DR11 - Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  Gable's nostrils were dilated as he breathed in the smell of Bootsie's shampoo, the perfume behind her ears, the soap from her bath, the heat off her skin, the hint of her sex in her underthings. I could see the cloth of his slacks tightening across his loins.

  Then I was running out of the rain toward him. I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman's blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table.

  A man I didn't know grabbed my arm, and a big uniformed policeman crashed into me from the other side, wrestling with both of his big meaty hands to get his arms around me and smother me against his girth. But even while the two men tried to pull me off of Gable, I kicked him in the side of the head and kicked at him once more and missed his face and shattered his watch on the cement.

  I fell over a chair and stared stupidly at the faces looking down at me, like a derelict who has collapsed on a sidewalk and must witness from the cement the pity and revulsion he inspires in his fellowman. Bootsie was between me and Gable now, her face incredulous. A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable's blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time of need.

  Through the sweat and water that dripped out of my hair I saw the governor and people from the crowd lifting Jim Gable to his feet. He was smiling at me, his teeth like pink tombstones in his mouth.

  26

  MY HANDS STILL HURT the next morning. I ran cold water over them in the kitchen sink, then drank coffee out on the picnic table in the blueness of the dawn and tried not to think about last night. I walked along the coulee that traversed the back of our property and looked at the periwinkles along the bank, the caladiums and elephant ears beaded with moisture, the willows swelling in the breeze. I wanted to stay in that spot forever and not go into the department on Monday morning, not look at the early edition of the Daily Iberian, not deal with the people who would speak politely to me on a sidewalk or in a courthouse corridor, then whisper to one another after they thought I was out of earshot.

  I walked back up toward the house just as the sun rose behind the cypress trees and seemed to flatten like fire inside the swamp. The back of the house was still deep in shadow, but I could see a white envelope taped to Alafair's screen. I pulled it loose and looked at her name written across the front in a flowing calligraphy. The flap was glued, with tiny felt-pen marks that transected both the flap and the body of the envelope so the dried glue could not be broken without the addressee knowing it.

  I opened my pocketknife and slit the envelope all the way across the top and removed the folded sheet of stationery inside.

  I went down to the bait shop and called Wally, our 275-pound dispatcher at the department, and told him I was taking a vacation day on Monday and not coming in.

  "You axed the old man?" he said.

  "I have a feeling he'll get in touch," I said.

  "Hey, Dave, if I pass the detectives exam, can I hang around wit' y'all, solve big cases, mop the shrimp tails off the floor with New Orleans cops?"

  But as I went back on the dock, I wasn't thinking about Wally's sardonic humor or my eventual encounter with the sheriff. I sat at a spool table and read again the letter that was written with the symmetry and baroque curlicues of a self-absorbed artist or what a psychologist would simply call a megalomaniac.

  It read:

  Dear Alafair,

  I had a harsh conversation with your father. But he has tried to destroy our friendship and has also been asking people about my private life, about things that are none of his business.

  At first I could not believe your words when you said you couldn't see me again. Did you really mean that? I would never betray you. Would you do that to me? I already know what the answer is.

  Remember all our secret meeting places? Just be at any one of them and I'll find you. You're the best person I've ever known, Alafair. We're like the soldier and the girl on the vase. Even though they lived long ago and have probably moldered in the grave, they're still alive inside the arbor on the vase. Death can be beautiful, just like art, and once you're inside either of them, you stay young forever and your love never dies. See you soon.

  As ever, Your loyal friend, Johnny

  I walked up the slope to the house and went into the bedroom with the letter and showed it to Bootsie.

  "My God," she said.

  "I'm at a loss on this one."

  "Where is she?"

  "Still asleep. I'd like to—"

  "What?" Bootsie said. She was still in her nightgown, propped on one elbow.

  "Nothing," I said.

  She sat up and took both my hands in hers. "We can't solve all our problems with violence. Remeta's a sick person," she said.

  "It sounds like we're talking about last night instead of Remeta."

  She lay back down on the pillow, then turned her head and looked out the window at the pecan and oak trees in the yard, as though fearing that whatever she said next would be wrong.

  "You know why I don't believe in capital punishment?" she said. "It empowers the people we execute. We allow them to remake us in their image."

  "Gables a degenerate. You didn't see him. I hope I ruptured his spleen."

  "I can't take this shit. I can't, I can't, I can't," she said, and sat on the side of the bed, her back stiff with anger.

  I FOUND Clete that afternoon, drinking beer, half in the bag, in a St. Martinville bar. The bar had lath walls and a high, stamped ceiling, and because it was raining outside, someone had opened the back door to let in the cool air, and I could see the rain dripping on a banana tree that grew by a brick wall. A group of bikers and their girlfriends were shooting pool in back, yelling each time one of them made a difficult shot, slamming the butts of their cues on the floor.

  "Passion tell you I was here?" Clete said. His lap and the area around his stool were littered with popcorn.

  "Yeah. Y'all on the outs?"

  "She's wrapped up in her own head all the time. I'm tired of guessing at what's going on. I mean who needs it, right?"

  "If I wanted to have somebody capped, who would I call?"

  "A couple of the asswipes at that pool table would do it for a hand job."

  "I'm serious."

  "The major talent is still out of Miami. You're actually talking about having somebody smoked? You must have had a bad day, Streak."

  "It's getting worse, too."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Nothing. I want to throw a steel net over Johnny Remeta. Most button men know each other."

  "I already tried. A stone killer in Little Havana, a guy who goes back to the days of Johnny Roselli? He hung up on me as soon as I mentioned Remeta's name. What's Remeta done now?"

  "He's got a death wish. I think he wants to take Alafair with him."

  Clete's face was flushed and he wiped the heat and oil out of his eyes with a paper napkin. The pool players yelled at another extraordinary shot.

  "How about putting it under a glass bell, Jack?" Clete said to them, then looked back at me, a half-smile on his face, his eyes slightly out of focus. "Say all that again?"

  "I'll catch you another time, Cletus."

  He removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and stared at it.

  "What's scareoderm mean? I couldn't find it in the dictionary," he said.

  "I don't know. Why?"

  "I took Passion to the doctor yesterday. I heard the nurses talking about her. I wrote that word down."

  "You mean scleroderma?" I asked.

  "That's it. That's what she has. What is it?"

  His mouth was parted expectantly, his green eyes bleary with alcohol, while he waited for me to reply.

  It continued TO rain
through the afternoon into the night. Little Face Dautrieve put her baby to bed in his crib and watched television until midnight in the front room of her cabin in the Loreauville Quarters. Then she undressed and put on a pajama top and lay down on top of her bed under the fan and listened to the rain on the tin roof. The wind was blowing hard against the slat walls and she knew the storm would be a long one. The occasional headlights on the state road looked like spi-derwebs flaring on the windowpane.

  From the edges of sleep she heard a raw scraping sound, like a rat clawing inside the walls. When she raised her head from the pillow, she saw the dead bolt on the back door rotating in its socket, then sliding free of the door frame.

  The man other people called Johnny Remeta stepped into the room, water sliding off his hat and black raincoat, a metal nail file glinting in his right hand.

  "I t'ought you was my auntie. She fixing to be here any minute," Little Face said.

  "Long drive from Lake Charles. Because that's where she moved to."

  Remeta sat down in a chair next to the bed and leaned forward on his hands, his hatted profile in silhouette against the lightning that leaped above the trees on the bayou.

  "Can I take off my things? They're wet," he said.

  "We ain't got nothing you want, Rain Man. My baby's got the croup. I melted Vicks in hot water. That's how come the room smell like it do. You stay here, you get sick."

  He removed his hat and set it crown-down on the floor, then pulled his raincoat off his shoulders and let it hang wet side out on the back of the chair. His eyes settled on her face and mouth and she saw his throat swallow. She pulled the sheet up to her stomach.

  "I ain't in that life no more," she said.

  He opened and closed his hands on top of his thighs, his veins cording under the skin.

  "You've been with white men?" he asked.

  "Down South the color line never got drawn when it come to the bedroom."

  Then he said something that was lost in the thunder or the thickness that caused his words to bind in his throat.

  "I cain't hear you," she said.

  "What difference does one more make?"

  "I ain't want your money. I ain't want you, Rain Man. You got to go back where you come from."

  "Don't talk to me like that," he said. The rain clattered on the roof and sluiced down over the windows. Little Face could feel her heart beating inside the thinness of her pajama top. The elastic of her nylon panties cut into her skin, but she knew she should not move in order to make herself more comfortable, although she could not explain why she knew this.

  Remeta's breath came out in a ragged exhalation before he spoke.

  "I've used a trick to scare people so I wouldn't have to hurt them. I'll show you," he said.

  He slipped a blue-black snub-nosed revolver from a holster that was attached to his ankle with a Velcro strap. He flipped the cylinder out of the frame and ejected all six rounds into his palm. They were thick and brass-cased and seemed too large for the size of the revolver. He inserted one back into a chamber and spun the cylinder, then flipped the cylinder back into the frame without looking at where the loaded chamber had landed.

  "Ever read about Doc Holliday? His edge was everybody knew he didn't care if he lived or died. So I do this sometimes and it makes people dump in their drawers," Remeta said.

  He cocked the revolver, pressed the barrel against the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

  "See, your face jumped. Just like it was you instead of me about to take the bullet. But I can tell by the weight where the round is," he said.

  She pushed herself up on her hands so her back was against the headboard. She thought she was going to lose control of her bladder. She looked at her baby in the crib and at the glow of a television set inside the cabin of a neighbor who worked nights and at her plastic welfare charge card on the table and next to it the thirteen dollars she had to make last until the end of the week and at the cheap clothes that hung on hangers in her closet. She breathed the funk that rose from her armpits and a soapy odor that either came from her bedclothes or her pajama top, and her breasts seemed to hang like an old woman's jugs from her skeleton. Her stomach had stretch marks on it and felt flaccid and like a water-filled balloon at the same time, and she realized she owned absolutely nothing of value in this world, not even in her own person, nor could she call upon one friend or resource, to bargain for her and her baby's life, that if she was lucky the world would simply take what it needed from her and leave a piece of something behind.

  "I ain't gonna fight you no more, Rain Man. I'm just a nigger."

  She pulled the sheet off her and sat on the side of the bed, her feet not quite touching the floor, her eyes downcast.

  "You shouldn't use racial words like that. It's what whites have taught you people to do. To feel bad about yourself," he said, and sat beside her. He moved his arm around her waist but did not look at her. Instead, his lips moved silently, as though he were talking to other people in the room.

  "You coming apart, Rain Man?" she said.

  "You couldn't guess at what's in my head, girl."

  She unfastened his belt and unbuttoned the top of his trousers and pulled his zipper partway down. She placed one hand inside his underwear and looked into his eyes. They were black, then suddenly apprehensive in the flashes of light through the window, as though he were watching his own behavior from outside himself and was not sure which person he was.

  Her hand moved mechanically, as though it were disconnected from her. She watched the side of his face.

  She took her hand away and let it rest by his thigh.

  "It ain't me you want," she said.

  "Yes, it is."

  "The one you want is the one you cain't have."

  He got up from the bed and stood in front of her, his legs slightly spread, his unbuttoned trousers exposing the top of his Jockey underwear. His stomach was as flat as a swimmer's, smooth as tallow in the flashes of lightning through the window.

  "Take off your clothes," he said.

  "Won't do no good, Rain Man. Can kill me and my baby, both. But it ain't gonna get you no satisfaction."

  He made a sound that she could not interpret, like someone who knew his anger must always be called upon in increments and never allowed to have complete expression.

  He tucked in his shirt and worked the zipper up on his trousers and fastened the button at the top and began buckling his belt. But his fingers started shaking and he could not line up the hole in the leather with the metal tongue in the buckle.

  She reached out to help him. That's when his fist exploded on the side of her face.

  She found Bootsie and me that Sunday evening at Jefferson Island while we were eating supper in the restaurant by the lake, the sun glowing through the oak trees and Spanish moss. I watched her come up the winding walkway through the flower gardens and groups of tourists, her diapered baby mounted on her arm, her blue-jeans shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face bruised like an overripe eggplant.

  She marched into the restaurant and stopped in front of our table.

  "Somebody shit in that white boy's brain. It ain't me done it, either. You better get him out of our lives, Sad Man. I mean now. 'Cause he come back around, I got me a gun now and I'm gonna blow his fucking head off," she said.

  I walked outside with her into the gardens and we sat down on a scrolled-iron bench. Through the restaurant windows I could see Bootsie by herself at our table, staring out at the lake, her coffee cold and her dessert uneaten.

  "Did you file a report at the department?" I asked.

  "They was real hepful. Man kept looking down my top to make sure Johnny Remeta wasn't hiding there."

  "I doubt Remeta will bother you again."

  "Where Fat Man at?"

  "Why?" I asked.

  "'Cause he ain't like you. 'Cause he don't fool hisself. 'Cause people mess wit' him only once."

  "Remeta might try to kill my daughter, Little Fac
e. I'm sorry about what happened to you. But I'm tired of your anger," I said.

  I left her on the bench with her baby. When I went back inside the restaurant, Bootsie was gone.

  The sheriff was at the bait shop before dawn Monday morning, but he did not come inside the building right away. He propped his hands on the dock railing and stared across the bayou at the cypress trees inside the fog. In his cowboy boots and pinstripe suit and Stetson hat, he looked like a cattleman who had just watched his whole herd run off by dry lightning. He took off his hat and walked through the cone of light over the screen door and entered the shop.