Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  The sky was dark and streaked with rain when Clete and I went back outside. The air smelled of ozone and schooled-up fish out in the bay. Lightning leaped from the horizon to the top of the sky, and I looked out at the pale green color of the sugarcane blowing in the wind and at the crossroads in the distance where we had stopped at the general store next to the abandoned nightclub with the cabins in back, and I remembered when I had been there before.

  “My mother ran off with a man named Mack when I was a little boy,” I said to Clete. “She came back for me once and we stayed in one of those cabins behind the nightclub.”

  “Let it go, Streak,” he said.

  “My father was in jail. Mack dealt cards at that club. My mother was a waitress there.”

  “That was a long time before she died, big mon. Don’t hurt yourself like this.”

  We had backed out almost to the front gate. I stopped the truck and walked to the front door in the rain and knocked loudly on the door.

  Jim Gable opened it with a turkey drumstick wrapped in a paper napkin in his hand. He was grinning.

  “You forgot something?” he said.

  “You’re from Lafourche Parish, Mr. Gable?”

  “I grew up right down this road.”

  “My mother’s name was Mae Guillory. I think she was murdered somewhere close by. Zipper says it was around ’66 or ’67. Did you know a woman named Mae Guillory?”

  His face transformed itself into the smiling, disingenuous countenance that all dishonest people know how to affect, the light in his eyes deliberately unfocused, the lips parted solicitously.

  “Why, no, I don’t think I ever knew anyone by that name. Mae? No, I’m sure of it,” he replied.

  I got back into the truck and backed into the road and headed toward the crossroads.

  Clete reached under the seat and removed his half pint bottle of whiskey and unscrewed the cap with one thumb, his eyes on the sugarcane and the rain ditches that swept past both sides of the truck. He took a sip from the bottle and put a Lucky Strike in his mouth.

  “How about eighty-sixing the booze while we’re driving?” I said.

  “Gable knows something about your mother’s death?” he said.

  “Put it in the bank,” I said.

  4

  On Monday I drove to the women’s prison at St. Gabriel, ten miles south of Baton Rouge, and waited for a female guard to walk Letty Labiche from a lockdown unit to an interview room. While I waited a television crew and a male and female journalist from a Christian cable channel were packing up their equipment.

  “You interviewed Letty?” I asked the woman.

  “Oh, yes. Her story’s a tragic one. But it’s a beautiful one, too,” she replied. She was middle-aged, blond and attractive, her hard, compact body dressed in a pink suit.

  “Beautiful?” I said.

  “For a Christian, yes, it’s a story of forgiveness and hope.” Her face lifted into mine, her blue eyes charged with meaning.

  I looked at the floor and said nothing until she and the other journalist and their crew were gone.

  When Letty came into the room with the female guard she was wearing prison denims and handcuffs. The guard was as broad as an ax handle, pink-complected, with chestnut hair, and arms like an Irish washerwoman. She turned the key in the handcuff locks and rubbed Letty’s wrists.

  “I got them a little tight. You gonna be okay here, hon?” she said.

  “I’m fine, Thelma,” Letty said.

  I could not tell the difference between Letty and her twin sister, except for a rose with green leaves tattooed on her neck. They had the same skin, the same smoke-colored, wavy, gold-streaked hair, even the same powerful, physical presence. She sat down with me at a wood table, her back straight, her hands folded in front of her.

  “You’re going to be on cable television, huh?” I said.

  “Yes, it’s pretty exciting,” she said.

  But she caught the look in my eyes.

  “You don’t approve?” she said.

  “Whatever works for you is the right thing to do, Letty.”

  “I think they’re good people. They been kind to me, Dave. Their show goes out to millions of homes.”

  Then I saw the consuming nature of her fear, her willingness to believe that exploitative charlatans could change her fate or really cared what happened to her, the dread and angst that congealed like a cold vapor around her heart when she awoke each morning, one day closer to the injection table at Angola. How much time was left? Six weeks? No, it was five weeks and four days now.

  I remembered a film clip that showed Letty at a religious service in the prison chapel, rising from her knees in front of the cross, her clasped hands extended high above her head in a histrionic portrayal of prayer. It was almost embarrassing to watch. But I had learned long ago that unless you’ve had your own ticket punched in the Garden of Gethsemane, you shouldn’t judge those whose fate it is to visit there.

  “What can you tell me about a black woman named Little Face Dautrieve?” I asked.

  “Tell you?”

  “You know her, don’t you?”

  “The name’s not real familiar,” she said.

  “Why do you and Passion refuse to confide in me?” I said.

  She looked at the tops of her big-boned hands. “The information you’re after won’t help. Leave it alone,” she said.

  One hand opened and closed nervously on the tabletop. Her palm was gold, shiny with moisture, her nails trimmed close to the cuticle. I took her fingers in mine.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  But she wasn’t. I could see her pulse beating in her neck, the white discoloration on the rim of her nostrils. She swallowed dryly when she looked back into my face, her eyes working hard to retain the light that the reborn seemed to wear as their logo.

  “No one has to be brave all the time. It’s all right to be afraid,” I said.

  “No, it’s not. Not if you have faith.”

  There was nothing for it. I said good-bye and walked outside into the world of wind and green lawns and sunlight on the skin and trees bending against the sky. It wasn’t an experience I took for granted.

  When I got home that evening Clete Purcel was leaning on the rail at the end of my dock, eating from a paper sack filled with hog cracklings, brushing the crumbs off his hands into the bayou. The sun was red behind the oaks and pecan trees in my yard, and the swamp was full of shadows and carrion birds drifting above the tops of the dead cypress.

  I walked down the dock and leaned against the rail next to him.

  “The moon’s rising. You want to try some surface lures?” I said.

  “I got a call from Zipper Clum today. He says a shit-load of heat just came down on his head and we’re responsible for it.” He pulled a crackling out of the sack and inserted it in his mouth with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Gable sicced some cops on him?”

  “They rousted him and put him in a holding cell with a bunch of Aryan Brotherhood types. Zipper left a couple of teeth on the cement.”

  “Tell him to give us something and we’ll help him.”

  “The guy’s a bottom-feeder, Dave. His enemy’s his mouth. He shoots it off, but he doesn’t have anything to give up.”

  “Life’s rough.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I told him.” Clete tore the tab on a beer can and leaned his elbows on the handrail. The wind rippled the bamboo and willow trees along the bayou’s edge. “Zipper thinks he might get popped. I say good riddance, but I don’t like to be the guy who set him up. Look, the guy’s conwise. If he’s wetting his pants, it’s for a reason. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah,” I said abstractly.

  “You stuck a broom up Jim Gable’s ass. He plans to be head of the state police. You remember that black family that got wiped out with shotguns about ten years back? Out by the Desire Project? The husband was snitching off some narcs and they wasted him and his
wife and kid. I heard Gable ordered the clip on the husband and it got out of control.”

  “Let me tell Bootsie I’m home and we’ll put a boat in the water,” I said.

  Clete finished his cracklings and wadded up the sack and popped it with the flat of his hand into a trash barrel.

  “I’ve always wondered what it was like to have a conversation with a wood post,” he said.

  At that time the governor of the state was a six-foot-six populist by the name of Belmont Pugh. He had grown up in a family of sharecroppers in a small town on the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge, feckless, illiterate people who sold pecans off the tailgates of pickup trucks and pulled corn and picked cotton for a living and were generally referred to as poor white trash. But even though the Pughs had occupied a stratum below that of Negroes in their community, they had never been drawn to the Ku Klux Klan, nor were they known to have ever been resentful and mean-spirited toward people of color.

  I had known Belmont through his cousin Dixie Lee Pugh at SLI when we were all students there during the late 1950s. Dixie Lee went on to become the most famous white blues singer of his generation, second only to Elvis as a rock ‘n’ roll star. Belmont learned to play piano in the same Negro juke joint that Dixie Lee did, but he got hit with a bolt of religion and turned to preaching as a career rather than music. He exorcised demons and handled snakes and drank poisons in front of electrified rural congregations all over Louisiana. He baptized Negroes and poor whites by immersion in bayous so thick with mud they could clog a sewer main, while cottonmouth moccasins and alligators with hooded eyes watched from among the lily pads.

  But the donations he received from church people were small ones and he made his living by selling detergent, brooms, and scrub brushes out of his automobile. Occasionally he would stop by New Iberia and ask me to have lunch with him at Provost’s Bar. He had attended college only one year, but he was proud of what he called his “self-betterment program.” He read a library book thirty minutes before breakfast each morning and thirty minutes before going to bed. He learned one new word from a thesaurus each day, and to improve what he called his “intellectual thinking skills,” he did his business math in his head. He performed one good deed a day for somebody else, and, in his words, “as a man on his way up, one good deed for my own self.”

  To save money he slept in his car, ate fifty-cent lunches in poolrooms, and sometimes bathed and shaved with a garden hose behind a church house fifteen minutes before his sermon.

  Then Belmont discovered the carnival world of Louisiana politics, in the way a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realize that life held more promise than he had ever dreamed.

  Newspeople called Belmont the most mesmerizing southern orator since Huey Long.

  During his run for his second term as governor, the opposition spread rumors that Belmont was not only a drunk but that his mulatto mistress, whom he had stashed over in Vicksburg, had borne him twins. Time magazine said he was finished. Fundamentalist preachers, once his colleagues, denounced him from every pulpit in the state. Belmont appeared on a nationally telecast religious show and tried to rinse his sins in public. His contrition was a flop.

  He held a July Fourth political rally and barbecue in Baton Rouge. The beer, the corn on the cob, the chicken, and the links were free, paid for, some said, by casino interests in Chicago and Las Vegas. Belmont climbed up onto a flatbed truck while his string band belted out “The Orange Blossom Special.” He played harmonica into the microphone, his face reddening, sweat leaking out of his Stetson hat. When the song ended, the applause was no more than a ripple, while the audience waited to hear what Belmont Pugh had to say about his misdeeds.

  He wore shined oxblood cowboy boots, a white suit, a blue shirt, and a flowered necktie. He was too tall to speak comfortably into the microphone, and he removed it from the stand and held it in his huge hand.

  His face was solemn, his voice unctuous.

  “I know y’all heered a lot of stories about your governor,” he said. “I won’t try to fool you. They grieve me deeply. I’m talking heartfelt pain.”

  He paused, taking a breath. Then his knees bent slightly, as though he were gathering a huge volume of air in his lower parts.

  “But I’m here to tell y’all right now … That anytime, anywhere, anybody …” He shook his head from side to side for emphasis, his voice wadding in his throat as though he were about to strangle on his own emotions. “I mean anybody sets a trap for Belmont Pugh with whiskey and women …” His body was squatted now, his face breaking into a grin as wide as an ax blade. “Then by God they’ll catch him every time!” he shouted.

  The audience went wild.

  The price of domestic oil rose the same week and the economy bloomed. Belmont was reelected by a landslide.

  Late the next afternoon I looked through the screen window of the bait shop and saw Belmont’s black Chrysler park by the boat ramp and Belmont walk down the dock toward the shop. His aides had started to follow him but he waved them off with his Stetson hat, then began slapping the hat against his thigh, as though pounding dust off his clothes. His brow was furrowed, his eyes deep in his face. He blew out his breath and punched and shaped the crown of his hat with his fist and fitted it back on his head just before entering the shop, his easy smile back in place.

  Fifteen minutes later we were a mile down the bayou, the outboard pulled into a cove of cypress and willow trees. Belmont sat on the bow and flipped his lure toward the edge of the lily pads and retrieved it slowly through the dark water. He had a lean face and long teeth and pale eyes and graying hair that hung over his ears. His Stetson, which he wore virtually everywhere, was shapeless and stained with sweat and wrapped with a silver cord around the crown.

  “You a student of Scripture, Dave?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “The Old Testament says Moses killed maybe two hundred people when he come down off Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments still smoking in his hands. God had just talked to him from the burning bush, but Moses saw fit to put them people to death.”

  “I’m not following you, Belmont.”

  “I’ve signed death warrants on a half dozen men. Every one of them was a vicious killer and to my mind deserved no mercy. But I’m sorely troubled by the case of this Labiche woman.”

  I lay my rod across the gunnels of the boat. “Why?” I asked.

  “Why? She’s a woman, for God’s sakes.”

  “That’s it?”

  He fanned a mosquito out of his face.

  “No, that’s not it. The minister at my church knows her and says her conversion’s the real thing. That maybe she’s one of them who’s been chosen to carry the light of God. I got enough on my conscience without going up to judgment with that woman’s death on me.”

  “I know a way out.”

  “How?”

  “Refuse to execute anyone. Cut yourself loose from the whole business.”

  He threw his rod and reel against the trunk of a cypress and watched it sink through a floating curtain of algae.

  “Send me a bill for that, will you?” he said.

  “You can bet on it,” I replied.

  “Dave, I’m the governor of the damn state. I cain’t stand up in front of an auditorium full of police officers and tell them I won’t sign a death warrant ’cause I’m afraid I’ll go to hell.”

  “Is there another reason?”

  He turned his face into the shadows for a moment. He rubbed the curls on the back of his neck.

  “Some people say I might have a shot at vice president. It ain’t a time to be soft on criminals, particularly one who’s chopped up an ex-state trooper.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, trying to conceal the disappointment in my voice.

  He beat at the air with both hands. “I’m gonna call the Mosquito Control down here and bomb this whole place,” he said. “Lord God Almighty, I thought liquor and women’s thi
ghs were an addiction. Son, they don’t hold a candle to ambition.”

  The next morning a young black woman walked through the front door of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and down the hall to my office and tapped on the glass with one ringed finger. She wore a lavender shirt and white blouse and lavender pumps, and carried a baby in diapers on her shoulder.

  “Little Face?” I said when I opened the door.

  “I’m moving back here. Out at my auntie’s place in the quarters at Loreauville. I got to tell you something,” she said, and walked past me and sat down before I could reply.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Zipper Clum is what’s up. He say he gonna do you and Fat Man both.”

  “Clete Purcel is ‘Fat Man’?”

  “Fat Man shamed him, slapped his face up on that roof, throwed his pimp friends crashing down through a tree. I ax Zipper why he want to hurt you. He say you tole some people Zipper was snitching them off.”

  “Which people?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Zipper’s gonna tell me that? He’s scared. Somebody done tole him he better clean up his own mess or Zipper ain’t gonna be working his street corners no more. Anybody who can scare Zipper Clum is people I wouldn’t want on my case.”

  She shifted her baby to her other shoulder.

  “You’re an intelligent lady, Little Face.”

  “That’s why I’m on welfare and living with my auntie in the quarters.”

  “The day Vachel Carmouche was killed a black girl of about twelve was turning an ice cream crank on his gallery. That was eight years ago. You’re twenty, aren’t you?”

  “You been thinking too much. You ought to go jogging with Fat Man, hep him lose weight, find something useful for you to do so you don’t tire out your brain all the time.”

  “What happened inside Vachel Carmouche’s house that night? Why won’t you tell me?”

  “He wanted to live real bad, that’s what happened. But he didn’t find no mercy ’cause he didn’t deserve none. You ax me, a man like that don’t find no mercy in the next world, either.”

  “You saw him killed, didn’t you?”