Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  22

  The next day the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Department faxed me all their file material on the shooting death of Ladrine Theriot in 1967. The crime scene report was filled with misspellings and elliptical sentences but gave the shooter’s name as one Bobby Cale, a part-time constable, barroom bouncer, and collector for a finance agency.

  I called the sheriff in Lafourche.

  “The shooter wasn’t the constable,” I said.

  “Says who?” he replied.

  “A woman by the name of Mae Guillory saw it happen.”

  “You wired up about something?”

  When I didn’t reply, he said, “Look, I read that file. The constable tried to serve a bench warrant on Ladrine Theriot and Theriot pulled a gun. Why would the constable take responsibility for a shooting he didn’t do?”

  “Because he was told to. Two other cops were there. They put a throw-down on the body.”

  “I couldn’t tell you. I was ten years old when all this happened. You guys running short of open cases in New Iberia?”

  “Where’s Bobby Cale now?”

  “If you’re up to it, I’ll give you directions to his place. Or you can get them from the Department of Health and Hospitals.”

  “What do you mean ‘if I’m up to it’?”

  “Maybe his sins are what got a fence post kicked up his ass. Check it out. Ask yourself if you’d like to trade places with him,” the Lafourche Parish sheriff said.

  I drove my pickup truck to Morgan City, then down deep into Terrebonne Parish, toward the Gulf, almost to Point au Fer. The sky was gray and roiling with clouds and I could smell salt spray on the wind. I went down a dirt road full of sinkholes, between thickly canopied woods that were hung with air vines, dotted with palmettos, and drifting with gray leaves. The road ended at a sunless, tin-roofed cypress cabin that was streaked black with rainwater. A man sat in a chair on the front porch, his stomach popping out of his shirt like a crushed white cake, a guitar laid flat on his lap.

  When I got out of the truck, the man leaned forward and picked up a straw hat from the porch swing and fitted it low on his head. In the shade his skin had the bloodless discoloration that an albino’s might if he bathed in blue ink. He wore steel picks on the fingers of his right hand and the sawed-off, machine-buffed neck of a glass bottle on the index finger of his left. He slid the bottle neck up and down the strings of the guitar and sang, “I’m going where the water tastes like cherry wine, ’cause the Georgia water tastes like turpentine.”

  A mulatto or Indian woman who was shaped like a duck, with Hottentot buttocks and elephantine legs, was hanging wash in back. She turned and looked at me with the flat stare of a frying pan, then spit in the weeds and walked heavily to the privy and went inside and closed the door behind her by fitting a hand through a hole in a board.

  “She ain’t rude. She’s just blind. Preacher tole me once everybody’s got somebody,” the man on the porch said. He picked up a burning cigarette from the porch railing and raised it to his mouth. His hand was withered, the fingers crimped together like the dried paw of an animal.

  “You Bobby Cale?” I asked.

  He pushed his hat up on his forehead and lifted his face, turning it at a slight angle, as though to feel the breeze.

  “I look like I might be somebody else?” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “I was in Carville fifteen years. That was back in the days when people like me was walled off from the rest of y’all. I run off and lived in Nevada. Wandered in the desert and ate grasshoppers and didn’t take my meds and convinced myself I was John the Baptizer come back in modern times. I scared the hell out of people who turned up the wrong dirt road.”

  I started to open my badge.

  “I know who you are. I know why you’re here, too. It won’t do you no good,” he said.

  “You didn’t shoot Ladrine Theriot,” I said.

  “The paperwork says otherwise.”

  “The two other cops there had on uniforms. They wore black slickers. They made you take their heat because they were from another parish and out of their jurisdiction.”

  He threw his cigarette out into the yard and looked into space. His nose was eaten away, the skin of his face drawn back on the bone, the cheeks creased with lines like whiskers on a cat.

  “You know a whole lot for a man wasn’t there,” he said.

  “There was a witness. She used the name Mae Guillory,” I said.

  “Everybody’s got at least one night in his life that he wants to carry on a shovel to a deep hole in a woods and bury under a ton of dirt. Then for good measure burn the woods down on top of it. I wish I was a drunkard and could just get up and say I probably dreamed it all. I don’t remember no witness.”

  “The two other cops killed her. Except a hooker saw them do it.”

  His eyes held on me for a long time. They were green, uncomplicated, and still seemed to belong inside the round, redneck face of an overweight constable from thirty years ago.

  “You got an honest-to-God witness can hold them over the fire?” he said, his eyes lingering on mine.

  “She never knew their names. She didn’t see their faces well, either.”

  The moment went out of his eyes. “This world’s briers and brambles, ain’t it?” he said.

  “You a churchgoin’ man, Mr. Cale?”

  “Not no more.”

  “Why not get square and start over? People won’t be hard on you.”

  “They killed Mae Guillory? I always thought she just run off,” he said, an unexpected note of sadness in his voice.

  I didn’t reply. His eyes were hooded, his down-turned nose like the ragged beak of a bird. He pressed the bottle neck down on the frets of the guitar and drew his steel picks across the strings. But his concentration was elsewhere, and his picks made a discordant sound like a fist striking piano keys.

  “I had a wife and a little boy once. Owned a house and a truck and had money left over at the end of the month. That’s all gone now,” he said.

  “Mae Guillory was my mother, Mr. Cale. Neither she nor I will rest until the bill’s paid.”

  He set his guitar in the swing and placed his hat crown-down next to it and pulled the bottle neck and steel picks off his fingers and dropped them tinkling inside the hat.

  “The old woman and me is going to eat some lima bean soup. You can stay if you want. But we’re done talking on this particular subject,” he said.

  “Those cops are still out there, aren’t they?” I said.

  “Good-bye, sir. Before you judge me, you might be thankful you got what you got,” he said, and went inside the darkness of the cabin and let the screen slam behind him.

  Members in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous maintain that alcohol is but the symptom of the disease. It sounds self-serving. It’s not.

  That night I sat at the counter in the bait shop and watched Clete Purcel use only one thumb to unscrew the cap from a pint bottle of whiskey, then pour two inches into a glass mug and crack open a Dixie for a chaser. He was talking about fishing, or a vacation in Hawaii, or his time in the corps, I don’t remember. The beer bottle was dark green, running with moisture, the whiskey in the mug brownish gold, like autumn light trapped inside a hardwood forest.

  The air outside was humid and thick with winged insects, and strings of smoke rose from the flood lamps. I opened a can of Dr Pepper but didn’t drink it. My hand was crimped tightly around the can, my head buzzing with a sound like a downed wire in a rain puddle.

  Clete tilted the glass mug to his mouth and drank the whiskey out of the bottom, then chased it with the beer and wiped his mouth on his palm. His eyes settled on mine, then went away from me and came back.

  “Your head’s back in that story the black hooker told you,” he said.

  “My mother said her name was Mae Robicheaux,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Before she died, she said her name was Robicheaux. She took back her
married name.”

  “I’m going to use your own argument against you, Dave. The sonsofbitches who killed your mother are pure evil. Don’t let them keep hurting you.”

  “I’m going to find out who they are and hunt them down and kill them.”

  He screwed the cap back on his whiskey bottle and wrapped the bottle in a paper bag, then drank from his beer and rose from the counter stool and worked the whiskey bottle into his side pocket.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Going back to the motel. Leaving you with your family. Taking my booze out of here.”

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “It’s not the main one, but you’d like it to be. See you tomorrow, Streak,” he said.

  He put on his porkpie hat and went out the door, then I heard his Cadillac start up and roll heavily down the dirt road.

  I chained up the rental boats for the night and was turning off the lights when Clete’s Cadillac came back down the road and parked at the cement boat ramp. He met me at the end of the dock with a tinfoil container of microwave popcorn in his hand.

  “I hate watching TV in a motel room by myself,” he said, and laid his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me up the slope to the house.

  Early the next morning I put all the crime scene photos from the Vachel Carmouche homicide in an envelope and drove out to his deserted house on Bayou Teche. I pushed open the back door and once more entered the heated smell of the house. Purple martins, probably from the chimney, were flying blindly against the walls and windows, splattering their droppings on the floors and counters. I swatted them away from my face with a newspaper and closed off the kitchen to isolate the birds in the rest of the house.

  Why was I even there? I asked myself. I had no idea what I was looking for.

  I squatted down and touched a brownish flake of blood on the linoleum with my ballpoint pen. It crumbled into tiny particles, and I wiped my pen with a piece of Kleenex, then put my pen away and blotted the perspiration off my forehead with my sleeve.

  All I wanted to do was get back outside in the wind, under the shade of a tree, out of the smell that Vachel Carmouche seemed to have bled into the woodwork when he died. Maybe I had to stop thinking of Passion and Letty Labiche as victims. I tried to tell myself that sometimes it took more courage to step away from the grief of another than to participate in it.

  I felt a puff of cool air rise from the floor and I looked down through a crack in the linoleum, through a rotted plank, at a pool of water under the house with purple martins fluttering their wings in it. Then I realized the birds inside the house had not come from the chimney. But it wasn’t the birds that caught my attention. One of the cinder-block pilings was orange with rust that had leaked from a crossbeam onto the stone.

  I went back outside and lay flat on my stomach and crawled under the house. Three feet beyond the rear wall, wedged between the crossbeam and the cinderblock piling, was a one-handed weed sickle. I pried it loose and crawled back into the sunlight. The short wood handle was intact, but the half-moon blade had rusted into lace.

  I slipped the sickle handle-first into a Ziploc bag and knocked on Passion’s door.

  “This is the instrument that slung blood on the ceiling and walls. Letty hit him with the mattock and you used this,” I said when Passion came to the door.

  “It look like a piece of junk to me,” she said.

  “I came out here because I feel an obligation to your sister. But I don’t have time for any more of y’all’s bullshit. I’m going to bust Little Face Dautrieve as a material witness and make her life miserable. She’ll stay in jail until she tells me what happened and in the meantime Social Services will take her baby. Is that how you want it to play out?”

  “You seen the paper today?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “The Supreme Court won’t hear any more of Letty’s appeals. Unless Belmont Pugh commute her sentence, she’s gonna die. You want to know what happened? I’m gonna tell you. Then you can carry it down to your office and do whatever you want to wit’ it.”

  Her face was wan, her eyes unfocused inside the gloom of the house, as though she didn’t recognize the words she had just spoken. But suddenly I felt my victory was about to become ashes in my mouth. She studied my face through the screen, then pushed open the door and waited for me to come inside.

  Eight years ago Passion and Letty looked out their side window in dismay at the return of their neighbor, Vachel Carmouche. In their minds he had been assigned to their past, to a world of dreams and aberrant memories that dissipated with time and had no application in their adult lives. Now they watched him blow his gallery clean of birds’ nests with a pressure hose while crushing the tiny eggs under his rubber boots; they watched him pry the plywood covering from his windows, hoe out a vegetable patch, and drink lemonade in the shade, a small sip at a time, like a man who was stintful even with his own pleasure, his starched and pressed gray work clothes and gray cloth cap unstained by sweat, as though the rigidity that characterized his life allowed him to control the secretion in his glands.

  They left the house and went grocery shopping, hoping somehow he would be gone when they returned and a rental sign would be standing in the yard. Instead, they saw him moving his belongings into the house, ignoring Passion and Letty as though they were not there. They saw him split open a ripe watermelon and ease chunks of it off a knife blade into his mouth, his face suffused with a self-contained sensual glow. In the evening shadows they saw him scythe weeds out of his front yard and fire a barbecue pit and impale a pork roast on its rotisserie; they saw him pack rock salt and ice into a hand-crank ice cream maker, then give a quarter to a twelve-year-old black girl to turn the crank for him. They saw him press the coin into her palm and fold his fingers over her fist and smile down at her, her upraised eyes only inches from his gleaming cowboy belt buckle and the flatness of his stomach and the dry heat that emanated from his clothes.

  Letty went into the yard with a paper sack and walked among the trees in front, picking up scraps of paper that had blown off the road. She waited until Carmouche went into his house, then called the little girl over.

  “What are you doing around here?” she asked.

  “Visiting my auntie up the road,” Little Face replied.

  “Go back home. Stay away from that white man.”

  “My auntie left me here. She rent from Mr. Vachel.”

  Letty squatted down and looked directly into Little Face’s eyes.

  “Has he touched you? Put his hand somewhere he shouldn’t?” she said.

  “No, ma’am. He ain’t like that.”

  “You listen to me—” Letty began, squeezing the girl’s arm. Then she looked past Little Face’s head at the silhouette of Vachel Carmouche, who stood in the drive now, leaves swirling around his shoes, the early moon like a pink wafer in the sky behind him.

  He pinched the brim of his cloth cap with two fingers.

  “Been a long time. You grown into a handsome woman, Miss Letty,” he said.

  “Why’d you come back?” she said.

  “A lot of building going on. A man with electrical knowledge can make a good deal of money right now.”

  “You get your goddamn feet off my property,” she said.

  “You might be righteous now. But you and your sister were always switching your rear ends around when you wanted something.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I hate you,” Letty said, rising to her feet.

  “What you hate are your own sins. Think back, Letty. Remember how you’d turn somersaults on the lawn, grinning and giggling at me? You were thirteen years old when you did that. Now you reprimand me and blaspheme God’s name in front of a child.”

  Carmouche put his hand in Little Face’s and led her back onto his property. The white streaks of cornstarch that had been ironed into his gray clothes recalled an image out of Letty’s memory that made her shut her eyes.

  Letty work
ed in the backyard, raking the winter thatch out of her garden, thrusting a spade deep into the black soil, taking a strange pleasure when the blade crushed a slug or cut through the body of a night crawler. Her flannel shirt became heavy with sweat and she flung the spade on the ground and went inside the house and showered with hot water until her skin was as red and grained as old brick.

  “We’ll try to do something about him tomorrow,” Passion said.

  “Do what?” Letty said, tying the belt around her terry-cloth robe.

  “Call Social Services. Tell them about the little girl.”

  “Maybe they’ll hep her like they hepped us, huh?”

  “What else you want to do, kill him?” Passion said.

  “I wish. I really wish.”

  Passion walked over to her sister and put her arms around her. She could smell a fragrance of strawberries in her hair.

  “It’s gonna be all right. We can make him move away. We’re grown now. He cain’t hurt us anymore,” she said.

  “I want him to pay.”

  Passion held her sister against her, stroking her back, feeling her sister’s breath on her neck. Through the second-story window she could see down into Vachel Carmouche’s backyard. Her face tingled and a bilious taste rose into her mouth.

  “What is it?” Letty said, stepping back and looking at her sister’s expression. Then she turned around and looked down into Vachel Carmouche’s yard.

  He had set Little Face on his knee and was feeding ice cream to her with a spoon. Each time he placed the spoon between her lips he smoothed back her hair, then wiped the drippings from the corners of her mouth with the backs of his fingers. He kissed her forehead and filled another spoonful of ice cream and placed a fresh strawberry on it. She opened her mouth like a bird, but he withdrew the spoon quickly, offering and withdrawing it again and again, and finally putting it into her mouth and lifting the spoon handle up so as not to drop any of the melted ice cream on her chin.

  Letty charged barefoot down the stairs, tearing the sole of one foot on an exposed nailhead. She found a pair of work shoes in the downstairs closet and leaned against the wall with one arm and pulled them on.