DR02 - Heaven's Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  I found the master bedroom farther down the hall. Through the French doors that gave onto the gallery I could see the tops of the oak trees beating in the wind. I turned on the light and looked at the canopied bed that was centered against one wall. The sheets, bedspread, pillows, and mattress were gone. Only the box spring remained in the wooden frame. I walked in a circle around the bed and felt the rug. It was still damp in two places and smelled of dry-cleaning fluid or spot remover.

  I knew it was time to call the Lafayette Parish sheriff's office. I was overextended legally, in the home on questionable grounds, and perhaps even in danger of tainting evidence in a homicide. But legality is often a matter that is decided after the fact, and I believed sincerely that someone owed me ten more minutes.

  I went out a side door onto the flagstone patio, past the screened-in pool and the breezeway where Bubba kept his dumbbells, universal gym, and punching bags, and found a garden rake leaned against the carriage house. The wind was blowing stronger now, the first raindrops clicking against the upstairs windows.

  Even though the flower bed by the side of the house was flooded from the soak hose, the leaves of the geraniums still looked like wilted green paper. I began to rake the dirt and the plants out of the bed. The soil was rich and black and had been built up with compost, and as I scooped it out on the gravel, milky puddles formed in the hollows. A foot down the rake's head struck something solid. I worked the dirt and torn plants and root systems back over the brick border and created a long, shallow depression through the center of the garden, the rake's teeth again touching something thick and resistant. Then I saw the edge of a vinyl shower curtain rise on one of the teeth and a pajama-clad knee protrude through the soil. I scraped around the edges of the body, watched the feet and shoulders and brow take shape, as though I were its creator and sculpting it from the earth.

  I set the rake on the gravel and cut the soak hose in half with my knife to release a strong jet of water. Then I washed the soft dirt, which looked like black coffee grounds, from Bubba's face. He rested on top of the shower curtain, his gray-blue eyes open, his face and hands and feet absolutely bloodless. The handle and the metal back of the cane knife she had used stuck out of the dirt by his head. The cut across the side of his neck went all the way to the bone.

  I turned off the soak hose and went back through the kitchen door and called the Lafayette Parish sheriff's office and Minos Dautrieve, then I started toward my truck. Dead leaves swirled all over the yard in the wind, the sky was black, and the few raindrops that struck my face were as hard as BBs.

  Behind me I heard the phone ring. I went back inside and picked up the receiver.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Bubba? This is Kelly. What's the deal on this dago linen service?" a man's voice said over the hum of long-distance wires. "Claudette says I'm supposed to hire these guys. What the fuck's going on over there?"

  "Bubba's dead, partner."

  "What? Who is this?"

  "I'm a police officer. What's your name?"

  He hung up the phone.

  I drove back down the gravel lane toward the highway while the thick limbs of the oak trees beat against one another overhead. The black thunderheads on the southern horizon were veined with lightning. The air was almost cold now, and the young sugarcane was bent to the ground in the wind. I rolled up my windows, turned on the windshield wipers, and felt the steering wheel shake in my hand. Pieces of newspaper and cardboard were flying in the air across the highway, and the telephone wires flopped and bounced like rubber bands between the poles.

  I passed a cement plant and a sidetracked Southern Pacific freight, and then I saw the maroon convertible parked in front of a truck stop that had a small lounge attached to it. It began raining hard just as I walked inside.

  Because the Negro janitor was mopping the floor and wiping down the tables, the curtains were open and the overhead lights were turned on. In the light you could see the cigarette burns on the floor, the mending tape on the booths, and the stacked beer cases in a back corner. An overweight barmaid was drinking coffee and talking with two oilfield roughnecks at the bar. The roughnecks wore tin hats and steel-toed boots and had drilling mud splattered on their clothes. One of them rolled a matchstick in his mouth and said something to me about the weather. When I didn't answer, he and his friend and the woman continued to look at me and the pistol and badge on my belt.

  Claudette Rocque was at a table by the back door. The door was open and mist was blowing through the screen. Out on the railway tracks I could see the rust-colored SP freight cars shining in the rain. She sipped her gin rickey and looked at me across the top of the glass. Her face was bruised and fatigued, and her brown eyes, which had that strange red cast to them, were glazed and sleepy with alcohol. There was an outline of adhesive tape around the stitches on her chin, and the skin was puckered on the tip of the bone. But her yellow sundress and the orange bandana in her hair were fresh and clean and even looked attractive on her, and I guessed that she had showered and changed after she had dragged Bubba downstairs on the shower curtain, dug up the garden, buried him, replanted the geraniums, and burned the mattress and pillows and sheets. She inhaled from her filtertipped cigarette and blew smoke out toward me.

  "You had a hard night," I said.

  "I've had worse."

  "You should have taken him somewhere else. You might have gotten away with it."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I dug him up. The cane knife, too."

  She drank from her glass and puffed on the cigarette again. Her eyes looked vaguely amused.

  "Drink it up, Claudette. You're going on a big dry."

  "Oh, I wouldn't count on that, pumpkin. You ought to watch more television. Battered wives are in fashion these days."

  I slipped the handcuffs off the back of my belt, took the cigarette out of her mouth and dropped it on the floor, and cuffed her wrists through the back of the chair.

  "Oh, our law officer is so uncorruptible, so noble in his AA sobriety. I bet you might like a slightly bruised fuck, though. It's your last chance, sugarplum, because I'll be out on bond tomorrow morning. You should give it some thought."

  I turned a chair around backwards and sat across from her.

  "You did three years and you think you're conwise, but you're still a fish," I said. "Let me give you the script. You won't do time because you cut Bubba's throat. Nobody cares when somebody like Bubba gets killed, except maybe the people he owes money to. Instead, a jury of unemployed roughnecks, fundamentalist morons, and welfare blacks who don't like rich people will send you up the road because you're an ex-con and a lesbian.

  "Of course, you'll think that's unfair. And you'll be right, it is. But the greatest irony is that the people who'll send you back to St. Gabriel will never hear the name of the innocent girl you had murdered. Some people might call it comedy. It'll make a good story in the zoo."

  Her reddish-brown eyes were narrow and mean. The bruise over the lid of one eye looked like a small blue mouse. I walked to the pay phone on the wall by the bar and called the sheriff's office. Just as I was about to hang up, I heard Claudette scrape the chair across the floor and smash it with her weight against the wall. She snapped the back loose from the seat, and then with the broken wood supports hanging from her manacled wrists, she went out the screen door into the rain.

  I followed her across a field toward the railroad tracks. The bottom of her yellow dress was flecked with mud, and her bandanna fell off her head and her hair stuck wetly to her face. The rain was driving harder now, and the drops were big and flat and cold as hail. I grabbed her by the arm and tried to turn her back toward the truck stop, but she sat down in a puddle of gray water. Her arms, twisted behind her by the handcuffs, were rigid with muscle.

  I leaned over and tried to lift her to her feet. She sat in the water with her legs apart, her shoulders stooped, her head down. I pulled her by the arms, her dead weight and wet skin slipping out of my
hands. She fell sideways in the water, then she got to her knees and I thought she was going to stand up. I bent down beside her and lifted under one arm. She looked up at me in the rain, as though she were seeing me for the first time, and spit in my face.

  I stepped back from her, used my handkerchief, and threw it away. She stared fixedly across the fields at the green line of trees on the horizon. Water ran in rivulets out of her soaked hair and down over her face. I walked to an empty freight car on the siding and pulled an old piece of canvas off the floor. It was stiff and crusted with dirt but it was dry. I spread it over her so that she looked like she was staring out of a small, peaked house.

  "It's the Mennonite way of doing things," I said.

  But she wasn't interested in vague nuances. She was looking at the sheriff's deputies and Minos Dautrieve stepping out of their cars in the truck-stop parking lot. I stood beside her and watched them make their way across the drenched field toward us. Through the open doors of the freight car I could see chaff spinning in the wind, and in the distance the gray buildings of the cement plant looked like grain elevators in the rain. Minos was calling to me in the echo of thunder across the land, and I thought of drowned voices out on the salt and wheat fields in the rain. I thought of white-capping troughs out on the Gulf and sunflowers and wheat fields in the rain.

  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  I WORKED TWO more weeks with the sheriff's department and then hung it up. In August the sun came up white every morning and the air was hazy with humidity and even your lightest clothes stuck to your body like wet paper. I rented a clapboard bungalow by the Texas coast, and Robin and Alafair and I spent two weeks fishing for gafftop and white and speckled trout. At dawn, when the tide was drawn out over the flats, the gulls squeaked and circled in the sky and dipped their beaks into the pools of trapped shellfish, then the long, flat expanses of wet sand became rose-tinted and purple, and the palm tree in our side yard would stand like a black metal etching against the sun.

  It was always cool when we took the boat out in the morning, and the wind would come up out of the southeast and we could smell the schools of trout feeding under the slicks they made on the water. We took the boat across a half-moon bay that was bordered on each side by sand pits, sawgrass, and dead cypress, and just as we crossed over the last sandbar into deep water and entered the Gulf, we would see those large floating slicks, like oil that had escaped from a sunken freighter, and we'd bait our hooks with live shrimp, cast on the edge of the slick, and pop our wood floats loudly against the surface. Occasionally we'd hook gafftop, and we always knew it was a catfish by the way he'd pull straight down for the bottom and not break the surface until we had socked the treble hook all the way through his head and forced him to the top. But a speckled trout would run and strip line off the drag, turn across your bow or stern and go under your boat if he could, and even when you got the net under him he'd still try to break your rod across the gunnel.

  We'd put cold drinks and sausage, cheese, and onion sandwiches in the ice chest, and by noon, when we had eaten our lunch and the sun was straight up in the sky and the salt was crusty on the hot bow of the boat, the ice would be covered with rows of silver trout, their gills open and red, their teeth hooked wide, their eyes like black glass.

  It was late August when we went back to New Iberia, and then one morning Robin was gone. I read the letter at the breakfast table in my underwear while the backyard turned from blue to gray in the early light. She had left coffee for me on the stove and a bowl of Grape-Nuts and strawberries on the table.

  I had the cab stop up on the road so I wouldnt wake you. Goodbyes and apologys are for the Rotary and the dipshits, right? I love you, babe. Its important you understand and believe that. You turned me around and cared about me when nobody else did. And I mean nobody. Your not like any guy I new before. You hurt for other people and for some reason you feel guilty about them. But thats not love, Dave. Its something else and I dont understand it really. I think maybe you still love Annie. I guess thats the way its suppose to be. But I think youve got to find out for yourself and you dont need me in the way.

  Hey, this is no big deal. Im going to work as a cashier at your brothers resterant on Dauphine, so if you ever want to hit on a hot broad you know where to go. Im off the juice and pills too thanks to a good hearted roach I know. Thats not a bad thing to put on your score card.

  My love to Alafair

  Take it easy,

  Streak Robin

  I did strange things during that last week in August. On a twilight evening I walked across the deserted campus of USL in Lafayette, where I attended college in the 1950s. The quadrangle was filled with shadows, the warm breeze blew through the brick walkways, and the dark green oaks were filled with the sounds of birds in the gathering dusk. I sat in a late-hour café by the SP yard and listened over and over to a 1957 Jimmy Clanton record on the jukebox while redbone gandy walkers, glistening with sweat, tore up the track outside in the glare of burning flares, and long strips of freights clattered by in the darkness. I played dominoes with the old men in the back of Tee Neg's pool hall, chipped minie balls out of the coulee's dirt wall by the ruined sugar planter's house on the bayou, and drove my truck down the levee deep into the marsh, where an abandoned community of shacks on stilts still stood, rotting and gray, against the willows and cypress. Forty years ago my father and I had come here for a fais dodo on July Fourth, and the people had cooked a pig in the ground and drunk wine out of Mason jars and danced to an accordion band on a houseboat until the sun was a red flare on the horizon and the mosquitoes were black on our skin.

  As I stared out the truck window at the gray tops of the trees, the shacks hanging in pieces on the stilts, the water black and still in the dying light, I heard a solitary bullfrog croak, then the flooded woods ached with sound. Three blue herons sailed low against the late sun, and with a sinking of the heart I knew that the world in which I had grown up was almost gone and it would not come aborning again.

  And maybe Bubba Rocque and I had been more alike than I cared to admit. Maybe we both belonged to the past, back there in those green summers of bush-league baseball and crab boils and the smoke of neighborhood fish fries drifting in the trees. Every morning came to you like a strawberry bursting on the tongue. We ran crab traps and trotlines in the bay with our fathers, baited crawfish nets with bloody chunks of nutria meat, cleaned boxes of mudcat with knife and pliers, and never thought of it as work. In the heat of the afternoon we sat on the tailgate of the ice wagon at the depot, watching the troop trains roll through town, then fought imaginary wars with stalks of sugarcane, unaware that our little piece of Cajun geography was being consumed on the edges like an old photograph held to a flame. The fiery rifts in evening skies marked only the end of a day, not the season or an era.

  But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in a winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon. I can't be sure. I brood upon it and sleep little. I wait like a denied lover for the blue glow of dawn.

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