Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  “Who’s the best source for cold pieces around New Orleans?” I asked.

  “It used to be Tommy Carrol, till somebody flushed his grits for him. Right now?” He scratched his hairline and thought. “You ever hear of the Eighteenth Street gang in Los Angeles? They’re here, kind of like sewer growth metastasizing across the country. I never thought I’d miss the greaseballs.”

  I drove down East Main at sunrise the next day, under the arched canopy of live oaks that lined the street, and picked Clete up at the apartment he had rented downtown. The moon was still up, the air heavy with the smell of night-blooming flowers and wet trees and bamboo and water that has seeped deep into the soil and settled permanently around stone and brickwork.

  But three hours later Clete and I were in a rural area north of New Orleans that in terms of toxicity probably has no environmental equivalent in the country. The petrochemical plants on the edge of the wetlands bleed their wastes into the drainages and woods, systemically killing all life in them, layering the soil with a viscous, congealed substance that resembles putty veined with every color in the rainbow.

  The man we were looking for, Garfield Jefferson, lived at the end of a row of tin-roofed shotgun shacks left over from the days of corporate plantations. The rain ditch in front was blown with Styrofoam litter, the yard heaped with upholstered furniture.

  “This guy’s a gun dealer?” I said.

  “He creates free-fire zones for other people to live in and keeps a low profile in Shitsville. Don’t be deceived by his smile, either. He’s a mainline grad of Pelican Bay,” Clete said.

  Garfield Jefferson’s skin was so black it gave off a purple sheen, at least inside the colorless gloom of his tiny living room, where he sat on a stuffed couch, legs spread, and grinned at us. The grin never left his face, as though his mouth were hitched on the corners by fishhooks.

  “I’m not following y’all. You say you a cop from New Iberia and some dude give you my name?” he said.

  “Johnny Remeta says you sold him the piece he did Zipper Clum with. That puts you deep down in the bowl, Garfield,” I said.

  “This is all new to me, man. How come the guy is telling you this, anyway? He just running around loose, popping people, calling in information from the phone booth?” Jefferson said.

  “Because he fucked up a hit for the wrong people and he knows his ass is hanging over the fire. So he wants to cut a deal, and that means he gives up a few nickel-and-dimepus heads like yourself as an act of good faith,” Clete said.

  Jefferson looked out the window, grinning at nothing, or perhaps at the outline of a chemical plant that loomed over a woods filled with leafless trees. His hair was shaved close to the scalp, his wide shoulders knobby with muscle under his T-shirt. He fitted a baseball cap backwards on his head and adjusted it, his eyes glowing with self-satisfaction.

  “A turned-around cap in Louisiana mean a guy don’t do drugs. You white folks ain’t caught on to that. You see a nigger with his hat on backwards, you think ‘Mean-ass motherfucker, gonna ’jack my car, get in my daughter’s bread.’ I ain’t dealt no guns, man. Tell this cracker he be dropping my name, I be finding his crib. I got too much in my jacket to sit still for this shit,” he said. He grinned innocuously at us.

  Clete stood up from his chair and remained standing on the corner of Jefferson’s vision. He picked up a ceramic lamp, the only bright object in the room, and examined the motel logo on the bottom of it.

  “You got a heavy jacket, huh?” I said.

  “Eighteen Streeters always get Pelican Bay. Twenty-three-hour lockdown. But I’m through with all that. I come back here to be with the home folks,” Jefferson said.

  Clete smashed the lamp across the side of Jefferson’s head. Pieces of ceramic showered on the couch and in Jefferson’s lap. For a moment his face was dazed, his eyes out of focus, then the corners of his mouth stretched upward on wires again.

  “See, when people got a weight problem, they go around pissed off all the time, big hard-on ’cause they fat and ugly and don’t want no full-length mirrors in their bathrooms,” Jefferson said.

  “You think you’re funny?” Clete said, and hit him with the flat of his hand on the ear. “Tell me you’re funny. I want to hear it.”

  “Clete,” I said softly.

  “Butt out of this, Streak.” Then he said to Jefferson, “You remember those three elementary kids got shot at the playground off Esplanade? The word is you sold the Uzi to the shooter. You got something to say about that, smart-ass?”

  “Free enterprise, motherfucker,” Jefferson said, evenly, grinning, his tongue thick and red on his teeth.

  Clete knotted Jefferson’s T-shirt with his left hand and drove his right fist into Jefferson’s face, then pulled him from the couch and threw him to the floor. When Jefferson started to raise himself on his arms, Clete crashed the sole of his shoe into his jaw.

  “It looks like you just spit some teeth there, Garfield,” Clete said.

  “Get away from him, Clete,” I said.

  “No problem. Sorry I lost it with this outstanding Afro-American. Do you hear that, Garfield? I’ll come back later sometime and apologize again when we’re alone.”

  “I mean it, Clete. Wait for me in the truck.”

  Clete went out into the yard and let the screen slam behind him. He looked back at me, his face still dark, an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth. I helped Jefferson back onto the couch and found a towel in the bathroom and put it in his hand.

  “I’m sorry that happened,” I said.

  “You the good guy in the act, huh?” he replied.

  “It’s no act, partner. Clete will tear you up.”

  Jefferson pushed the towel tight against his mouth and coughed on his own blood, then looked up at me, this time without the grin, his eyes lackluster with the banal nature of the world in which he lived.

  “I didn’t sell the piece to the cracker. He wanted one, but he ain’t got it from me. He got some wicked shit in his blood. I don’t need his grief,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He do it for hire. But if there wasn’t no money in it, he’d do it anyway. You say he fucked up a hit? I don’t believe it. He gets off on it, man. Somebody done reamed that dude good.”

  Clete and I drove into the French Quarter, then across the river into Algiers. We talked to hookers, pimps, house creeps, stalls, dips, strong-arm robbers, fences, money washers, carjackers, petty boosters and addicts and crack dealers, all the population that clings to the underside of the city like nematodes eating their way through the subsoil of a manicured lawn. None of them seemed to know anything about Johnny Remeta.

  But an ex-prizefighter who ran a saloon on Magazine said he’d heard a new button man in town had bought a half dozen clean guns off some black kids who’d burglarized a sporting goods store.

  “Who’s he working for, Goldie?” I asked.

  “If he waxed Zipper Clum, the human race,” he answered.

  At dusk, when the sun was only an orange smudge over the rooftops and the wind was peppered with grit and raindrops, we found one of the kids who had broken into the sporting goods store. Clete pulled him out of a fig tree down the street from the St. Thomas Welfare Project.

  He was fourteen years old and wore khaki short pants and tennis shoes without socks. Sweat dripped out of his hair and cut lines in the dust on his face.

  “This is the mastermind of the group. The ones who got away are younger than he is,” Clete said. “What’s your name, mastermind?”

  “Louis.”

  “Where’s the guy live you sold the guns to?” Clete asked.

  “Probably downtown somewhere.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “ ’Cause he drove toward downtown. The same direction the streetcar go to.”

  “Pretty smart deduction, Louis. How much did he give you for the guns?” Clete said.

  “A hunnerd dollars.”

  “For six g
uns?” Clete said.

  “He said he didn’t have no more money. He showed us his wallet. It didn’t have no more money in it.”

  “One of those guns was used to kill somebody, Louis,” I said.

  He looked into space, as though my words and the reality they suggested had nothing to do with his life. He must have weighed eighty pounds. He looked like an upended ant, with small ears, hooked teeth, and eyes that were too large for his face. His knees and elbows were scabbed, his T-shirt glued to his chest with dried food.

  “What’d you do with the money, partner?” I asked.

  “Didn’t get no chance to do nothing. Big kids took it. We was going to the show. Y’all got any spare change?”

  His eyes blinked in the silence while he waited for an answer.

  What had we accomplished? There was no way to tell. We had put the word on the street that Johnny Remeta was willing to give up people in the New Orleans underworld. Maybe either he or the people who had given him the contract on Zipper Clum and Little Face Dautrieve would be forced into the sunlight. But that night I was too tired to care.

  When I was nineteen I worked on an offshore seismograph rig, called a doodlebug outfit in the oil field. It was the summer of 1957, the year that Hurricane Audrey pushed a tidal wave out of the Gulf of Mexico on top of Cameron, Louisiana, crushing the town flat, killing hundreds of people.

  For weeks afterward bodies were found in the forks of gum trees out in the swamp or inside islands of uprooted cypress that floated out of the wetlands into the Gulf. Sometimes the long, rubber-coated recording cables we strung from the bow and stern of a portable drill barge got hung on a sunken tree in the middle of a bay or river and a crew member on the jugboat would have to go down after them.

  The water was warm with the sun’s heat, dark brown with mud and dead hyacinths. The kid who went over the gunnel and pulled himself hand over hand down to the fouled place on the cable did so without light. The sun, even though it was absolutely white in the sky, could not penetrate the layers of silt in the water, and the diver found himself swimming blindly among the water-sculpted and pointed ends of tree branches that gouged at his face like fingers. If he was lucky, the cable came loose with one hard tug in the right direction.

  On a late July afternoon I swam down fifteen feet until I touched the smooth, mud-encased trunk of an enormous cypress. I felt my way along the bark until I bumped into the root system, then unwrapped the cable and slid it toward me off the sides of a taproot.

  A gray cloud of mud mushroomed around me, as though I had disturbed an envelope of cold air trapped inside the maw of the tree’s root system. Suddenly the body of a woman rose out of the silt against mine, her hair sliding across my face, her dress floating above her underwear, the tips of her ringed fingers glancing off my mouth.

  No one on the jugboat saw her and some of the crew did not believe the story I told them. But the woman who had been gripped and held fast by the cypress tree, set free only to be lost again, lived with me in my dreams for many years. Her memory had the power to close my windpipe and steal the air from my lungs.

  Tonight she was back, although in a different form.

  It was nighttime in the dream, the air thick and acrid and sweet at the same time with smoke from a distant stubble fire. I saw my mother, Mae Robicheaux, on a dirt road that led past a neon-lit dance hall. The road was bordered on each side by fields that were bursting with fat stalks of purple cane, their leaves rustling with wind. She was running down the dirt road in the pink uniform she wore to work at the beer garden, her hands outstretched, her mouth wide with a desperate plea. Two cops ran behind her, their hands holding their revolvers in their holsters to prevent them from falling out on the ground.

  I was unable to move, watching impotently as a torrent of water surged out of the bay at the end of the dirt road and roared toward her between the walls of sugarcane. She tripped and fell and the root systems from the fields wrapped her body like white worms and held her fast while the water coursed around her thighs, her hips and breasts and neck.

  I could see her eyes and mouth clearly now and read my name on her lips, then the current closed over her head and I sat up in bed, my face popping with sweat, my lungs burning as though acid had been poured in them.

  I sat in the kitchen, in the dark, my heart twisting in my chest. I went into the bedroom and came back again, with my .45 in my hand, my palm damp on the grips. In my mind I saw the two cops who had chased my mother down the road, saw the sky blue of their uniforms, the glint of the moon on their shields and revolver butts and waxed gun belts, saw everything about them except their faces. I wanted to fire my weapon until the barrel was translucent with heat.

  When Bootsie lay her hand on my back, I twitched as though touched with a hot iron, then placed the .45 on the table and buried my face in her stomach.

  10

  On Saturday I woke early, before sunrise, to help Batist, the elderly black man who worked for me, open the bait shop and fire the barbecue pit on which we prepared chickens and links for our midday customers. I unhooked Tripod, Alafair’s pet three-legged coon, from his chain and set him on top of the rabbit hutch with a bowl of water and a bowl of fish scraps. But he hopped down on the ground and walked ahead of me through the pecan and oak trees and across the dirt road to the dock, his tail and rear end swaying.

  He and Batist had been at war for years, Tripod flinging boudin all over the counter, destroying boxes of fried pies and candy bars, Batist chasing him down the dock with a broom, threatening to cook him in a pot. But finally they had declared a truce, either out of their growing age or their recognition of their mutual intractability. Now, whenever Alafair or I turned Tripod loose, he usually headed for the dock and worked the screen open and slept on top of the icebox behind the counter. Last week I saw Batist roaring down the bayou in an outboard, with Tripod sitting on the bow, his face pointed into the breeze like a hood ornament.

  When I went inside the shop Batist was drinking a cup of coffee, looking out the screen window at the swamp.

  “You ever seen a red moon like that this time of year?” he said.

  “The wind’s up. There’s a lot of dust in the air,” I said.

  He was a big man, the muscles in his upper arms like croquet balls; his bell-bottomed dungarees and white T-shirt looked sewn to his skin.

  “Old people say back in slave days they poured hog blood in the ground under a moon like this,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Make the corn and cane bigger. Same reason people kill a gator and plant it in the field,” he replied. “I seen Clete Purcel with Passion Labiche.”

  “Really?”

  “Them girls are trouble, Dave. Their folks was pimps.”

  “A good apple can come off a bad tree,” I said.

  “Tell that to the man got his parts chopped up all over the flo’.”

  “I think he had it coming,” I replied.

  Tripod had crawled up on the counter and was sniffing a jar of pickles. Batist hefted him up in the crook of his arm. Tripod’s tail was ringed with silver bands and it flipped back and forth between his upended legs.

  “We was ten of us when I was growing up. My mama made a big pan of biscuits for breakfast every morning but we didn’t have nothing to put on them. So she kept a jar of fig preserves on the table. We rubbed the biscuit on the side of the jar, then ate it. We all laughed when we done that. Everybody’s road got glass on it, Dave. Don’t mean you got the right to kill nobody,” he said.

  “What does that have to do with Clete seeing Passion, Batist?”

  “I knowed them girls since they was little. You seen one, you seen the other. They wasn’t never more than a broom handle apart.”

  “It’s too early in the morning to argue with you, partner,” I said.

  “I ain’t arguing. The troot’s the troot. I ain’t got to prove nothing, me.”

  He walked outside into the soft blue light and set Tripod on the
handrail and began hosing down the spool tables on the dock, the moon dull red behind his head.

  Later that morning I filled an envelope full of black-and-white photos taken at the Vachel Carmouche murder scene and drove out to Carmouche’s boarded-up house on the bayou. The property itself seemed physically stricken by the deed that had been committed there. The yard was waist-high in weeds, the gallery stacked with old tires and hay bales that had gone gray with rot. Nests of yellow jackets and dirtdobbers buzzed under the eaves and a broken windmill clanged uselessly in a dry, hot wind.

  I walked around back, re-creating in my mind’s eye the path that Letty must have taken from the back porch to the rear of her house, where she stripped off her shoes and robe and washed the blood from her hair and body with a garden hose. The lock was already broken on the back door of Carmouche’s house, and I pushed the door open, scraping it back on the buckled linoleum.

  The air was stifling, like the inside of a privy in summer, rife with the smell of bat guano and pools of settled water under the floor, superheated by the tin roof and the closed windows. A green plant, as dark as spinach, had blossomed from the drain in the sink.

  But the signs of Carmouche’s agony from his crawl were still visible on the linoleum, like smeared reddish black paint that had dried and taken on the crisp, razored design of broken leaves. But there were other stains in the kitchen, too—a tentacle of connected dots on the wall by the stove and two similar streakings on the ceiling. I touched my fingers on the dots by the stove and felt what I was sure were the crusted, physical remains of Louisiana’s most famous electrician.

  I looked through the crime scene photos again. Blood had been slung all over the floor, the walls, the curtains on the cabinets, the icebox, and even the screen of the television set, which had been tuned to an old Laurel and Hardy comedy when the photo was taken. But how would blood from a mattock, a heavy, two-handed tool used to bust up stumps and root systems, create whipped patterns like those on the ceiling and the wall?

  I walked across the yard to the back of the Labiche house. The faucet where Letty had washed herself dripped water into the dust; the oil drum she had tried to destroy her robe and shoes in now smoldered with burning leaves; the house she had grown up in was ringed with roses and gardenias, and red squirrels leaped from the branches of the live oaks and clattered across the roof.