A Stained White Radiance (20 page)

Then she went into the back of the apartment and returned with several sheets of typing paper in her hand.

“I got maybe two hundred people here,” she said. “They're spread all over Lou'sana and Miss'sippi, too.”

“Well, let's take a look,” I said. “You see, Tante Majorie, the interesting thing about these guys is their ego. So when they use an alias they usually keep their initials. Or maybe their aliases have the same sound value as their real names.”

Her list was in alphabetical order. I sorted the pages to the “R's.”

“How about Elton Rubert?” I asked.

“I don't 'member it, Mr. Davis. My clerk must have put it down, and he don't work here anymore.”

“My name is Dave, Tante Majorie. Dave Robicheaux. Where's your clerk now?”

“He moved up to Ohio, or one of them places up North.”

I wrote down the mailing address of Elton Rubert, a tavern in a small settlement out in the Atchafalaya basin west of Baton Rouge.

“Here's my business card,” I said. “If the man in the photo shows up here again, read his palm or whatever he wants, then call me later. But don't question him or try to find out anything about him for me, Tante Majorie. You've already been a great help.”

“Give me your hand.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She reached out and took my hand, stared into my palm and kneaded it with her fingers. Then she stroked it as though she were smoothing bread dough.

“There's something I ain't told you,” she said. “The last time that man was in here, I read his hand, just like I'm reading yours. He axed me what his lifeline was like. What I didn't tell him, what he didn't know, was he didn't have no lifeline. It was gone.”

I looked at her.

“You ain't understood me, darlin',” she said. “When your lifeline's gone, his kind get it back by stealing somebody else's.” She folded my thumb and fingers into a fist, then pressed it into a ball with her palms. I could feel the heat and oil in her skin. “You hold on to it real hard, Mr. Streak. That tiger don't care who it eat.”

I
HAD HAD TROUBLE
finding a parking place earlier and had left my pickup over by Rampart Street, not far from the Iberville welfare project. When I rounded the corner I saw the passenger door agape, the window smashed out on the pavement, the flannel-wrapped brick still in the gutter. The glove box had been rifled and the stereo ripped out of the panel, as well as most of the ignition wires, which hung below the dashboard like broken spaghetti ends.

Because First District headquarters was only
two blocks away, it took only an hour to get a uniformed officer there to make out the theft report that my insurance company would require. Then I walked to a drugstore on Canal, called Triple A for a wrecker, and called Bootsie and told her that I wouldn't be home as I had promised, that with any luck I could have the truck repaired by late tomorrow.

“Where will you stay tonight?” she asked.

“At Clete's.”

“Dave, if the truck isn't fixed tomorrow, take the bus back home and we'll go get the truck later. Tomorrow's Friday. Let's have a nice weekend.”

“I may have to check out a lead on the way back. It might be a dud, but I can't let it hang.”

“Does this have to do with Drew?”

“No, not at all.”

“Because I wouldn't want to interfere.”

“This may be the guy who tried to take my head off with a crowbar.”

“Oh God, Dave, give it up, at least for a while.”

“It doesn't work that way. The other side doesn't do pit stops.”

“How clever,” she said. “I'll leave the answering machine on in case we're in town.”

“Come on, Boots, don't sign off like that.”

“It's been a long day. I'm just tired. I don't mean what I say.”

“Don't worry, everything's going to be fine. I'll call in the morning. Tell Alafair we'll go crabbing on the bay Saturday.”

I was ready to say goodnight, then she said, as
though she were speaking out of a mist, “Remember what they used to teach us in Catholic school about virginity? They said it was better to remain a virgin until you married so you wouldn't make comparisons. Do you ever make comparisons, Dave?”

I closed my eyes and swallowed as a man might if he looked up one sunny day and felt the cold outer envelope of a glacier sliding unalterably into his life.

W
HEN
I
WAS
recuperating from the bouncing Betty that sent me home from Vietnam, and I began my long courtship with insomnia, I used to muse sometimes on what were the worst images or degrees of fear that my dreams could present me with. In my innocence, I thought that if I could face them in the light of day, imagine them perhaps as friendly gargoyles sitting at the foot of my bed, even hold a reasonable conversation with them, I wouldn't have to drink and drug myself nightly into another dimension where the monsters were transformed into pink zebras and prancing giraffes. But every third or fourth night I was back with my platoon, outside an empty ville that stunk of duck shit and unburied water buffalo; then as we lay pressed against a broken dike in the heated, breathless air, we suddenly realized that somebody back at the firebase had screwed up bad, and that the 105 rounds were coming in short.

The dream about an artillery barrage can be as real as the experience. You want to burrow into the
ground like an insect; your knees are pulled up in a fetal position, your arms squeezed over your pot. Your fear is so great that you think the marrow in your skull will split, the arteries in your brain will rupture from their own dilation, blood will fountain from your nose. You will promise God anything in order to be spared. Right behind you, geysers of mud explode in the air, and the bodies of North Vietnamese regulars are blown out of their graves, their bodies luminescent with green slime and dancing with maggots.

I had seen Vietnamese civilians who had survived B-52 raids. They were beyond speech; they trembled all over and made mewing and keening sounds that you did not want to take with you. When I would wake from my dream my hands would shake so badly that I could hardly unscrew the cap on the whiskey bottle that I kept hidden under my mattress.

As I slept on Clete's couch that night, I had to deal with another creation of my unconscious, one that was no less difficult than the old grainy filmstrips from Vietnam. In my dream I would feel Bootsie next to me, her nude body warm and smooth under the sheet. I would put my face in her hair, kiss her nipples, stroke her stomach and thighs, and she would smile in her sleep, take me in her hand, and place me inside her. I would kiss the tops of her breasts and try to touch her all over while we made love, wishing in my lust that she were two instead of one. Then as it built inside of me like a tree cracking loose from a riverbank,
rearing upward in the warm current, she would smile with drowsy expectation and close her eyes, and her face would grow small and soft and her mouth become as vulnerable as a flower.

But her eyes would open again and they would be as sightless as milk glass. A scaled deformity like the red wings of a butterfly would mask her face, her body would stiffen and ridge with bone, and her womb would be filled with death.

I sat up in the darkness of Clete's living room, the blood beating in my wrists, and opened and closed my mouth as though I had been pulled from beneath the ocean's surface. I stared through the window and across the courtyard at a lamp on a table behind a curtain that was lifting in the breeze from a fan. I could see someone's shadow moving behind the curtain. I wanted to believe that it was the shadow of a nice person, perhaps a man preparing to go to work or an elderly woman fixing breakfast before going to Mass at St. Louis Cathedral. But it was 4
A.M.;
the sky overhead was black, with no hint of the false dawn; the night still belonged to the gargoyles, and the person across the courtyard was probably a hooker or somebody on the downside of an all-night drunk.

I put on my shirt and slacks and slipped on my loafers. I could see Clete's massive form in his bed, a pillow over his face, his porkpie hat on the bedpost. I closed the door softly behind me. The air in the courtyard was electric with the smell of magnolia.

The bar was over by Decatur, one of those
places that never closes, where there is neither cheer nor anger nor expectation and no external measure of one's own failure and loss.

The bottles of bourbon, vodka, rum, gin, rye, and brandy rang with light along the mirror. The oak-handled beer spigots and frosted mugs in the coolers could have been a poem. The bartender propped his arms impatiently on the dish sink.

“I'll serve you, but you got to tell me what it is you want,” he said. He looked at another customer, raised his eyebrows, then looked back at me. He was smiling now. “How about it, buddy?”

“I'd like a cup of coffee.”

“You want a cup of coffee?”

“Yes.”

“This looks like a place where you get a cup of coffee? Too much, too much,” he said, then began wiping off the counter with a rag.

I heard somebody laugh as I walked back out onto the street. I sat on the railway tracks behind the French Market and watched the dawn touch the earth's rim and light the river and the docks and scows over in Algiers, turn the sky the color of bone, and finally fill the east with a hot red glow like the spokes in a wagon wheel. The river looked wide and yellow with silt, and I could see oil and occasionally dead fish floating belly up in the current.

M
Y TRUCK WAS NOT
repaired until six o'clock Friday evening. By the time I hit South Baton Rouge the sun was a red molten ball in the western sky. I crossed the Mississippi and swung off the interstate at Port Allen and continued through the Atchafalaya basin on the old highway. The bar that Eddy Raintree may have been using as his mail drop was on a yellow dirt road that wound through thick stands of dead cypress and copper-colored pools of stagnant water.

It was hammered together from clapboard, plywood, and tarpaper, its screens rusted and gutted, the windows pocked from gravel flung against the building by spinning car tires; it sat up on cinder blocks like an elephant with a broken back. A half-dozen Harleys were parked on the side, and in the back a group of bikers were barbecuing in an oil drum under an oak tree. The yellow dust from the road drifted across their fire.

The Atchafalaya basin is the place you go if you don't fit anywhere else. It encompasses hundreds of square miles of bayous, canals, sandspits, willow
islands, huge inland bays, and flooded woods where the mosquitoes will hover around your head like a helmet and you slap your arms until they're slick with a black-red paste. Twenty minutes from Baton Rouge or an hour and a half from New Orleans, you can punch a hole in the dimension and drop back down into the redneck, coonass, peckerwood South that you thought had been eaten up by the developers of Sunbelt suburbs. It's a shrinking place, but there's a group that holds on to it with a desperate and fearful tenacity.

I slipped my .45 in the back of my belt, along with my handcuffs, put on my seersucker coat, and went inside the bar. The jukebox played Waylon and Merle; the men at the pool table rifled balls into side pockets as though they wanted to drive pain into the wood and leather; and a huge Confederate flag billowed out from the tacks holding it to the ceiling.

A metal sign, the size of a bumper sticker, over the men's-room door said
WHITE POWER.
I used the urinal. Above it, neatly written on a piece of cardboard, were the words
THIS IS THE ONLY SHITHOUSE WE GOT, SO KEEP THE GODDAMN PLACE CLEAN.

The bartender was a small, prematurely balding, suntanned man with thin arms who wore a wash-frayed suit vest with no shirt. On his right forearm was a tattoo of the Marine Corps globe and anchor. He didn't ask me what I wanted; he simply pointed two fingers at me with his cigarette between them.

“I'm looking for Elton Rupert,” I said.

“I don't know him,” he said.

“That's strange. He gets his mail here.”

“That might be. I don't know him. What do you want?”

“How about a 7-Up?”

He took a bottle out of the cooler, snapped off the cap, and set it before me with a glass.

“The ice machine's broken, so there's no ice,” he said.

“That's all right.”

“That's a dollar.”

I put four quarters on the bar. He scraped them up and started to walk away.

“It looks like you have some letters in a box up there. Would you see if Elton's picked up his mail?” I said.

“Like I told you, I don't know the man.”

“You're the regular bartender, you're here most of the time?”

He put out his cigarette in an ashtray, mashing it methodically, then his eyes went out the open front door and across the road as though I were not there. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue.

“I'd appreciate your answering my question,” I said.

“Maybe you should ask those guys barbecuing out back. They might know him.”

“You were in the corps?”

“Yeah.”

“You're only in the crotch once.”

“You were in the corps?”

“No, I was in the army. That's not my point. You're only in the AB once, too.”

He lit another cigarette and bit a hangnail on his thumb.

“I don't know what you're saying, buddy, but this is the wrong fucking place to get in somebody's face,” he said.

A barmaid came in the side door, put her handbag in a cabinet, and carried a sack of trash out the back.

“You're saying you don't understand me, my words confuse you?” I asked.

“What's with you, man? Somebody shoved a bumblebee up your ass?”

“What's your name, podna?”

“Harvey.”