Heaven’s Prisoners

by James Lee Burke

  "Forget him. I already had a serious talk with him."

  "Yeah?" He looked at me curiously. "Sounds mean."

  "He thought so."

  "Who's the friend that got hurt?"

  "The friend is out of it."

  "I think we got a problem with trust here."

  "I don't read it that way. We're just establishing an understanding."

  "No. I don't have to establish anything. You're my guest. I look at you and it's like yesterday I was watching you leaning over the spit bucket, your back trembling, blood all over your mouth, and all the time I was hoping you wouldn't come out for the third round. You didn't know it, but in the second you hit me so hard in the kidney I thought I was going to wet my jock."

  "Did you know I found Johnny Dartez's body in that plane crash out at Southwest Pass, except his body disappeared?"

  He laughed, cut a piece of boudin, and handed it to me on a cracker.

  "I just ate," I said.

  "Take it."

  "I'm not hungry."

  "Take it or you'll offend me. Christ, have you got a one-track mind. Listen, forget all these clowns you seem to be dragging around the countryside. I told you I have a lot of businesses and I hire people to run them I don't even like. You're educated, you're smart, you know how to make money. Manage one of my clubs in New Orleans, and I'll give you sixty thou a year, plus a percentage that can kick it up to seventy-five. You get a car, you cater trips to the Islands, you got your pick of broads."

  "Did Immigration ever talk to you?"

  "What?"

  "After they busted Dartez and Victor Romero. They tried to smuggle in some high-roller Colombians. You must know that. I heard it in the street."

  "You're talking about wetbacks or something now?"

  "Oh, come on, Bubba."

  "You want to talk about the spicks, find somebody else. I can't take them. New Orleans is crawling with them now. The government ought to send massive shipments of rubbers down to wherever they come from."

  "The weird thing about this bust is that both these guys were mules. But they didn't go up the road, and they didn't have to finger anybody in front of a grand jury. What's that lead you to believe?"

  "Nothing, because I don't care about these guys."

  "I believe they went to work for the feds. If they'd been muling for me, I'd be nervous."

  "You think I give a fuck about some greasers say they got something on me? You think I got this house, all these businesses because I run scared, because the DEA or Immigration or Minos Dautrieve with his thumb up his pink ass say a lot of bullshit they never prove, that they make up, that they tell to the newspapers or people that's dumb enough to listen to it?"

  His eyes were bright, and the skin around his mouth was tight and gray.

  "I don't know. I don't know what goes on inside you, Bubba," I said.

  "Maybe if a person wants to find out, he's just got to keep fucking in the same direction."

  "That's a two-way street, podna."

  "Is that right?"

  "Put it in the bank. I'll see you around. Thanks for the boudin."

  I stood up to leave, and he rose from the table with me. His face was flat, heated, as unknowable as a shark's. Then suddenly he grinned, ducked into a boxer's crouch again, bobbed, and feinted a left at my face.

  "Hey, got you!" he said. "No shit, you flinched. Don't deny it."

  I stared at him.

  "What are you looking at?" he said. "All right, so I was hot. You come on pretty strong. I'm not used to that."

  "I've got to go, Bubba."

  "Hell, no. Let's slip on the pillows. We'll take it easy on each other. Hey, get this. I went to this full-contact karate club in Lafayette, you know, where they box with their feet like kangaroos or something. I'm in the ring with this guy, and he's grunting and swinging his dirty foot around in the air, and all these guys are yelling because they know he's going to cut my head off, and I stepped inside him real fast and busted him three times before he hit the deck. They had to lead him back to the dressing room like somebody took his brains out with an ice cream scoop."

  "I'm over the hill for it, and I still have to work this afternoon, anyway."

  "Bullshit. I can see it in your eyes. You'd still like to take me. It's that long reach. It's always a big temptation, isn't it?"

  "Maybe."

  I was almost disengaged from Bubba and his mercurial personality when his wife walked through the French doors onto the patio. She was at least ten years younger than he. Her black hair was tied with ribbon behind her head; her skin was dark, and she wore a two-piece red and yellow flower-print bathing suit with a matching sarong fastened on one hip. In her hand she carried an open shoe box filled with bottles and emery boards for her nails. She was pretty in the soft, undefined way that Cajun girls often are before they gain weight in the middle years. She smiled at me, sat at the patio table, crossed her legs, arching one sandal off her foot, and put a piece of boudin in her mouth.

  "Dave, you remember Claudette, from New Iberia?" Bubba said.

  "I'm sorry, I'm a little vague on people from home sometimes," I said. "I lived in New Orleans for fourteen years or so."

  "I bet you remember her mother, Hattie Fontenot."

  "Oh yes, I think I do," I said, my eyes flat.

  "I bet you lost your cherry in one of her cribs on Railroad Avenue," Bubba said.

  "I'm not always big on boyhood memories," I said.

  "You and your brother had a paper route on Railroad Avenue. Are you going to tell me y'all never got paid in rade?"

  "I guess I just don't remember."

  "She had two colored joints on the corner," he said. "We used to go nigger-knocking down there, then get laid for two dollars."

  "Bubba just likes to talk rough sometimes. It doesn't bother me. You don't have to be embarrassed," she said.

  "I'm not."

  "I'm not ashamed of my mother. She had a lot of good qualities. She didn't use profane language in polite company, unlike some people I know." She had a heavy Cajun accent, and her brown eyes had a strange red cast in them. They were as round as a doll's.

  "Bubba, will you make me a gin rickey?" she said.

  "Your thermos is in the icebox."

  "So? I'd like one in a glass, please."

  "She can drink gin rickeys all day and not get loaded." Bubba said. "I think she's got hollow buns."

  "I don't think Dave is used to our kind of talk," she said.

  "He's married too, isn't he?"

  "Bubba…"

  "What?"

  "Would you please get me a drink?"

  "All right," he said, taking the thermos and a chilled glass out of the icebox. "I wonder what I pay Clarence for. I damn near have to show him a diagram just to get him to dust."

  He poured from the thermos into his wife's glass, then put it in front of her. He continued to look at her with an exasperated expression on his face.

  "Look, I don't want to get on your case all the time, but how about not filing your nails at the table?" he said. "I can do without nail filings in my food."

  She wiped the powdered filings off the glass top with a Kleenex, then continued filing her nails over the shoe box.

  "Well, I have to go. It was nice meeting you," I said.

  "Yeah, I got to pack and get on the road, too. Walk him out to his truck, Claudette. I'm going to make some calls when I get to New Orleans. I find out somebody's been causing you problems, I'll cancel their act. That's a promise. By the way, that bartender better be out of town."

  He looked at me a moment, balancing on the balls of his feet, then cocked his fists and jerked his shoulders at an angle as quickly as a rubber band snapping.

  "Hey!" he said, grinned and winked, then walked back out the patio toward the circular staircase. His back was triangular, his butt flat, his thighs as thick as telephone posts.

  His wife walked with me out to my pickup truck. The wind blew across the lawn and flattened the spray fr
om the sprinklers into a rainbow mist among the trees. Gray clouds were building in the south, and the air was close and hot. Upstairs, Bubba had turned on a 1950s Little Richard record full blast.

  "You really don't remember me?" she said.

  "No, I'm sorry."

  "I dated your brother, Jimmie, in New Orleans about ten years ago. One night we went out to visit you at your fish camp. You were really plastered and you kept saying that the freight train wouldn't let you sleep. So when it went by, you ran outside and shot it with a flare pistol."

  I suddenly realised that Bubba's wife wasn't so uncomplicated after all.

  "I'm afraid I was ninety-proof-a lot of the time back then," I said.

  "I thought it was funny."

  I tried to be polite, but like most dry alcoholics I didn't want to talk about my drinking days with people who saw humor in them.

  "Well, so long. I hope to see you again," I said.

  "Do you think Bubba's crazy?"

  "I don't know."

  "His second wife left him two years ago. He burned all her clothes in the incinerator out back. He's not crazy, though. He just wants people to think he is because it scares them."

  "That could be."

  "He's not a bad man. I know all the stuff they say about him, but not many people know the hard time he had growing up."

  "A lot of us had a hard time, Mrs. Rocque."

  "You don't like him, do you?"

  "I guess I just don't know your husband well, and I'd better go."

  "You get embarrassed too easy."

  "Mrs. Rocque, I wish you good luck because I think you're going to need it."

  "I heard him offer you a job. You should take it. The people that work for him make a lot of money."

  "Yes, they do, and there's a big cost to lots of other people."

  "He doesn't make them do anything they don't already want to."

  "Your mother ran brothels, but she wasn't a white-slaver and she didn't sell dope. The most polite thing I can say about Bubba is that he's a genuine sonofabitch. I don't even think he'd mind."

  "I like you. Come have dinner with us sometime," she said. "I'm home a lot."

  I drove back down the pea-gravel lane and headed toward New Iberia and the picnic in the park with Annie and Alafair. The sun was bright on the tin roofs of the barns set back in the sugarcane fields. The few moss-hung oaks along the road made deep pools of shadow on the road's surface. I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.

  I had gotten to him when I mentioned Immigration busting two of his mules. Which made me wonder even more what role Immigration played in all of this. They had obviously stonewalled Minos Dautrieve at the DEA, and I believed they were behind the disappearance of Johnny Dartez's body after it was recovered from the plane crash by the Coast Guard. So if I was any kind of cop at all, why hadn't I dealt with Immigration head-on? They probably would have thrown me out of their office, but I also knew how to annoy bureaucrats, call their supervisors in Washington collect, and file freedom-of-information forms on them until their paint started to crack. So why hadn't I done it, I asked myself. And in answering my own question, I began to have a realisation about presumption and denial in myself.

  5

  ANNIE AND ALAFAIR were wrapping fried chicken in wax paper and fixing lemonade in a thermos when I got back home. I sat at the kitchen table with a glass of iced tea and mint leaves and looked out the window at the blue jays swooping over the mimosa tree in the backyard. The ducks in my pond were shaking water off their backs and waddling onto the bank in the shade created by the cattails.

  "I feel foolish about something," I said.

  "We'll take care of that tonight," she said, and smiled.

  "Something else."

  "Oh."

  "Years ago when I was a patrolman there was a notorious street character in the Quarter named Dock Stratton. The welfare officer would give him a meal-and-lodging ticket at one of their contract hotels, and he'd check into the place, then throw all the furniture out the window-tables, chairs, dresser drawers, lamps, mattresses, everything he could squeeze through the window, it would all come crashing down on the sidewalk. Then he'd run downstairs before anybody could call the heat and haul everything to the secondhand store. But no matter what this guy did, we never busted him. I was new and didn't understand. The other guys told me it was because Dock was a barfer. If he got a finger loose in the back of the car, he'd stick it down his throat and puke all over the seats. He'd do it in a lineup, in a holding cell, in a courtroom. He was always cocked and ready to fire. This guy was so bad a guard at the jail threatened to quit rather than take him on the chain to morning court. So Dock was allowed to drive welfare workers and skid-row hotel managers crazy for years, and when rookies like me asked why, we got treated to a good story.

  "Except I discovered there was another reason why Dock stayed on the street. He not only knew every hustler and thief in downtown New Orleans, but he'd been a locksmith before he melted his head with Thunderbird, and he could get into a place faster than a professional house creep. So there were a couple of detectives in robbery and homicide who would use him when things weren't working right in a case. One time they knew a hit man from Miami was in town to take out a labor union agent. They told Dock they were making him a special agent with the New Orleans police department and got him to open up the guy's motel room, steal his gun, his suitcase, all his clothes and traveler's checks, then they picked up the guy on suspicion-it was a Friday, so they could hold him until Monday morning-and kept him in a small cell for two days with three drag queens."

  "What's the point?" Annie said. Her voice was flat, and her eyes looked at the sunlight in the trees when she spoke.

  "Cops leave certain things and people in place for a reason."

  "I know these people you talk about are funny and unusual and interesting and all that, Dave, but why not leave them in the past?"

  "You remember that guy from Immigration that came around here? He's never been back to the house, has he? He could make a lot of trouble for us if he wanted to, but he hasn't. I told myself that was because I'd given him reason to avoid us."

  "Maybe he has other things to do. I just don't think the government is going to be interested in one little girl." She wore a pair of wash-faded Levi's and a white sun halter, and I could see the brown spray of sun freckles on her back. Her hips creased softly above her belt line while she filled the picnic hamper at the drainboard.

  "The government is interested in what they choose to be interested in," I said. "Right now I think they've got us on hold. They sent me a signal, but I didn't see it."

  "To tell you honestly, this sounds like something of your own creation."

  "That guy from Immigration, Monroe, was asking questions about us at the sheriff's office. He didn't need to do that. He could have cut a warrant, come out here, and done anything he wanted. Instead, he or somebody above him wanted me to know their potential in case I thought I could make problems for them about Johnny Dartez."

  "Who cares what they do?" Annie said.

  "I don't think you appreciate the nature of bureaucratic machinery once it's set in motion."

  "I'm sorry. I'm just not going to invest my life in speculating about what people can do to me."

  Alafair was looking back and forth between the two of us, her face clouded with the tone of our voices. Annie had dressed her in pink shorts, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and pink tennis shoes with the words left and right stamped boldly on the rubber tip of each shoe. Annie rubbed her hand over Alafair's head and gave her the plastic draw bag in which we kept the old bread.

  "Go feed the ducks," she said. "We'll leave in a minute."

  "Feed ducks?"

  "Yes."

  "Feed ducks now?"

  "That's right."

  "Dave viene al parque?"

  "Sure, he's coming," Annie said.

/>   Alafair grinned at me and went out the back screen to the pond. The sunlight through the trees made patterns on her brown legs.

  "I'll tell you one thing, Dave. No matter what those people from Immigration do, they're not going to take her away. She's ours, just as if we had conceived her."

  "I didn't tell you the rest of the story about Dock Stratton. After he finished blowing out his wiring with synthetic wine and wasn't any good to anybody, they shipped him off to the asylum at Mandeville."

  "So what does this mean? Are you going to become the knight-errant, tilting with the U.S. government?"

  "No."

  "Do you still want to go to the park?"

  "That's the reason I came home, kiddo."

  "I wonder. I really do," she said.

  "I'd appreciate it if you'd explain that."

  "Don't you see it, Dave? It's like you want to taint every moment in our lives with this conspiratorial vision of yours. It's become an obsession. We don't talk about anything else. Either that or you stare into space. How do you think I feel?"

  "I'll try to be different."

  "I know."

  "I really will."

  Her eyes were wet. She sat down across the table from me.

  "We haven't been able to have our own child. Now one's been given to us," she said. "That should make us the happiest people in the world. Instead, we fight and worry about what hasn't happened yet. Our conversation at home is filled with the names of people who shouldn't have anything to do with our lives. It's like deliberately inviting an obscene presence into your home. Dave, you say at AA they teach you to give it all up to your Higher Power. Can't you try that? Just give it up, cut it out of your life? There's not a problem in the world that time can't help in some way."