The Levee: A Novel of Baton Rouge

by Malcolm Shuman

  I got into the front seat, but Blaize huddled in the back as if he was afraid someone would see him. Toby laughed to himself and shot backward down the driveway, almost hitting the median. He peeled out down the quiet street.

  “So who was it?” I asked him.

  “Who what?”

  “The man they arrested.”

  “A nigger lives on the River Road. I don’t know his name.”

  “I heard that much already. You said you knew more about him.”

  “He’s a nigger, shithead. What’s there to know? He raped her ass and then he killed her, and he’s gonna fry.”

  I heard Blaize give a little gasp in the back seat.

  “He raped her?” I asked.

  “Shit, yes. What did you think this was all about?”

  “How do you know?” Blaize asked then, his voice trembling.

  “I know because my old man said so. He talked to the chief deputy.”

  “But what would she have been doing down on the River Road at night?” I asked.

  “Maybe he took her there. Or maybe she was parked there, waiting for somebody, like Cornhole. Shit, she was probably screwing half the town.”

  “Is that something else your father told you?” I asked.

  “He didn’t have to. Are you so queer you didn’t notice the way she used to shake it when she walked?”

  “Let’s go back,” Blaize said.

  “Fuck you,” Toby said, annoyed. “We’re almost there.”

  As soon as we turned into the street we could see the police cars, a white marked unit at the curb, manned by a single uniformed officer, and a black unmarked car in the drive. It was the first time I’d seen where she lived and now, with the yellow crime scene tape and a couple of sweating men in neckties tramping around her yard I had the sense that I was looking at a Hollywood set, where actors were going through the motions.

  “What are they looking for?” Blaize asked. “I thought you said they caught the killer.”

  “It’s what cops do,” Toby said. “Like maybe he broke in and left something when he raped her.”

  “You mean they’ll search the whole house and all her things?” Blaize asked.

  “Of course.”

  “But what if she has private things? I mean, it doesn’t seem right.”

  “It’s a fucking murder, dumbass. Everything’s fair. Besides, what if they come up with some letters from old Cornhole, say? That’d be great.”

  “I still don’t think it’s right,” Blaize said, hunching deeper down in the seat.

  “And you still don’t have one damn reason to suspect Cornwall,” I told him, though, after my visit with the principal that morning, I was starting to think the prospect might be satisfying.

  “We’ll see,” Toby said, tossing his butt out the window.

  “Where are you going?” Blaize asked, as Toby jerked the wheel into a second right turn.

  “I’m making the block again. Maybe we’ll see ’em bring something out.”

  But all we saw was the uniformed cop at the curb, who squinted up at us as we cruised slowly past.

  “He’s gonna come after us,” I said.

  “Screw him,” Toby said. “It’s a free country.”

  But the cop didn’t follow, probably because the curious had been driving past all day, and a few seconds later we reached Nicholson Drive, the boulevard that connected the campus with downtown. But instead of turning right, toward the downtown area, Toby went left, toward the university.

  “This isn’t the way home,” Blaize said.

  “I’ll take you home,” Toby promised. “But there’s one more place I want to go.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “I want to drive out to where it happened,” he said. “It won’t take long.”

  “Hey,” I protested, “you told us …”

  Toby glowered. “Shit on you. I just want to drive past the goddamned place.”

  “I want to get out,” Blaize said.

  “Then get the fuck out but I’m not stopping.”

  “You asshole,” Blaize swore.

  “Just for that I may make you walk back from the cemetery. How’d you like that, mama’s boy? What would your old lady say then?”

  Blaize lunged from the back seat and Toby ducked. The car swerved into the next lane and Toby cursed.

  “You skinny little bastard, if you make me wreck, I’ll beat the piss out of you.”

  “Go back now,” I said. “I’ll beat the piss out of you if you don’t.”

  But he only accelerated.

  “You won’t do shit unless you want to get us all killed.”

  “You mother fucker,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure.” We came to the River Road and Toby whipped through the stop sign onto the gravel. We skidded and then he straightened out, leaving a spray of rocks and dust behind us. Now the levee was on our right, and there were open pastures on the left. My heart started to beat faster. I didn’t want to go back to the place and yet, at the same time, there was a thrill I couldn’t deny.

  We rounded a curve and on the right I saw Bergeron’s store, a ramshackle wooden structure with a tin roof, a couple of propane tanks on the side, and two gas pumps in front. Toby eased off the accelerator.

  “Come on, ladies, I’ll buy us Cokes.”

  We eased to a stop at the side of the building and Toby opened his door.

  “You people coming?”

  I opened my door and, grudgingly, Blaize opened his. At least we were on safe ground. Alcide Bergeron was a friend, someone we’d bought soft drinks and foodstuffs from on our camping trips, and who’d let us use his phone when we needed to call our parents to be picked up. He lived behind the store, in a couple of added-on rooms, with his wife and four kids, all girls. There was a fifth daughter, grown up now and married, and sometimes we saw her at the store, visiting, with a baby in her arms. But it was the second-to-oldest daughter, Michelle, that we all noticed.

  She was a senior in high school, dark and lush, and mysterious. We’d speculated endlessly during our nights in camp as to whether her fruit had been plucked. Stan doubted it, I didn’t know, and Toby said it was a foregone conclusion, though, for once, he made no claims of firsthand knowledge. Now, as we drifted into the store, we saw her at the far end of the counter, breasts thrusting against her white parochial school blouse. She glanced casually up from a schoolbook and then dismissed us as if we were of no consequence.

  “Boys,” Alcide Bergeron said, getting up from behind the counter where he was watching a tiny black-and-white television.

  We mumbled greetings and went past the dusty shelves of mostly stale bread and outdated canned goods to the cooler, where we delved for our drinks. From the living quarters in back came the smell of grease frying and I thought I heard the clink of a skillet.

  Toby leaned toward me as he extracted a Coca Cola and whispered: “Did you see the way she looked at us when we came in? Hot …”

  I moved away with my Dr. Pepper.

  “You boys down here the other night?” Bergeron asked genially. He was somewhere in his forties, with wrinkled skin and receding hair, stocky and on the verge of running to fat.

  “Yeah, but we didn’t see anything,” I said quickly.

  “No.” He seemed amused. “Well, that was a hell of a thing.” He leaned forward over the counter. “You boys know this woman?”

  I nodded. Toby said: “Blaize here had a class with her.”

  “Damn.” Bergeron shook his head. “I hear she was a nice-looking woman.”

  There was a rustle of curtains at the far end of the store and Mrs. Bergeron, a fat woman with an enormous bosom, emerged into the store area and I figured she’d been listening all along.

  “It’s not safe any more,” she said. “I worry about all of us.”

  “They caught the man did it,” Toby said. “A nigger.”

  Alcide Bergeron snorted. “Amos Poole didn’t kill nobody. He barely has en
ough sense to come in out the rain. Fact is, they let him loose this morning, ’cause I saw him just an hour ago. He come in here for his pork and beans.”

  Toby blinked, caught up short.

  “Must of been another nigger,” he said finally.

  “Hell,” Bergeron said, “wasn’t no nigger.”

  Mrs. Bergeron interrupted then, shooing her daughter into the back room.

  “Michelle, you got no need to hear this. You got studying anyway.”

  But before Michelle vanished she cast a sultry glance in our direction and I was certain she was looking directly at me.

  “I know who done it,” the storekeeper said.

  For a few seconds the only sound came from the television. Then Toby spoke.

  “You saw?”

  “Didn’t need to see,” Bergeron pronounced. “I know. Who else could’ve done it but Rufus Sikes, the no-count bastard.”

  “Sikes,” I said.

  “Hell, yes. I wouldn’t put nothing past that man. I won’t have him in my store and I’ve told him to keep away from my family. I see him around here …” Bergeron reached down and brought up a rifle. “I’ll do what the law should of done a long time ago.”

  “But you didn’t actually see him,” Toby said.

  “Son, you some kind of lawyer or something? I told you, now don’t be smart.”

  I broke in before Toby got us all thrown out.

  “We saw a car,” I said.

  Bergeron blinked. “You mean the other night?”

  “We were up on the levee,” I said. “We saw a car heading down the River Road. Of course, it may not’ve had anything to do with it.”

  The storekeeper shrugged. “Cars always going up and down the River Road at night. College students, mostly. Yeah, I heard a car about midnight. I’d just had it out with that girl of mine for dragging in late again. I thought it was that boy coming back to sneak her out and I was gonna tell him a thing or two.” He shook his head. “Young people these days: my old man would’ve whipped my ass if I come in at that hour. You kids don’t know what you do to your parents, you.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about the worried storekeeper, I was thinking about Michelle and wondering if she’d really been home all night. Maybe she had snuck out again. Maybe Toby had been right about her. Maybe she’d ended up with her boyfriend, in the backseat of his car, or at some motel, or at his parents’ house while they were away. What would she look like with her clothes off? I tried to envision her but failed.

  “Let’s go,” Toby said, setting his empty bottle on the counter.

  Bergeron nodded. “You boys take it easy. Stay away from Sikes, you hear?”

  We nodded and went back out to Toby’s car.

  “Let’s get back to town,” Blaize said.

  “We will,” Toby said. “I just want to drive past the graveyard, since we’re already out here.”

  It didn’t do any good to argue, because he was already turning left, away from town. I sat back, gritting my teeth. I didn’t really want to go there, I told myself, and yet in a sense I did. I wanted to see it in daylight, convince myself that I’d only imagined the specter of the other night. And maybe when we got there the place would be deserted and it would be like nothing had happened at all.

  We came to Windsong, a brooding hulk half-hidden by an alley of live oaks and pecan trees. The iron gate was locked, as it always was, and the grass on the lawn was ankle high. Behind it were the outlines of outbuildings, and behind them, a half-mile from the River Road, the massive brick finger of the smokestack that was all that remained of the sugarhouse. It was hard to imagine bygone revels or women in Gone With the Wind attire gracing the porch and lawn, especially when we passed the shack that served as the home for the overseer, Rufus Sikes.

  A 1950 Belair on blocks decorated the grassless front yard and chickens pecked futilely at the dirt. A barefoot boy of five with corn-colored hair stared at us as we passed and then spat in our direction, but the master of the manor was nowhere in evidence.

  I thought about what Alcide Bergeron had said about Sikes being the killer. I didn’t know if it was true, but I wanted it to be.

  “Shit,” Toby said, and I turned to the road in front of us. Ahead, at the place where the dirt track led back to the cemetery, a white sheriff’s unit blocked the entrance. “The bastards have it blocked off.”

  “Why don’t you stop and tell ’em who your father is?” Blaize said.

  Toby’s knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “You skinny little mother, I oughta put your ass out right now.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “You brought us all the way here.”

  “Fuck you both,” Toby growled. “You want to see the place? Okay. I’ll take you where you can see it.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, but I knew. Toby gunned forward to an open gate on the side of the levee and wheeled off the gravel and up the grassy slope.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “You’re gonna get us stuck up here.” I had visions of explaining to my father and of the hysterics Blaize’s mother would surely throw.

  “Nobody’s getting stuck,” Toby said, bumping onto the top of the dike. He jerked the wheel right and we were on the little track that led along the top of the levee all the way back to the city. “We can see from right up here.”

  We bounced over a rut and a clot of cattle moved slowly out of the way. Just ahead a fence led up one side of the levee and then down the other, but there was no gate to bar the road, just a wooden sign: NO TRESPASSING. PROPERTY OF WINDSONG PLANTATION.

  “You aren’t going through there?” Blaize asked.

  “Watch me. Nobody owns the levee. My old man told me. Only people that can kick us off here are the levee police.”

  Blaize said something under his breath and I knew what he was thinking. You hardly ever saw the levee police and somebody like Rufus Sikes didn’t give a damn about them anyway.

  Still, it wasn’t but half a mile and we were already well into it. There was no place to turn around so we might as well just keep going. A few minutes more and we’d be out of the forbidden zone and it wouldn’t matter.

  I allowed myself to glance out over the fields, in the direction of the cemetery, but all I could see was a second white car parked at the grove of trees that marked the gravestones.

  Then another thought came to me and my stomach did a little flip. What if I’d left footmarks in the dry dirt of the cemetery road? What if I’d dropped something when I tripped? How could I explain myself if somehow they found out I’d been there?

  Then I remembered what Toby had said once: The cops around here are bozos. My old man said they couldn’t find their dicks with both hands. The only way they solve crimes is somebody confesses or squeals on somebody.

  I didn’t know if it was true, but I could hope.

  But why should I be worried? I hadn’t done anything and there were plenty of better suspects. Rufus Sikes, for example. Surely they’d be talking to him.

  I saw Windsong below. From the levee top I could see the distant fields better, make out the tumbled pile of brick that was the old sugar refinery.

  I was shaken out of my thoughts by Toby leaning on the horn. In front of us a herd of cattle blocked the road, milling about with no apparent concern for the automobile. Toby hit the horn again and a couple of the cows raised their heads.

  “Get the hell out the way!” Toby cursed but the animals seemed not to hear. He jerked open his door and got out, waving his hands at them. “Get on, damn you.”

  He started forward, shooing the cattle, and maybe that was why he didn’t hear, but we did, through the open door: it was the rumble and clank of another vehicle, coming up from behind us, and when I turned my head to look through the rearview window my blood went cold.

  It was a battered red Ford pickup, with a shattered right headlight and the front bumper hanging at an angle, like it had hit one pedestrian too many. I’d seen that truck before, in the front yard
of the Sikes shack.

  “Jesus, Toby …” I yelled, but it was too late. Like the mummy in the old movies, the truck inched toward us, its progress infinitely slow but inevitable. Then it was stopping and the driver’s door was opening and when Toby turned around I saw all the color drain out of his face.

  The man who limped toward us wore faded overalls and his face was the color of raw hamburger. A felt hat shaded bead-like eyes and he carried a tire tool in his left hand.

  “Christ,” Blaize breathed. Toby took two quick steps forward, then ducked into the car, slammed the door and reached for the shift lever, but by then it was too late.

  Sikes was already leaning over the open car window, his foul breath filling the inside of the car like a pestilential fog.

  “What’re you boys doing up here?” he demanded in a raspy voice.

  Toby cleared his throat. “Just taking a shortcut.”

  “Shortcut to where? Can’t you read signs? You’re trespassing. You’re on Windsong. I can have you locked up.”

  “We just want to leave,” Toby said, his voice unaccustomedly meek. “But the cattle …”

  “I seen what you was doing with the cattle. Scaring ’em. Trying to run ’em away. Cattle get spooked, they take off, run into fences, trip down and break their legs. Drown in the borrow pit.”

  Toby’s mouth opened but no words came out.

  “I found a cow last month with a broke leg. Somebody run into her. Had to shoot her. Three hundred dollars. You got three hundred dollars?”

  “Mister, it wasn’t us,” Toby swore.

  “That’s what you say,” Sikes said, leering through rotten teeth. “How do I know? People would hit one of my cows would lie.”

  “I’m not lying, I swear.”

  “Who’s your daddy, boy?”

  “He works downtown,” Toby squeaked.

  “One of them state workers, huh?”

  “Yes, sir, I guess.”

  “You guess. You know about that woman they found down there the other night?”

  Behind me I heard Blaize’s breath leak out.

  “She was where she didn’t have no business being,” the overseer said before Toby could answer. “You boys got no business being here, neither. You want to end up the same way?”