A Stained White Radiance (11 page)

“You got in here when you shouldn't have. Now you're on your way out,” he said.

“That sounds serious. No J.D. refills?” Clete said.

The butler rested his hand on the back of Clete's chair. Through the banana trees I saw the gateman walking across the lawn toward us. I stood up to
go. Clete lit a cigarette and flipped the match into the swimming pool. It was deep dusk now, and the trees were swimming with fireflies.

“Don't crowd the plate,” he said, his eyes looking straight ahead.

The butler looked at Bobby Earl, who nodded his head negatively and rose from his chair.

“I get it,” Clete said, rising also, his grin back in place. “You're cutting us some slack. Otherwise the hired help might just stomp the shit out of us. But this ain't nigger-town. And it's no time for bad press, right? I've changed my mind about you, Mr. Earl. You've got real Kool-Aid. I dig it.” He blew cigarette smoke at an upward angle into the violet air and gazed approvingly about the grounds. “What a place. I've been in the wrong line of work.”

Then the butler fitted his hand around Clete's biceps to point him toward the driveway.

Clete pivoted and lifted his huge fist into the butler's stomach. It was a deep, unexpected blow, in the soft place right under the sternum, and the butler's face went white with shock. His mouth gasped, and his eyes locked open as big as half dollars.

Then Clete grabbed him by the back of his jacket and threw him spread-eagled across the table that had been set for two.

“Back off, Clete!” I said.

“Yeah? Take a look at the lollipop our man's got in his pocket?” He held up a leather-hided slapjack in one hand, and tossed it over his shoulder into the pool. “Let's see what other items Bonzo's
holding. How about this? A .25-caliber Beretta. What were you going to do with this, fuckhead?”

The side of the butler's face was pressed flat against the table; spittle dripped into his chin beard.

“Answer me. You think this is Beirut?” Clete said, his hand tight on the back of the butler's neck.

Then he straightened his back, released the clip from the pistol's magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, and sailed the pistol over a hedge. He threw the clip and the ejected round into the pool.

The gateman's eyes flicked back and forth between us and Bobby Earl; then he stepped hesitantly out on the flagstones, the skin around his mouth tight with expectation.

“You don't get paid enough money for it, partner,” I said.

“You want me to call the cops, Mr. Earl?” he said.

Bobby Earl didn't answer him. Instead he looked at me.

“You've made a grave mistake,” he said. The pupil in his right eye was round and black, like a large, broken drop of India ink.

“I don't think so,” I said. “I think you're dirty. I think you're involved with the death of a police officer. In Louisiana you don't skate when you kill a cop. Do some research on the Red Hat and find out who they've processed through there.”

“The what?” The rim below his right eye was red and trembling with anger.

“The Red Hat House. You're in the legislature. Call up at Angola and check it out. They used to have a sign on one wall that said,
This is where they knock the fire out of your ass.
I think they meant it.”

Clete and I walked across the lawn toward my truck. I looked back over my shoulder before I opened the door. Bobby Earl was staring after us, his face bathed in the yellow-red light of a flaming gas torch by the pool. The blonde girl in the pink swimsuit and terry-cloth robe clung to his arm like a frightened acolyte, her mouth a silent O. The 1970s photograph of Bobby Earl in silken robes, a cross crawling with fire in the background, no longer seemed out of place and time.

T
HE
HOUSE WAS
DARK
when I got back home. I looked in on Alafair, who was sleeping with her thumb in her mouth and her stuffed frog on the pillow next to her. Her room was filled with souvenirs from our vacation trips to Houston, Key West, Biloxi, and Disney World: an Astros space helmet, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill, conch shells, dried starfish, a huge inflated Goofy figure, rows of sand dollars, a coral-encrusted cannon ball that I had chopped out of Seven-Mile Reef. I took her thumb out of her mouth and stroked her hair when her eyes fluttered temporarily awake. Then I latched her screen window, which had become part of a silent conspiracy three or four nights a week when she forgot to hook it after letting Tripod in her room against house rules.

Then I undressed in the main bedroom and sat on the side of the bed in my skivvies next to Bootsie's sleeping form. The sky had cleared, and the pecan trees clicked with moonlight in the breeze off the bayou; I could smell the fecund odor of bream spawning in the marsh. In the
distance I heard a freight train blowing down the line.

I tried to let go of the day's concerns, let all the heat and fatigue and anger drain out of my hands and feet; but I was genuinely wired, wrapped so tight that my skin felt like a prison. I could hear the tiger pacing in his cage, his paws softly scudding on the wire mesh. His eyes were yellow in the darkness, his breath as fetid as meat that had rotted in the sun.

Sometimes I imagined him prowling through trees in William Blake's dark moral forest, his striped body electrified with a hungry light. But I knew that he was not the poet's creation; he was conceived and fed by my own self-destructive alcoholic energies and fears, chiefly my fear of mortality and my inability to affect the destiny of those whom I could not afford to lose.

Then Bootsie rolled against me, and I felt her hand brush my thigh and touch my sex. I took off my shorts and undershirt and lay down next to her, slipped my arms around her back, and put my face in her hair. Her body was warm from sleep, and she spread one leg around my calf, placed me inside her, and pressed her palm in the small of my back. When we made love I always had several images in my mind of Bootsie and I never saw her as one person, maybe because we had both known each other since we were nineteen. I remembered her in an organdy evening dress and the bright redness of her sunburned shoulders under the Japanese lanterns when we first met at a college dance
out on Spanish Lake; I saw the fearful innocence in her face when we lost our virginity together in my father's boathouse, the rain dripping out of the cypress trees into the dead water as loudly as the beating of our hearts; and I still saw the pain in her eyes when I rejected her, hurt her deeply, and caused her to marry another man, all because of my own self-loathing and inability to explain to anyone else the dark psychological landscape I had wandered in and out of since I was a child.

But just as Alafair had been given to me in a wobbling bubble of air below the Gulf's surface, I believed my Higher Power had given me back Bootsie when I had lost all claim to her, had undone my youthful mistakes for me, and had made that wonderful summer of 1957 as immediate and tangible and ongoing as the four o'clocks that bloomed nightly under the moon on Bayou Teche.

But how do you cast out the canker from the rose, I thought.

Then she put both her legs in mine, held me tightly inside her, her mouth open and wet against my cheek, and in my mind's eye I saw a wave bursting in a geyser of foam against the hard outline of a distant jetty, a coral boulder ripping loose from the ocean's floor, and a flurry of silver ribbon fish rising from the mouth of an underwater cave.

B
Y THE NEXT AFTERNOON
I had received the files and photos of Jewel Fluck and Eddy Raintree from the National Crime Information Center in
Washington, D.C.; police departments in New Orleans, Jackson, Biloxi, and Baton Rouge; and Angola and Parchman penitentiaries. Both men belonged to the great body of psychologically misshapen people that I refer to as The Pool. Members of The Pool leave behind warehouses of official paperwork as evidence that they have occupied the planet for a certain period of time. Their names are entered early on in welfare case histories, child-abuse investigations, clinic admissions for rat bites and malnutrition. Later on these same people provide jobs for an army of truant officers, psychologists, public defenders, juvenile probation officers, ambulance attendants, emergency-room personnel, street cops, prosecutors, jailers, prison guards, alcohol- and drug-treatment counselors, bail bondsmen, adult parole authorities, and the county morticians who put the final punctuation mark in their files.

The irony is that without The Pool we would probably have to justify our jobs by refocusing our attention and turning the key on slumlords, industrial polluters, and the coalition of defense contractors and militarists who look upon the national treasury as a personal slush fund.

I looked at the mug shots of Fluck and Raintree and was reasonably sure that these were the same men who had been in Weldon's house (I say “reasonably sure” because a booking-room photograph is often taken when the subject is tired, angry, drunk, or drugged, and recidivists constantly change their hairstyles, grow and shave mustaches and hillbilly sideburns, and become bloated on
jailhouse fare like grits, spaghetti, and mashed potatoes).

But Fluck's file told me little that I didn't already know, or couldn't have guessed at. At seventeen he had pushed another boy down a stairs at the Superdome and broken his arm, but the charge had been dropped. He had been banned for life from Louisiana racetracks after he was caught feeding a horse a speedball; he had been in the New Orleans city prison twice, once for beating up a taxicab driver, a second time for distribution of obscene film materials. His mainline fall had been at Parchman, where he did a five-year jolt and went out on what is called “max-time,” which meant he either gave the hacks constant trouble and earned no good-time, or he refused parole because he didn't want to go back on the street under supervision.

But because he had gone out on max-time, Parchman had no address for him, and he hadn't been arrested again in the two years since his discharge. His parents were deceased, and neither the New Orleans phone directory nor any of the utility companies listed anyone by the name of Fluck.

Eddy Raintree's photo stared at me out of his file with a face that had the moral depth and complexity of freshly poured cement. He had a sixth-grade education, a dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps, and had never had a more skilled job than that of fry cook and hod carrier. He had been in the Calcasieu, West Baton Rouge, and Ascension parish prisons for bigamy, check writing, arson, and sodomy with animals. He went down
for three years in Angola for possession of stolen food stamps, and he spent two of those three years in lockdown with the big stripes (the violent and unmanageable) after he was suspected of involvement in a gang rape that left a nineteen-year-old convict dead in a shower stall.

He, like Jewel Fluck, had gone out max-time three years ago, and there was no current address for him. But at the bottom of Raintree's prison sheet was a notation that Captain Delbert Bean had recommended that this man be reclassified as a big stripe, and that no good-time be applied toward his early release from the farm.

Early Monday morning I drove up to Angola, north of Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River, rolled across the cattle guard between the gun towers and the fences topped with rolls of razor wire, and followed the narrow road past the Block, an enormous fenced compound where both the snitches and the big stripes were kept in lockdown, through fields of sweet potatoes and corn and freshly plowed acreage that dipped all the way down to the river basin. I passed the old prison cemetery, where those who die while incarcerated do Angola time for all eternity; the bulldozed and weed-grown foundations of the sweat boxes on Camp A (there had been two of them, upright, narrow cast-iron places of torment, with a hole the diameter of a cigar to breathe through, the space so tight that if a convict collapsed, his knees and buttocks would wedge against the walls); the crumbled ruins of the stone buildings left over
from the War Between the States (which for years had been used to house Negro inmates, including three of the best twelve-string blues guitarists I know of—Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, and Hogman Mathew Maxie); and finally the old Red Hat House down by the river bank, a squat, ugly off-white building that took its name from the red-painted straw hats worn by the big-stripe levee gangs who were locked there before the building became the home of the electric chair, which has since been moved to a more modern environment, one with tile walls that glow with the clean, antiseptic light of a physician's clinic.

The Mississippi was high and churning with mud and uprooted trees, and out on the flat, among the willows, I saw Captain Delbert Bean on horseback, a pearl-gray Stetson hat slanted on his head, working a gang of convicts who were filling sandbags out of a dump truck and laying them along the base of the levee.

That levee is a burial ground for an untold number of convicts who were murdered, some as object lessons, by prison personnel. Ask anyone who ever worked in Angola, or did time there. I will not use their names, but there used to be two old-time gunbulls, brothers, who would get sodden and mean on corn whiskey, sometimes take a nap under a tree, then awake, single out some hapless soul, tell him to start running, and then kill him.

Delbert Bean was a dinosaur left over from that era. He had been a prison guard for forty-seven years, and I don't believe that in his life he had
ever traveled farther away from the farm than New Orleans or Shreveport. He had no family or friends that I knew of, no external frame of reference, little knowledge of change in the larger world. His eyes were a washed-out blue, his skin covered with brown spots the size of dimes, his liver eaten away with cirrhosis. His stomach looked like a watermelon under his long-sleeved blue shirt. The accent was north Louisiana hill country, the voice absolutely certain when he spoke, and the face absolutely joyless.