I went back outside and lay flat on my stomach and crawled under the house. Three feet beyond the rear wall, wedged between the crossbeam and the cinder-block piling, was a one-handed weed sickle. I pried it loose and crawled back into the sunlight. The short wood handle was intact, but the half-moon blade had rusted into lace.
I slipped the sickle handle-first into a Ziploc bag and knocked on Passion's door.
"This is the instrument that slung blood on the ceiling and walls. Letty hit him with the mattock and you used this," I said when Passion came to the door. "It look like a piece of junk to me," she said. "I came out here because I feel an obligation to your sister. But I don't have time for any more of y'all's bullshit. I'm going to bust Little Face Dautrieve as a material witness and make her life miserable. She'll stay in jail until she tells me what happened and in the meantime Social Services will take her baby. Is that how you want it to play out?"
"You seen the paper today?" she asked. "No."
"The Supreme Court won't hear any more of Letty's appeals. Unless Belmont Pugh commute her sentence, she's gonna die. You want to know what happened? I'm gonna tell you. Then you can carry it down to your office and do whatever you want to wit' it."
Her face was wan, her eyes unfocused inside the gloom of the house, as though she didn't recognize the words she had just spoken. But suddenly I felt my victory was about to become ashes in my mouth. She studied my face through the screen, then pushed open the door and waited for me to come inside.
Eight YEARS ago Passion and Letty looked out their side window in dismay at the return of their neighbor, Vachel Carmouche. In their minds he had been assigned to their past, to a world of dreams and aberrant memories that dissipated with time and had no application in their adult lives. Now they watched him blow his gallery clean of birds' nests with a pressure hose while crushing the tiny eggs under his rubber boots; they watched him pry the plywood covering from his windows, hoe out a vegetable patch, and drink lemonade in the shade, a small sip at a time, like a man who was stintful even with his own pleasure, his starched and pressed gray work clothes and gray cloth cap unstained by sweat, as though the rigidity that characterized his life allowed him to control the secretion in his glands.
They left the house and went grocery shopping, hoping somehow he would be gone when they returned and a rental sign would be standing in the yard. Instead, they saw him moving his belongings into the house, ignoring Passion and Letty as though they were not there. They saw him split open a ripe watermelon and ease chunks of it off a knife blade into his mouth, his face suffused with a self-contained sensual glow. In the evening shadows they saw him scythe weeds out of his front yard and fire a barbecue pit and impale a pork roast on its rotisserie; they saw him pack rock salt and ice into a hand-crank ice cream maker, then give a quarter to a twelve-year-old black girl to turn the crank for him. They saw him press the coin into her palm and fold his fingers over her fist and smile down at her, her upraised eyes only inches from his gleaming cowboy belt buckle and the flatness of his stomach and the dry heat that emanated from his clothes.
Letty went into the yard with a paper sack and walked among the trees in front, picking up scraps of paper that had blown off the road. She waited until Car-mouche went into his house, then called the little girl over.
"What are you doing around here?" she asked.
"Visiting my auntie up the road," Little Face replied.
"Go back home. Stay away from that white man."
"My auntie left me here. She rent from Mr. Vachel." Letty squatted down and looked directly into Little Face's eyes.
"Has he touched you? Put his hand somewhere he shouldn't?" she said.
"No, ma'am. He ain't like that."
"You listen to me—" Letty began, squeezing the girl's arm. Then she looked past Little Face's head at the silhouette of Vachel Carmouche, who stood in the drive now, leaves swirling around his shoes, the early moon like a pink wafer in the sky behind him.
He pinched the brim of his cloth cap with two fingers.
"Been a long time. You grown into a handsome woman, Miss Letty," he said.
"Why'd you come back?" she said.
"A lot of building going on. A man with electrical knowledge can make a good deal of money right now."
"You get your goddamn feet off my property," she said.
"You might be righteous now. But you and your sister were always switching your rear ends around when you wanted something."
"I can't tell you how much I hate you," Letty said, rising to her feet.
"What you hate are your own sins. Think back, Letty. Remember how you'd turn somersaults on the lawn, grinning and giggling at me? You were thirteen years old when you did that. Now you reprimand me and blaspheme God's name in front of a child."
Carmouche put his hand in Little Face's and led her back onto his property. The white streaks of cornstarch that had been ironed into his gray clothes recalled an image out of Letty’s memory that made her shut her eyes.
Letty worked in the backyard, raking the winter thatch out of her garden, thrusting a spade deep into the black soil, taking a strange pleasure when the blade crushed a slug or cut through the body of a night crawler. Her flannel shirt became heavy with sweat and she flung the spade on the ground and went inside the house and showered with hot water until her skin was as red and grained as old brick.
"We'll try to do something about him tomorrow," Passion said.
"Do what?" Letty said, tying the belt around her terry-cloth robe.
"Call Social Services. Tell them about the little girl."
"Maybe they'll hep her like they hepped us, huh?"
"What else you want to do, kill him?" Passion said.
"I wish. I really wish." Passion walked over to her sister and put her arms around her. She could smell a fragrance of strawberries in her hair.
"It's gonna be all right. We can make him move away. We're grown now. He cain't hurt us anymore," she said.
"I want him to pay."
Passion held her sister against her, stroking her back, feeling her sister's breath on her neck. Through the second-story window she could see down into Vachel Carmouche's backyard. Her face tingled and a bilious taste rose into her mouth.
"What is it?" Letty said, stepping back and looking at her sister's expression. Then she turned around and looked down into Vachel Carmouche's yard.
He had set Little Face on his knee and was feeding ice cream to her with a spoon. Each time he placed the spoon between her lips he smoothed back her hair, then wiped the drippings from the corners of her mouth with the backs of his fingers. He kissed her forehead and filled another spoonful of ice cream and placed a fresh strawberry on it. She opened her mouth like a bird, but he withdrew the spoon quickly, offering and withdrawing it again and again, and finally putting it into her mouth and lifting the spoon handle up so as not to drop any of the melted ice cream on her chin.
Letty charged barefoot down the stairs, tearing the sole of one foot on an exposed nailhead. She found a pair of work shoes in the downstairs closet and leaned against the wall with one arm and pulled them on. "He used to keep a shotgun," Passion said. "He put his hand on it, I'll shove it up his ass. You coming or not?" Letty said.
They went out the back door, into the twilight, into the smell of spring and cut grass and newly turned dirt and night-blooming flowers opening in the cool of the evening. They crossed into Vachel Carmouche's property, expecting to see him on his back porch with the little girl, expecting to confront and verbally lacerate him for a deed he had committed out in the open, upon the person of a third victim, a deed he could not possibly deny, as though Passion's and Letty's knowledge of their own molestation had long ago lost its viability and had to be corroborated by the suffering of another in order to make it believable.
But Carmouche was nowhere in sight. The little girl sat on the back step, coloring in a crayon book. "What did he do to you, honey?" Letty said.
"Ain't done no
thing. He gone inside to eat his dinner," the girl replied.
"Did he touch you?" Passion said. The little girl did not look back at them. A bright silver dime was on the step by her shoe.
"Mr. Vachel gonna take me up to the video store to get some cartoons," she said.
"You come home wit' us. We'll call your auntie," Letty said.
"She at work. I ain't suppose to go nowhere except Mr. Vachel's."
Letty mounted the steps and shoved open the back door. Carmouche was sitting at the kitchen table, his back erect, his whole posture as rectangular as his chair, a fork poised in front of his mouth. He laid the fork down and picked up a glass of yellow wine.
"I'd appreciate it if you'd show some respect toward my home," he said.
"You sonofabitch," she said, and stepped inside the room. When she did, the belt around her waist came loose and her terry-cloth robe fell open on her body.
Carmouche's eyes moved over her breasts and stomach and thighs. He sipped from his wine and pushed back his chair and crossed his legs.
"Some say love's the other side of hate. You're a beautiful woman, Letty. An older man can bring a woman pleasure a younger man cain't," he said, his voice growing more hoarse with each word.
He rose from his chair and approached her, his eyes liquid and warm under the bare electric light. She clutched her robe with one hand and stepped backwards, then felt her work shoe come down on the iron head of the mattock that was propped against the wall, knocking the handle into her back.
She reached behind her and picked the mattock up with both hands, her robe falling open again, and swung it into his face.
His nose broke and slung a string of blood across his shoulder. He stared at her in disbelief and she hit him again, this time directly in his overbite, breaking his upper teeth at the gums. His face quivered as though he had been electrically shocked, then the thousands of tiny wrinkles in his face flattened with rage and he attacked her with his fists.
He swung wildly, like a girl, but he was strong and driven by his pain and the disfigurement she had already done his face and she knew it was only a matter of time until he wrested the mattock from her.
His hands locked on the handle, his nose draining blood across his mouth, his broken teeth like ragged pieces of ceramic in his gums. She closed her eyes against the stench of his breath.
Passion picked up the weed sickle from the porch step and came through the door and drove the curved point into Carmouche's back, pushing with the heel of her hand against the dull side of the blade. His mouth fell open and his chin jutted upward like a man who had been garroted. He fell backwards, stumbling, reaching behind him with one hand as though he could insert a thumb in the hole that was stealing the air from his lung. He collapsed on one knee, his eyes suddenly luminous, like a man kneeling inside a cave filled with specters whose existence he had long ago forgotten.
Letty hit him again and again with the mattock while Passion shut the back door so the little girl could not see inside the house. Letty's robe and work shoes and arms and thighs were splattered with Carmouche's blood, but her violence and anger found no satiation, and a muted, impotent cry came from between her teeth each time she swung the mattock.
Passion put her hand on her sister's shoulder and moved her away from Carmouche's body.
"What? What is it?" Letty said, as though awakening from a trance.
Passion didn't reply. Instead, she lifted the sickle above her head and looked into Carmouche's eyes.
"Don't. . . please," he said, his hand fluttering toward his cowboy belt buckle.
Then Passion's arm came down and Letty pressed both her forearms against her ears so she would not hear the sound that came from his throat.
23
I WENT HOME instead of returning to the office. I sat at one of the spool tables on the dock, the Cinzano umbrella popping in the breeze above my head, and looked at the blue jays flying in and out of the cypress and willow trees. I watched the clouds marble the swamp with shadow and light, and the wind from the Gulf straightening the moss on the dead snags. I stayed there a long time, although I didn't look at my watch, like a person who has strayed unknowingly into the showing of a pornographic film and would like to rinse himself of a new and unwanted awareness about human behavior.
The story of Carmouche's death was repellent. I wished I had not heard it, and I wished I did not have to make decisions about it.
I walked up to the house and told Bootsie of my morning with Passion Labiche.
She didn't say anything for perhaps a full minute. She got up from the kitchen table and stood at the sink and looked into the yard.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, her back to me.
"Nothing she told me can help her sister."
"You have the sickle in the truck?"
"I put it back under the house." I went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee. She turned around and followed me with her eyes.
"You're going across a line, Dave," she said.
"I virtually coerced a confession out of her. I don't know if Carmouche deserved to die the way he did, but I know the girls didn't deserve what happened to them." She walked to the stove and slipped her hand down my forearm and hooked her fingers under my palm.
"You know what I would do?" she said.
"What?" I said, turning to look at her.
"Start the day over. You set out to help Passion and Letty. Why bring them more harm? If Letty were tried today, she might go free. You want to enable a process that's already ignored the injury done to two innocent children?"
Bootsie was forever the loyal friend and knew what to say in order to make me feel better. But the real problem was one that went beyond suppression of nonexculpatory evidence in a crime of eight years ago. I was tired of daily convincing myself that what I did for a living made a difference.
I fixed a ham and onion sandwich for myself and ate it on the picnic table in the backyard. A few minutes later Bootsie came outside and sat down across from me, a small cardboard box in her hand.
"I hate to hit you with this right now, but this came in the morning mail. Alafair left it on her bed. I shouldn't have read the letter, but I did when I saw the name at the bottom," she said.
The box was packed with tissue paper and contained a six-inch-high ceramic vase that was painted with miniature climbing roses and a Confederate soldier and a woman in a hoop dress holding each other's hands in an arbor of live oaks. The detail and the contrast of gray and red and green were beautiful inside the glazed finish.
The letter, handwritten on expensive stationery and folded in a neat square, read:
Dear Alafair,
I hope you don't think too badly of me by this time. Your father cares for you and wants to protect you, so I don't hold his feelings toward me against him. This is the vase I was working on. I tried to make the girl look like you. What do you think? You can't see the face of the Confederate soldier. I'll let you imagine who he is.
I wish I could have lived in a time like the soldier and the girl on the vase did. People back then were decent and had honor and looked after each other.
You're one of the best people I ever met. If you ever need me, I promise I will be there for you. Nobody will ever make me break that promise.
Your devoted friend from the library,
Johnny
"Where is she?" I asked.
"At the swimming pool." Bootsie watched my face. "What are you thinking?"
"That boy is definitely not a listener."
I went back to the office and placed another call to the psychologist at the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford. It wasn't long before I knew I was talking to one of those condescending, incompetent bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to hold on to their jobs and hide their paucity of credentials.
"You're asking me if he has obsessions?" the psychologist said.
"In a word, yeah."
"We don't have an adequate vocabulary to describe what some of these peopl
e have."
"You don't have to convince me of that," I said. "He was a suspect in a killing here. A gasoline bomb thrown inside another inmate's cell. Your man was probably raped. You were faxed everything we have. I don't know what else to tell you about him."
"Wait a minute. You didn't know him?"
"No. I thought you all understood that. Dr. Louvas worked with O'Roarke, or Remeta, as you call him. Dr. Louvas is at Marion now."
DR11 - Purple Cane Road Page 24