All the Devil's Creatures

  Willie looked up and Geoff saw terror in his eyes. “No. Beneath. You need to see—”

  “Paw-paw,” Joey said with glimmering eyes, sounding too adult. “We’ve gotta go.”

  Chapter 34

  Willie sat behind his grandson Joey, the boy clad in a florescent orange life jacket by virtue less of state law or any real prospect of drowning than at the insistence of his mother Sally. They paddled the aluminum john boat through a maze of bald cypress trees with their protruding knees along the swampy shore of China Island until they came to one of Willie’s Purex-bottle buoys.

  “Alright, son. Remember how I told you.”

  “Yessir.”

  Joey used his oar to lift the line out of the water. “I don’t feel any pulling, Paw-paw.”

  “Well, you take em one by one.”

  The boy took hold of the line and pulled up until the first barbed hook emerged from the murky water. Nibbled clean. With his free hand, Joey reached into the bucket of live bream and, after a few tries, managed to grab one of the little fish—fish he had caught that morning off the pier with a cane pole using balled-up white bread as bait. Willie watched to make sure the boy did not hold the trot line up solely by the short piece hanging down that held the hook. If he did not have a firm grip on the main line, a big fish submerged further down could jerk and send the hook right through Joey’s pale hand.

  Not that such an accident would hurt the boy any.

  Willie pushed the thought away, wanting what might be their last shared experience to be one of normalcy. Just an old timer teaching his grandson a thing or two.

  Joey bait the first hook with the bream, sending the barb through one eye socket and out the other so the little fish would wriggle like a sugar-high toddler without swimming free. He moved down the line and repeated the routine on the second and third hooks, both empty.

  Then he said, “I think I feel something coming up.”

  “Okay.”

  He pulled up and revealed an eighteen-inch catfish, alive but given up the fight. It had swallowed the hook.

  “You’re gonna have to cut him off.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Watch you don’t let him fin you.”

  Joey grabbed hold of the shears with one hand and the cat with the other, stroking down from head to tail to flatten the sharp fins. He cut the little line holding the hooked fish and put the creature into a plastic cooler of lake water and then he tied another hook and resumed working the line. Willie caressed the water with an oar to keep the little boat straight. The trot line yielded one nasty alligator gar that Joey cut off and let splash into the murk, hook and all.

  Willie said, “Let’s row around the island.”

  They paddled through the lily pads and the water hyacinth and, just below the surface of the dark water, the thick green weedy moss spread out like a thick and rotting shag carpet in a deserted and flooded house. He watched the back of Joey’s remarkable head. To himself, he cursed Geoff Waltz. The lawyer had gotten so close but had not come through. Then he cursed the sheriff, whose investigation had failed to reveal the truth.

  But no, it’s all on me—I made the deal, and I have to live with it. He’d hoped when he hired Geoff that the majestic turnings of the law would expose all. And then the killing, that pour girl. That hadn’t been part of the plan; it broke his heart. But surely, Willie had thought, the evildoings would all come to light in the wake of the murder investigation. Then he would not have to keep his end of the bargain—and at the same time would never have to reveal what he had done.

  I could have just told them all, could have come clean and put a stop to it. But he had held back. Out of fear for Joey. Or himself.

  That’s not right either. It’s like every time I opened my mouth to talk, something (Joey, the Doctor) grabbed my tongue and stomped on it.

  Joey pointed into the cypress boughs overhead, kelly-green with new spring growth, and he said, “Look there, Paw-paw.”

  A colony of a dozen or more monkeyish creatures occupied the trees—orange pelts and yellow eyes and big rat teeth through which they chattered in a clattering cacophony like the sound of a hundred manual typewriters. They gripped the branches with hands and feet but their tails, like their teeth, were outsized and misshapen and rodentine. They looked like misbegotten beasts left to guard hell’s back door.

  “Damn ugly creatures. If I had my gun I’d shoot them.”

  Joey turned back to look at his grandfather, his oar still. Why, Paw-paw? They’re not hurting anything.

  “They don’t belong, Joey. Each one is an aberration.” Joey turned and Willie met his grandson’s electric blue eyes across the boat and then averted his gaze as he realized that the boy had not spoken—Willie had seen or heard the question somehow though those eyes. He pushed his oar through the water and Joey turned forward and followed suit, and they turned the wooden oars sideways and left them submerged on the return strokes as Willie once told Joey the Indians had done to remain silent and undetected on their watery forays. And as they moved away from the chattering simian beasts, it came to Willie another way he could save his grandson from his destiny.

  He said, “We’re going to turn up into this channel.”

  They maneuvered the canoe into the narrow lane of clear water between the trees to a damp shore of red clay and humus and undergrowth. Water lilies blossomed in yellow fireballs, and, peeking through from deeper in, sumac and wild plum and the white cruciform blooms of dogwoods with their poignant crimson markings. Like a garden long forgotten and gone feral. And in the center loomed the remains of a minor oil well like an ill-conceived and ruined sculpture, capped and idle on a wooden platform, the piers penetrating the muck. Amid the rust and rotting wood, the cap itself glistened with a strange unnatural light, and a sign—like new—read: “Property of Texronco Inc. Danger. High Voltage. Keep Away.”

  Willie watched the back of his grandson’s head as the boy stared up at the old well, but he knew he could never comprehend the workings of the souped up organ nestled within. He said, “This is the way in.”

  “Not the only way.”

  “It’s my way.” The way I showed to the poor Bordelon girl.

  Joey did not turn around. “There’s no need. He’ll come to us.”

  “I don’t want to wait—I want to face him on my own terms.” But maybe we won’t need to face him at all.

  He raised the oar above his head and braced himself to smash that beautiful head—beautiful, but an aberration—the only way he knew to save the boy’s soul. And his own.

  Joey turned back to him again. His eyes glimmered. No, Paw-paw.

  I can’t send you back—

  It’s what’s fated. My destiny.

  I cain’t accept that … beautiful boy.

  I detest him. But it’s what’s got to be.

  Willie felt his arm lowering the oar and he wept. “I love you. Your momma loves you.”

  “Momma doesn’t know.”

  “She knows what she wants to know.”

  “It’s not time, anyway.” Joey again faced ahead. The cry of a loon pierced the sky. “My father’s not ready for me yet.”

  Chapter 35

  The sheriff seemed old and distracted that morning. His jowls sagged and his silver hair had dulled to gray. As if his virility had leached out through his pores and his bonhomie had withered inside him leaving a sack of a man, a broken widower with a badge but no will. Bobby sat across the big desk in the courthouse annex and listened through his boss’s sighs to his instructions for that night’s operation.

  “Y’all go in late. We can’t avoid having some press—there’s one or two camped out at the hospital day and night. But we can avoid a dadgum circus.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’ll put the hospital administration on notice so the staff should be expecting you. You and your team of deputies will go in and join the guards at Duchamp’s door. Y’all go in—he’ll be restrained. Get him into his jumpsuit.”
/>
  Bobby winced. “Can’t that wait till we get him in the lockup?”

  Seastrunk shook his head. “Regulations. You’ll have the wagon waiting at the curb. Get him in the back and drive him down here. I’ll be waiting. We lock him up, and that’s it. Report here at twenty-three hundred.”

  “Alright Sheriff.”

  Bobby rose to leave, but before he was all the way out of his seat, Seastrunk said: “Son, there’s one more thing.”

  “Sir?” Bobby half-stood with his hands on the armrests of his chair.

  “You really saved my hide the other day.” The sheriff paused and broke eye contact. “Thank you.”

  Bobby lowered himself into the seat. “My job, Sheriff. What I’m trained to do.” Bobby recognized the cockiness in his voice and fought to restrain it. He did not often receive the old man’s praise.

  “Well, it made this old lawman feel mighty slow.”

  “Sheriff, you’re the one that tracked him to his plane, kept him from flying off to Mexico or God knows where. And then he pulled a gun on you. What were you supposed to do?”

  Seastrunk leaned back and let out a big breath. “Dang it son, I don’t know. Not let it get to that point? I’m the one that kept you from pursuing the Duchamp lead. And if you hadn’t shown up when you did …”

  Bobby knew the sheriff had been lucky, would probably be dead if not for his own intervention. Going in armed, it should not have been so difficult to restrain Duchamp in the confines of the cockpit; the old man had gotten slow, sloppy. He struggled to find words for his defeated boss. But then the sheriff stood up and turned away and laced his hands behind his back and began looking at that the photographs hanging around his office, many of Seastrunk’s own father.

  “A Seastrunk’s been sheriff of this county for sixty years. And hell, I’ve done served twice as long as my daddy. I think it might be time to call her quits.”

  Bobby looked up, but his boss’s back was to him. “Come on, Sheriff. They love you in this county.”

  The old man paused at the window, looking out at the courthouse lawn. A gaggle of demonstrators remained, their muddy camp seeming semi-permanent now. Like gypsies who had found a lucrative spot. Bobby suspected they would stick around through Duchamp’s trial.

  “These little towns,” Seastrunk said. “Lordy but there ain’t much point to them anymore, is there? A county seat, a place for farmers to come in on Saturday and get a haircut? What’s the purpose when anybody can get to the city in two hours on an Interstate highway? Used to be, every little town had its own ice house. Its own family-owned drug store, its own five-and-dime. Now, more and more they all go bust and we end up with the same dang ol’ chains out on the highway as anyplace else. And, hell, you’ve seen this county’s budget, you know the dirty secret. As much as folks around here cry and moan about taxes, for every dime we send to Austin or Washington we get two bits back. Road funding. Homeland Security funding. That ain’t even counting farm subsidies.”

  The sheriff’s voice had reached its finest storytelling pitch—as had enamored Bobby on many nights with tales of everything from back-woods bootleggers to Austin hippies to the back slapping, hard drinking world of Texas politics of an earlier generation. But this ramble lacked the usual bonhomie, the good cheer of the natural politician that had propelled Seastrunk into office term after term. A bitterness, and maybe a touch of despair, underlay this speech. And he almost whispered the final words: “So we serve no function.”

  Bobby wanted to say: But the world does need towns like this. We do need the old ways. We need you. He could not find the words in time.

  “I don’t blame you, Bobby.” The sheriff had turned back to face him—a look between anger or hurt lingering in his eyes. “I don’t blame you one bit for wanting to get the hell out of this county.”

  “I … I don’t.” And at that moment, it felt true. He’d taken steps—Houston had announced the city would be hiring a hundred cops a year for the rest of the decade. Maybe word of his inquiries had gotten back to the sheriff. But looking into the old man’s eyes, deep with the history of that place—a history Bobby now understood he could not escape no matter how far away he moved, a history that dwelled within him as well—and considering all they had nearly lost in the wake of the Bordelon murder, Bobby could not fathom leaving.

  He tried to speak these things. Again, too slow.

  The desk phone rang and the sheriff answered. The old man grew red as he listened as if filling with rage that was a liquid thing. Bobby heard one side of the conversation: “The hell you are … You got no jurisdiction … Who’s your commanding officer? … His name, damn it … the governor my ass!”

  The sheriff hung up the phone and breathed, almost snorting like a bull. A hard gleam in his eyes displaced all dejection. “The goddamn Texas Rangers are taking our prisoner. They’re transferring Duchamp from the hospital. Right now.”

  •

  Bobby arrived at the hospital amid the demonstrators and the drifters and the cable news people who had converged on the hospital grounds awaiting the emergence of the newly revealed villain. The masses paid no heed to the medical center’s intended purpose. It served only as a backdrop to their ebullition. They were like Mardi Gras revelers amok in a cathedral garden. Television news helicopters circled overhead, and their vans blocked the approaches to the buildings. Bobby had left the sheriff at his desk making irate phone calls—all the way to the son-of-a-bitch governor himself if I have to, he told Bobby.

  The deputy fought his way through with his lights and sirens. He parked in a loading zone and shoved his way toward a parking garage where a phalanx of Rangers kept the crowd at bay. Yelling sheriff’s department as he walked, he held his badge high to part the sea of strange humanity. Then he felt his hat lifted from his head. He glanced back into the crowd and saw a girl of maybe eighteen in a flowing skirt placing it atop her blonde braids. She swayed as if to a pulsating rhythm and they made brief eye contact. She flashed a wry grin and Bobby kept walking.

  At the line of guards he showed his badge and they let him into the garage. He said: “Who’s in charge?” Up close, the men did not look like Texas Rangers. They looked scared and younger than Bobby himself. Like the soft-faced sons of cattlemen not yet matriculated. They wore jeans and khaki shirts that bore no insignia. But one of them gestured to a rough man in Western clothes bearing the silver star of that storied company of lawmen. He stood facing a set of double doors into the hospital with his hands on hips.

  “Who ordered this?”

  “Stand back son. We’ve got it covered.”

  Then two Rangers emerged from the building, the Speaker shackled between them. He did not wear an orange jumpsuit but rather baggy sweat pants and a loose white t-shirt, stained and torn at the sleeve. He looked far removed from the polished politician he once was—his face covered in stubble, his hooded eyes rimmed in red. His mouth hung agape and he made no attempt to shield his face from the cameras.

  Bobby saw in his periphery a youngish black man in a crisp blue suit and narrow tie snake past the child guards. He would later swear he saw the Ranger beside him grin.

  The well-dressed man stepped to Duchamp unimpeded as he and his captors approached a van. When the man was inches from the Speaker, he pulled a weapon and emptied three shots into the prisoner’s abdomen and chest. The Rangers holding Duchamp jumped back, but they betrayed no surprise.

  As the lawmen wrestled the assassin to the oil-stained ground, Bobby heard him say: “That’s for Dalia.”

  Chapter 36

  Geoff sat back and took a sip of his pint. Tony and Marisol looked back at him. He had felt secure with these two back here at this neighborhood dive, but they gaped at him now with an incredulity verging on despair, as if he had disclosed to them a dark intention to commit murder or suicide. And maybe his plan would lead to the former. Or, effectively, the latter.

  But he felt a determination like nothing he had felt in two years. So he awaited the re
sponses of his pair of allies. Two days had passed since his conversation with Willie Kincaid, two days since the killing of Robert Duchamp.

  Marisol said, “I thought we were done.”

  Geoff half-smiled. “Are you ready to be done with me?”

  “Hey, no way. It was a blast almost getting burned alive in a storage container and all.”

  Geoff took a quick gulp of beer to mask the melting of his grin. They took that first trip to New Orleans—the drink in Pirates Alley, dinner in the Marigny, meeting T-Jacques—barely three weeks before, but it seemed like a million years. And then the return, that incredible passion. Just a one night stand, sure—but it had left a feeling Geoff could not shake. Had he seen a glimmer of that same feeling in Marisol’s eyes that night on the runway as paramedics carried Duchamp away? No matter—she gave him now only cold sarcasm. Geoff did not judge her to be one whose spirit mere physical danger could crush. He thought it was more—some dark thing she had seen that had pushed her from him.

  “Well Geoffy,” Tony said. “You really could be done. The judge might lift the stay on your environmental lawsuit, but she already found that Texronco’s polluting the lake. With Duchamp murdered, it throws everything into flux. She’ll give you thirty days to supplement an expert report, to make your case. Then you’ll win, get your fees—”

  “You’re not listening. This is about more than a little pollution and attorney’s fees.”

  Tony raised his hands as if in surrender. “Fine. Assume you’re right. But the lawsuit you have now isn’t about any of that. It’s just a simple pollution case. So wrap it up. You may never know what Duchamp was up to at that refinery, if anything. But he’s dead. Cut your losses and move on.”

  Marisol nodded along with Tony. “And there’s still Kathleen. Once you’re done with this lawsuit, start a new investigation with her. Maybe she’ll give you enough for a new case against Texronco if you think the company’s really doing more than it seems—”