A Stained White Radiance (14 page)

“Oh.”

She blew smoke at an upward angle, her face aloof and flat-sided in the shadows.

“Mattie?”

“Yes?”

“Weldon's out back. Can he come in the house?”

“Little mice always return where the cheese is,” she said.

At that moment Lyle wanted something terrible to happen to her.

She turned on one high heel, her palm supporting one elbow, her cigarette an inch from her mouth, her hair wreathed in smoke.

“Do you have a reason for staring through the screen at me?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“When you're bigger, you'll get to do what's on your mind. In the meantime, don't let your thoughts show on your face. You're a lewd little boy.”

Her suggestion repelled him and made water well up in his eyes. He backed away from the screen, then turned and ran through the rear of the house and out into the backyard, where Weldon and Drew sat against the barn wall, fireflies lighting in the wisteria over their heads.

No one came for Mattie that evening. She sat in the stuffed chair in her room, putting on layers of lipstick until her mouth had the crooked bright-red shape of a clown's. She smoked a whole package of Chesterfields, constantly wiping the ashes off her dark-blue skirt with a hand towel soaked in dry-cleaning fluid; then she drank herself unconscious.

It was hot that night, and dry lightning leaped from the horizon to the top of the blue-black vault of sky over the Gulf. Weldon sat on the side of his bed in the dark, his shoulders hunched, his fists between his white thighs. His chopped haircut looked like feathers on his head in the flicker of lightning
through the window. When Lyle was almost asleep Weldon shook him awake and said, “We got to get rid of her. You know we got to do it.”

Lyle put his pillow over his head and rolled away from him, as though he could drop away into sleep and rise in the morning into a sun-spangled and different world.

But in the false dawn he woke to Weldon's face close to his. Weldon's eyes were hollow, his breath rank with funk. The mist was heavy and wet in the pecan trees outside the window.

“She's not gonna hurt Drew again. Are you gonna help or not?” he said.

Lyle followed him into the hallway, his heart sinking at the realization of what he was willing to participate in. Mattie slept in the stuffed chair, her hose rolled down over her knees, an overturned jelly glass on the rug next to the can of spot cleaner.

Weldon walked quietly across the rug, unscrewed the cap on the can, laid the can on its side in front of Mattie's feet, then backed away from her. The cleaning fluid spread in a dark circle around her chair, the odor as bright and sharp as white gas.

Weldon slid open a box of kitchen matches, and they each took one, raked it across the striker, and, with the sense that their lives at that moment had changed forever, threw them at Mattie's feet. But the burning matches fell outside the wet area. Lyle jerked the box from Weldon's hand, clutched a half dozen matches in his fist, dragged them across the striker, and flung them right on Mattie's feet.

The chair was enveloped in a cone of flame, and she burst out of it with her arms extended, as though she were pushing blindly through a curtain, her mouth and eyes wide with terror. They could smell her hair burning as she raced past them and crashed through the screen door out onto the gallery and into the yard. She beat at her flaming clothes and raked at her hair as though it was swarming with yellow jackets.

Lyle and Weldon stood transfixed in mortal dread at what they had done.

A Negro man walking to work came out of the mist on the road and knocked her to the ground, slapping the fire out of her dress, pinning her under his spread knees as though he were assaulting her. Smoke rose from her scorched clothes and hair as in a depiction of a damned figure on a holy card.

The Negro got to his feet and walked toward the gallery, a solitary line of blood running down his black cheek where Mattie had scratched him.

“Yo' mama ain't hurt bad. Go get some butter or some bacon grease. It gonna be fine, you gonna see,” he said. “Don't be shakin' like that. Where yo' daddy at? It gonna be just fine. You little white children ain't got to worry about nothing.”

He smiled to assure them that everything would be all right.

“T
HEY PUT HER
in the crazy house at Mandeville,” Lyle said, his face turned into the warm breeze off the bayou. “She died there about ten years later, I heard.”

“And you've felt guilt about it all this time?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“No?”

“We were kids. Nobody would help us. It was her or us. Besides, I think my sins are forgiven.”

“I don't know what to tell you, Lyle. I just don't believe that your father has reappeared after all these years to do y'all harm. People just don't come back after that long for revenge.”

He sipped from his bottle and shook his head sadly.

“The son of a buck was evil. If ever Satan took a human form, it was my old man,” he said.

“Well, I'll have a talk with Drew about the intruder. But I want to ask you something else while we're out here.”

“Go ahead. I got no secrets.”

“If you really did get religion, was it because of something that happened in Vietnam that I don't know about?”

The oil wells clanked up and down in the unplowed field, which was now pink in the sun's afterglow.

“You think maybe you had something to do with it?” he asked. “Don't give yourself too much credit, Dave.”

He snuffed dryly and touched at his nostrils with one knuckle.

“I killed a nun,” he said.

“You did what?”

“I never told you about it. I climbed down into
what I thought was a spider hole, but one tunnel went off into a room that they must have used as an aid station because there were bloody field dressings all over the floor. I saw something go across the door, and I opened up. It was a nun, a white woman. There were two of them in there. The other one was huddled up against the wall, trembling all over. They must have been from the school in the ville. You remember there were some French nuns in that one ville?”

I nodded silently.

“When I climbed back up, Charlie started firing from the ville and the captain called in the arty,” he said. “Then we were all hauling butt. You remember? It was short. That's when Martinez got it. So I just never said anything about it. The next day we got into that minefield. I couldn't keep it all straight in my head anymore.”

“It wasn't your fault, Lyle. You were a good soldier.”

“No, I told you before, I dug it down there. The ragin' Cajun, sliding down the tunnel to give Charlie a red-hot enema. What a hand job.”

“I'll give you some advice someone once gave me. Get Vietnam out of your life. We already fought our war. Let the people who made it grieve on it.”

“I don't grieve. I believe I've been reborn. I don't care if you accept that or not. I give those people out there something they ain't found anyplace else. And I couldn't give it to them unless God gave it to me first. And if He gave it to me, that means I've been forgiven.”

“What is it you give them?”

“Power. A chance to be what they're not. They wake up scared every morning of their lives. I show them it doesn't have to be that way anymore. I grew up uneducated, in foster homes, hustled drugs on the street, spent time in a couple of jails, washed dishes for a living with this crippled hand. But the man on high got my attention, and, son, I ain't did bad. . . . Sorry, that word's just one I can't seem to get away from.”

“That sounds a little bit vain, Lyle.”

“I never said I was perfect. Look, make me one promise. Watch out for my sister. I suspect you've got personal feelings toward her anyway, don't you?”

“I'm not sure I know what you mean.”

“She said you poked her when y'all were in college.”

I looked at the side of his face, the scars that leaked from one eye, then I gazed at the bayou and a black man fishing in a pirogue and drummed my fingers on the leather seat.

“I'd better get home now,” I said. “The next time you have information for me, I'd appreciate your bringing it to me at my office.”

“Don't get bent out of shape. Drew made it with a lot of guys. So you were one of them. Why pretend you were born fifty years old?”

“I changed my mind. I really don't need a ride all the way home, Lyle. Just drop me at the four-corners. I'm going to ask Bootsie to come in town for some crawfish.”

“Whatever you want, Loot.” He screwed the
cap on his whiskey bottle, dropped it on the seat, and started the engine. “You might think I have a head full of spiders, but if I do, I don't try to hide them from anybody. You get my meaning?”

“I want you to take this in the right spirit, Lyle. You don't have the franchise on guilt about Vietnam, and you're not the only guy who had his life set back on track by some power outside himself. I think the problem here is peddling it to other people for money.”

“You ever see a bishop drive a Volkswagen?”

“I'll get off right there at the corner. Thanks very much for the evening.”

I stepped out onto the gravel road, closed the car door, and walked toward a clapboard bar that vibrated with the noise from inside. Lyle's fire-engine-red convertible grew small in the distance, then disappeared in the purple shadows between the sugarcane fields.

I had to wait to use the pay phone in the bar, and I drank a 7-Up at a table in the corner and watched a drunk black-haired girl in blue jeans dance by herself in front of the bandstand. Her undulating, slim body was haloed in cigarette smoke.

I hadn't meant to be self-righteous with Lyle. I truly felt for him and his family and what they had endured at the hands of the father and the prostitute named Mattie, but Lyle also made me angry in a way that I couldn't quite describe to myself. It wasn't simply that he pandered to an audience of ignorant and fearful people or that he misused the money they gave him; it went even deeper than
that. Maybe it was the fact that Lyle had truly been inside the fire storm, had seen human behavior at its worst and best, had made a mistake down in a tunnel that perhaps beset his conscience with a level of pain that could only be compared to having one's skin ripped off in strips with a pair of pliers. And he sold it all as cheaply as you might market the plastic flowers that adorned the stage of his live TV show.

Yes, that was it, I thought. He had made a meretricious enterprise out of an experience that you share with no one except those who've been there, too. I don't believe that's an elitist attitude, either. There are events you witness, or in which you participate, that forever remain sacrosanct and inviolate in memory, no matter how painful that memory is, because of the cost that you or others paid in order to be there in that moment when the camera lens clicked shut.

How do you tell someone that a drunk blue-collar girl dancing in a low-rent Louisiana bar, her black hair curled around her neck like a rope, makes you remember a dead Vietnamese girl on a trail three klicks from her village? She wore sandals, floppy black shorts, a white blouse, and she lay on her back, with one leg folded under her, her eyes closed as though in sleep, the only disfiguration in her appearance a dried stream of blood that curled from the corner of her mouth like a red snake. Why was she there? I don't know. Was she killed by American or enemy fire? I don't know that either. I only remember that at the time,
I wanted to see a weapon near her person, to believe that she was one of
them.
But there was no weapon, and in all probability she was simply a schoolgirl returning from visiting someone in another village when she was killed.

That was my third day in-country. That was twenty-six years ago. I had news for Lyle. He might be honest about the spiders crawling around in his head, but he wouldn't get rid of them by trying to sell them through a television tube. You offer them the real thing, Brother Lyle, you tell them the real story about what happened over there, and they'll put you in a cage and take out your brains with an ice cream scoop.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I telephoned Drew to ask her about the intruder in her kitchen, but there was no answer, and later when I went by her house she wasn't home. I stuck my business card in the corner of her screen door.

As I drove back down East Main under the oaks that arched over the street, I saw her jogging along the sidewalk in a T-shirt and a pair of purple shorts, her tan skin glistening with sweat. She raised her arm and waved at me, her breasts big and round against her shirt, but I didn't stop. She could call me if she wanted to, I told myself.

I drove home for lunch and stopped my pickup at the mailbox on the dirt road at the foot of my property. Among the letters and bills was a heavy brown envelope with no postage and my name written across it with no address. I cut the engine, sorted out the junk mail, then sliced open the brown envelope with my pocket knife. Inside were a typed letter and twenty one-hundred-dollar bills. The letter read:

We think this fell out of your pocket in Weldon Sonnier's house. We think you should have it back. The cop in the basement was an accident. Nobody wanted it that way. He could have walked out of it but he wanted to be a hard guy. Sonnier is a welsher and a prick. If you want to be his knothole, that's your choice. But we think you should mark off all this bullshit and stay in New Iberia. What you've got here is two large with more down the road, maybe some business opportunities too, if we get the right signals. Let Sonnier drown in his own shit. If you don't want the money, blow your nose on it. It's all the same to us. We just wanted to offer you an intelligent alternative to being Sonnier's main local fuck.