Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  In the dream I saw a long stretch of clear green water in the Dry Tortugas, the pink and gray mass of old Fort Jefferson in the background, and down below a horseshoe-shaped coral reef that formed a bowl in which a cloud of hot blue water floated like ink poured from a bottle. The reef was strung with gossamer fans, and inside them I could see lobsters hiding in the rocks and the shadows of lemon sharks moving across the whiteness of the sand.

  Then the water began to recede from the cusp of beach that surrounded the fort, exposing the ragged and crumbling foundation under it, the water dropping steadily as though someone had pulled a plug from a drain hole in the bottom of the ocean. The boat I was standing on descended with the water level until the keel settled on the seabed. I had expected to see coral-encrusted cannons and spent torpedoes and the wrecks of ancient ships and an undulating landscape that had the softly molded contours of a sand sculpture. I was mistaken. I was surrounded by a desert, and in the distance I could see the curvature of the earth dipping off the horizon into a hard blue sky unmarked by either clouds or birds. The sand was salted with volcanic grit and dotted with big lumps of basaltic rock and glimmering pools of a viscous green liquid that could have been chemical waste. There was no sign of life of any kind, not even the lobsters and the lemon sharks I had seen moments earlier inside the coral horseshoe. The only human edifice in sight was Fort Jefferson, the place where Dr. Samuel Mudd was imprisoned for his role in the assassination of President Lincoln. The flag that flew above it had frayed into sun-faded strips of red and white and blue cheesecloth.

  I sat up in bed and was glad to hear the rain hitting the trees and our tin roof and running through the gutters into our flower beds and out into the yard. I hoped the rain would pour down during the entirety of the night and flood our property and clog the storm sewers and overflow the curbs and wash in waves through the streets and down the slope of the Teche until the oaks and cypresses and canebrakes along the banks seemed to quiver inside the current. I wanted to see the rain wash clean all the surfaces of the earth, as it did in Noah’s time. I wanted to believe that morning would bring a pink sunrise and the hanging of the archer’s bow in the sky and the appearance of a solitary dove flying toward a ship’s bow with a green branch in its beak. I wanted to believe that biblical events of aeons ago would happen again. In short, I wanted to believe in things that were impossible.

  I was on the way to the bathroom when the phone rang. I picked it up in the kitchen. Through the window, I could see a heavy coat of white fog on the bayou’s surface, and I could see Tripod and Snuggs inside the hutch, rain sluicing off the tarp I had stretched over the top.

  “Guess who this is, Mr. Dave,” the voice said.

  “I don’t know if I’m up to this, Tee Jolie,” I replied.

  “I done somet’ing wrong?”

  “We went to the island southeast of the Chandeleurs. Nobody was home.”

  “What you mean? Where you t’ink I’m at now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I can see the palm trees and the water t’rew the window.”

  “You sound pretty stoned, kiddo.”

  “You make me feel bad. I cain’t he’p what they give me.”

  “Who gives you?”

  “The doctor and the nurse. I almost bled out. You heard from Blue?”

  “No, I haven’t. Blue died of an overdose. Her body was frozen in a block of ice and dumped overboard south of St. Mary Parish. I saw her body on the coroner’s table. The last thing she did was put a note in her mouth telling us that you were still alive. You have to stop lying to yourself, Tee Jolie.”

  “Blue don’t use drugs. At least not no more. I seen her on a video. She was waving at me on a boat. Out on the ocean in California.”

  “Where is Pierre Dupree?”

  “I ain’t sure. I sleep most of the time. I wish I was back home. I miss St. Martinville.”

  “You have to find out where you are and tell me.”

  “I done tole you. I can see the walls outside and the palm trees and the waves smashing on the beach.”

  “You’re in a place that looks like a fort? That’s made out of stucco?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “There’s a wall around it with broken glass on top of the wall? Some of the wall has crumbled down, and you can see cinder blocks inside it?”

  “That’s it. That’s where I’m at.”

  I was at a loss. “Listen to me. You’re not where you think you are. I went to the island southeast of the Chandeleurs, but the house was deserted. You have to find out where you are now and call me back.”

  “I got to go. They don’t want me on the phone. They say I cain’t have no excitement.”

  “Do you know Alexis Dupree?”

  “I ain’t said nothing about Mr. Alexis.”

  “Is he there?”

  “I cain’t talk no more.”

  “Did he do something to you?”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Dave. I ain’t gonna call no more. Take care of yourself. Hey, you gonna see me on TV out in California one day. You gonna see me and Blue both. Then tell me I been lying, you.”

  After I had hung up the phone, I stared at it. I tried to think back on the things Tee Jolie had told me. Obviously, she was deluded, hyped to the eyes with coke or brown skag, inside a chemically induced schizophrenia. But I believed she had told the truth about one thing: I probably would not be hearing from her again.

  I DIDN’T TELL Molly or Alafair about Tee Jolie’s phone call. I didn’t tell anyone except Clete. I no longer trusted my own perceptions, and I wondered if I wasn’t experiencing a psychotic break. Since my return to the department, my colleagues had treated me with respect but also with a sense of caution and a degree of fear, the kind we express around drunk people or those whose mortality has begun to show in their eyes. It’s not a good way to feel about yourself. If you’ve visited the provinces of the dead, you know what I’m talking about. When you hover on the edge of the grave, when you feel that the act of shutting your eyes will cause you to lose all control over your life, that in the next few seconds you will be dropped into a black hole from which you will never exit, you have an epiphany about existence that others will not understand. Every sunrise of your life will become a candle that you carry with you until sunset, and anyone who tries to touch it or blow out its flame will do so at mortal risk. There’s a syndrome called the thousand-yard stare. Soldiers bring it back from places that later are reconfigured into memorial parks filled with statuary and green lawns and rows of white crosses and copses of maple and chestnut trees. But the imposition of a bucolic landscape on a killing field is a poor anodyne for those who fear their fate when they shut their eyes.

  It was 7:46 Friday morning, and I was sitting at Clete’s breakfast table, watching him cook at his small stove. “Tee Jolie told you she could see palm trees and ocean waves outside her window?” he said.

  “She said she could see the stucco wall with the exposed cinder blocks where the wall crumbled. I mentioned the broken glass on the top of the wall and asked if she was in the house that looked like a fort. She said that’s where she was.”

  “It sounds like you gave her the details rather than the other way around, Dave.”

  “That’s possible. But she told me she was looking at palm trees and the ocean hitting on a beach.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “She didn’t know where Pierre Dupree was. When I mentioned the old man, she sounded frightened.”

  “That guy should have been put on the bus a long time ago,” Clete said. He scraped a pork chop and two eggs out of the frying pan and slid them off the spatula onto a plate. “You sure you don’t want any?”

  “You know how much grease is in that stuff?”

  “That’s why I’ve never had problems with arthritis. The grease in your food oils your joints and your connective tissue. Nobody in my family has ever had arthritis.”

  “Because they didn’t live long enough,” I
replied.

  He sat down across from me and filled my coffee cup and started eating, mopping up the egg yolk with a piece of toast dripping with melted butter. He didn’t lift his eyes when he spoke. “Are you sure you weren’t having a dream?”

  “No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure about anything these days,” I replied.

  “After the shootout on the bayou, I started having all kinds of weird dreams and hearing voices in my sleep,” he said. “Sometimes I see things when I’m awake that aren’t there.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “After I busted up Lamont Woolsey, I was hauling ass down St. Charles, and I saw the streetcar coming toward me on the neutral ground. The guy at the helm didn’t look like any streetcar conductor I ever saw. Know what I mean?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “The guy’s face was like a death’s-head. I grew up here. The streetcar was a dime when I was a kid. I loved to ride the car downtown and transfer out to Elysian Fields and sometimes go to the amusement park on the lake. I never thought about the streetcar as something you had to be afraid of.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “You worked over Woolsey because he was sexually abusing the Vietnamese girl, and that made you think about the Eurasian girl back in Vietnam and what the VC did because she was in love with a GI. You were blaming yourself again for something that wasn’t your fault.”

  “Why are you always fussing at me about my health?”

  “I’m not sure that’s the case.”

  “You kill me, Streak.”

  “Where’s Gretchen?”

  “I don’t know. But if I catch Pierre Dupree around her, I’m going to turn him into wallpaper.”

  “Did you know a woman’s panties are lying on your rug?”

  “Really?” he said. His jaw was swollen with meat and eggs and bread and looked as tight as a baseball. “Want to go to the 1940s revue tonight with me and Julie Ardoin? They’re going to blow the joint down.”

  THE PERFORMANCE WAS scheduled to begin in the Sugar Cane Festival Building inside City Park at eight o’clock Friday evening. In that same building, in 1956, I had listened to Harry James perform with Buddy Rich on drums, Willie Smith on alto sax, and Duke Ellington’s arranger Juan Tizol on valve trombone. The band had worn summer tuxes, and James had worn a bloodred carnation in his lapel. For us down here in our provincial Cajun world on the banks of Bayou Teche, the people playing horns and reed instruments on the stage were magical creatures that had descended from the ether. Their black trousers had razor creases, and their dress shoes gleamed, and their trombones and cornets had the brightness of liquid gold. The female singer sang Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” to a swing arrangement, then the orchestra went right into “One O’Clock Jump.” For two hours we were dancing at the Savoy or the Trianon or the Hollywood Palladium, James’s trumpet rising like a bell into the rafters, Buddy Rich’s drums rumbling in the background, the saxophones creating a second melody that was like an ocean wave starting to crest on a beach, all of it building into a crescendo of sound and rhythm that was almost sexual, that left us dry-mouthed and with a sense of longing we couldn’t explain.

  Now we were over a half century down the road, almost to the winter solstice and the re-creation of Saturnalia, probably no wiser than our antecedents, our fears of mortality and the coming of night no less real. The live oaks in the park were wrapped with strings of tiny white lights; the Sugar Cane Festival Building was hung with wreaths and thick red ribbons tied in big bows; and families who were undaunted by cold weather were barbecuing under the picnic shelters, the blue smoke of their meat fires hanging as thick as fog in the damp air. Above the wide sweep of the oaks in the park, the sky was black and bursting with stars. The night could not have been more beautiful.

  Alafair and Molly and I parked down by the duck pond and joined the crowd entering the building. “There’s Gretchen Horowitz,” Alafair said.

  “Pretend you don’t see her,” I said.

  “That’s a cheap way to act,” she replied.

  “Leave her alone,” I said, putting my hand on her forearm.

  “You’re not going to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do, Dave.”

  “Will both of you stop it?” Molly said. She stared through the crowd at Gretchen’s hot-rod pickup, which was parked on a concrete pad at the rear of the building. “What’s she doing, anyway?”

  “Unloading her film equipment. She’s making a documentary,” Alafair said. “I was going to help her with it.”

  “You think she has any talent?” Molly said.

  “I think she’s an artist. She has the love of it. What she doesn’t have are friends who are willing to help her,” Alafair said.

  “You’re talking about me?” I said.

  “No, I’m talking about myself. I gave her the impression that I might help her with her documentary. But I ended up telling her I was busy with my new novel. She got pretty mad about it.”

  “At you?” I said, watching Gretchen pull a boom pole from her truck.

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll meet y’all inside,” I said.

  “Don’t,” Alafair said. This time it was she who grabbed my arm.

  “Gretchen needs to think about relocation. I think southern California is a fine place to visit this time of year,” I said.

  “If you do this, Dave, I’ll move out of the house,” Alafair said.

  “Clete is my best friend,” I said. “But he has to get Gretchen Horowitz out of New Iberia. She also needs to understand that members of our family don’t have the answer to her problems, all of which are connected to killing people.”

  “Lower your voice,” Molly said.

  “There’s Pierre Dupree,” Alafair said.

  He had moved out of the crowd and was walking toward Gretchen’s pickup, wearing a pin-striped suit with a western shirt and buffed needle-nosed cowboy boots. In the background, through the trees, I could see Clete Purcel parking his maroon convertible by a picnic shelter. He and Julie Ardoin got out, and the two of them headed toward the building.

  “Does Clete know Pierre is trying to put moves on Gretchen?” Alafair said.

  “Yep.”

  “What’s he plan to do about it?” she asked.

  “Turn Pierre Dupree into wallpaper. Maybe that was just a metaphor,” I replied.

  “I’m going over there,” Alafair said.

  “For what?” I said.

  “Pierre is evil. Gretchen is fighting a war in her head about forgiveness while this lying piece of shit is giving her a line.”

  “Stay with Molly, Alf. I’m asking you, not telling you,” I said. “Please trust me on this.”

  “You said you weren’t going to call me that again.”

  “I’m just not much good at keeping certain kinds of promises.”

  Her eyes studied mine, and I knew she wasn’t thinking about pet names. “I’ve got a bad feeling, Dave.”

  “About what?”

  “All of this,” she said.

  AT FIRST GRETCHEN tried to ignore him, to pretend that either his presence or his absence was of no concern to her. But even as she reached back into the cab of her pickup to retrieve her Steadicam, his shadow seemed to loom above her and block out the lights of the building and invade her thoughts and reduce her in size and importance, as though he knew the location of every weakness in her body and soul. “I hoped you’d be here,” he said.

  “I said I would be, didn’t I?” she replied.

  “You sure did. Is this your equipment?”

  “Whose does it look like?”

  “You have to remember, film isn’t my medium.” He was smiling, his collar unbuttoned, the black hair on his chest showing.

  “You see movies, though?” she said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “You ever see The Johnson Patrol? It was about an American patrol in Vietnam. But it was done by the French. It’s one of the best documentaries I ever saw. It
made me think of Robert Capa’s work.”

  “Who?”

  “He was one of the greatest combat photographers who ever lived.”

  “I was never that keen on motion pictures and photography. I’m a painter.”

  “You don’t like movies?”

  He grinned and shrugged. “Sit with me.”

  “I’m working.”

  “How about a drink afterward?”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Pierre.”

  “Give me a chance to prove myself.”

  She began fitting on the harness of the Steadicam, avoiding his eyes and the way he seemed to deliberately block out the light from the building, like a dark cloak trying to wrap itself around her. She realized he was not looking at her anymore. “There’s your employer,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Mr. Purcel. There in the crowd, going into the building. He’s with Julie Ardoin.” He sucked his teeth.

  “Why do you make that sound?”

  He tried to smile like a gentleman who doesn’t want to be unkind.

  “Sorry, I’m not good at facial sign language,” Gretchen said.

  He blew out his breath. “I don’t think Mr. Purcel is a very good judge of character.”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

  “Julie Ardoin is a pilot. She used to do some work for my ex and her father, Jesse Leboeuf. The expression ‘under the radar’ comes to mind.”

  “She’s dirty?”

  “Because of the mistakes I’ve made in my life, I don’t have the moral authority to speculate about others. That said, I knew Julie’s husband for twenty years. He was a good man and would put his hand in a fire for a friend. His brains ended up on Julie’s ceiling. The coroner put his death down as a suicide. I don’t think that’s what happened. I think your employer is walking into a spiderweb.”