DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

by James Lee Burke

  Legion Guidry watched the Cadillac float into the curves ahead of him, the rain blowing in a vapor off the rear wheels. He put a fresh cigarette in his mouth and removed the lighter from the dashboard and pressed the red coils against the tobacco. He could hear the crisp sound of the paper burning as he inhaled. The smell of something burning on hot metal gave him a vague sense of satisfaction, one he could not quite define, but it traveled pleasantly down into his loins. He smiled to himself when the rear end of the Cadillac swung heavily on its springs as it went into the curves, and he wondered what that smart-ass Purcel was feeling now, his head bashed with a pipe, trussed like a three-hundred-pound hog in the trunk of his own car. He hadn't figured out the connection between the kid in the cowboy hat and Purcel and the woman yet. He had seen the kid clearly in his binoculars for perhaps thirty seconds, just enough to recognize him as the salesman "who drug a suitcase on a roller skate through black neighborhoods in St. Mary Parish. He had never gotten his binoculars adequately on the woman, but he knew she had to be that slut Barbara Shanahan, who walked around town with a pissed-off look on her face, like her shit didn't stink, whom he'd watched through her window while she mounted Purcel and stroked his sex like a whore before she put it inside her. His blackjack and S&W .38 were in his glove compartment. He popped it open and removed the .38 and laid it on the passenger seat, where it vibrated with the motion of the truck. After Robicheaux had thrown it in his unflushed toilet bowl, he'd had to wash it with a garden hose outside, then take it apart and soak it in gasoline overnight, before reassembling and oiling the parts. But the gasoline had softened the blueing, which came off on his cleaning rag and streaked and dulled the uniform blue-steel shine that had defined the pistol he had always been proud to own. But Robicheaux gonna have his day, too, he told himself. Maybe Perry LaSalle, too, who Legion had convinced himself was writing a book exposing Legion as a blackmailer and molester of Negro field women and the murderer of a New York journalist. Because he had convinced himself that the educated, the well-traveled, the technologically sophisticated, all belonged to the same club, one that had excluded him for a lifetime, treating him little differently from the Negroes, serving him his food in their backyards, on tin plates and in jelly jars that were kept in a special cabinet for people of color and white trash. But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people. He mashed out his cigarette in the ashtray and took a six-pack of hot beer off the floor and ripped the tab off a can and drank it half empty, the foam curling down his wrist and forearm. Up ahead, the lavender Cadillac roared through a red light. I bet that cowboy hitting on you now, bitch, hethought. But that's just the previews. You cain't even guess what it gonna be like tonight. You gonna see, you. He finished his beer and tossed the can out the window. He looked in the wide-angle mirror and watched the can bounce crazily in the middle of the road.

  Zerelda drove where Marvin pointed, in this instance down a winding road bordered with ditches that were brimming with rainwater, to a dirt driveway that led past a church whose roof was embedded with a fallen persimmon tree. They passed a house that was stacked inside with baled hay, and Marvin told her to park behind the house, in a stand of slash pines and water oaks, and to cut the ignition and the headlights. The hood of the Cadillac smoked in the rain, the engine ticking in the silence. There was no sound at all from the trunk. "I got a place fixed up for us in the house. Food and soda, bedrolls, mosquito repellent, a Coleman lantern, paper towels, a mess of board games. I dint forget anything, I don't think," Marvin said, his lips pursed. "Board games? We're gonna play board games here?" she said. "Yeah, or anything you want to do. Till I can get rid of him." He nodded toward the trunk. "I'm gonna hide the Cadillac in a barn back in them trees. I'll borrow a car for us till I can buy us one in Texas. We'll cross into Mexico on the other side of Laredo." "You think I'm staying with you? That's the plan? After you shot Clete and beat the shit out of me?" she said. "What did you expect? You wouldn't do anything I tole you. I think it was the way you was brought up, Zerelda. I'd like to have kids with you, but you're gonna have to change your attitude about a lot of things." "Are you insane? I wouldn't let you touch the parings from my toenails." "See? That's what I mean. It's being around them Sicilian criminals all your life. They give you that potty mouth," he said. He pulled the keys out of the ignition and stepped out into the drizzle, the Beretta hanging from his right hand. He walked around the front of the car and opened the door for her. She could smell the odor of ozone and humus and evaporated salt in the air and the drenched earth out in the sugarcane fields, a fecund heaviness she had always associated with life and birth, then the wind changed and an execrable stench struck her face like a fist. "God, what is that?" she said. "It's them pigs. They shouldn't be penned up like that. The germs gets in the groundwater, too. This state don't have no environmental direction. Fact is, I'm gonna turn them poor critters out right now," he said. He walked to the hog pen and kicked down the rails on one side, then threw dirt clods at the hogs to spook them into the woods. But they milled in circles, grunting, and stayed inside the confines of the pen. He watched them, perplexed, and sprayed an atomizer of breath freshener into his mouth. "That's some dumb animals," he said, then saw Zerelda walking toward the road. She felt his hand clench her under the arm and turn her back toward the house. "You're a handful, woman. I'm gonna need to keep an eye on you," he said. She looked at his chiseled profile, the smoothness of his complexion, his country-boy good looks and the vacuous serenity in his eyes, and she wondered, almost desperately, who lived inside his skin, whom she should address herself to. But she realized his attention was diverted now, that he was staring at a pickup truck that had stopped on the road and was backing up to the small wooden bridge over the rain ditch. He chewed on his lip, hesitating only a moment, then pushed the Beretta inside her blouse, flat against her back, and began walking with her toward the truck. "The man who taught me sales always said 'A good salesman is a good listener. The customer will always tell you what he wants if you'll just listen,'" Marvin whispered in her ear. "Just smile at this fellow while he talks. We'll tell him what he needs to hear and he'll go on about his bidness. There ain't nothing to it." She watched a man in a straw hat and khaki shirt and trousers get out of the truck, a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked up and down the road, as though lost, then approached them, his boots hollow sounding on the wooden bridge that spanned the rain ditch. He nodded his head deferentially. "I got lost on the turn-off to Pecan Island, me," he said. "Just go a half mile back. This road here don't go nowhere except down to the bay," Marvin said. The man in the straw hat puffed on his cigarette and looked down the road, bemused. "You could have fooled me. I t'ought this went to Abbeville," he said. "No, sir, it don't go nowhere," Marvin said. 'Yall been fucking?" the man said. "What?" Marvin said. "I ain't caught y'all fucking, huh?" he said. Both Marvin and Zerelda looked at the man, stupefied. "You t'ink you bad, you?" the man said to Marvin. He reached out, his cigarette still in his mouth, and grabbed Marvin by his shirt and ripped him away from Zerelda, the Beretta tangling under her blouse, falling to the ground. Almost simultaneously the man removed a blackjack from his side pocket and whipped it down between Marvin's eyes, then across the side and back of his skull as though he were driving nails in wood. Marvin was unconscious before he hit the ground. Zerelda's mouth hung open. "You with Vermilion Parish? The sheriff's department?" she said. "Ain't none of your bidness who I am, bitch. Where's Barbara Shanahan at?" "Shanahan?" she said. His fist seemed to explode in the center of her face.

  The rain had stopped altogether when I came around the curve and saw th
e wood-frame church, the boughs of the persimmon tree, still in leaf, protruding from its crushed roof. I parked on the side of the road and cut the headlights. There were no vehicles in the yard or out in the trees, at least none that I could see, but the wooden bridge over the rain ditch was stenciled with fresh tire tracks. I rolled down the window and listened. "What's that noise?" Sal, the ex-soldier, asked. "I don't know," I replied. It was an irregular, cacophonous sound, like a tractor-mower idling and misfiring, perhaps without a muffler. I slipped my .45 out of its holster and opened the door of my truck. "What you gonna do, Loot?" Sal asked. "I'll be back in a few minutes," I said. "That don't sound too good. I think I'd better come along," he said. "Wrong," I said. He got out of the truck and grinned. "You gonna arrest me?" he said. "I might," I said. But he wasn't impressed with my attempt at sternness, and we crossed the bridge and saw two sets of vehicle tracks, one overlapping the other, both leading past the frame house filled with baled hay. Sal stooped down and picked up a Beretta nine-millimeter lying by a puddle of water. He tapped the mud out of the barrel and used his shirttail to wipe the mud off the grips and hammer and trigger guard, then pulled the slide far back enough to see the bright brass glint of a round already seated in the chamber. I extended my hand for him to give me the gun, but he only grinned again and shook his head. The moon looked like a piece of burnt pewter inside the clouds now, and in the pale light it gave off I could see hogs rooting at the edge of a flooded woods. I walked on ahead of Sal, past the church and the house where the preacher must have once lived, the sound of a gasoline-or diesel-powered engine growing louder. On the far sideof a three-sided tin shed, someone turned on a lantern of some kind, one that exuded a dull white luminescence. Out in the trees I could see Clete's Cadillac convertible and Legion's red pickup truck. The hatch to the Cadillac was open, gaping, the trunk empty. I bent down, the .45 gripped in two hands, and got closer to the shed and looked through the back window at the collection of tar cookers and road graders and bulldozers that had been stored there by a parish maintenance crew. A battery-powered Coleman lantern burned on the ground, the humidity in the air almost iridescent in the glow of me neon tubing. Legion Guidry was filling a bucket from a water tap. Marvin Oates lay unconscious on the ground, his hair matted with straw and mud. Close by, Zerelda sat against a wood post. Her wrists were bound behind the post with electrician's tape. But it was Clete Purcel who was obviously in the most serious jeopardy. He was slumped over by the lantern, his head hanging down, his eyes half shut with trauma and blood loss, the back of his shirt a dark red. A tree-shredding machine idled on the outer edge of the shed, the ejection funnel aimed out into the darkness, the entry chute that fed into the blades pointed back at Clete. Legion turned off the tap and threw the bucket of water into Marvin's face. "Get up, boy. You fixing to hep me make some pig food, you," he said. Marvin blew water out of his nostrils and mouth and pushed himself up on his hands. Legion shoved him in the shoulder with his boot. "Don't make me tell you twice, no," he said. "I dint hear you," Marvin said. "Pick up the other side of that shithog. He going in the grinder. You be good, maybe you won't end up there, too," Legion said. Marvin glanced at Zerelda. "What about her?" he asked. "She lay down wit' the wrong dog. She got his fleas," Legion said. Marvin rose to his feet, his face dazed, his eyes looking back at Zerelda. "You'll let me go?" he said, the register of his voice falling. Then the skin on his face seemed to shrink when he heard the fear and cowardice in his own words. I started to stand up straight, to move around the edge of the shed, where I could have a clear shot at Legion. But I felt an open handcuff come down on my right wrist, the steel tongue ratcheting into the lock. Sal locked the other end of the cuffs on a water pipe that elbowed out of the shed into the ground. My handcuff key was in my right pocket and I couldn't reach it with my left hand. I tried to grab his arm as he walked away from me, but he only turned and grinned, lifting a finger to his lips. Sal rounded the corner of the shed and aimed the Beretta with both hands at Legion's chest. Legion released Clete's arm, his eyes focusing on Sal, as though recognizing an.old enemy. "Where you come from, you?" Legion said. "Looks like you been causing folks a lot of grief," Sal said. "I ain't got no quarrel wit' you." "Time for you to check out, Jack. I don't mean boogie on down the road, either," Sal said. Legion stepped backward, tripping over the water bucket, his .38 revolver pushed down in his belt, a loud hiss rising from his throat. Then he bolted for the woods. Sal began shooting, the recoil of the Beretta jerking against his wrists, sparks flying from the barrel. I had worked my right pants pocket inside out with my left hand now, and I inserted my handcuff key into the lock on my wrist and ran around the corner of the shed with my .45. I could see Legion running through the woods toward the bay, hogs scattering around him, while Sal fired all ten rounds from the Beretta. A bolt of lightning struck the bay or the woods, I couldn't tell which, and I saw Legion's silhouette in the illumination, like a piece of scorched tin. Then the woods were dark again, and I saw Clete looking up at me in the glow of the Coleman lantern, his face white, a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Better hook up the pinhead, big mon," he said. I cuffed Marvin Oates and put him on the ground, then knelt down and used my pocketknife to cut the tape on Zerelda's wrists. A pair of headlights bounced across the wooden bridge over the rain ditch, levering up and down as the car came too fast across the ground. Then Joe Zeroski's Chrysler braked by the shed and Joe and Baby Huey got out on each side. Joe wore a pair of tight slacks and a formfitting strap undershirt, his flat chest rising and falling, his vascular arms pumped. He studied his niece's battered face and stroked her hair. Then he looked down at Marvin Oates. A smallchrome-plated automatic pistol protruded from his pocket. "This is the man who beat my daughter to death?" he said. "We going to have a problem here, Joe?" I said. "I asked you if this is the piece of shit who killed my Linda." "Yes, sir, I think he probably is," I said. Joe stared at Marvin a long time, the nails of his right hand cutting into his palm. His nostrils whitened around the rims and his hand floated toward his pants pocket. "Joe" I began. He removed a handkerchief from his back pocket and reached down to Marvin's face with it. "He's got a runny nose. It ain't nice to look at. You ought to wipe it for him," Joe said. When he finished, he threw the handkerchief on the ground.

  Twenty minutes later Helen Soileau and I watched the paramedics load Clete and Zerelda into an ambulance and take them to an emergency receiving room in Abbeville. The sky was still churning with black clouds, the air loud with crickets and the sound of tree frogs. I looked for the ex-soldier named Sal Angelo but found him nowhere. The last I had seen him, he had walked into the trees, but I could not remember seeing him come out. The coroner and several Vermilion Parish deputies were deep in the woods, almost to the bay, their flashlights bouncing off the trees and scrub brush. "He locked you up with your own cuffs?" Helen said. "Yeah, I'd left them on the truck seat," I said. "Why'd he want to cap Guidry?" "He knew I was going to do it," I replied. "I didn't hear you say that." She watched the coroner and three Vermilion Parish sheriff's deputies come out of the woods with a zipped body bag. The bag looked heavy, sagging in the center, and the deputies had trouble holding on to the corners. "Did you talk to the coroner?" Helen asked. "No," I replied. "Your friend must have been the worst shot in the U.S. Army," she said. "What do you mean?" "There were no wounds in Guidry's body. It looks like he was hit by lightning. His boots were blown off his feet," she said. "Lightning?" I said. "Anyway, he didn't go out alone. He was floating around with a bunch of dead pigs. Buy me coffee, Pops?" she said.