“What was it?”
“A man whipped me with his belt behind Provost’s saloon. Another man held me while he done it.”
“What else?”
“I caught him later that night. When he was by himself. It worked out different this time.”
He unsnapped the button on his shirt pocket and took a Camel out and fitted it in his mouth without ever letting go of my eyes.
“You’re not lying about the warrant, are you?” he said.
“I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“What would you lie about?”
“Sir?”
When we drove away I saw the little black girl who had been laying steaks on the mesquite fire run out from the side of the building and wave at the station wagon.
That night I slept on a bare mattress on the floor of a stucco cottage full of garden tools behind the main house. I dreamed I was on a flat-wheeler freight, high up on a trestle above a canyon, and the trestle’s supports were folding under the train’s weight and the wheels were squealing on the rail as they gushed sparks and fought to gain traction.
* * *
The main house was three-story purple brick, with white balconies and widow’s walks and poplar trees planted as windbreaks around the yard. There was a bunkhouse with a tar paper roof for the fieldhands, rows of feeder lots and corrugated water tanks and windmills for the livestock, a red barn full of baled hay you could stuff a blimp in, a green pasture with hot fences for Jude’s thoroughbreds, a scrap yard that was a museum of steam tractors and Model T flatbed trucks, a hundred irrigated acres set aside for vegetables and melons and cantaloupes, and through a long, sloping valley that fanned into a bluff above the river, deer and Spanish bulls mixed in together, belly-deep in grass.
Every fence had a posted sign on it, and for those who couldn’t read, animals and stray wetbacks, Jude’s foreman had nailed dead crows or gutted and salted coyotes to the cedar posts.
The lights in the main house went on at 4 A.M., when Mrs. LaRose, a black-haired German lady with red cheeks and big arms Jude had brought back from the war, read her Book of Mormon at the kitchen table, then walked down to the open-air shed by the bunkhouse and fired the wood cook stove.
By 7 A.M. my first day I was wearing bradded work gloves and a hard hat and steel-toe boots and wrestling the drill bit on the floor of an oil rig right above the Rio Grande, the drill motor roaring, tongs clanging, the chain whipping on the pipe, and drilling mud and salt water flooding out of the hole like we’d punched into an underground lake.
After a week Jude walked down to my cottage and stood in the doorway with Buford, who was just seven years old then and the miniature of his daddy in short pants.
“You got any questions about how things run?” he said.
“No, sir.”
He nodded. “You sure about that?”
“I’m getting along real fine. I like it here.”
“That’s good.” He turned and looked off at the sun on the hills. His eyes were close-set, almost violet, like they were painted with eye shadow.
“Sometimes the Mexican boys talk. They forget what it was like down in the bean field in Chihuahua.”
“I don’t pay it no mind.”
“Pay what no mind?”
“They talk in Spanish. So I don’t waste my time listening.”
“I see.” He cupped his hand on Buford’s head. “I want you to take him to work in the tomato field tomorrow.”
“I’m supposed to be on the rig.”
“I want Buford to start learning work habits. Come up to the house and get him at six.”
“Yes, sir, if that’s what you want.”
“My foreman said you asked about the wages the Mexican boys were making.”
“I guess I don’t recall it,” I said.
He studied the side of my face, all the time his fingers rubbing a little circle in Buford’s hair.
“Next time you bring your questions to me,” he said.
I looked at the floor and tried not to let him see the swallow in my throat.
* * *
You didn’t have to roughneck long in Jude’s oil patch to find out what was going on. You could hear the trucks at night, grinding across the riverbed. Jude’s foreman had moved all the cattle to the upper pasture and dropped the fences along the riverbank so the trucks could cross when the moon was down and catch the dirt road that wound into the ranch next door, where another oil man, a bigger one than Jude, was running the same kind of economics.
A white man got two dollars an hour on the floor of a rig and two twenty-seven up on the monkey board. Wetbacks would do it for four bits and their beans. They’d drill into pay sands with no blowout preventers on the wellhead; work on doodlebug crews in an electric storm, out on a bald prairie, with dynamite and primers and nitro caps in the truck, all those boys strung out along a three-hundred-foot steel tape, handling steel chaining pins arid a range pole that might as well have been a lightning rod. I had a suspicion it made for a religious moment.
I saw boys on the rig pinch their fingers off with pipe chains, get their forearms snapped like sticks by the tongs, and find out they weren’t taking anything back to Mexico for it but a handshake.
The ranch next door was even worse. I heard a perforating gun blew up and killed a wet on the rig floor. A deputy sheriff helped bury him in a mesquite grove, and an hour later the floor was hosed down and pipe was singing down the hole.
That’s not all of it, either. Jude and some of his friends had a special crew of higher-paid wets and white boys who’d been in Huntsville and on the pea farm at Sugarland that were slant drilling, which is when you drill at an angle into somebody else’s pool or maybe a company storage sand and you pay off whoever is supposed to be watching the pressure gauges. They’d siphon it out like soda through a straw, cap the well, call it a duster, and be down in Saucillo, drinking Dos X’s and mescal before the Texaco Company knew they’d been robbed blind.
I had no complaint, though. Jude paid me a white person’s wage, whether I was clanging pipe or watching over Buford in the field. He was a cute little guy in his short pants and cowboy hat. We’d hitch a mule to the tomato sled, set four baskets on it, and pick down one row and up the other, and I’d always let him drive the mule and see how far he could fling the tomatoes that had gotten soft.
The second month I was there, Buford and me started pulling melons at the back end of the field, where a black family lived in a shack by a grove of dried-up mesquite trees. Jude rode his horse out in the field and stretched in the saddle and leaned his arms on the pommel and pushed his hat up on his brow with his thumb. Buford was slapping the reins on the mule’s butt and gee-hawing him in a circle at the end of the row.
“How’s he doing?” Jude said.
“He’s a worker,” I said.
“That’s good.” He looked over at the black family’s shack. A little girl was playing with a doll on the gallery. “Y’all been working straight through?”
“Yes, sir, haven’t missed a beat,” I said.
“I don’t want him playing with anybody back here.”
I tried to keep my focus on Buford and the sled at the end of the row, let the words pass, like it wasn’t really important I hear them.
“You understand what I’m saying?” Jude said.
“Yes, sir. You’re pretty clear.”
“You bothered by what I’m telling you?”
“That’s the little girl who works with her mom at the cafe, ain’t it?”
“Don’t look at something else when you talk to me, Jerry Joe.”
I raised my eyes up to his. He looked cut out of black cloth against the sun. My eyes burned in the heat and dust.
“It’s time the boy learns the difference, that’s all,” he said.
“I’m not here to argue, Mr. Jude.”
“You may intend to be polite, Jerry Joe. But don’t ever address a white man as a person of color would.”
&
nbsp; Jude knew how to take your skin off with an emery wheel.
* * *
I liked Mrs. LaRose. She cooked big breakfasts of eggs and smokehouse ham and refried beans and grits for all the hands and was always baking pies for the evening meal. But she seemed to have a blind spot when it came to Jude. Maybe it was because he was a war hero and her father died in one of Hitler’s ovens and Jude brought her here from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus. What I mean is, he wasn’t above a Saturday night trip down into Mexico with his foreman, a man who’d been accused of stealing thoroughbred semen from a ranch he worked over in Presidio. One Sunday morning, when the foreman was still drunk from the night before and we were driving out to the rig, he said, “Y’all sure must grow ’em randy where you’re from.”
“Beg your pardon?” I said.
“Bringing back a German heifer ain’t kept Jude from milking a couple at a time through the fence.”
Later, he caught me alone in the pipe yard. He was quiet a long time, cleaning his nails with a penknife, still breathing a fog of tequila and nicotine. The he told me I’d better get a whole lot of gone between me and the ranch if I ever repeated what he’d said.
Don’t misunderstand, I looked up to Jude in lots of ways. He told me how scared he’d been when they flew into German ack-ack. He said it was like a big box of torn black cotton, and there was no way to fly over or around or under it. They’d just have to sit there with their sweat freezing in their hair while the plane shook and bounced like it was breaking up on a rock road. Right after Dresden a piece of shrapnel the size and shape of a twisted teaspoon sliced through his flight jacket and rib cage so he could actually put his hand inside and touch the bones.
I blame myself for what happened next.
Buford and me were hoeing weeds in the string beans at the end of the field, when this old Mexican hooked one wheel of the pump truck off the edge of the irrigation ditch and dropped the whole thing down on the axle. I left Buford alone and got the jack and some boards out of the cab, and the old man and me snugged them under the frame and started jacking the wheel up till we could rock it forward and get all four wheels on dirt again. Then I looked through the square of light under the truck and saw Buford across the field, playing under a shade tree with the little black girl just as Jude came down the road in his station wagon.
I felt foolish, maybe cowardly, too, for a reason I couldn’t explain, lying on my belly, half under the truck, while Jude got out of his station wagon and walked toward his son with a look that made Buford’s face go white.
He pulled Buford by his hand up on the black family’s gallery, went right through their door with no more thought than he would in kicking open a gate on a hog lot, and a minute later came back outside with one of the little girl’s dresses wadded up in his hand.
First, he whipped Buford’s bare legs with a switch, then pulled the dress down over his head and made him stand on a grapefruit crate out in the middle of the field, with all the Mexicans bent down in the rows, pretending they didn’t see it.
I knew I was next.
He drove out to where the pump truck was still hanging on the jack, and stared out the car window at me like I was some dumb animal he knew would never measure up.
“You didn’t mind your priorities. What you see yonder is the cost of it,” he said.
“Then you should have took it out on me.”
“Don’t be a hypocrite on top of it. If you had any guts, you’d have spoken up before I whipped him.”
I could feel my eyes watering, the words quivering in my mouth. “I think you’re a sonofabitch, Jude.”
“He’s a LaRose. That’s something you won’t ever understand, Jerry Joe. You come from white trash, so it’s not your fault. But you’ve got a chance to change your life here. Don’t waste it.”
He dropped the transmission in first gear, his face as empty of feeling as a skillet, and left me standing in the weeds, the dust from his tires pluming in a big cinnamon cloud behind his car.
* * *
I’d like to tell you I drug up that night, but I didn’t. Jude’s words burned in my cheeks just like a slap, like only he knew, of all the people in the world, who I really was.
It’s funny how you can become the reflection you see in the eyes of a man you admire and hate at the same time. The family went back to Louisiana in the fall, and I stayed on and slant drilled, brought wets across the river, killed wild horses for a dog food company, and fell in love every Saturday night down in Chihuahua. Those boys from Huntsville pen and the pea farm at Sugarland didn’t have anything on me.
When he died of lung cancer ten years later, I thought I’d go to the funeral and finally make my peace with him. I made it as far as the door, where two guys told me Mr. LaRose had left instructions the service was to be attended only by family members.
Ole Jude really knew how to do it.
CHAPTER
14
It was dark now and rain was falling on the bayou and the tin roof of the bait shop. Jerry Joe drank out of a thick white coffee cup across the table from me. A bare electric light bulb hung over our heads, and his face was shadowed by his fedora.
“What’s the point?” I said.
“You’re a parish cop in a small town, Dave. When’s the last time you turned the key on a rich guy?”
“A DWI about twenty years ago.”
“So am I getting through here?”
“It doesn’t change anything.”
“I saw Buford pitch in a college game once. A kid slung the bat at him on a scratch single. The kid’s next time up, Buford hit him in the back with a forkball. He acted sorry as hell about it while the kid was writhing around in the dirt, but after the game I heard him tell his catcher, ‘Looks like we made a Christian today.’ ”
“Buford’s not my idea of a dangerous man.”
“It’s a way of mind. They don’t do things to people, they let them happen. Their hands always stay clean.”
“If you’re letting the LaRoses use you, that’s your problem, Jerry Joe.”
“Damn, you make me mad,” he said. He clicked his spoon on the handle of his cup and looked out at the rain falling through the glare of the flood lamps. His leather jacket was creased and pale with wear, and I wondered how many years ago he had bought it to emulate the man who had helped incinerate the Florence of northern Europe.
“Take care of what you got, Dave. Maybe deep-six the job, I’ll get you on with the union. It’s easy. You get a pocketful of ballpoint pens and a clipboard and you can play it till you drop,” he said.
“You want to come up and eat with us?”
“That’s sounds nice . . .” His face looked melancholy under his fedora. “Another time, though. I’ve got a gal waiting for me over in Lafayette. I was never good at staying married, know what I mean? . . . Dave, the black hooker who saw the screenwriter popped, you still want to find her, she works for Dock Green . . . Hey, tomorrow I’m sending you a jukebox. It’s loaded, podna—Lloyd Price, Jimmy Clanton, Warren Storm, Dale and Grace Broussard, Iry LeJeune . . . Don’t argue.”
And he went out the screen door into the rain. The string of electric bulbs overhead made a pool of yellow light around his double shadow, like that of a man divided against himself at the bottom of a well.
* * *
Dock Green was an agitated, driven, occasionally vicious, ex-heavy-equipment operator, who claimed to have been kidnapped from a construction site near Hue by the Viet Cong and buried alive on the banks of the Perfume River. His face was hard-edged, as though it had been layered from putty that had dried unevenly. It twitched constantly, and his eyes had the lidless intensity of a bird’s, focusing frenetically upon you, or the person behind you, or the inanimate object next to you, all with the same degree of wariness.
He owned a construction company, a restaurant, and half of a floating casino, but Dock’s early money had come from prostitution. Whether out of an avaricious fear that his legitimate businesse
s would dry up, or the satisfaction he took in controlling the lives of others, he had never let go of the girls and pimps who worked the New Orleans convention trade and kicked back 40 percent to him.
He had married into the Giacano family but soon became an embarrassment to them. Without warning, in a restaurant or in an elevator. Dock’s voice would bind in his throat, then squeeze into a higher register, like a man on the edge of an uncontrollable rage. During these moments, his words would be both incoherent and obscene, hurled in the faces of anyone who tried to console or comfort him.
He had a camp and acreage off of old Highway 190 between Opelousas and Baton Rouge, right by the levee and the wooded mudflats that fronted the Atchafalaya River. His metallic gray frame house, with tin roof and screened gallery, was surrounded by palm and banana trees, and palmettos grew in the yard and out in his pasture, where his horses had snubbed the winter grass down to the dirt. Clete and I drove down the service road in Clete’s convertible and stopped at the cattleguard. The gate was chain-locked to the post.
A man in khakis and a long-sleeve white shirt with roses printed on it was flinging com cobs out of a bucket into a chicken yard. He stopped and stared at us. Clete blew the horn.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“He’s crazy. Give him something to work with.”
“How about waiting here, Clete?”
“The guy’s got syphilis of the brain. I wouldn’t go in his house unless I put Kleenex boxes over my shoes first.”
“It’s Tourette’s syndrome.”
“Sure, that’s why half of his broads are registered at the VD clinic.”
I climbed through the barbed wire fence next to the cattleguard. Dock Green was motionless, the bale of the bucket hooked across his palm as if it had been hung from stone. His thin brown hair was cut short and was wet and freshly combed. I saw the recognition come into his eyes, a tic jump in his face.
But the problem in dealing with Dock Green was not his tormented and neurotic personality. It was his intuitive and uncannily accurate sense about other people’s underlying motivations, perhaps even their thoughts.
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