DR02 - Heaven's Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  He pulled his knees up to his chin in the litter of cigarette butts and peanut hulls. He couldn't talk and instead trembled all over. The bar was absolutely silent. The bartender, the hookers, the oilfield workers in their hardhats, the waitresses in their pink shorts and cut-off black blouses, the rockabilly musicians, the half-undressed mulatto stripper on the dance floor, all stood like statues in the floating layers of cigarette smoke.

  I heard someone dial a telephone as I walked out into the night air.

  The next morning I drove into New Iberia and picked up a supply of red worms, nightcrawlers, and shiners. It was a clear, warm day with little wind, and I rented out almost all my boats. While I worked behind the counter in the bait shop and, later, started the fire in the barbecue pit for the lunch customers, I kept looking down the dirt road for a sheriff's car. But none came. At noon I called Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette.

  "I need to come in and talk to you," I said.

  "No, I'll come over there. Stay out of Lafayette."

  "Why's that?"

  "I don't think the town's ready for Wyatt Earp this morning."

  An hour later he came down the dirt road under the oak trees in a government car, parked by the dock, and walked into the shop. He stooped automatically as he came through the door. He wore a pair of seersucker slacks, shined loafers, a light blue sports shirt, and a red and gray striped tie pulled loose at the collar. His scalp and crewcut blond hair shone in the light. He looked around the shop and nodded with a smile on his face.

  "You've got a nice business here," he said.

  "Thanks."

  "It's too bad you're not content to just run it and stop over-extending yourself."

  "You want a soft drink or a cup of coffee?"

  "Don't be defensive. You're a legend this morning. I came into the office late, because somebody woke me up last night, and everybody was having a big laugh about the floor show at the Jungle Room. I told you we don't get to have that kind of fun. We just fill out forms, advise the slime-o's of their rights, and make sure they have adequate counsel to stay on the street. I heard they had to use a mop to soak up all the blood."

  "Are they cutting a warrant?"

  "He wouldn't sign the complaint. A sheriff's detective took it to the hospital on a clipboard."

  "But he identified me?"

  "He didn't have to. One of his hookers got your license number. Eddie Keats doesn't like courtrooms. But don't mess with the Lafayette cops anymore. They get provoked when somebody comes into their parish and thinks he can start strumming heads with a pool cue."

  "Too bad. They should have rousted him when I got my face kicked in."

  "I'm worried about you. You don't hear well."

  "I haven't been sleeping a lot lately. Save it for another time, all right?"

  "I'm perplexed, too. I know you've been into some heavy-metal shit before, but I didn't figure you for a cowboy. You know, you could have put out that guy's light."

  Two fishermen came in and bought a carton of worms and a dozen bottles of beer for their ice chest. I rang up their money on my old brass cash register and watched them walk out into the bright sunlight.

  "Let's take a ride," I said.

  I left Batist in charge of the shop, and Minos and I rode down the dirt lane in my pickup. The sunlight seemed to click through the thick green leaves overhead.

  "I called you up for a specific reason this morning," I said. "If you don't like the way I do things, I'm sorry. You're not in the hotbox, partner. I didn't invite any of this bullshit into my life, but I got it just the same. So I don't think it's too cool when you start making your observations in the middle of my shop, in front of my help and my customers."

  "Okay. You've got your point."

  "I never busted up a guy like that before. I don't feel good about it."

  "It's always dumb to play on the wiseguys' terms. But if you needed to scramble somebody's eggs, Keats was a fine selection. But believe it or not, we have a couple of things in his file that are even worse. The kid of a federal witness disappeared a year ago. We found him in a—"

  "Then why don't you put the fucker away?"

  He didn't answer. He turned the wind vane in his face and looked out at the Negro families fishing in the shade of the cypress trees.

  "Is he feeding you guys?" I said.

  "We don't use hit men as informants."

  "Don't jerk me around, Minos. You use whatever works."

  "Not hit men. Never. Not in my office." He turned and looked me directly in the face. There was color in his cheeks.

  "Then give him a priority and weld the door shut on him."

  "You think you're twisting in the wind while we play pocket pool. But maybe we're doing things you don't know about. Look, we never go for just one guy. You know that. We throw a net over a whole bunch of these shitheads at once. That's the only way we get them to testify against each other. Try learning some patience."

  "You want Bubba Rocque. You've got a file on everybody around him. In the meantime his clowns are running loose with baseball bats."

  "I think you're unteachable. Why did you call me up, anyway?"

  "About Immigration."

  "I didn't eat breakfast this morning. Stop up here somewhere."

  "You know this guy Monroe that was sniffing around New Iberia?"

  "Yeah, I know him. Are you worried about the little girl you have in your house?"

  I looked at him.

  "You have a way of constantly earning our attention," he said. "Stop there. I'm really hungry. You can pay for it, too. I left my wallet on the dresser this morning."

  I stopped at a small wooden lunch stand run by a Negro, set back in a grove of oak trees. We sat at one of the tables in the shade and ordered pork chop sandwiches and dirty rice. The smoke from the stove hung in the sunlit branches of the trees.

  "What's this about Immigration?" Minos said.

  "I heard they busted both Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero."

  "Where'd you get that?" He watched some black children playing pitch-and-catch next to the lunch stand. But I could see that his eyes were troubled.

  "From a bartender in New Orleans."

  "Sounds like a crummy source."

  "No games. You knew that a government agency of some kind had a connection with Dartez or his body wouldn't have disappeared. You just weren't sure about Victor Romero."

  "So?"

  "I think Immigration was using these guys to infiltrate the sanctuary movement."

  He put his hand on his chin and watched the children throwing the baseball.

  "What does your bartender friend know about Romero now?" he said.

  "Nothing."

  "What's this guy's name? We'd like to chat with him."

  "So would Bubba Rocque. That means that Jerry—that's his name, and he works at Smiling Jack's on Bourbon—is probably looking for a summer home in Afghanistan."

  "You never disappoint me. So you've managed to help scare an informant out of town. Just out of curiosity, how is it that people tell you these things they don't care to share with us?"

  "I stuck a cocked .45 up his nose."

  "That's right, I forgot. You learned a lot of constitutional procedure from the New Orleans police department."

  "I'm correct, though, aren't I? Somehow Immigration got these two characters into the underground railway, or whatever the sanctuary people call it."

  "That's what they call it. And no matter what you might have figured out, it's still not your business. Of course, that doesn't make any difference to you. So I'll put it another way. We're nice guys at the DEA. We try to lodge as many lowlifes as we can in our gray-bar hotel chain. And we respect guys like you who are well intended but who have their brains encased in cement. But my advice to you is not to fuck with Immigration, particularly when you have an illegal in your home."

  "You don't like them."

  "I don't think about them. But you should. I once met a regional INS commissio
ner, an important man wired right into the White House. He said, 'If you catch 'em, you ought to clean 'em yourself.' I wouldn't want somebody like that on my case."

  "It sounds like folksy bullshit to me," I said.

  "You're a delight, Robicheaux."

  "I don't want to mess up your lunch, but aren't you bothered by the fact that maybe a bomb sent that plane down at Southwest Pass, that somebody murdered a Catholic priest and two women who were fleeing a butcher shop we helped create in El Salvador?"

  "Are you an expert on Central American politics?"

  "No."

  "Have you been down there?"

  "No."

  "But you give me that impression just the same. Like you've got the franchise on empathy."

  "I think you need a whiff of a ville that's been worked over with Zippo-tracks."

  "Don't give me that righteous dogshit. I was there, too, podna." The bread in the side of his mouth made an angry lump along his jaw.

  "Then don't let those farts at Immigration jerk you around."

  He put his sandwich in his plate, drank from his iced tea, and looked away reflectively at the children playing under the trees.

  "Have you ever thought that maybe you'd be better off drunk than sober?" he said. "I'm sorry. I really didn't mean that. What I meant to say is I just remembered that I have a check in my shirt pocket. I'll pay for my own lunch today. No, don't argue. It's just been a real pleasure being out with you."

  The inside of the church was cool and dark and smelled of stone, burning candles, water, and incense. Through the side door I could see the enclosed garden where, as a child, I used to line up with the other children before we made the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. It was sunny in the garden, and the St. Augustine grass was green and clipped, and the flower beds were full of yellow and purple roses. At the head of the garden, shaded by a rain tree with bloodred blooms on it, was a rock grotto with a waterfall at the bottom and a stone statue of the crucified Christ set back in the recess.

  I walked into the confessional and waited for the priest to slide back the small wooden door in the partition. I had known him for twenty-five years, and I trusted his working-class instincts and forgave him his excess of charity and lack of admonition, just as he forgave me my sins. He slid back the door, and I looked through the wire screen at the round head, the bull neck, the big shoulders in silhouette. He had a small, rubber-bladed fan in the box with him, and his crewcut gray hair moved slightly in the breeze.

  I told him about Eddie Keats. Everything. The beating I took, the humiliation, the pool cue shattered across his face, the blood stringing from the fingers cupped over his nose.

  The priest was quiet a moment.

  "Did you want to kill this man?" he said.

  "No."

  "Are you sure of that?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you plan to hurt him again?"

  "Not if he leaves me alone."

  "Then put it behind you."

  I didn't reply. We were both quiet in the gloom of the box.

  "Are you still bothered?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "Dave, you've made your confession. Don't try to judge the right and wrong of what you did. Let it go. Perhaps what you did was wrong, but you acted with provocation. This man threatened your wife. Don't you think the Lord can understand your feelings in a situation like that?"

  "That's not why I did it."

  "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

  "I did it because I want to drink. I burn inside to drink. I want to drink all the time."

  "I don't know what to say."

  I walked out the side door of the church into the garden. I could hear the waterfall in the grotto, and the odor of the yellow and purple roses and the red flowers on the rain tree was heavy and sweet in the warm, enclosed air. I sat on the stone bench by the grotto and stared at the tops of my shoes.

  Later I found Annie weeding the vegetable garden behind our old smokehouse. She was barefoot and wore blue jeans and a denim shirt with no sleeves. She was on her hands and knees in the row, and she pulled the weeds from between the tomato plants and dropped them into a bucket. Her face was hot with her work. I had told her that morning in bed about Eddie Keats. She had said nothing in reply, but had merely gone into the kitchen and started breakfast.

  "I think maybe you should go visit your family in Kansas and take Alafair along," I said. I had a glass of iced tea in my hand.

  "Why?" She didn't look up.

  "That guy Keats."

  "You think he's going to come around?"

  "I don't know. Sometimes when you bash his kind hard enough, they stay away from you. But then sometimes you can't tell. There's no point in taking chances."

  She dropped a handful of weeds into the bucket and stood up from her work. There was a smear of dirt and perspiration on her forehead. I could smell the hot, dusky odor of the tomato plants in the sunlight.

  "Why didn't you think of that earlier?" she said. She looked straight ahead.

  "Maybe I made a mistake. I still want you and Alafair to go to Kansas."

  "I don't want to sound melodramatic, Dave. But I don't make decisions in my life or my family's because of people like this."

  "Annie, this is serious."

  "Of course it is. You're trying to be a rogue cop of some kind, and at the same time you have a family. So you'd like to get one part of the problem out of Louisiana."

  "At least give it some thought."

  "I already did. This morning, for about five seconds. Forget it," she said, and walked to the coulee with the weed-filled bucket and shook the weeds down the bank.

  When she came back she continued to look at me seriously, then suddenly she laughed.

  "Dave, you're just too much," she said. "At least you could offer us Biloxi or Galveston. You remember what you said about Kansas when you visited there? 'This is probably the only place in the United States that would be improved by nuclear war.' And now you'd like to ship me back there?"

  "All right, Biloxi."

  "No deal, baby love." She walked toward the shade of the backyard, the bucket brushing back and forth against her pants leg.

  That evening we went to a fais dodo in St. Martinville. The main street was blocked off for the dancers, and an Acadian string band and a rock 'n' roll group took turns playing on a wooden platform set back against Bayou Teche. The tops of the trees were green against the lavender and pink light in the sky, and the evening breeze blew through the oaks in the churchyard where Evangeline and her lover were buried. For some reason the rock 'n' roll music in southern Louisiana has never changed since the 1950s. It still sounds like Jimmie Reed, Fats Domino, Clifton Chenier, and Albert Amnions. I sat at a wooden table not far from the bandstand, with a paper plate of rice and red beans and fried sac-a-lait, and watched the dancers and listened to the music while Annie took Alafair down the street to find a rest room.

  Then rain clouds blackened the western sun temporarily and the wind came up strong and blew leaves, newspapers, beer cups, and paper plates through the streets. But the band kept playing, as though the threat of rain or even an electric storm were no more important a consideration than time and mortality, and for some reason I began to muse on why any of us are what we are, either for good or bad. I didn't choose to be an alcoholic, to have the oral weakness of a child for a bottle, but nevertheless that self-destructive passion, that genetic or environmental wound festered every day at the center of my life. Then I thought about a sergeant in my platoon who was perhaps the finest man I ever knew. If environment was the shaping and determining factor in our lives, his made no sense.

  He grew up in a soot-covered foundry town in Illinois, one of those places where the sky is forever seared with smoke and cluttered with the blackened tops of factories and the river so polluted with chemicals and sludge that once it actually caught fire. He lived with his mother in a block of row houses, a world that was bordered on one end by a Saturday-night beer joint and poo
l hall and on the other by his job as a switchman in the train yard. By all odds he should have been one of those people who live out their lives in a gray and undistinguished way with never a bolder ambition than a joyless marriage and a cost-of-living raise. Instead, he was both brave and compassionate, caring about his men and uncompromising in his loyalties; his intelligence and courage carried both of us through when mine sometimes failed. But even though we served together for seven months, I'll always retain one essential image of him that seemed to define both him and what is best in our country's people.

  We had just gotten back to a hot, windblown firebase after two days out in Indian country and a firefight in which the Viet Cong were sometimes five feet from us. We had lost four men and we were drained and sick and exhausted the way you are when even in sleep you feel that you're curled inside a wooden box of your own pain and your soul twitches like a rubber band. I had taken my platoon down a trail at night, a stupid and reckless act, had walked into their ambush, lost our point man immediately, and had gotten flanked, and there was only one person to blame for it—me. Although it was now noon and the sun was as hot and bright as a welder's arc overhead, in my mind's eye I still saw the flash of the AK-47s against the black-green of the jungle.

  Then I looked at Dale, my sergeant, wringing out his shirt in a metal water drum. His back was brown, ridged with vertebrae, his ribs like sticks against his skin, the points of his black hair shiny with sweat. Then his lean Czechoslovakian face smiled at me, with more tenderness and affection in his eyes than I had yet seen in a woman's.

  He was killed eight days later when a Huey tipped the treetops by an LZ and suddenly dipped sideways into the clearing.

  But my point about the origins of the personality and the mysteries of the soul concerns someone else and not my dead friend. A half-dozen stripped-down Harleys, mounted by women in pairs, pulled to the edge of the street barricade, and Claudette Rocque and her friends strolled into the crowd. They wore greasy jeans and black Harley T-shirts without bras, wide studded belts, bandannas around their foreheads like Indians, chains, tattoos, half-topped boots with metal taps. They had six-packs of beer hooked in their fingers, folders of Zig-Zag cigarette papers protruding from their T-shirt pockets. They wore their strange form of sexuality like Visigoth warriors in leather and mail.