A Stained White Radiance (3 page)

Except I remembered Lyle when he was an eighteen-year-old tunnel rat in my platoon who would crawl naked to the waist down a hole with a flashlight in one hand, a .45 automatic in the other, and a rope tied around his ankle as his lifeline. I also remembered the day he squeezed into an opening that was so narrow his pants were almost scraped off his buttocks; then, as the rope uncoiled and disappeared into the hillside with him, we heard a
whoomph
under the ground, and a red cloud of cordite-laced dust erupted from the hole. When we pulled him back out by his ankle, his arms were still extended straight out in front of him, his hair and face webbed with blood, and two fingers of his right hand were gone as though they had been lopped off with a barber's razor.

People in New Iberia who knew Lyle usually spoke of him as a flimflam man who preyed on the fear and stupidity of his followers, or they thought of him as an entertaining borderline psychotic who had probably cooked his head with drugs. I didn't know what the truth was about Lyle, but I always suspected that in that one-hundredth of a second between the time he snapped the tripwire with his outstretched flashlight or army .45 and the instant when the inside of his head roared with white light and sound and the skin of his face felt like it was painted with burning tallow, he thought he saw with a third eye into all the baseless fears, the
vortex of mysteries, the mockery that all his preparation for this moment had become.

I looked at his Baton Rouge phone number on the piece of message paper, then turned the piece of paper over in my fingers. No, Lyle Sonnier wasn't a joke, I thought. I picked up my telephone and started to dial the number, then realized that Garrett, the ex-Houston cop, was standing in the entrance to my cubicle, his eyes slightly askance when I glanced up at him.

“Oh, hi, thanks for dropping by,” I said.

“Sure. What's up?”

“Not much.” I tapped my fingers idly on the desk blotter, then opened and closed my drawer. “Say, do you have a smoke?”

“Sure,” he said, and took his package out of his shirt pocket. He shook one loose and offered it to me.

“Lucky Strikes are too strong for me,” I said. “Thanks, anyway. How about taking a walk with me?”

“Uh, I'm not quite following this. What are we doing, Dave?”

“Come on, I'll buy you a snowball. I just need some feedback from you.” I smiled at him.

It was bright and warm outside, and a rainbow haze drifted across the lawn from the water sprinklers. The palm trees were green and etched against the hard blue sky, and on the corner, by a huge live oak tree whose roots had cracked the curb and folded the sidewalk up in a peak, a Negro in a white coat sold snowballs out of a handcart that was topped with a beach umbrella.

I bought two spearmint snowballs, handed one to Garrett, and we sat down side by side on an iron bench in the shade. His holster and gunbelt creaked like a horse's saddle. He put on his sunglasses, looked away from me, and constantly fiddled with the corner of his mustache.

“The dispatcher was telling me about that IA beef in Houston,” I said. “It sounds like you got a bad deal.”

“I'm not complaining. I like it over here. I like the food and the French people.”

“But maybe you took two steps back in your career,” I said.

“Like I say, I got no complaint.”

I took a bite out of my snowball and looked straight ahead.

“Let me cut straight to it, podna,” I said. “You're a new man and you're probably a little ambitious. That's fine. But you tainted the crime scene out at the Sonniers'.”

He cleared his throat and started to speak, then said nothing.

“Right? You climbed over that brick retaining wall and looked around on the mudbank? You dropped a cigarette butt on the grass?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No, sir.”

“You're sure?” I looked hard at the side of his face. There was a red balloon of color in his throat.

“I'm sure.”

“All right, forget about it. There's no harm
done. Next time out, though, you secure the scene and wait on the investigator.”

He nodded, looking straight ahead at some thought hidden inside his sunglasses, then said, “Does any of this go in my jacket?”

“No, it doesn't. But that's not the point, here, podna. We're all clear on the real point, aren't we?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, I'll see you inside. I have to return a phone call.”

But actually I didn't want to talk with him anymore. I had a feeling that Deputy Garrett was not a good listener.

I called Lyle Sonnier's number in Baton Rouge and was told by a secretary that he was out of town for the day. I gave the spent .308 casing to our fingerprint man, which was by and large a waste of time, since fingerprints seldom do any good unless you have the prints of a definite suspect already on file. Then I read the brief paperwork on the prowler reports made by Bama Sonnier, but it added nothing to my knowledge of what had happened out at the Sonnier place. I wanted to write it all off and leave Weldon to his false pride and private army of demons, whatever they were, and not spend time trying to help somebody who didn't want any interference in his life. But if other people had had the same attitude toward me, I had to remind myself, I would be dead, in a mental institution, or putting together enough change and crumpled one-dollar bills in a sunrise bar to buy a double shot of Beam, with
a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, in the vain hope that somehow that shuddering rush of heat and amber light through my body would finally cook into ashes every snake and centipede writhing inside me. Then I would be sure that the red sun burning above the oaks in the parking lot would be less a threat to me, that the day would not be filled with metamorphic shapes and disembodied voices that were like slivers of wood in the mind, and that ten
A.M.
would not come in the form of shakes so bad that I couldn't hold a glass of whiskey with both hands.

At noon I drove home for lunch. The dirt road along the bayou was lined with oak trees that had been planted by slaves, and the sun flashed through the moss-hung branches overhead like a heliograph. The hyacinths were thick and in full purple flower along the edges of the bayou, their leaves beaded with drops of water, like quicksilver, in the shade. Out in the sunlight, where the water was brown and hot-looking, dragonflies hung motionless in the air and the armor-plated backs of alligator gars turned in the current with the suppleness of snakes.

A dozen cars and pickup trucks were parked around the boat ramp, dock, and bait shop that I owned and that my wife, Bootsie, and an elderly black man named Batist operated when I wasn't there. I waved at Batist, who was serving barbecue lunches on the telephone-spool tables under the canvas awning that shaded the dock. Then I turned into my dirt drive and parked under the pecan trees
in front of the rambling cypress-and-oak house that my father had built by himself during the Depression. The yard was covered with dead leaves and moldy pecan husks, and the pecan trees grew so thick against the sky that my gallery stayed in shadow almost all day, and at night, even in the middle of summer, I only had to turn on the attic fan to make the house so cool that we had to sleep under sheets.

My adopted daughter, Alafair, had a three-legged pet raccoon named Tripod, and we kept him on a chain attached to a long wire that was stretched between two oaks so he could run up and down in the yard. For some reason whenever someone pulled into the drive Tripod raced back and forth on his wire, wound himself around a tree trunk, tried to clatter up the bark, and usually crashed on top of one of the rabbit hutches, almost garroting himself.

I turned off the truck engine, walked across the soft layer of leaves under my feet, picked him up in my arms, and untangled his chain. He was a beautiful coon, silver-tipped, fat and thick across the stomach and hindquarters, with a big ringed tail, a black mask, and salt-and-pepper whiskers. I opened one of the unused hutches, where I kept his bag of cornbread and dry cracklings, and filled up his food bowl, which was next to the water bowl that he used to wash everything he ate.

When I turned around, Bootsie was watching me from the gallery, smiling. She wore white shorts, wood sandals, a faded pink peasant's blouse, and
a red handkerchief tied up in her honey-colored hair. In the shadow of the gallery her legs and arms seemed to glow with her tan. Her figure was still like a girl's, her back firm with muscle, her hips smooth and undulating when she walked. Sometimes when she was asleep I would put my hand against her back just to feel the tone of her muscles, the swell of her lungs against my palm, as though I wanted to assure myself that all the heat, the energy, the whirl of blood and heartbeat under her tanned skin were indeed real and ongoing and not a deception, that she would not awake in the morning stiff with pain, her connective tissue once more a feast for the disease that swam in her veins.

She leaned against the gallery post with one arm, winked at me, and said, “
Comment la vie,
good-lookin'?”

“How you doin' yourself, beautiful?” I said.

“I made
étoufée
for your lunch.”

“Wonderful.”

“Did Lyle Sonnier get hold of you at the office?”

“No. He called here?”

“Yes, he said he had something important to tell you.”

I squeezed her with one arm and kissed her neck as we went inside. Her hair was thick and brushed in swirls, tapered and stiff on her neck and lovely to touch, like the clipped mane on a pony.

“Do you know why he's calling you?” she said.

“Somebody took a shot at Weldon Sonnier this morning.”

“Weldon? Who'd do that?”

“You got me. I think Weldon knows, but he's not saying. The older Weldon gets, the more I'm convinced he has concrete in his head.”

“Has he been in trouble with some people?”

“You know Weldon. He always went right down the middle. I remember once he got caught stealing food out of the back of the poolroom in St. Martinville. The bartender pulled him out of the kitchen by his ear and twisted it until he squealed in front of everybody in the room. Ten minutes later Weldon came back through the door with tears in his eyes and grabbed a handful of balls off the pool table and smashed every inch of window glass in the place.”

“That's a sad story,” she said.

“They were sad kids, weren't they?” I sat down at the table in front of my smoking bowl of crawfish
étoufée.
The roux was glazed with butter and sprinkled with chopped green onions. The white window curtains with tiny pink flowers on them rose in the breeze that blew through the oak and pecan trees in the sideyard. “Well, let's eat and not worry about other people's problems.”

She stood close to me and stroked my hair with her fingers, then caressed my cheek and neck. I put my arm across her soft rump and pulled her against me.

“But you do worry about other people's problems, don't you?” she said.

“Under it all Weldon's a decent guy. I think it's a contract hit of some kind. I think he's going to lose, too, unless he stops acting so prideful.”

“You mean Weldon's mixed up with the mob or something?”

“After he got out of the navy I heard he flew for Air America. It was a CIA front in Vietnam. I think that stuff involves a lifetime membership.” I clicked my spoon on the side of the étoufée bowl. “Or maybe Bobby Earl has something to do with it. A guy like that doesn't forget somebody dragging him through the tossed salad by his necktie.”

“Ah, a big smile on our detective's face.”

“It would have made wonderful footage on the evening news.”

She leaned over me, pressed my head against her breasts, and kissed my hair. Then she sat across from me and started peeling a crawfish.

“Are you busy after lunch?” she asked.

“What'd you have in mind?”

“You can't ever tell.” She looked up and smiled at me with her eyes.

I am one of the few people I have ever known who has been given two second chances in his life. After investing years in being a drunk and sawing myself apart in pieces, I was given back my sobriety and eventually my self-respect by what people in Alcoholics Anonymous call a Higher Power; then after the murder of my wife Annie, Bootsie Mouton came back into my life unexpectedly, as though all the years had not passed and suddenly it was once again the summer of 1957 when we first met at a dance out on Spanish Lake.

I'll never forget the first time I kissed her. It was at twilight under the Evangeline Oaks on Bayou
Teche in St. Martinville, and the sky was lavender and pink and streaked with fire along the horizon, and she looked up into my face like an opening flower, and when my lips touched hers she came against me and I felt the heat in her suntanned body and suddenly realized that I'd never had any idea of what a kiss could be. She opened and closed her mouth, slowly at first, then wider, changing the angle, her chin lifting, her lips dry and smooth, her face confident and serene and loving. When she let her hands slide down on my chest and rested her head against mine, I could hardly swallow, and the fireflies spun webs of red light in the black-green tangle of oak limbs overhead, and the sky from horizon to horizon was filled with the roar of cicadas.

I stopped eating and walked around behind her chair, leaned down and kissed her on the mouth.

“My, what kind of thoughts have you been having this morning?” she said.

“You're the best, Boots,” I said.

She looked up at me, and her eyes were kind and soft, and I touched her hair and cheek with my fingers.

Then she looked out the window toward the front road.

“Who's that?” she said.

A silver Cadillac with television and CB antennas and windows that were tinted almost black turned off the dirt road by the bayou and parked next to my pickup truck under the pecan trees. The driver cut the engine and stepped out into the yard, dressed in a suit that was silver-charcoal,
a blue shirt with French cuffs, a striped red-and-blue necktie, and wrap-around black sunglasses. He pulled off his sunglasses gingerly with his right hand, which had only a carved, half-moon area where the two bottom fingers should have been, widened his eyes to let them adjust to the light, and walked over the layer of leaves and pecan husks toward the gallery. His black shoes were shined so brightly they could have been patent leather.