His feet were already set when he swung. He caught me on the chin, and my head snapped back and my hard hat rolled across the rig floor.
I straightened up, held the rail with one hand, and looked into his face. It was stretched tight on the bone, and the suntanned skin at the corners of his eyes was filled with white lines.
The roughnecks on the floor stared at us in disbelief.
I pushed at the side of my chin with my thumb.
"They'll melt you into lard in the courtroom, Weldon," I said. "Gouza won't even have to take the stand. Instead, you and Drew will be on trial, and those defense attorneys will make you sound like a pornographer's wet dream."
I saw his hand move, his eyes click again as though he'd been slapped.
"Don't even think about it," I said. "The first one was free. You come at me again, and I'll make sure you do time for assaulting a police officer." I picked up the hard hat from the rig floor and shoved it into his hands, jammed it into his chest. "Thanks for the tour of the rig. My recommendation is you hire a good lawyer and get some advice about the wisdom of suboming perjury. Or apply for a pilot's job in a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States, See you around, Weldon."
I walked down the iron steps to my truck. I could hear the canvas awning flapping in the hot wind, a chain clinking brightly against a piece of pipe, in the embarrassed silence of the roughnecks on the rig floor.
The next morning I drove across the I-10 bridge over the Mississippi to Baton Rouge. The river was high and muddy, almost a mile across, and the oil barges far below looked as tiny as toys. Huge oil refineries and aluminum plants sprawled along the east bank of the river, but what always struck my eye first when I rolled over the apex of the bridge into Baton Rouge was the spire of the capitol building lifting itself out of the flat maze of trees and green parks in the old downtown area. All the state's political actors since Reconstruction had passed through there: populists in suspenders and clip-on bow ties, demagogues, alcoholic buffoons, virulent racists, a hillbilly singer who would be elected governor twice, another governor who broke out of a mental asylum in order to kill his wife, a recent governor who pardoned a convict in Angola, who repaid the favor by murdering the governor's brother, and the most famous and enigmatic player of them all, the Kingfish, who might have given FDR a run for his money had he not died, along with his supposed assassin, in a spray of eighty-one machine-gun bullets in a hallway of the old capitol building.
I parked my truck and sat in the gallery during the morning session of the legislature. I watched the regard with which Bobby Earl was treated by many of his peers, the warm handshakes, the pats on the arm and shoulder, the expression of gentlemanly goodwill by men who should have known better. It reminded me of the deference sometimes shown to a small-town poolroom bully or redneck police chief. The people around him well know his hatred of Jews, intellectuals, news people, Asians, blacks; no one doubts his potential with the leaded baton or the hobnailed boot across the neck. But they make friends with the ape in their midst, no matter how violently the tuning fork vibrates inside them; consequently they absorb his dark powers, and secretly gloat at the fear he inspires in others.
They recessed for lunch, and I followed Bobby Earl and a group of his friends one block to the entrance of an expensive restaurant with an awning that extended out over the sidewalk. The windows were filled with ferns and hanging copper pots. After Earl and his group had entered the restaurant, I put on my seersucker coat, tightened my necktie, and walked inside, too. Most of the tables were filled, the air loud with conversation and scented with the smell of gumbo from the kitchen, bourbon and tropical drinks from the bar.
"I don't think we have a seating for one, sir. Would you like to wait in the bar?" the matre d' said.
"I'm with Mr. Earl's party. Ah, there he is right over there," I said.
"Very well. Please follow me, sir," he said.
I walked with the maitre d' to Bobby Earl's table. The maitre d' set a menu down for me at an empty place setting and walked away. Earl turned away from his conversation with another man, then his mouth opened silently as he looked up and realized who was sitting down at his table.
"Hello, Mr. Earl. I apologize for bothering you again, but I'm just in town briefly and I didn't want to disturb you at the legislature," I said. "How are you gentlemen? I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office. I just need to ask Mr. Earl a question or two. Y'all go right ahead with your lunch."
They went on talking to each other, as though my presence was perfectly natural, but I could see their eyes, the positions of their bodies, already disassociating themselves from the situation.
Bobby Earl wore a brown pinstripe suit and a yellow silk tie, and his thick hair looked blow-dried and recently cut.
"What are you doing here?" he said.
"Do you know that Joey Gouza's in custody?"
"No."
I set my notebook on the tablecloth and peeled back several pages. It contained nothing but notes from old investigations and a grocery list I had made out at the office yesterday.
"I interviewed him in his cell yesterday and your name came up," I said.
"What?"
"Gouza is charged with ordering two men to nail Drew Sonnier's hand to a gazebo. When I questioned him your name came up in the conversation. That fact bothered me, Mr. Earl. Is it your statement that you don't know Joey Gouza?"
"I'm not making a statement. What are you trying to do here?"
A man at the end of the table coughed quietly into his fist and went to the restroom.
"You and Joey Gouza seem to have the same friends. Your lines keep crossing in this case, Mr. Earl. Originally I questioned you about Eddy Raintree. Now someone has blown Eddy's face off with a shotgun. You knew that, didn't you?"
"No, I don't know anything about this. You listen-"
His voice level rose, and the man next to him excused himself to talk with friends at the bar.
"You're harassing me," Earl began again. "I can't prove it, but I suspect you have a political motivation for what you've been doing. It won't work. It just makes my cause stronger. If you doubt me, call the Morning Advocate and check the polls."
"Let me tell you what Gouza said and you can come to your own conclusions. We were talking about you, then he begins to tell me that if he goes down for what is called the 'bitch,' which is a life sentence given to habitual criminals, he's going to take others down with him. What does that seem to suggest to you, Mr. Earl?"
"It suggests you're going to have a lawsuit against you for slander." His monocular right eye, with the enlarged pupil like a spot of India ink, was fixed on my face. The skin along the bottom rim was trembling with anger.
I folded my notebook and put it in my shirt pocket. I picked up a package of crackers from the breadbasket, then dropped it in the basket again.
"You're an intelligent man, and I'll tell you the truth, Mr. Earl," I said. "I think Joey might be in on a bum rap. But unfortunately for him, nobody cares if a guy like Joey is innocent or not. People just want him put away in a cage for a long time, and they don't care how it's done. The prosecutor will probably get a new political career out of it, his lawyers will get rich on his appeals while he's chopping sugarcane at Angola, his wife and mistresses will clean out his bank accounts and sell everything he owns, and his hired stooges will go to work for his competitors and forget they ever heard of him. In the meantime, there are probably some sadistic gunbulls who will ejaculate at the thought of busting Joey's hump on their work gangs.
"Now, if you were Joey Meatballs and facing a prospect like that, wouldn't you be willing to cut a deal, any deal, including maybe putting your mother in harness on a dogsled team?"
The other men at the table had gone quiet now and had given up the pretense of conviviality. They looked at their watches, touched nervously at their mouths with their napkins, stared at a remote part of the restaurant. The cost of their lunch with Bobby Earl
was not one they had anticipated.
I rose from the table.
"You like primitive law and vigilante solutions to complex problems, Mr. Earl," I said. "Maybe you've stumbled into one of your own creations this time. But I wouldn't end up as Joey Gouza's fall partner. He doesn't care about political causes. He had his own brother-in-law fed into an airplane propeller. What do you think his lawyers might have planned for you?"
The tables around Bobby Earl's had now become quiet, too. He turned to speak to the men seated next to him, but their eyes were fixed on the flower arrangement in the center of the table. But I learned then that Bobby Earl was not easily undone in a public situation. He rose from the table, put his napkin neatly by his plate, and walked toward the men's room, pausing to let a black drink waiter pass. His gaze was level, his face handsome, almost pleasant-looking, his thick brown hair tousled by the cool currents from the air-conditioner.
I realized then that Bobby Earl might burn inside with banked fires, and that perhaps I had indeed inserted some broken glass in his head that would saw through brain tissue later; but in front of an audience he was a tragedian actor, a protean figure who could create an emanation of himself out of willpower alone and become as benign, photogenic, and seemingly anointed by history as Jefferson Davis in defeat.
I had a feeling this one would go into extra innings.
CHAPTER 12
That evening Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to a shrimp Tboil in the park on Bayou Teche. The air smelled of flowers and new-cut grass, the clouds were marbled with pink, the oak trees around the wood pavilion were dark green and thick with birds. School was out for the summer, and Alafair and some other kids played kickball on the baseball diamond with the sense of dusty, knee-grimed joy that's the special province of children during summer. In fact, Alafair's aggressiveness at play made me wonder if she didn't have a bent for adversarial roles. Her cheeks were dirt-streaked and flushed with excitement; she charged without blinking at the kicker and took the volleyball full in the face, and then ran after it again, sometimes knocking another child to the ground.
The last four days with Bootsie had been wonderful. The new balance of medicine seemed to be working. Her eyes smiled at me in the morning, her posture was erect and selfassured, and she helped me and Batist at the dock and in the bait shop with cheerful eagerness. Only an hour ago I had looked up from my work and caught her in a moment when she was unconscious of my glance, just as though I had clicked the camera lens and frozen her in the pose of the healthy and unworried woman that I prayed she would become again for both of us. She had just emptied the bait tanks, her denim shirt stuck wetly to her uplifted breasts, and she was staring abstractedly out the screen window at the bayou, eating a carrot stick, her hair touched by the breeze, one hand set jauntily on her hip, the muscles in her back and neck as strong and firm as a Cajun fishergirl's.
At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn't in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn't bothered to be grateful for the things I had.
She peeled the shell off a shrimp, dipped the shrimp in a horseradish sauce and put it in her mouth. She reached out and touched my chin lightly with two fingers, as though she were examining for a skin blemish.
"Is that where Weldon hit you?" she asked.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Oh my, such innocence." I cleared my throat.
"I was in the supermarket this morning," she said. "A woman whose husband is a floorman on Weldon's rig couldn't stop herself from asking about your welfare."
Her eyes crinkled at the corners.
"Weldon's not always a rational man," I said.
"Why didn't you arrest him?"
"He's a tormented man, Boots. He carries a burden nobody should have to carry."
She stopped chewing. Her eyes looked into mine.
"Lyle told me some things about their childhood, about Weldon's relationship with Drew," I said.
A crease went across her brow, and she set her half-eaten shrimp back on the paper plate. The children out on the baseball diamond were tumbling in the dust, their happy cries echoing off the backstop.
"They're messed up in the head real bad," I said. "Weldon's a pain in the butt, all right, but I suspect he wakes up each morning with the Furies after him."
"He and Drew?" she said, the meaning clear and sad in her eyes now.
"Probably Lyle, too. I said something pretty rough to Weldon about it. So he had a free one coming."
"That's an awful story."
"They'll probably never tell all of it, either."
She was quiet for a few moments. Her eyes were flat and turned inward; her hair looked like it was touched with smoke in the broken light through the tree.
"When this is over, maybe we can invite them to dinner," she said.
"That'd be fine."
"You wouldn't mind?"
"No, of course not."
"Why didn't anyone-" she began. Then she stopped, coughed in the back of her throat, and said, "I never guessed. Poor Drew."
I squeezed her hand; but it felt dry and pliant inside mine.
Her mouth had the down-turned expression of someone who might have opened a bedroom door at the wrong moment.
Then she stood up and began clearing the table, her face concentrating on her work.
"I'm going to invite her to go shopping with me in Lafayette," she said. "You think she'd like that?"
"You bet," I said.
You'll always be a standup lady, Boots, I thought.
Out on the baseball diamond a shout went up from the children as someone fired the volleyball into the backstop.
It was dusk when we returned home, and the air was heavy and cool, motionless, loud with the croaking of frogs out in the cypress. I parked under the pecan trees in the front yard, and Bootsie and Alafair walked up to the house while I rolled up the truck's windows. The sky had turned blueblack, the color of scorched iron, and I could feel the barometer dropping again, and smell sulfur and distant rain.
As I started up the incline toward the gallery, a beat-up flatbed truck bounced through the chuckholes in the dirt road and turned in to my drive. On the back was a huge chrome-plated cross, with the top end propped on the cab's roof and the shaft fastened to the bed with a boomer chain.
Lyle Sonnier cut the ignition and stepped down, grinning, from the running board. He wore a pair of striped overalls without a shirt, and his thin chest and shoulders were red with sunburn.
"I thought I'd take your time just for a minute," he said.
"What do you think of it?"
"It looks like it's made of car bumpers."
"It is. Me and this ole boy in Lafayette welded a shell all around the wood beams. What do you think?"
Batist had left on the string of electric bulbs over the dock, and the cross rippled and glowed with a silver and blue light.
"It looks like an artwork. It's beautiful," I said.
"Thanks, Loot. It's the only thing the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock left me before they sent him off to Parchman Farm. One time we were outside New Albany, Mississippi, where some Klan uglies had burned a cross in a field, and Jimmy Bob was eating a hamburger in the truck across the road, looking out at that black cross, when he says, 'No sense letting good building material go to waste.' Then he walks across the road and gives this colored farmer who was out there plowing a dollar for it."
" 'What in the world are we gonna do with that?' I say."
"He says, 'Son, the most exciting place in a shithole like this is the Dairy Queen on Saturday night. When you run a hallelujah tent show, you gotta give them lights in the sky.' "
"He went into a supermarket, bought eight rolls of aluminum foil, and wrapped the cross in it, then we drov
e out to a junkyard and he got a guy to string it with electric bulbs.
That night we put it up on a hill, way up the slope from the tent, and hooked it up to the generator, and you could see that cross glowing in the mist for five miles."
I nodded absently and looked up toward my lighted gallery.
"Well… I didn't mean to take up a lot of your evening," he said. "I just wanted to tell you I didn't feel good about the other night in Baton Rouge. You came to me for help and I couldn't offer you very much."
"Maybe you did, Lyle."
He looked at me curiously, then lifted one of his overall straps off his sunburn with his thumb.
"I'm going to put the cross up on my new bible college," he said. "I was going to call it the Lyle Sonnier Bible Institute. Now I'm just going to call it the South Louisiana Bible College. How's that sound?"
"It sounds pretty good."
"I told you I ain't as bad as you think."
"I think maybe you're not bad at all, Lyle."
His eyes looked into the corners of mine, then he brushed at the dirt and leaves in the drive with his shoe.
"I appreciate it, Loot," he said.
"You want to come in?" I asked.
"No, thanks anyway. I just came into town to see Drew at the hospital and pick up my cross in Lafayette. Weldon told me about him taking a swing on you. I'm sorry that happened. I know you've been as good and fair as you can to both him and Drew. But you really stuck a garden rake in his head."
"Weldon has to stop jerking everybody around. Maybe it's time he takes his own fall."
Lyle etched lines in the leaves and dust with the point of his shoe. He rested his mutilated hand, which in the deepening shadows looked almost like part of an amphibian, on the truck's door handle.
"Weldon told me last night what he's been involved in. It's a mess, it surely is," he said. "I think he wants to tell you about it. He's pretty well worn-out with it."
"Do you want to tell me what it is?"
"It's his grief. You'll have to get it from him. No offense meant." He got up in the cab of his truck and clicked the door shut with his underarm. He smiled. "I better get out of here before I get in some kind of legal trouble. You know why I keep that burnt cross, why I'm gonna put it up on top of my Bible college? It don't let me forget where I've been and what I'm fixing to be. It's like that ole boy says in the song, 'I might be an old chunk of coal but I'm gonna be a diamond someday.' Give Weldon a chance. Maybe inside that cinder-block head of his he wants you to like him."
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