Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  He ordered another Bud longneck and two fingers of Jack. The girl sat down at the bar, three stools from him, and idly tapped a quarter on the bar’s apron, as though she had not made up her mind. Clete looked at the mirror and tossed back his Jack, a great emptiness if not a balloon of fear swelling in his chest. The Jack went down like gasoline on a flame. He began opening and closing his Zippo, his heart racing, an unlit cigarette between his fingers.

  She tilted her head forward and massaged the back of her neck, her fingers kneading deep into the muscle. Then she turned and gazed at the side of his face. “You eyeballing me in the mirror, boss?” she said.

  “Me?” he said. When she didn’t reply, he asked, “You talking to me?”

  “Is someone else sitting on your stool?”

  “You had some tats removed from your arms, maybe. I guess I noticed that. I know what that can be like.”

  “I never had tats. Would you put a needle in your arm that an AIDS patient has used?”

  “So where’d you get the scars?”

  “I was in an accident. My mother’s diaphragm slipped, and I was born. Is that your come-on line?”

  “I’m over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down.”

  “I get what you’re saying: Old guys are rarely interested in getting in a girl’s pants. That would be strange, wouldn’t it?”

  “Where’d you learn to talk like that?”

  “At the convent.” The bartender brought her a drink in an oversize glass without her having ordered one. She used both hands to pick it up and drink. She took a cherry out of it and broke it between her teeth.

  “Why not order your next one in a bathtub and put a straw in it?” Clete said.

  “Not a bad idea,” she said. Her cheeks had taken on a deeper color, and her mouth was glossy and red with lipstick. “I’ve seen you around.”

  “I doubt it. I’m a traveling man, mostly.”

  “You’re a salesman?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re a cop.”

  “I used to be. But not anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had an accident, too. I popped a government witness.”

  “‘Popped,’ like made him dead?”

  “Actually, getting snuffed was the noblest deed in his career. The DA’s office here made a lot of noise about it, but the truth is, nobody cared.”

  She picked a second cherry out of her drink by its stem and sucked on it. “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Are you from New Orleans?”

  “Sure.”

  “Say ‘New Orleans.’ Say it like you regularly say it.”

  “‘Neu Or Luns.’”

  “It’s not ‘Nawlens’?”

  “Nobody from New Orleans uses that pronunciation. TV news-people do it because it gives the impression they know the city.”

  She turned her stool toward him, her thighs slightly spread, her eyes roving over his face and body. She pursed her lips. “What are you looking for, hon? An easy lay out here in the swamps? I don’t like people who make comments about the scars on my arms. None of my scars look like they came from tattoo removal.”

  “I was just making conversation.”

  “If that’s your best effort, it’s a real dud.”

  “I think you’re beautiful. I wouldn’t say something to offend you.”

  He hadn’t meant to say that. Nor did he know why he had. His face was burning. “Sometimes I say things the wrong way. I bet you like baseball and outdoor dance pavilions and barbecues and stuff like that. I bet you’re a nice girl.”

  “You go around saying things like that to people you don’t know?”

  “You look like an all-American girl, that’s all.”

  “If you’re determined to pick up girls in bars, this is what I suggest: Call Weight Watchers, don’t let your swizzle stick do your talking for you, and change your deodorant. You’ll get a lot better results.”

  Clete poured his glass full but didn’t drink. He felt a sensation similar to a great spiritual and physical weariness seeping through his body.

  “I was kidding. Brighten up,” she said. “Your problem is you’re a bad actor.”

  “I’m not following you on that.”

  “I’ve seen you before.” She fixed her eyes on his and held them there until he felt his scalp tighten. “Are you an Orioles fan?”

  “Yeah, I like them. I go to baseball games everywhere I travel.”

  “You ever go to exhibition games in Fort Lauderdale?” she asked.

  “They call it Little Yankee Stadium, because the Yankees trained there before the Orioles.”

  “That’s where I bet I saw you,” she said. She moved a strand of hair off her cheek. “Or maybe I saw you somewhere else. It’ll come to me. I don’t forget very much.”

  “Yeah, you look smart, the way you carry yourself and all.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re a mess,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want to dance?”

  “I’m clumsy when it comes to stuff like that. What do you mean, I’m a mess?”

  “You’re too innocent for words.”

  She went to the jukebox and began feeding coins into it. In spite of the air-conditioning, he was sweating inside his clothes, blood pounding in his temples. He walked out onto the dance floor and stood inches behind her. He could smell the heat in her skin and the perfume in her hair. She turned around and looked up into his face, her eyes violet-colored in the light. “Something wrong?” she asked.

  “I got to go,” he said.

  “Buy me a drink?”

  “No, I got to take care of some stuff. I’m sorry. It’s been good meeting you,” he said.

  “You better get yourself some high-octane tranqs, boss,” she said.

  “I really like you. I’m sorry for the way I talk,” he said.

  His hands were shaking when he got to his car.

  CLETE THOUGHT THE drive back into the city would calm his heart and give him time to think in a rational manner, but he was wired to the eyes when he pulled into the driveway of the garage apartment down by Chalmette that Frankie Giacano was using as a hideout. He didn’t even slow down going up the stairs. He tore the screen door off the latch and splintered the hard door out of the jamb. Frankie was sitting stupefied in a stuffed chair, a sandwich in his hand, food hanging out of his mouth. “Are you out of your mind?” he said.

  “Probably,” Clete said.

  “What are you gonna do with that blackjack?” Frankie said, rising to his feet.

  “It’s part of my anger-management program. I hit things instead of people. When that doesn’t work, I start hitting people,” Clete said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  He smashed a lamp in half and the glass out of a picture frame on the wall and the glass in a window overlooking the side yard. He went into the kitchen and turned the drying rack upside down and broke the dishes across the edge of the counter and began feeding a box of sterling silverware into the garbage grinder.

  With the grinder still roaring and clanking, he grabbed Frankie by the necktie and dragged him to the sink. “One of your skanks told me your nose is too long,” he said. “Let’s see if we can bob off an inch or two.”

  “Who pissed in your brain, man?”

  “When’d you peel Didi Gee’s safe?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a couple of months ago.”

  “Where?”

  “In Didi Gee’s old office.”

  “Who hired the shooter to cap Golightly and Grimes?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Yeah, but let me finish.”

  “You think that’s cute?” Clete swung Frankie in a circle by his tie and threw him over a chair and against the wall, then whipped the blackjack across the tendon behind one knee. Frankie fell to th
e floor as though genuflecting, his eyes watering, his bottom lip trembling. “Don’t do this to me, man,” he said.

  “Get up!”

  “What for?”

  “So I don’t start stomping you into marmalade.”

  When Frankie didn’t move, Clete pulled him erect by his shirtfront and swung him into the bedroom, knocking his head against the doorjamb and a bedpost. “Pack your suitcase,” he said. “You’re taking the first bus to either Los Angeles or New York, you choose.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “What do you care? You get to live.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Because you’re stupid.”

  “You’re trying to save my life? You beat me up so you can save my life?”

  “Yeah, the world can’t afford to lose a person of your brilliance. You’ve got three minutes.”

  Frankie lifted a suitcase from a shelf in the closet and opened it on the bed and began pulling clothes off the hangers and laying them inside the case. “I got a piece in my sock drawer. I’m gonna take it with me.”

  “No, you’re not,” Clete said. He moved between the dresser and Frankie and opened the top dresser drawer and reached inside and lifted out a black semi-automatic pistol. “Where you’d get a German Luger?”

  “At a gun show.”

  “You’re not a collector, and guys like you don’t buy registered firearms.”

  “It was a gift. A guy owed me. So I took it. It’s mine. You don’t have any right to it. Look at the Nazi stamps on it. It was used by the German navy. It’s worth at least two thousand bucks.”

  “When you get situated in your new rathole, drop me a card and I’ll mail it to you.”

  Frankie looked emptily into space, like a child whose alternatives had run out. “You’re really taking me to the bus station? ’Cause I heard a story about a guy you took out by the lake, a guy nobody saw again.”

  “I’m doing you a favor, Frankie. Don’t blow it.” Clete dropped the Luger’s magazine from the frame and pulled back the slide to clear the chamber. He stuck the Luger in his belt. “Time to catch the Dog.”

  “How about the airport?”

  “The person who put the hit on you has probably broken into your credit cards. So I’m paying for your ticket out of my own pocket. That means you’re riding the Dog.”

  “Bix had a new scam going. It was bringing in a lot of cash. But I don’t know what it was. I’m being honest here.”

  “The day you’re honest is the day the plaster will fall from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Clete said.

  “Why you got to run me down, man?”

  Clete thought about it. “You’ve got a point,” he replied. “Come on, Frankie. Let’s see if we can’t get you on an express to L.A. You might even dig it out there. Here, wipe your nose.”

  HAVE YOU EVER been told, either by friends or by a therapist, that you’re obsessive? If the answer is yes, I suspect that you, like most people of goodwill, had to accept one of two alternatives. You humbled yourself and ate your feelings and tried to change your emotional outlook, or you realized with a sinking of the heart that you were on your own and the problem you saw was not imaginary and others did not want to hear or talk about it or be reminded of it in any fashion, even though the house was burning down.

  My obsession was Tee Jolie Melton. I could no longer be sure she had visited me in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, but I had no doubt her message to me was real, transmitted perhaps in ways that are not quite definable. Many years back I gave up all claim to a rational view of the world and even avoided people who believed that the laws of physics and causality have any application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.

  There were only three leads in the disappearance of Tee Jolie, and all were tenuous: I had seen a group photo in her scrapbook taken at a zydeco club, with Bix Golightly in the background; at the recovery unit, she had indicated she feared for her life because of knowledge she had about the oil-well blowout in the Gulf; the boat that abducted her sister may have been a Chris-Craft, with a thick-bodied fish painted on the bow.

  I had left out one other element in the story: She was unmarried and pregnant, and the undivorced father of her child had asked if she wanted an abortion.

  Where do you start?

  Answer: Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive—money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire. Let’s face it, it’s hard to sell the virtues of poverty to people who have nothing to eat. In Louisiana, which has the highest rate of illiteracy in the union and the highest percentage of children born to single mothers, few people worry about the downside of casinos, drive-through daiquiri windows, tobacco depots, and environmental degradation washing away the southern rim of the state.

  Oil and natural gas, for good or bad, comprise our lifeblood. When I was a boy, my home state, in terms of its environment, was an Edenic paradise. It’s not one any longer, no matter what you are told. When a group of lawyers at Tulane University tried to file a class action suit on behalf of the black residents whose rural slums were used as dumping grounds for petrochemical waste, the governor, on television, threatened to have the lawyers’ tax status investigated. The same governor was an advocate for the construction of a giant industrial waste incinerator in Morgan City. His approval ratings remained at record highs for the entirety of his administration.

  In Louisiana, refined or extracted oil is everywhere, sometimes in barrels buried in the 1920s. Working-class people display bumper stickers that read GLOBAL WARMING IS BULLSHIT. Former vice president Al Gore is mocked and denigrated with regularity for his warnings about arctic melt.

  Last spring, when the wind was out of the south, I could stand in our front yard and smell oil. It was not buried in the ground, either. It was pouring in thick columns, like curds of smoke, from a blown casing five thousand feet below the Gulf’s surface.

  This particular blowout has been referred to again and again as a “spill.” A spill has nothing to do with the events that occurred southeast of my home parish. A spill implies an accident involving a limited amount of oil, one that will seep from a tanker until the leak is repaired or the ship’s hold is drained. The oil leaking from the tanker is not pressurized or on fire and incinerating men on the floor of a drilling rig.

  Even when a well is completed under normal circumstances, there is a cautionary tale buried inside the sense of accomplishment and prosperity that everyone on the rig seems to experience. At first you smell the raw odor of natural gas, like the stench of rotten eggs, then the steel in the rig seems to stiffen, as though its molecular texture is transforming itself into something alive; even in hundred-degree heat, the great pipes running out of the hole start to sweat with drops of moisture that are as cold and bright as silver dollars. The entire structure seems to hum with the power and intensity of forces whose magnitude we can only guess at. The driller touches a flaming board to a flare line to burn off excess gas, and a ball of fire rises into the blackness and snaps apart in the clouds and makes us wonder if our pride in technological success isn’t a dangerous presumption.

  When a drill bit hits what is called an early pay sand, punching into an oil or natural gas dome unexpectedly, with no blowout preventer in place, the consequences are immediate. An unlimited amount of fossil decay and oceanic levels of natural gas that are hundreds of millions of years old are released in seconds through one aperture, blowing pipe, drilling mud, salt water,
and geysers of sand up through the rig floor, creating havoc among the men working there and a cacophony of sound similar to a junkyard falling piece by piece out of the sky. The first spark off the wellhead ignites the gas. The explosion of flame is so intense in velocity and temperature that it will melt the spars of a rig and turn steel cable into bits of flaming string. In minutes the rig can take on the appearance of a model constructed from burned matchsticks.

  My father, Big Aldous, was a fur trapper on Marsh Island and a commercial fisherman who, in the off-season, worked the monkey board high up on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He was illiterate and irresponsible and spoke English poorly and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans. He also had no understanding of how or why the Cajun world of his birth was coming to an end. My mother’s infidelities filled him with shame and anger and bewilderment, just as she in turn could not understand his alcoholism and barroom violence and apparent determination to gamble away their meager income at bourré tables and racetracks.

  Big Al died in a blowout while I was in Vietnam. His body was never recovered, and I spent a great deal of time wondering whether he suffered greatly before his death. Sometimes I dreamed I saw him standing knee-high in the surf, giving me the thumbs-up sign, his hard hat tilted on his head, the swells around him denting with rain. I didn’t know what kind of death he died, but I knew one thing for sure about my old man: He was never afraid. And I knew in my heart, when the pipe came out of the hole on that windswept night decades ago, Big Al clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo line and jumped into the black with the courage of a paratrooper going out the door of a plane, and I also knew that as he plummeted toward the water with the tower coming down on top of him, his last thoughts were of me and my half brother, Jimmy, and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory. He died so we could have a better life. And that’s what I will always believe.