Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  Gretchen closed her phone and turned around and looked into Alafair’s face. “Didn’t see you there,” she said.

  “Who was that?” Alafair asked.

  “A guy I was in the antique business with in Key West. He’s a gusano and always spotting his drawers about something.”

  “A worm?”

  “A Batistiano, an antirevolutionary. Miami is full of them. They love democracy as long as it’s run by brownshirts.” She smiled awkwardly and shrugged. “We brought in some antiquities from Guatemala that were a little warm, like freshly dug up next to some Mayan pyramids, the kind of stuff that private collectors pay a lot of money for. I’m out of it now. You said something about going to your house for boiled crabs?”

  “It’s kind of late.”

  “Not for me.”

  “How about a drink at Clementine’s?” Alafair said.

  “You were looking at me a little funny. What did you think I was talking about?”

  “I wasn’t sure. It’s not my business.”

  “You had a real funny look on your face.”

  “You have mud in your hair. You must have dropped your phone.”

  Gretchen touched her ear and looked at her fingers. “You think I could fit in at a place like the University of Texas? I hear a lot of rich kids go there. I’m not exactly a sorority girl. Tell me the truth. I’m not sensitive.”

  CLETE PURCEL TURNED the Caddy south on the two-lane and headed down the green tree-lined strip of elevated land that led to Cypremort Point. The surface of the bay was the color of tarnished brass, the waves capping close to the banks, the late sun as red and angry and unrelenting as a stoplight at a railroad crossing. He pulled down the visor but could not keep the brilliance out of his eyes. He had to drive with one hand and shield himself from the glare, as though the sun had conspired with the voices in his head that told him to desist, to cut a U-turn and scour grass and mud out of the swale, to floor the Caddy back to New Iberia and find a bar with a breezy deck by Bayou Teche and quietly sedate his head for the next five hours.

  But omens and cautionary tales had never been an influence in the life of Clete Purcel. The sunset was splendid, the oil that lurked in the Gulf quiescent or even biodegrading, as the oil companies and government scientists had claimed. He and his best friend had eluded death on the bayou and left their enemies blown into bloody rags among the camellias and live oaks and pecan trees and elephant ears. How many times in his life had he been spared a DOA tag on his toe? Maybe it was for a reason. Maybe his attendance at the big dance was meant to be much longer than he had thought. Perhaps the world was not only a fine place and well worth the fighting for; perhaps it was also a neon-lit playground, not unlike the old Pontchartrain Beach, where the admission was free and the Ferris wheel and the aerial fireworks on the Fourth of July stayed printed against the evening sky forever.

  Varina Leboeuf had called and said she’d found a photo she thought he should see. Should he have ignored her call and not driven out to Cypremort Point? Was there something inherently bad in his level of desire or the fact that he admired the way a woman walked and glanced back over her shoulder at a man? Was it wrong that he was fascinated by the mystery that hid in women’s eyes and the way they kept their secrets to themselves and dressed for one another rather than for men? Why should age stop him from being who he was? The seventh-inning stretch was just the seventh-inning stretch. The game wasn’t over until the last pitch in the bottom of the ninth. And sometimes the game went into extra innings.

  He was almost home free in his thought processes, ready to get back on that old-time boogie-woogie, when he looked out at the bay and the flooded cypress trees strung with moss and a green rain cloud that had moved across the sun. Where had he seen all this before? Why did this seascape make his heart twist? Why couldn’t he accept loss and life on life’s terms? Why did he always have to seek surrogates for a girl who had not only been taken irrevocably from him but who was irreplaceable? Unfortunately, he knew the answer to his own question. When death stole the love of your life, no amount of revenge ever healed the hole in your heart. You lived with anger and physical yearnings that were insatiable, and you went about dismantling yourself on a daily basis, tendon and joint, for the rest of your days, all the time wearing the mask of a court jester.

  He clicked on his radio and turned up the volume full-blast and kept it there until he saw the house on stilts that Varina Leboeuf had described to him. The house was constructed of weathered, unpainted cypress and had a peaked, synthetically coated fireproof roof that blended with the surroundings. She had set up a badminton net in the yard and was batting a shuttlecock back and forth with two little black girls dressed in pinafores that were threaded with ribbons.

  He pulled onto the grass and got out of the Caddy. Varina was wearing shorts rolled high up on the thigh and a sleeveless blouse that exposed her bra straps. Her face was flushed and happy, her brown eyes electric, like light trapped inside a barrel of dark water. “Get a racket,” she said.

  He removed his porkpie hat and seersucker coat and put them in the Caddy, conscious of his shirt pulling loose from his slacks and the way his love handles hung over his belt. “Is your father back from the hospital?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

  “He’ll be at Iberia Medical Center for at least two more days. The twins here have been keeping me company. Their grandmother used to work for my father. He’s their godfather.”

  “Really?” Clete said.

  “Yeah, really. Did you hear some bad stories about him?”

  “If I did, I don’t remember them.”

  She hit the shuttlecock at him, whizzing it past his head. “Come on, I bet you can really sock it,” she said.

  But Clete was a hog on ice, slashing the racket into the net, tumbling over a lawn chair, batting the shuttlecock into a tree, almost stepping on one of the little girls. “I better quit,” he said.

  “You did great,” Varina said. “Girls, let’s have our ice cream and cake, then y’all had better run along home. Mr. Clete and I have some business to take care of.”

  “It’s somebody’s birthday?” Clete said.

  “Tomorrow is. I’m going to take them to the zoo in the morning.”

  “I didn’t mean to disturb y’all,” he said.

  “No, you’re not disturbing anything. Come inside. Go wash your hands, girls. Let’s hurry up now.”

  “I need to make a couple of calls,” he lied. “I’ll wait out here and have a cigarette.”

  He watched Varina escort the two girls into the back of the house. Through the window, he could see them gathered around a cake and a carton of ice cream at the kitchen table. He lit a cigarette and smoked it in the wind, unable to dispel his sense of discomfort. Why did the children have to leave? They obviously dressed for the occasion. They could have played in the yard while Clete looked at a photograph Varina had said would be of interest to him.

  The twins came out the back door and walked up the road holding hands. Varina waved him inside.

  “Think it’s all right for those kids to walk home by themselves?” he asked.

  “They don’t have far to go.” There was a smear of ice cream on her mouth. She wiped it away with her wrist. “I was watching you through the window. You looked wistful.”

  “South Louisiana makes me think of Southeast Asia sometimes. I’m an odd guy, probably one of the few who dug it over there.”

  “You were in Vietnam?”

  “Two tours. I was in Thailand and the Philippines. Cambodia, too. But we weren’t supposed to talk about that. I’d go back to Vietnam if I had the chance.”

  “What for?”

  “I had a girl there. Her name was Maelee. I always wanted to find her family. I think they got sent to a reeducation camp by the VC. But I’m not sure.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was killed.”

  “By who?”

  “What difference does it make? We used
snake and nape on their villes. The NVA buried people alive on the banks of the Perfume River. I helped dig up some of the bodies. When I was in Saigon, there was a place called the Stake where the public executions took place. The French could be nasty, too. The tiger cages and stuff like that. A lot of the Legionnaires were German war criminals. The whole country, north and south, was a moral insane asylum. The people got fucked by the Communists, then by us.”

  There was no expression on her face. She opened the icebox door and took out a bottle of tequila and a Carta Blanca and a white bowl of lime wedges. She set the tequila and the Mexican beer and the bowl of limes on the table and took two shot glasses from a cabinet and set them next to the tequila. “I’m sorry to hear about the girl you lost,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute. Pour yourself a drink.”

  “I’m not sure I want one.”

  “I’d like one. I’d like for you to join me. Did I say something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Because you give me that impression.”

  “Why’d you send the little girls home?”

  “I told their mother they’d be home before dark. They only have to walk two hundred yards, but if I had thought they were in danger, I would have driven them to their house. I’ve known their family since I was a small child.”

  Clete unscrewed the cap on the tequila and poured the two shot glasses full. The bottle felt cold and hard and full in his palm. “Can you show me that photo now?” he asked.

  “I’ll be right back,” she replied.

  He sat down at the table and salted a lime and took a hit off the tequila, then knocked back the whole shot and chased it with the Carta Blanca. The rush made him close his eyes and open his mouth, as though his body had just been lowered into warm water. Wow, he said to himself, and sucked on a salted lime. He heard the shower running in the back of the house.

  He filled his shot glass again, until it brimmed, then sipped from the rim and gazed out the window at the long expanse of the bay, the brasslike color in the water fading to pewter, the sun no more than a spark on the horizon. Varina appeared in the doorway, wiping the back of her neck with a towel. She had changed into blue jeans and beaded moccasins and a cowboy shirt that glittered like a freshly sliced pomegranate. “Come in here,” she said.

  “I poured you a shot,” he said. “Do you have another beer?”

  “No, that one is for you. Here’s the photo I wanted to show you.”

  The next room had no windows and was furnished with only a couch and a rollaway bed covered by a beige blanket with an Indian design. On the couch was a big brown teddy bear that she had propped up against the cushions, as though to surveil the room. Above the couch were two shelves filled with antique Indian dolls, stone grinding bowls, a tomahawk, a trade ax strung with dyed turkey feathers, and pottery whose discernible markings looked hundreds of years old. She pulled a scrapbook from under the rollaway and sat down on the mattress and began turning the stiffened pages in the book, never glancing up at him.

  He sat down next to her. It was only then that she turned to the back pages of the scrapbook and removed an envelope filled with photos. “These pictures were taken with a camera Pierre and I both used,” she said. “I think he forgot about a couple of photos he took in a nightclub. I had them developed a couple of years back but never paid particular attention to them. I went to the house in Jeanerette yesterday and picked up a few things, including this scrapbook.”

  She removed a photo from the envelope and handed it to him. In it, Pierre Dupree was standing in front of a bandstand festooned with strings of Christmas wreath and tinsel. A young Creole woman with cups of gold in her hair stood next to him. She wore a magenta evening gown, an orchid pinned to one strap. Neither person was touching the other.

  “Is that the girl you and Dave Robicheaux were looking for?” Varina asked.

  “That’s Tee Jolie Melton.”

  “And Pierre denies knowing her?”

  “According to Dave. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your husband.”

  “I no longer think of him as my husband.”

  “You think Mr. Dupree and Tee Jolie were an item?”

  “I’m afraid you didn’t hear me the first time. In my mind, Pierre is not my husband. That means I quit tracking his extracurricular activities years ago. He inherited the worst traits on both sides of his family. His grandfather is an imperious aristocrat who thinks he’s genetically superior to others. His mother’s family made most of their money on the backs of rental convicts. They literally worked those poor devils to death. I hated going out in public with any of them.”

  “Why?” Clete asked.

  “They think the rest of the world is like St. Mary Parish. They expect waiters to grovel wherever they eat. They’re boorish and loud and never read a book or see a film or talk about anything except themselves. They never once invited my father to dinner. I’m sorry, I can’t stand them. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Was your marriage a great success? Is that why you’re single? You are single, right?”

  Trying to follow her train of thought was exhausting. “My wife dumped me for a Buddhist guru in Boulder, Colorado. This was a guy who made people take off their clothes in front of the commune he ran. She also gave him most of our savings account. It took three years for the divorce to go through. By that time I was hiding out in El Salvador on a murder beef. You want to go for a walk?”

  “You committed a murder?”

  “Not exactly. I thought the guy had a piece in his hand. Anyway, he was a sorry sack of shit and had it coming. I need a drink.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You want to go in the kitchen?” he asked.

  “No, I want to stay here. This was my room when I was a child. It was always my room, even after I left home. What should I do with the photo?”

  “Give it to Dave. If I take it, I might create a problem with the chain of evidence.”

  “There’s a tray on the drainboard. Will you bring the drinks and the limes in? I’ll put the photo in my desk.”

  “It’s pretty nice out. We can have our drinks outside, if you want.”

  “No, I don’t want to go outside. The mosquitoes are terrible tonight. Would you rather not be here?”

  Clete propped his hands on his knees and studied the far wall and the Indian artifacts on the shelves and the teddy bear staring back at him from the couch. “I shouldn’t be calling somebody else a sorry sack of shit, even the guy I popped in the hogpen. His name was Starkweather, like the kid who killed all those people in Nebraska. What I’m saying is I have a history. For a while I was mobbed up with some guys in Reno and on Flathead Lake in western Montana. These guys happened to be on a plane that crashed into the side of a mountain. I heard they looked like fricasseed pork when they were raked out of the fir trees. The shorter version is I’ve got a jacket that’s probably three inches thick.”

  “Are you trying to scare me off?”

  He pressed his fingers against his temples. “Hang on a minute. There are some things I can’t talk about without a drink in my hand, otherwise my gyroscope spins out of control and I fall down.” He went into the kitchen and put the shot glasses and the Carta Blanca and the bottle of tequila and the bowl of limes and a salt shaker on the tray and brought them back to the rollaway. He drank his shot glass empty and sipped on the beer and felt it go down cold and bright and hard in his throat. He sucked on a lime and poured another shot, blowing out his breath, gin roses blooming in his cheeks. “I guess I’m going through some kind of physiological change. Hooch seems to go straight into my bloodstream these days, kind of like I’m mainlining. Or throwing kerosene on a fire. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got a dragon walking around in my chest. My nether regions get out of control, too.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t drink.”

  “That’s like telling the pope he shouldn’t work on Sundays.”

  “You shouldn’t belittle yourself.”

  “Yeah?”


  “The world beats up on everybody and breaks most of us,” she said. “Why should we do it to ourselves when it’s going to happen anyway? The only things we take with us are the memories of the good times we had and the good people we knew along the way.”

  “I never figured any of that stuff out.”

  “You’re a lot more complicated than you pretend.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “It’s almost dark. I’m going to turn on the floor lamp. I don’t like the dark.”

  “Why tell me about it?”

  “Because I don’t hide anything I do.” She walked to the lamp and clicked it on, then faced him. “Do you like me?”

  “I get in trouble, Miss Varina. Lots of it, on a regular basis. I think you’ve had enough trouble in your life already.”

  She unbuttoned her shirt and the top of her jeans. “Tell me if you like me.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “You like the way I look now? Am I too forward? Tell me if I am.”

  “I don’t have any illusions about my age and the way I look and the reasons I wrecked my career. I’d better hit the road. I showed bad judgment in coming here. You’re a nice lady, Miss V. It would be an honor to get involved with a lady like yourself, but you’re still married, and this won’t be good for either one of us.”

  “If you call me ‘Miss’ again, I’m going to hit you. No, don’t get up. Let me do this for you. Please. You don’t know how important the love of a good man can be. No, not just a good man but a strong man. You are a good man, aren’t you? Oh, Clete, you sweet man. Clete, Clete, Clete, that’s so good. Oh, oh, oh.”

  He felt as though a great wave had just curled out of the ocean and knocked him backward into the sand.

  I LOOKED OUT our back bedroom window early Saturday morning and saw Clete Purcel slouching through the fog like a medieval penitent headed for the side door of the cathedral, hoping no one would see the load of guilt he was carrying. He stared at the house, looking for signs of life, then picked up a folding chair and walked down to the bayou, past Tripod’s hutch, where both Tripod and Snuggs sat on the roof, watching him. Clete’s seersucker coat was sparkling with damp, his wilted necktie and porkpie hat and rumpled shirt as incongruous as formal dress on a hippopotamus.