Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  Alafair and Bootsie and I ate dinner at the kitchen table. Outside the window, the evening sky was piled high with rain clouds, and columns of sunlight shone through the clouds on my neighbor’s sugarcane. Alafair ate with her book bag by her foot. In it she kept her short stories and notebooks and felt pens and a handbook on script writing. By her elbow was a thick trade paperback with a black-and-white photo of a log cabin on the cover.

  “What are you reading?” I asked.

  “Night Comes to the Cumberland. It’s by a lawyer named Harry Caudill. It’s a history of the southern mountains,” she said.

  “For your creative writing group?” I asked.

  “No, a boy at the library said I should read it. It’s the best book ever written about the people of Appalachia,” she replied.

  “You’re going to read your new story tonight?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “By the way, I might get a ride home tonight.”

  “With whom?” Bootsie said.

  “This boy.”

  “Which boy?” I asked.

  “The one who told me about Night Comes to the Cumberland.”

  “That nails it down,” I said.

  “Dave, I am sixteen now … Why are you making that face?”

  “No reason. Sorry,” I said.

  “I mean, lighten up,” she said.

  “You bet,” I said, looking straight ahead.

  A few minutes later Alafair got into the car with Bootsie to ride into town. Under the trees the sunlight was red on the ground, and I could smell humus and the wet, dense warm odor of the swamp and schooled-up fish on the wind.

  “No riding home with boys we don’t know, Alafair. We got a deal?” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Alf?” I said.

  “You have to stop talking to me like I’m a child. Until you do, I’m just not going to say anything.”

  Behind Alafair’s angle of vision Bootsie shook her head at me, then she said, “I’ll be back in a little while, Dave,” and I watched them drive down the road toward New Iberia.

  I don’t know how good a father I was, but I had learned that when your daughter is between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, you will never win an argument with her, and if you fall back on anger and recrimination and coercion to prevail over her, you will come to loathe your triumph and the weakness it disguises and you will not easily find forgiveness for it in either her or yourself.

  I read the newspaper on the gallery, then the dusk gathered inside the trees and the leaves on the ground darkened and became indistinct and a car passed on the road with its headlights on. I saw Batist walk out of the bait shop and scoop the hot ashes out of the barbecue into a bucket and fling them in a spray of burning embers onto the bayou’s surface.

  I went inside and lay down on the couch with the newspaper over my face and fell asleep. In my dream I saw the sculpted, leafless branches of a tree on an alkali plain, and in the distance purple hills and piñon and cedar trees and cactus and rain bleeding like smoke out of the clouds. Then a flock of colored birds descended on the hardened and gnarled surfaces of the barren tree, and green tendrils began to grow from the tree’s skin and wind about its branches, and young leaves and flowers unfolded with the sudden crispness of tissue paper from the ends of the twigs, so that the tree looked like a man raising a floral tribute toward the sky.

  But a carrion bird descended into the tree, its talons and beak flecked with its work, its feathers shining, its eyes like perfectly round drops of black ink that had dried on brass. It extended its wings and cawed loudly, white insects crawling across its feathers, its breath filling the air with a scrofulous presence that enveloped the tree and the tropical birds in it like a moist net.

  I sat up on the couch and the newspaper across my face cascaded to the floor. I closed and opened my eyes and tried to shake the dream out of my mind, although I had no idea what it meant. I heard Bootsie’s car outside and a moment later she opened the front screen and came inside.

  “I fell asleep,” I said, the room still not in focus.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Yeah, sure.” I went into the bathroom and washed my face and combed my hair. When I came back out Bootsie was in the kitchen.

  “I had a terrible dream,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Is Alf all right?”

  “She’s at the library. She promised me she’d call or get a ride from somebody we know.”

  I took two glasses out of the cabinet over the drainboard and filled them from a pitcher of tea in the icebox.

  “Why wouldn’t she tell me who this boy is?” I asked.

  “The one who recommended the book about the Appalachians?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because she’s sixteen. Dave, don’t see a plot in everything. The kid she’s talking about is studying to be an artist.”

  “Say again?”

  “Alafair said he’s a painter. He paints ceramics. Does that sound like Jack the Ripper to you?”

  I stared stupidly at Bootsie, and in my mind’s eye I saw the humped black shape of the carrion bird in the midst of the flowering tree.

  I dialed 911 and got the city dispatcher, then I was out the back door and in the truck, roaring backwards in the driveway, the rear end fishtailing in a plume of dust out on the road. The dust drifted out onto the glare of the electric lights over the dock, glowing as brightly as powdered alkali under the moon.

  I came down East Main, under the oaks that arched over the street, and pulled into the City Library. The outside flood lamps were on and the oak trees on the lawn were filled with white light and shadows that moved with the wind, and next to the parking lot I could see a wall of green bamboo and the stone grotto that contained a statue of Jesus’ mother.

  A city police cruiser was parked under a tree by the grotto, and an overweight, redheaded cop, his cap at an angle on his brow, leaned against the fender, smoking a cigarette. He was a retired marine NCO nicknamed Top, although he had been a cook in the corps and never a first sergeant.

  “I’ve already been inside, Dave. Your daughter’s with a bunch of kids upstairs. I don’t see anything unusual going on here,” he said.

  “You didn’t see a tall kid, wide shoulders, dark hair, real white skin, maybe wearing glasses with black frames?”

  “How old?”

  “It’s hard to tell his age. He doesn’t always look the same.”

  He took the cigarette out of his mouth, and, without extinguishing it, tossed it in a flower bed.

  “That’s what I need. To be hunting down Plastic Man,” he said.

  We entered the building and walked through a large reading area, then went up the stairs. I saw Alafair sitting with five or six other high school kids around a table in a side room. I stood just outside the door until she noticed me. Her concentration kept going from me to the creative writing teacher, a black writer-in-residence at USL in Lafayette who volunteered his time at the library. Alafair got up from the table and came to the door, her eyes shining.

  “Dave …,” she said, the word almost twisting as it came out of her mouth.

  “The kid who paints ceramics? Is he here tonight?” I said.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, as though in pain, and opened them again. “I knew that was it.”

  “Alf, this guy isn’t what you think he is. He’s a killer for hire. He’s the guy who escaped custody in the shoot-out on the Atchafalaya.”

  “No, you’re wrong. His name’s Jack O’Roarke. He’s not a criminal. He paints beautiful things. He showed me photographs of the things he’s done.”

  “That’s the guy. O’Roarke was his father’s name. Where is he?”

  A fan oscillated behind her head; her eyes were moist and dark inside the skein of hair that blew around her face.

  “It’s a mistake of some kind. He’s an artist. He’s a gentle person. Jack wouldn’t hurt anybody,” she said.

 
“Alf, come with me,” I said, and put my hand on her forearm, my fingers closing around the skin, harder than I meant to.

  “No, I’m not going anywhere with you. You’re humiliating me.”

  I could see the veins in her forearm bunched like blue string under the skin, and I released her and realized my hand was shaking now.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Everybody’s looking at us. Just go,” she said, her voice lowered, as though she could trap her words in the space between the two of us.

  “He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “I’ll never forgive you for this.”

  “Alafair, I’m a police officer. I was almost killed because of this man.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut again and I saw the tears well out of her eyelids and shine on her lashes. Then inadvertently she glanced beyond me.

  “The rest room?” I said.

  But she wouldn’t answer.

  I waited until the area around the door of the men’s room was clear, then I slipped my .45 from its clip-on holster under my coat, holding it close against my thigh, and went inside.

  No one was at the urinals or lavatories. I pushed open each of the stall doors, standing back as they swung emptily against the partitions. I put the .45 back in my holster and went outside and motioned to the city cop to follow me. I saw Alafair looking at me, hollow-eyed, from across the room.

  We went back down to the first floor and I described Johnny Remeta to the librarian at the circulation desk. She removed the glasses from her face and let them hang from a velvet ribbon around her neck and gazed thoughtfully into space.

  “Did he have on a straw hat?” she asked.

  “Maybe … I don’t know,” I said.

  “He walked past me a few minutes ago. I think he’s in the historical collection. That room in the back,” she said, and pointed past the book stacks.

  I walked between the stacks, the city cop behind me, to a gray metal door inset with a small rectangle of reinforced glass. I tried to look through the glass at the entirety of the room but I saw only bookshelves and an austere desk lighted by a reading lamp. I pulled my .45 and held it down against my thigh, then shoved open the door and stepped inside.

  The side window was open and a straw hat, with a black ribbon around the crown, lay brim-down on the floor. A bound collection of Civil War-era photographs lay open on the narrow desk. The photographs on the two exposed pages showed the bodies of Confederate and Union dead at Dunker Church and the Bloody Angle.

  “This place is like a meat locker,” the city cop said.

  I looked out the window into the summer night, into the sounds of crickets and frogs on the bayou and the easy creak of wind in the oak trees. But the air inside the room was like the vapor from dry ice.

  “You believe in the angel of death, Top?” I said.

  “Yeah, I knew her well. My ex-wife. Or maybe she was the Antichrist. I’ve never been sure,” he replied.

  I climbed through the window and dropped onto the lawn. I walked out on the street, then through the parking lot and down to the bayou. I heard the horns on a tugboat in the distance, then the drawbridge at Burke Street clanking heavily into the air. There was no sign of Johnny Remeta. The sky had cleared and was as black as velvet and bursting with stars, like thousands of eyes looking down at me from all points on the compass.

  Later, when we drove home, Alafair sat on the far side of the truck’s seat, staring out the window, her anger or regret or humiliation or whatever emotion she possessed neutralized by fatigue and set in abeyance for the next day.

  “You want to talk with Bootsie?” I said.

  “No. You’re just the way you are, Dave. You’re not going to change.”

  “Which way is that?” I said, and tried to smile in the darkness.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  After I pulled into the drive and cut the engine, she got out and walked to the front yard and went into the house through the living room so she wouldn’t have to see me again that night.

  “What’s going on, Dave?” Bootsie said in the kitchen.

  “It was Remeta. I tried to take him down in the library. He got away.”

  The phone rang. I heard Alafair walking toward the extension that was in the hallway by her room. I picked up the receiver off the wall hook in the kitchen, my heart beating.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “You came after me like I was a germ,” Remeta said.

  “How’d you get this number?” I said.

  “What do you care? I got it.”

  “You stay the fuck away from my daughter,” I said.

  “What’s with you? Don’t talk to me like that.”

  My temples were hammering, the inside of my shirt cold with sweat, my breath sour as it bounced off the receiver.

  “So far I’ve got nothing against you personally. Drag your crazy bullshit into my family life, you’ll wish you were still somebody’s hump back in Raiford.”

  I could hear his breath on the phone, almost a palpable physical presence, like an emery cloth brushing across the receiver.

  When he spoke again, his voice was not the same. It came out of a barrel, dipped in blackness, the youthful face dissolving in my mind’s eye.

  His words were slow and deliberate, as though he were picking them one by one out of a cardboard box. “You’re not a smart man, after all, Mr. Robicheaux. But I got an obligation to you. That makes you … a lucky man. Word of caution, sir. Don’t mess with my head,” he said.

  There was a click in his throat, then an exhalation of breath like a damp match flaring to life.

  19

  A week and a half went by and I heard nothing else from Johnny Remeta or about Axel Jennings or Micah the chauffeur or Jim and Cora Gable, and I began to feel that perhaps they would simply disappear from my life.

  But my conclusions were about as wise as those of a man floating down a wide, flat stream on a balmy day, when the mind does not want to listen to the growing sounds of water cascading over a falls just beyond a wooded bend.

  “You ought to go easy on the flak juice, hon,” Cherry Butera said to him.

  Axel Jennings sat at the kitchen table in an undershirt and camouflage pants and house slippers without socks, a bottle of tequila and a sliced lime on a saucer in front of him. He poured into a jigger and knocked it back and licked salt from between his thumb and index finger and sucked on the lime. His shoulders were as dark as mahogany, hard and knobbed along the ridges, the skin taut and warm and smooth and sprinkled with sun freckles. He wasn’t a handsome man, not in the ordinary sense, but he had beautiful skin and she loved to touch it and to feel that she was pressing his power and hardness inside her when she spread her fingers across his shoulders and ran them down to the small of his back.

  The barmaids she worked with said she could do a lot better. They said Axel had a violent history. They should talk. Their boyfriends hit them, hung paper and cadged drinks at the bar, and usually had somebody on the side. He killed those guys in the line of duty; that’s what cops got paid to do. Besides, he didn’t talk about that part of his life, and the people he hurt deserved it. Nobody came on to her or treated her disrespectfully when she was with Axel.

  But it had sure gone south since Jimmy Burgoyne got killed out by the Atchafalaya. Axel brooded all the time, like he was responsible for Jimmy getting killed. Now there was even a worse problem, and she didn’t have an answer for it, either.

  “Drinking don’t hurt anything,” he said. “A man decides how much he takes out of the bottle. Then he puts the cork in it. He controls the situation. That’s what my dad said.”

  He had taken off his bandages and lain out in the backyard in his Jockey undershorts with a wet washcloth rolled across his eyes and talked for a half hour on his remote phone to another cop. When he came in he started up all his electric trains and poured himself a drink and didn’t replace his bandages. The collective hum of the electric trains made the house
reverberate like an enormous sewing machine.

  “Maybe I’d better be getting home. I mean, so’s you can rest,” she said.

  “Come over here,” he said.

  He extended his hand toward her, waiting for her to take it and sit on his lap. She placed her fingers in his, but remained standing, her vision fixed so his face did not come into focus.

  “The doctor says you got to take care of yourself,” she said.

  “You got a problem with this, Cherry?” he said, lifting one finger toward his face.

  “No, baby,” she said.

  He released her hand and watched two calico kittens out the window. The kittens raced after each other in a flower bed, their fur a patchwork of color among the elephant ears.

  “Why’d you bag out on me?” he said, his eyes still concentrated out the window.

  “Bag out on you?”

  “In the alley. When the perp told you to boogie, you hoofed it big-time.”

  “I called 911. I got help.”

  “You didn’t scream. That’s what women always do when they’re at risk. You didn’t do that, Cherry.”

  “You think I was in on it?”

  “You knew you were safe as long as you didn’t scream. It’s funny how fast people can add up the score when they’re scared.”

  She stood motionless for a long moment, her mind back in the alley now, inside the vortex of rain. She saw herself running through the rain puddles that were rainbowed with engine oil, her windpipe constricted, her breasts bouncing shamelessly in her blouse, and she knew what he said was true, and that an even greater, uglier truth was about to surface in her mind, that she was glad it had happened to him and not her.

  The house was hot, full of morning sun trapped between the glass and the freshly painted yellowed walls. The electric trains coursing down the tracks, emerging from tunnels, clicking across the switches, seemed to amplify in her head. She made herself look directly into Axel’s face. The jaws and chin line and brow looked like they had been disassembled and then rejoined and sealed together like the sunken and uneven pieces of an earthen pot.