DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  Weldon idly twirled a shrimp on a toothpick between his fingers.

  "Actually, today is Bobby's birthday," she continued.

  "We have to leave a bit early and drop off his present at the rally."

  "Bama-" Weldon began.

  "It'll take a few minutes. You can stay in the car," she said to him.

  He made a face and looked away into the shadows. A moment later Clemmie passed our table.

  "Go up and ask Vic to join us, would you, Clemmie?" Lyle said.

  She began clearing paper plates off the glass-topped table as though she hadn't heard him. Her breasts looked like watermelons inside her gray-and-white uniform.

  "Clemmie, would you please tell Vic all our guests are here?" Lyle said.

  "I got to live on the other side of the wall from that nasty old man. That don't mean I got to talk to him," she said.

  Lyle's face reddened with embarrassment.

  "Maybe he doesn't want to come down. Leave him alone," Weldon said.

  "No, he's going to come down here and eat with us," Lyle said. "He's paid for whatever he did to us, Weldon."

  "You don't even know that it's him," Weldon said.

  "Do you want me to go up there?" Drew said.

  Good ole Drew, I thought. Always letter-high and right down the middle. She stood by the bar, her weight resting on one foot, her thick, round arms covered with tan and freckles.

  "No, I'll do it," Lyle said.

  "Why do you keep stirring up the past all the time?" Weldon said. "If it's not moving, don't poke it. Why don't you learn that?"

  "Have another beer, Weldon," Lyle said.

  "Lyle, this is your craziness. Don't act like somebody else is responsible," Weldon said.

  Lyle got up from his chair and walked across the lawn toward the garage apartment.

  "Lord h'ep me Jesus," he said to no one in particular.

  Later, he came back down the stairs. Then, a few minutes later, the man who called himself Vic Benson stepped out the door and walked slowly down the stairs, a shaft of late sunlight breaking across his destroyed face.

  He wore a frayed white shirt that was gray with washing and creaseless shiny black trousers that were hitched tightly around his bony hips. People glanced once at his face, then focused intensely on their conversations with the people next to them. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth, and the paper was wet with saliva all the way down to the glowing ash.

  His eyes made you think he was being entertained by a private joke. He stopped by the edge of the patio, threw his cigarette into a flower bed, and picked up an empty glass off the bar. Then he knotted up a handful of mint from a silver bowl and bruised it around the inside of the glass.

  "What you having, sub?" the black bartender asked.

  Vic Benson didn't reply. He simply reached over the bar, picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel's and poured four fingers straight up.

  Lyle rose from his chair and stood beside him awkwardly.

  "This is Vic," he said to Bama and his brother and sister.

  "Glad to meet you," Vic said.

  Drew's and Weldon's eyes narrowed, and I saw Drew wet her lips. Weldon stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then took it out.

  "I'm Weldon Sonnier. Do you know me?" he said.

  "I don't know you. But I heard about you," Vic said.

  "What'd you hear?" Weldon asked.

  "You're a big oil man hereabouts"

  "I've got a record for dusters," Weldon said.

  "You only got to hit a pay sand one in eight. Ain't that right?"

  "You sound like you've been around the oil business, Vic," Weldon said.

  "I roughnecked some. But I ain't ever run acrost you, if that's what you're asking. I seen her though." He lifted a shriveled forefinger at Drew.

  I saw the side of her face twitch. Then she recovered herself.

  "I'm afraid I don't recall meeting you," she said.

  "I didn't say you'd met me. I seen you jogging on the street. In New Iberia. You was with some other people. But a man don't forget a handsome woman."

  Her eyes looked away. Bama stared down at her hands.

  "Lyle says you're our old man, Vic," Weldon said.

  "I ain't. But I don't argue with it. People abide the likes of me for different reasons. Mostly because they feel guilty about something. It don't matter to me. What time we eat? There's a TV show I want to watch."

  "Yeah, those crabs ought to be good and red now," Lyle said.

  "You cook them in slow water, they taste better," Vic said. "There's people don't like to do it 'cause of the sound they make in the pot."

  He took a long drink from his whiskey, his eyes roving over us as though he had just made a profound observation.

  Batist and Lyle began dipping the crabs out of the boiling water with tongs and dropping them in the empty washtub to cool. Vic filled half of a paper plate with dirty rice, walked to the fire pit ahead of everyone else, picked up two hot crabs from the tub with his bare hand, and began eating by himself on a folding chair under an oak tree.

  "Is that the man you saw at your window?" Drew said to Barna.

  Barna's pulse was quivering like a severed muscle in her throat.

  "I'm not sure what I saw," she said. "It was quite dark. Perhaps it was a man in a mask. To be frank, I've tried to put it out of my mind. I prefer not to talk about it, Drew. I don't know why we should be talking about these things at a dinner party."

  Weldon smoked a cigarette and watched Vic Benson with a whimsical look on his face.

  "Weldon?" Drew said.

  "What?"

  "Say something."

  "What do you want me to say?"

  "Is it him?"

  "Of course it's him. I'd recognize that old sonofabitch if you melted him into glue."

  Bootsie and I got in the serving line, then tried to isolate ourselves from the Sonniers' conversation. But Barna was having her troubles with it, too. She made a mess of shelling the crab on her plate, spraying her dress and face with juice when she squeezed a claw between the nutcrackers, then rushing from the table as though the deck of the Titanic had just tilted under her.

  When, she returned from the bathroom, her face was fresh and composed and her eyes were rekindled with an ethereal blue light.

  "My, I didn't realize it had gotten so late," she said. "We must be running, Weldon."

  "Give it a minute. Bobby's not going anywhere," he said.

  But he wasn't looking at her. His eyes were still on Vic Benson, who was hunkered forward on the folding chair under the oak tree, drinking another glass of whiskey as though it were Kool-Aid.

  "I don't want him to think we've forgotten his birthday," she said.

  "Maybe he'd like for you to forget it, Bama. Maybe that's why he has the wrinkles chemically rinsed out of his face," Weldon said.

  "I think that's an unkind remark to make, Weldon," she said.

  But he wasn't listening to her.

  "You know, the old fart did a lot of bad things to us," he said. "But there's one that always stuck in my mind." He shook his head back and forth. "He caught me whanging it when I was about thirteen, and he clipped a clothespin on my penis and made me stand out in the backyard like that for a half hour."

  "Hey, ease up, Weldon," Lyle said.

  "I insist that we not continue this," Bama said.

  Bootsie was already excusing herself from the table, and I was looking at my watch.

  "You're right, damn it," Weldon said. "Let's drive the nail in this bullshit, give Bobby his present, then come back for some serious drinking."

  Weldon got up from his chair and walked toward the tree under which Vic Benson sat.

  "What are you going to do?" Lyle said. Then, "Weldon?"

  But he paid no attention. He was talking to Vic Benson now, his back to us, his big hands gesturing, while Benson looked up at him silently. Then Benson set his glass down and rose to his feet. Clemmie poure
d the water from the caldron into the fire pit, and steam billowed out of the bricks and drifted across Benson and Weldon's bodies.

  We couldn't hear what Weldon said, but the puckered skin of Benson's face was pulled back from his mouth in a leer of teeth and blackened gums, and his thin shoulders were as rectangular and stiff as if they were made of wire.

  Then Weldon walked back to the bar, pulled a sweating bottle of Jax out of the ice bin, and cracked off the cap.

  "Quit staring at me like that, Lyle," he said.

  "I ain't here to judge you," Lyle said.

  "What'd you think I was going to tell him?" Weldon said.

  "You got a lot of anger. Nobody can blame you for it."

  "I offered him a job," Weldon said.

  "Doing what?"

  "Roustabout, driving a truck, whatever he wants to do. I also told him no matter what he decides the past between him and us is quits."

  "What'd he say?" Lyle asked.

  Weldon blew little puffs of air out his lips.

  "I already forgot it," he said. "I tell you what, though. If I were you, I'd either buy that man an airplane ticket to Iraq or put bars over his doors and windows."

  After Bama and Weldon were gone, Vic Benson stared at us for a long time from under the tree, then he turned and mounted the stairs to the garage apartment. The trees were deep in shadow, and down the street, against the lavender sky and amid the flights of swallows, you could see the sun's last red light reflecting on the chrome-plated cross atop Lyle's Bible college.

  We were leaving also when we heard someone start a car engine immediately below the garage apartment.

  "What's he doing with Clemmie's car?" Lyle said.

  We turned and saw Vic Benson backing an ancient, dented gas guzzler, with red cellophane taped over the broken taillights, out the driveway. Smoke poured from under the frame.

  "Oh, boy, I got a bad feeling," Lyle said.

  He headed for the garage apartment, and I followed him.

  We found Clemmie in her small living room, sitting very still in a lopsided stuffed chair, her right hand balanced carefully in the palm of the other, as though any movement would put her in peril. Her rouge was streaked with tears, and her nostrils and mouth were smeared with blood and mucus. Two fingers of her right hand were as bulbous as a oons at the joints.

  "What happened?" Lyle said.

  "He say, 'Ginune your car keys, you nigger bitch." I say, 'You ain't getting them. I work hard for my car. I ain't giving it to no nasty white trash to drive round in." He hit me in the face with his belt, hard as he could. I tried to run and throw my keys out the do', but he twisted them outta my hand, broke my fingers, Rev'end Lyle, just like twigs snapping. Then he spit in my hair."

  Her shoulders were shaking. You could smell smoke, perfume, and dried sweat in her clothes. Lyle wet a towel and blotted her face with it. I lifted her hand and set it gingerly on the arm of the chair. A silver ring with a yellow stone was almost buried in the flesh below one knuckle.

  "We'll take you to the hospital, Clemmie, then we'll get your car back," I said. "Don't worry about Vic Benson, either. He's going to be in the Baton Rouge city jail tonight. Do you know where he was going with your car?"

  "He axed where that park at," she said.

  "Which park?" I said.

  "The place where Mr. Weldon gonna go see Bobby Earl. He got a pistol, Rev'end Lyle. He gone back in his room and come out with it, a little shiny pistol ain't no bigger than yo' hand. He say, "You go down there and tell them people 'bout this I'll be back and cut off yo' nose." That's what he say to me."

  Lyle stroked her hair and patted her shoulders. I told Lyle to take her to the hospital, and I used the phone to call the Baton Rouge police department.

  Outside, I asked Bootsie to wait for me, then I headed for the car. I didn't expect Batist to follow me.

  But he did. And in so doing turned the two of us into a historical footnote.

  CHAPTER 17

  I tried to dissuade him, too, as he stood with his huge hand on the door handle, about to get in the passenger's seat.

  "It's just not a good idea," I said.

  "You t'ink I scared, Dave? That's what you t'ink after all these years?"

  His flower-print tie was knotted wrong; the top button of his white short-sleeved shirt had popped off; his seersucker slacks were stretched as tight as cheesecloth on his muscular thighs and buttocks. I don't think I ever loved a man more.

  "Batist, there's some low-rent white people there," I said.

  "There's places I still cain't go, huh? That's what you tellin' me, Dave, and I don't like to hear that, me."

  "I'm asking you to stay with Bootsie, Batist."

  "I ain't stayin' here no rno'. You don't want me wit' you, I'll walk back down to Catfish Town. Vall can pick me up on your way back home."

  I looked at the injury in his face, and I remembered my father admonishing me never to treat a brave man as anything other than a fire walker, and I wondered if I was guilty of that old southern white conceit that we must protect people of color from themselves.

  "Well, I think the city cops will probably grab the old man before he does any more harm. But let's check it out, partner," I said. "It's really just the roller-derby crowd with a political agenda."

  "What?"

  "Never mind."

  We drove back down Highland, through the LSU campus, to the park where Bobby Earl's constituency had come out in force. Amid the pin oaks, the pine and chinaberry trees, against the backdrop of tennis courts and a dusty softball diamond and picnic tables, it looked like a festive and innocent celebration of the coming of summer. A Dixieland band thundered under a pavilion; black cooks in white uniforms turned flank steaks on a huge portable barbecue pit that had been towed in on a truck; the back of the speaker's platform was lined with a thick row of American flags, and under trees that were strung with red, white, and blue bunting children raced breathlessly across the pine needles and queued up for free lemonade and ice cream.

  Who were the parents? I asked myself. Their, cars came from Bogalusa, Denham Springs, Plaquemine, Bunkie, Port Allen, Vidalia, and mosquito-infested dirt-road communities out in the Atchafalaya basin. But these were not ordinary small-town blue-collar people. This was the permanent underclass, the ones who tried to hold on daily to their shrinking bit of redneck geography with a pickup truck and gun rack and Jones on the jukebox and a cold Coors in the hand.

  They were never sure of who they were unless someone was afraid of them. They jealously guarded their jobs from blacks and Vietnamese refugees, whom they saw as a vast and hungry army about to descend upon their women, their neighborhoods, their schools, even their clapboard church houses, where they were assured every Sunday and Wednesday night that the bitterness and fear that characterized their lives had nothing to do with what they had been born to, or what they had chosen for themselves.

  But when you looked at them at play in a public park, in almost a tattered facsimile of a Norman Rockwell painting, it was as hard to be angry at them for their ignorance as it would be to condemn someone for the fact that he was born disfigured.

  Then on a side street we saw Clemmie's junker car parked in a yellow zone. I found a parking place farther down the street, and Batist walked back to Clemmie's car, raised the hood, disconnected a fistful of sparkplug wires, and locked them in our trunk, I took my holstered.45 out of the glovebox, clipped it onto my belt, and put on my sports coat.

  "You're sure you want to go?" I said.

  "What else I'm gonna do, me? Stand here and wait for a man that's got a pistol?"

  "Well, I don't think anybody is going to give us any trouble," I said. "They feel secure when they're in numbers. But if anybody gets in our face, we walk on through it. All right, Batist?"

  "Dave, ain't nobody know these people better than a black man. They ain't worried by the likes of me, no. They scared of the young ones. They ain't gonna admit that, but that's what's on they mind. They scared t
o death of some noisy kids whose mamas should have whupped them upside the head a long time ago."

  "They're scared of anybody who looks them in the eye, Partner.

  "We gonna set around here and wait for that man to shoot Mr. Sonnier?"

  "No, you're right. Let's go see what they're doing at the bottom of the food chain these days."