DR11 - Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  "That's where you want to go?" he asked.

  "Yes. Can you wait so I can make sure she's home?" Mae said.

  "You didn't tell me it was Callie Patout. Ma'am, she work up at the nightclub. In the cribs."

  "I'll give you an extra half dollar if you wait. Then fifty cents more if you got to take me back."

  "Ladrine Theriot got killed shooting it out wit' a constable. I ain't having no truck with that kind of stuff. Look, smoke's coming out of the chimney. See? Ain't nothing to worry about."

  Then she was standing alone in front of the shack, watching the black man's pickup disappear down the dirt road between the cane fields, the enormous gray bowl of sky above her head.

  Callie sat on a wooden footstool by the fireplace, a cup of coffee between her fingers, and would not look at her.

  "What I'm suppose to do? I ain't got a car," she said.

  "You the only one, Callie."

  "There's trucks up on the state road. There's people going by all the time."

  "I stand out there, they gonna get me."

  Callie pushed her hands inside her sleeves and stared into the fire.

  "This white folks' trouble, Mae. Ain't right to be dragging colored peoples in it."

  "Where I'm gonna go, huh?"

  "Just ain't right. What I got that can hep? I ain't even got a job. Ain't none of it my doing," Callie said.

  Mae stood a long time in the silence, watching the firelight flicker on Callie's averted face, embarrassed at the shame and cowardice that seemed to be both her legacy and that of everyone she touched.

  Mae left the shack and began walking down the dirt road. She heard the door of the cabin open behind her.

  "Zipper Clum suppose to pick me up this afternoon or tomorrow morning and take me to New Orleans. Where's your suitcase at?"

  "My place."

  "You should have taken it, Mae. They would have thought you was gone."

  They waited through the afternoon for Zipper Clum, but no vehicles came down the road. The day seemed to have passed without either a sunrise or a sunset, marked only by wind and a grayness that blew like smoke out of the wetlands. But that evening the temperature dropped, sucking the moisture out of the air, fringing the mud puddles with ice that looked like badgers' teeth, and a green-gold light began to rim the horizon.

  Mae and Callie ate soda crackers and Vienna sausage out of cans in front of the fireplace, then Callie wiped her hands on a rag and put on a man's suit coat over her sweater and went outside to the privy. When she came back her face and eyes looked burned by the wind.

  "Their car's coming, Mae. Lord God, they coming," she said.

  Mae turned and looked through the window, then rose slowly from her chair, the glow of the firelight receding from her body like warmth being withdrawn from her life. She shut her eyes and pressed a wadded handkerchief to her mouth, swallowing, her brow lined with thought or prayer or perhaps self-pity and grief that was of such a level she no longer had to contend with or blame herself for it.

  "Get under the bed, you. Don't come out, neither. No matter what you hear out there. This all started when I run off with Mack. The ending ain't gonna change," she said.

  A four-door car that was gray with mud came up the road and stopped in front, and two police officers got out and stood in the dirt yard, not stepping up on the small gallery and knocking or even calling out, but simply reaching back into the car and blowing the horn, as though they would be demeaned by indicating that the home of a mulatto required the same respect and protocol as that of a white person.

  Mae straightened the purple suit she still wore and stepped outside, the skin of her face tightening in the cold, her ears filling with the sounds of seagulls that turned in circles above the sugarcane.

  "Where's Callie?" the taller of the two officers said.

  "She gone to Morgan City with a colored man. She ain't coming back," Mae answered.

  "Would you step out here, please? Don't be afraid," the officer said.

  "People call me Mae Guillory. But my married name is Robicheaux," she said.

  "We know that, ma'am. You saw something we think you don't understand. We want to explain what happened there on the bayou," he said.

  She ran her tongue over her lips to speak, then said nothing, her desire to respect herself as great as her desire to live, her pulse so thunderous she thought a vein would burst in her throat.

  "Ladrine Theriot tried to kill a constable. So the constable had to shoot him. It was the constable. You saw it, didn't you?" the officer said. Then he began to speak very slowly, his eyes lingering on hers with each word, waiting for the moment of assent that had not come. "The constable shot Ladrine Theriot. That's what you saw. There was no mistake about what happened . . . Okay?"

  She stepped off the tiny gallery into the yard, as though she were in a dream, not making conscious choices now, stepping into the green light that seemed to radiate out of the fields into the sky.

  "Ladrine was a good man. He wasn't like his brother, no. He done right by people. Y'all killed him," she said.

  "Yeah. Because we had to . . . Isn't that right?" he said.

  "My name's Mae Robicheaux. My boy fought in Vietnam. My husband was Big Aldous Robicheaux. Nobody in the oil field mess with Big Aldous."

  "We'll take you to where Ladrine died and explain how it happened. Get in the car, ma'am."

  "I know what y'all gonna do. I ain't afraid of y'all no more. My boy gonna find you. You gonna see, you. You gonna run and hide when you see my boy."

  "You are one ignorant bitch, aren't you?" the officer said, and knocked her to the ground.

  He unbuttoned his raincoat and exposed his holstered gun. He placed his fists on his hips, his jaw flexing, his raincoat flapping in the wind. Then a decision worked its way into his eyes, and he exhaled air through his nose, like a man resigning himself to a world that he both disdained and served.

  "Help me with this," he said to the other officer. Mae's face was white and round when the two officers leaned out of the greenness of the evening, out of the creaking and wheeling of land-blown gulls, and fitted their hands on her with the mercy of giant crabs.

  22

  THE NEXT DAY the Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Department faxed me all their file material on the shooting death of Ladrine Theriot in 1967. The crime scene report was filled with misspellings and elliptical sentences but gave the shooter's name as one Bobby Cale, a part-time constable, barroom bouncer, and collector for a finance agency.

  I called the sheriff in Lafourche.

  "The shooter wasn't the constable," I said.

  "Says who?" he replied.

  "A woman by the name of Mae Guillory saw it happen."

  "You wired up about something?"

  When I didn't reply, he said, "Look, I read that file. The constable tried to serve a bench warrant on Ladrine Theriot and Theriot pulled a gun. Why would the constable take responsibility for a shooting he didn't do?"

  "Because he was told to. Two other cops were there. They put a throw-down on the body."

  "I couldn't tell you. I was ten years old when all this happened. You guys running short of open cases in New Iberia?"

  "Where's Bobby Cale now?"

  "If you're up to it, I'll give you directions to his place. Or you can get them from the Department of Health and Hospitals."

  "What do you mean 'if I'm up to it'?"

  "Maybe his sins are what got a fence post kicked up his ass. Check it out. Ask yourself if you'd like to trade places with him," the Lafourche Parish sheriff said.

  I DROVE MY PICKUP truck to Morgan City, then down deep into Terrebonne Parish, toward the Gulf, almost to Point au Fer. The sky was gray and roiling with clouds and I could smell salt spray on the wind. I went down a dirt road full of sinkholes, between thickly canopied woods that were hung with air vines, dotted with palmettos, and drifting with gray leaves. The road ended at a sunless, tin-roofed cypress cabin that was streaked black with rainwater. A man sa
t in a chair on the front porch, his stomach popping out of his shirt like a crushed white cake, a guitar laid flat on his lap.

  When I got out of the truck, the man leaned forward and picked up a straw hat from the porch swing and fitted it low on his head. In the shade his skin had the bloodless discoloration that an albino's might if he bathed in blue ink. He wore steel picks on the fingers of his right hand and the sawed-off, machine-buffed neck of a glass bottle on the index finger of his left. He slid the bottle neck up and down the strings of the guitar and sang, "I'm going where the water tastes like cherry wine, 'cause the Georgia water tastes like turpentine."

  A mulatto or Indian woman who was shaped like a duck, with Hottentot buttocks and elephantine legs, was hanging wash in back. She turned and looked at me with the flat stare of a frying pan, then spit in the weeds and walked heavily to the privy and went inside and closed the door behind her by fitting a hand through a hole in a board.

  "She ain't rude. She's just blind. Preacher tole me once everybody's got somebody," the man on the porch said. He picked up a burning cigarette from the porch railing and raised it to his mouth. His hand was withered, the fingers crimped together like the dried paw of an animal.

  "You Bobby Cale?" I asked.

  He pushed his hat up on his forehead and lifted his face, turning it at a slight angle, as though to feel the breeze.

  "I look like I might be somebody else?" he said.

  "No, sir."

  "I was in Carville fifteen years. That was back in the days when people like me was walled off from the rest of y'all. I run off and lived in Nevada. Wandered in the desert and ate grasshoppers and didn't take my meds and convinced myself I was John the Baptizer come back in modern times. I scared the hell out of people who turned up the wrong dirt road."

  I started to open my badge.

  "I know who you are. I know why you're here, too. It won't do you no good," he said.

  "You didn't shoot Ladrine Theriot," I said.

  "The paperwork says otherwise."

  "The two other cops there had on uniforms. They wore black slickers. They made you take their heat because they were from another parish and out of their jurisdiction."

  He threw his cigarette out into the yard and looked into space. His nose was eaten away, the skin of his face drawn back on the bone, the cheeks creased with lines like whiskers on a cat.

  "You know a whole lot for a man wasn't there," he said.

  "There was a witness. She used the name Mae Guillory," I said.

  "Everybody's got at least one night in his life that he wants to carry on a shovel to a deep hole in a woods and bury under a ton of dirt. Then for good measure burn the woods down on top of it. I wish I was a drunkard and could just get up and say I probably dreamed it all. I don't remember no witness."

  "The two other cops killed her. Except a hooker saw them do it."

  His eyes held on me for a long time. They were green, uncomplicated, and still seemed to belong inside the round, redneck face of an overweight constable from thirty years ago.

  "You got an honest-to-God witness can hold them over the fire?" he said, his eyes lingering on mine.

  "She never knew their names. She didn't see their faces well, either."

  The moment went out of his eyes. "This world's briers and brambles, ain't it?" he said.

  "You a churchgoin' man, Mr. Cale?"

  "Not no more."

  "Why not get square and start over? People won't be hard on you."

  "They killed Mae Guillory? I always thought she just run off," he said, an unexpected note of sadness in his voice.

  I didn't reply. His eyes were hooded, his down-turned nose like the ragged beak of a bird. He pressed the bottle neck down on the frets of the guitar and drew his steel picks across the strings. But his concentration was elsewhere, and his picks made a discordant sound like a fist striking piano keys.

  "I had a wife and a little boy once. Owned a house and a truck and had money left over at the end of the month. That's all gone now," he said.

  "Mae Guillory was my mother, Mr. Cale. Neither she nor I will rest until the bill's paid."

  He set his guitar in the swing and placed his hat crown-down next to it and pulled the bottle neck and steel picks off his fingers and dropped them tinkling inside the hat.

  "The old woman and me is going to eat some lima bean soup. You can stay if you want. But we're done talking on this particular subject," he said.

  "Those cops are still out there, aren't they?" I said.

  "Good-bye, sir. Before you judge me, you might be thankful you got what you got," he said, and went inside the darkness of the cabin and let the screen slam behind him.

  Members in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous maintain that alcohol is but the symptom of the disease. It sounds self-serving. It's not.

  That night I sat at the counter in the bait shop and watched Clete Purcel use only one thumb to unscrew the cap from a pint bottle of whiskey, then pour two inches into a glass mug and crack open a Dixie for a chaser. He was talking about fishing, or a vacation in Hawaii, or his time in the corps, I don't remember. The beer bottle was dark green, running with moisture, the whiskey in the mug brownish gold, like autumn light trapped inside a hardwood forest.

  The air outside was humid and thick with winged insects, and strings of smoke rose from the flood lamps. I opened a can of Dr Pepper but didn't drink it. My hand was crimped tightly around the can, my head buzzing with a sound like a downed wire in a rain puddle.

  Clete tilted the glass mug to his mouth and drank the whiskey out of the bottom, then chased it with the beer and wiped his mouth on his palm. His eyes settled on mine, then went away from me and came back.

  "Your head's back in that story the black hooker told you," he said.

  "My mother said her name was Mae Robicheaux," I said.

  "What?"

  "Before she died, she said her name was Robicheaux. She took back her married name."

  "I'm going to use your own argument against you, Dave. The sonsofbitches who killed your mother are pure evil. Don't let them keep hurting you."

  "I'm going to find out who they are and hunt them down and kill them."

  He screwed the cap back on his whiskey bottle and wrapped the botde in a paper bag, then drank from his beer and rose from the counter stool and worked the whiskey bottle into his side pocket.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "Going back to the motel. Leaving you with your family. Taking my booze out of here."

  "That's not the problem."

  "It's not the main one, but you'd like it to be. See you tomorrow, Streak," he said.

  He put on his porkpie hat and went out the door, then I heard his Cadillac start up and roll heavily down the dirt road.

  I chained up the rental boats for the night and was turning off the lights when Clete's Cadillac came back down the road and parked at the cement boat ramp. He met me at the end of the dock with a tinfoil container of microwave popcorn in his hand.

  "I hate watching TV in a motel room by myself," he said, and laid his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me up the slope to the house.

  Early the next morning I put all the crime scene photos from the Vachel Carmouche homicide in an envelope and drove out to his deserted house on Bayou Teche. I pushed open the back door and once more entered the heated smell of the house. Purple martins, probably from the chimney, were flying blindly against the walls and windows, splattering their droppings on the floors and counters. I swatted them away from my face with a newspaper and closed off the kitchen to isolate the birds in the rest of the house.

  Why was I even there? I asked myself. I had no idea what I was looking for.

  I squatted down and touched a brownish flake of blood on the linoleum with my ballpoint pen. It crumbled into tiny particles, and I wiped my pen with a piece of Kleenex, then put my pen away and blotted the perspiration off my forehead with my sleeve.

  All I wanted to do was get ba
ck outside in the wind, under the shade of a tree, out of the smell that Vachel Carmouche seemed to have bled into the woodwork when he died. Maybe I had to stop thinking of Passion and Letty Labiche as victims. I tried to tell myself that sometimes it took more courage to step away from the grief of another than to participate in it.

  I felt a puff of cool air rise from the floor and I looked down through a crack in the linoleum, through a rotted plank, at a pool of water under the house with purple martins fluttering their wings in it. Then I realized the birds inside the house had not come from the chimney. But it wasn't the birds that caught my attention. One of the cinder-block pilings was orange with rust that had leaked from a crossbeam onto the stone.