's art class. That area is now off-limits for you. If she needs a ride, I'll provide one," I said. "I don't know you, never brought you no grief, never given you no truck, but you always in my face and on my case. What is it wit' you, Chuck?" "I don't think you're hearing me. Rosebud Hulin is out of your life. We're together on that, right?" "You wrapped too tight for your job, man. I got a girl over there can take care of that for you, unzipper your problem, know what I'm sayin', but in the meantime don't be jabbing your finger at me." "Just so you understand later why it all went south, you shouldn't call a guy 'Chuck,' not unless you've paid some dues, humped a sixty-pound pack for twenty klicks in the rain, had Sir Charles kick your ass, seen your friends blown into hamburger, that sort of thing. You reading me, partner?" "You got a serious jones, Lou'sana Chuck. Now shake your cakes down the road, before I have you picked up," he said. I caught him solidly on the jaw with a right cross, snapping his head sideways, slinging food out of his mouth, then hooked him in the eye and caught him with another right, this time in the throat, before he could get off the bar stool. He threw two fast punches at me, off balance, unable to draw his arms back for a full swing, and I slipped one of his punches, took the other on the ear, and then hit him with everything I had. I put my whole weight into each blow, breaking his nose, splitting his mouth against his teeth, gashing open the skin above one eye. He managed to roll off the stool and right himself, even to get his guard up and catch me once, hard, in the chest, but I drove my fist into his rib cage, right under the heart, and saw his willpower leave him, his resistance drain from his face, like water bursting from the bottom of a balloon. I hooked him in the kidney, then in the stomach, doubling him over, forcing him to cling to the stool for support. But I couldn't let go of it. I seized the back of his headand drove his face down on the knurled edge of the bar, smashing it into the wood, over and over, while behind me women screamed and a tall black man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows tried to get his arms around me and put himself between me and Jimmy Dean Styles. I pulled my .45 and barrel-stroked the man with orange and purple hair across the face, knocking him to the floor, then racked a round into the chamber and aimed the sight between his eyes, my hands streaked with Jimmy Style's blood, shaking on the grips. "I'll get out of town. I promise. Don't do it, man. Please," the man on the floor said, turning his face to one side. A dark stain spread through his slacks.

  Iwas arrested before I could get out of the parking lot. Ten minutes later I was escorted in cuffs inside the St. Martin Parish Jail, my shirt split down the back, and pushed inside the drunk tank. My skin felt dead to the touch, my muscles without texture or tone, as though I had just come off a two-day whiskey drunk. The voices of the inmates around me seemed muffled, filtered through wet cotton, even though some of them appeared to know me and were speaking directly in my face. In my mind's eye I saw a homeless man bent under a cross made of a rolled yellow tent stuffed with all his earthly belongings, and I knew that for all of us who had been there the war would never be over and the real enemy was not Jimmy Sty but a violent creature who rose with me in the morning and lived quietly inside my skin, waiting for the proper moment to vent his rage upon the world.

  CHAPTER 17

  When the Iberia sheriff arrived at the jail, I thought he would have me released. Instead, he had me moved out of the drunk tank to an empty holding cell, one with a drain hole and a urine-streaked, rusty grate in the center of a cement floor, graffiti and female breasts and male genitalia smoked on the ceiling with Bic lighters. I sat on a wooden bench, the sheriff in a chair on the other side of the bars, his eyes deep-set with his anger and disappointment. I felt light-headed and my hands were swollen and as thick as grapefruit when I tried to close them. "Were you trying to kill him?" the sheriff asked. "Maybe." "Everyone in the bar says there was no provocation. They say Styles was just sitting on a stool and you went apeshit and starting tearing him apart." "He owns the bar. He owns most of the people in it. I'm a cop. What are they supposed to say?" "You're being charged with felony assault." "Thanks for passing on the news," I said. "You just going to sit there and act like a wiseass?" "Styles is a human toilet. Someone should have ripped out his spokes a long time ago," I said. He rose from his chair and put on his Stetson hat and stared down at me, the light from a high window breaking around his head. "You want me to call your wife, or can you handle that yourself?" he asked. "You know, there is something you could do for me. I'd really appreciate a pack of gum from the machine out in the hall. That would really be nice," I replied.

  Isat for twenty minutes, listening to all the sounds that are common to any jailhouse environment: steel doors clanging, toilets flushing, trusties dragging wash buckets down the corridor, Mariel felons yelling at one another in Spanish, a blaring television set tuned to a stock car ra
ce, a three-hundred-pound biker, wrapped in chains and stink, his hair like a lion's mane, deciding to make his captors earn their money when they tried to shove him inside a cell. I took off my ruined shirt and rolled it into a ball for a pillow and lay down on the wooden bench and placed my arm over my eyes. Then I heard footsteps in the corridor again and, vain fool that all drunks are, thought it was the sheriff, my friend, returning to set things straight. But the sheriff did not return, nor did anyone take me out of the holding cell or indicate when I might be arraigned. The unpleasantness of jailhouse life has less to dowith confusion and the cacophony of noise that fills the inside of your head twenty-four hours a day than it does with your disconnection from the outside world and the fact that for you time stops when the cell door slams behind you. You make no decisions for yourself. You are strip-searched by a bored turnkey who fits on polyethylene gloves before he pries your buttocks apart, then fingerprinted, photographed, given a cleansing cream and a dirty rag to remove the ink from your hands, spoken to in a toneless voice by people who never address you as an individual or look into your face, as though eye contact would grant you a level of personal identity that you do not deserve. Then you sit. Or lie on the floor. Or try to find anyplace in a crowded cell away from the open toilet that eventually you will use in full view of everyone in the cell and anyone passing in the corridor. But most of the time you simply wait. No sexual encounters in the shower, no racial beefs with blacks or the Mariels from Castro's prisons whose space is rented for them by the G, no meetings with Damon Runyon street characters or O. Henry safecrackers. Most of the miscreants are hapless and stupid. Out-of-control hardcases are sedated, forced to shower, powdered with disinfectant, and transferred to hospitals. The screws are usually duffers worried about their prostates. You wait in a vacuum, maybe in a large, colorless room, one more face among the faceless and uneducated and inept and self-pitying, convinced you are not like the others, that it is only bad luck that has put you here. After a while you wonder what it is you are waiting for,then realize you're thinking about your next meal, a chance to use the toilet or to stand a few moments at a window that looks out upon a tree. One morning you ask somebody which day of the week it is. The life that used to be yours comes to you only in glimpses, perhaps through a letter, a visitor who sees you out of obligation, or financial notices of foreclosure and repossession. The noise, the ennui, the lack of uncomfortable comparisons inside the jail now become a means of forgetting the sense of loss that eats daily at your heart. If there was ever a viable benchmark to indicate a person's life is unraveling around him, I know of none better than the day a person discovers himself inside the gray-bar hotel chain. I called Bootsie, but no one was at home. When Alafair's recorded message ended and the machine beeped, I started to speak, then realized the inadequacy as well as harmful potential of the message I would have to leave. I replaced the receiver in the cradle and called Clete's apartment, but there was no answer. A half hour went by and I asked the turnkey for another visit to the phone. "Maybe you won't need it. You got a visitor," he said. Then he shouted at the other cells, "Female on the gate!" "Female?" I said. Barbara Shanahan walked down the corridor in a pink suit and white blouse and heels, her perfume as strange and incongruous inside the jail as a flower inside a machine shop. She stood at the cell door, a tinge of pity in her eyes that made me look away. "Clete told the locals he saw the fight. He got them togo back to Styles's club and search the area where Styles was sitting. They found a switchblade knife under a table," she said. "Switchblade knife, you say?" I said. "Right." Her gaze wandered over my face. "Clete says he saw Styles pull it on you. But the arrest report makes no mention of a knife. I wonder why that is." "I'm a little unsure of what happened, actually." "I'm not going anywhere near this, but I made a couple of calls. A bondsman will be over here shortly. So will your lawyer." "My lawyer? I don't have a lawyer." "You do now. He's a prick, but he's the best at what he does." "Why are you doing this?" I asked. "You're a good cop and don't deserve this bullshit. Most people think you're nuts. The sheriff has washed his hands of you. You're totally self-destructive. I wish you'd killed Jimmy Dean Styles. Take your choice." "Who's the lawyer?" She winked at me. "Put a piece of ice on that eye, handsome," she said. She walked back down the corridor, her scent lingering in the air, smiling slightly at the remarks made to her through the bars of the adjoining cells. Ten minutes later Perry LaSalle came down the corridor with the turnkey. "You know a song by Lazy Lester titled 'Don't Ever Write Your Name on the Jailhouse Wall'? Man, I love that song. By the way, Jimmy Dean Styles swallowed his bridge and had to have his stomach pumped. How's it hangin', Dave?" he said.