Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  He touched the point of a canine tooth and looked at the spittle on the ball of his finger, just the way he once did right before he hurt a man in a bar. She saw the network of red lines on his face transferred to hers and she wanted to weep.

  “I’ll leave, Axel. I mean, if that’s what you want,” she said, and folded her arms suddenly across her chest, gripping her elbows as though she were cold.

  He closed and opened his hand and watched the veins pump with blood in his forearm. Then he picked an apple out of a bowl of fruit and began peeling off the skin with a paring knife, watching it curl like a red and white wood shaving over his thumbnail.

  “I’m gonna have a lot of money. I think I’m going to South America and start up a business. You can come,” he said.

  “Sure, baby,” she said, and she realized she was trembling inside.

  “So you go home and think about it. Get in touch with your inner self. Then come back tomorrow and let me know … You want to use the bathroom before you go? You look like maybe you’re gonna have an accident.”

  Clete had sublet his apartment from a couple who wanted it back, evidently after the manager had called them in Florida and told them Clete sometimes parked the Cadillac in front with bail skips handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat while he showered and changed clothes or fixed lunch in the apartment. One of the skips yelled out the window for fifteen minutes, announcing to the whole neighborhood that he had to use the bathroom.

  On Saturday afternoon Bootsie went to visit her sister in Lafayette and Alafair and I helped Clete move to a tan stucco cottage in a 1930s motor court down Bayou Teche. The motor court was hemmed in by live-oak and banana and palm trees, and toward evening working-class people cooked on barbecue grills outside the cottages. The sunlight off the bayou glowed through the tunnel of trees like the amber radiance of whiskey held up against firelight.

  After we finished unloading Clete’s things from my truck, Clete and I tore up the packing cartons and stuffed them in a trash barrel while Alafair put away his kitchen utensils inside.

  “I’m gonna get us some po’ boys,” he said.

  “We’d better go,” I said.

  “Y’all got to eat. Relax, big mon. Cletus is in charge,” he said, then got in his Cadillac and bounced out the drive onto East Main before I could argue.

  Alafair walked out of the cottage and looked in both directions. She wore blue-jeans shorts that were rolled high up on her thighs, and a Clorox-stained lavender T-shirt that seemed to hang off the tips of her breasts. A man playing a guitar in front of the cottage next door let his gaze wander over the backs of her legs. I stared at him and he looked away.

  “Where’s Clete?” she asked.

  “He went for some food.”

  She made a pout with her mouth and blew her breath out her nose. “I have a date, Dave.”

  “With whom?”

  “It’s somebody I go to school with. He doesn’t have two heads. He’s very safe. In fact, he’s gay. How’s that?”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way, Alf.”

  “My name’s Alafair. If you don’t want to call me that, why didn’t you give me another name?”

  “Take the truck. I can get a ride with Clete,” I said.

  She raised her chin and tapped her foot and put her hands on her hips and looked at the barbecue smoke drifting in the trees. “It’s not that big a deal,” she said.

  I shook my head and walked out to the street and waited for Clete. He turned into the motor court, cut his engine, then walked back to the entrance and looked up East Main.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’d swear somebody was watching me with binoculars from the Winn-Dixie parking lot,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “You got me. I circled around to get a look and he’d taken off.”

  “Have you messed with Ritter or this guy Jennings again?” I said.

  “I figure Jennings already got his. I’ll catch up with Ritter down the road.”

  We walked back to the cottage, but he kept glancing over his shoulder.

  “Alafair, take the truck on home, would you?” I said.

  “Just stop telling me what to do, please,” she said.

  Clete raised his eyebrows and glanced upward at the mockingbirds in the trees as though he’d suddenly developed an interest in ornithology.

  “Y’all want to eat on that table by the water?” he said, and lifted a sack of po’ boys and a six-pack of Dr Pepper out of the Cadillac, an unlit Lucky Strike hanging from his mouth. He waited until Alafair was out of earshot, put the cigarette behind his ear, and said, “Tell me, Streak, if I quit the juice and start going to meetings, can I enjoy the kind of serenity you do?”

  While we ate at a table among a cluster of pine trees, a tall, sinewy man in a small red Japanese station wagon drove farther south of town, crossed a drawbridge, then followed the road back up the Teche to a grassy slope directly opposite the motor court.

  He pulled his car down the slope and parked by a canebrake and walked down to the water’s edge with a fishing rod and a bait bucket and a folding canvas chair that he flopped open and sat upon.

  An elderly black man who had caught no fish was walking up the slope to the road. He glanced into the tall man’s face, then looked away quickly, hiding the shock he hoped had not registered in his own face.

  The tall man seemed disconcerted, vaguely irritated or angry that someone had looked at him. He gazed at his bobber floating among the lily pads, his back to the black man, and said, as though speaking to the bayou, “You have any luck?”

  “Not a bit. Water too high,” the black man said.

  The tall man nodded and said nothing more, and the black man gained the road and walked toward the distant outline of the house where he lived.

  It was dusk now. Across the bayou, Clete Purcel lighted a chemically treated candle that repelled mosquitoes. The fisherman sitting on the canvas stool watched through a pair of opera glasses from the edge of the canebrake as our faces glowed like pieces of yellow parchment in the candlelight.

  He went back to his station wagon and opened the front and back doors on the driver’s side, creating a kind of blind that shielded him from view. He removed a rifle wrapped in a blanket from the floor and carried it down to the bayou and lay it in the grass at his feet.

  It was all about breathing and heartbeat, locking down on the target, remembering the weapon is your friend, an extension of angles and lines whose intersection your mind created. That’s what his father had said.

  He began to feel the old excitement pumping inside him and he had to refrain from beating his fists together. It was too good, a trio of faces bent around a candle flame, an alcove of shadow surrounding their heads. It wasn’t just a hit now, but the perfect challenge, to drill a clean shot into the target, snip all his wires, and leave the people around him intact, with stunned, disbelieving looks on their faces and a sudden jellylike presence on the skin they were afraid to touch.

  The beauty of it was they’d never hear the shot. While people ran in circles and screamed and crawled under tables and hid behind parked cars, he would recover his brass and get back in his station wagon and drive away. People talking on trash TV about using politics and sex for power and control? Forget it.

  The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. What a joke. A drunk and a pile of whale sperm with a P.I. license. He bit down softly on his lower lip in anticipation of the moments to come.

  Then, for just a second, he saw Jimmy Burgoyne’s brains exploding in that gig gone bad on the Atchafalaya and he had to squeeze his eyes shut until the image disappeared from his mind.

  It was starting to sprinkle. The bayou was suddenly dotted with rain rings and the bream started popping the surface among the hyacinths. He opened his eyes as though awakening from sleep and took a deep breath and resolved to order more flowers for Jimmy’s grave, to send another card to the family, to continue making those incremental gestures that tempor
arily lifted the guilt for Jimmy’s death from his soul.

  Then anger bloomed in his chest like an old friend, cleansing his mind of all his self-accusatory thoughts.

  Show time, boys and girls.

  He flipped back the blanket that was folded around the M-1A rifle, the semiauto civilian equivalent of the old M-14. It was a far better piece than any of the other modified military weapons, silenced and scoped, deadly accurate, rapid-firing, the twenty-round magazine packed tight with soft-nosed .308s. He worked the blanket out from under the rifle and draped it over his head like a tent. Then he gathered up the weight of the rifle, knelt on one knee, and fitted the stock against his shoulder and cheek.

  A man’s head swam into the lens of his telescopic sight, and Axel’s mouth opened wetly against the stock, almost like his lips were pressing at a twisted angle into a woman’s throat. He exhaled slowly and tightened his finger inside the trigger guard. This one’s for Jimmy and me, both, he thought.

  “I heard you were queer bait with Vice before NOPD let you start blowing heads,” a voice said behind him.

  Axel jerked around, the blanket sliding off his head and shoulders, and stared into the face of a kid who looked like a 1950s greaser. Where had he seen that face before? On a composite? The kid smiled briefly, as though he were about to introduce himself, then shot Axel with a .22 Ruger automatic between the eyes. The kid watched Axel tumble into the cane, then nudged Axel’s head to one side with his shoe and leaned over and fired a second round into his ear and a third into his temple.

  The splatter hit the barrel of his pistol and he used the blanket to wipe it off.

  When the shots went off, the elderly black man had been walking back down the bank to look for a pocketknife he had lost. He stood stark still, his heart racing, and watched the young dark-haired man with white skin, who only a moment ago had seemed like a fellow taking a stroll, straighten up from his work and mount the slope, a pistol hanging from his hand.

  The black man thought he should run, but his feet would not move. He was going to say, “White people fightin’ ain’t my bidness,” but he never got the chance.

  “How’s it goin’, cappie?” the young man said, and passed him by, shaking a pair of black-framed glasses loose from their case and slipping them on his face.

  The black man watched him wrap his pistol in a paper bag and cross the road and toss the pistol on his car seat and drive away, his turn indicator clicking to warn oncoming traffic of his presence.

  20

  The night was absolutely black when Alafair and I got home two hours later. In the dash light her face was drawn, her eyes filled with questions that she didn’t have adequate words for. And I was both depressed and angry with myself for having taken her to Clete’s when I knew Axel Jennings might be coming after him.

  I pulled into the drive and parked next to the gallery.

  “I’ve got to help Batist close up. I’ll see you in the house, okay?” I said.

  But she didn’t move. The light on the gallery shone through the trees and made shadows inside the truck. She stared at nothing, her eyes almost luminous in their solitary concern.

  “You sure it was Johnny?” she said.

  “That old black fellow picked out his photo from five others,” I replied.

  “He shot point-blank in the man’s ear? It wasn’t self-defense or something?”

  “It was an execution, Alafair.”

  “But you said it saved Clete’s life.”

  “Remeta thought he owed me a debt and I guess this is how he paid it.”

  “Then he’s not all bad, Dave.”

  “When people kill other people, they find a flag of some kind to do it under. But their motivation is always the same. They enjoy it.”

  “I don’t believe that about Johnny.”

  She got out of the truck and walked across the yard to the front door. But she paused before she went inside and looked back at me, as though seeking approval or just the knowledge that I did not condemn her for her humanity.

  “Alf?” I said.

  She opened the screen and went inside.

  I walked down to the dock and helped Batist total up the receipts and hose the dried fish blood and cut-bait off the dock.

  Clete Purcel’s Cadillac came down the road, bouncing through the rain puddles. Then Clete pulled up at an angle across the cement boat ramp and cut the engine and got out and left the door open. He walked toward me with a can of beer in one hand and a pint bottle wrapped in a brown bag in the other. Under the string of electric lights his face was oily and distorted, his mouth unnaturally red.

  “I can’t believe I let that asswipe get behind us,” he said.

  “I love you, Cletus, but you’re not using my shop to get drunk in tonight,” I said.

  “I’ve got local leper status now?”

  “Your skin’s crawling because a shithead had you in his crosshairs. Booze only tattoos the fear into your sleep. You know that.”

  “You’re pissed off because you think I put your daughter at risk.”

  “You didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I used the pressure nozzle on the hose to blow the dock and railing clean. When I released the handle I could hear the water draining between the boards into the darkness below. Clete stood silently and waited, his booze in each hand, the hurt barely concealed in his face.

  “Let me hold that for you,” I said, and eased the pint bottle from his hand.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

  “I’ve got a couple of steaks in the cooler. You’re going to eat one and I’m going to eat the other,” I said.

  “I don’t get to vote about my own life?” he asked.

  “I’ll do it for you.”

  I lit the gas stove inside the bait shop, seasoned the T-bone steaks, and lay them on the grill. Clete sat at the counter and drank from his beer and watched me. He kept touching at his forehead, as though an insect were on his skin.

  “What’s with this kid Remeta?” he asked, forcing his concentration on a subject other than his self-perceived failure.

  “You were right the first time. He’s nuts.”

  “He was putting moves on Alafair?”

  “Who knows?”

  The phone on the counter rang. I picked it up impatiently, waiting once again to hear the voice of Johnny Remeta. But it was the sheriff.

  “I thought this shouldn’t wait till tomorrow,” he said. “Levy and Badeaux tore apart Axel Jennings’ station wagon. There was fourteen thousand dollars in new bills hidden in the trunk. He also had a passport and an Iberia Parish map with an inked line from I-10 to just about where your house is.”

  “My house?” I said.

  “Your picture and an article about the shoot-out on the Atchafalaya were in a newspaper on the floor. He’d drawn a circle around your head. Purcel wasn’t the target.”

  I could feel the heat and moisture trapped between my palm and the phone receiver. A drop of sweat ran from my armpit down my side.

  Clete lowered his beer can from his mouth and looked curiously at my expression.

  Later I lay in the dark next to Bootsie, the window fan blowing across us, and tried to put together the events of the day. A rogue cop doing a hit for hire on another police officer? It happened sometimes, but usually the victim was dirty and shared a corrupt enterprise with the shooter. Who would be behind it, anyway? Jim Gable was obnoxious and, in my view, a sexual degenerate, but why would he want me killed?

  The contract could have been put out by a perpetrator with a grudge, but most perpetrators thought of cops, prosecutors, and judges as functionaries of the system who were not personally to blame for their grief; their real anger was usually directed at fall partners who sold them out and defense attorneys who pled them into double-digit sentences.

  The only other person with whom I was currently having trouble was Connie Deshotel. The attorney general putting a whack on a cop?

  But all the
syllogisms I ran through my head were only a means of avoiding a nightmarish image that I couldn’t shake from my mind. I saw Alafair seated next to me at the plank table, petting a cat in the glow of the candle Clete had just lighted. Then, in my imagination, I saw a muzzle flash across the bayou, a brief tongue of yellow flame against the bamboo, and an instant later I heard the sound a soft-nosed round makes when it strikes bone and I knew I had just entered a landscape of remorse and sorrow from which there is no exit.

  I picked up my pillow and went into Alafair’s room. She wore a cotton nightgown and was sleeping on her stomach, her face turned toward the wall, her black hair fanned out on the pillow. The moon had broken out of the clouds, and I could see the screen hanging ajar and Tripod curled in a ball on Alafair’s rump. He raised his nose and sniffed at the air, then yawned and went back to sleep.

  I lay down on the floor, on top of Alafair’s Navaho rug, and put my pillow under my head. Her shelves were lined with books, stuffed animals, and framed photographs and certificates of membership in Madrigals and Girls State and the school honor society. Inside a trunk I had made from restored cypress wood were all her possessions we had saved over the years: a Baby Orca T-shirt, red tennis shoes embossed with the words “Left” and “Right” on the appropriate shoe, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill, her Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, a brown, cloth Sodality scapular, the mystery stories she wrote in elementary school, with titles like “The Case of the Hungry Caterpillar,” “The Worm That Lost Its Wiggle,” and, most chilling of all, “The Roller Rink Murders.”

  Outside, the wind lifted the moss in the trees and I drifted off to sleep.

  It was around 3 A.M. when I heard her stir in bed. I opened my eyes and looked up into her face, which hung over the side of the mattress.

  “Why are you sleeping down there?” she whispered.

  “I felt like it.”

  “You thought something was going to happen to me?”

  “Of course not.”

  She made a solitary clicking sound with her tongue, then got out of bed and went out to the hall closet and came back and popped a sheet open and spread it across me.