Sunset Limited (15 page)

Megan had stopped eating. Her cheeks were freckled with discoloration, as though an invisible pool of frigid air had burned her face.

“What is this, Dave?” Clete said.

“Maybe nothing,” I said.

“Just lunch conversation?” he said.

“The Terrebonnes have had their thumbs in lots of pies,” I said.

“Will you excuse me, please?” Megan said.

She walked between the tables to the rest room, her purse under her arm, her funny straw hat crimped across the back of her red hair.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Clete said.

THAT EVENING I DROVE to Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club in Lafayette and worked out with free weights and on the Hammer-Strength machines, then ran two miles on the second-story track that overlooked the basketball courts.

I hung my towel around my neck and did leg stretches on the handrail. Down below, some men were playing a pickup basketball game, thudding into one another clumsily, slapping one another’s shoulders when they made a shot. But an Indonesian or Malaysian man at the end of the court, where the speed and heavy bags were hung, was involved in a much more intense and solitary activity. He wore sweats and tight red leather gloves, the kind with a metal dowel across the palm, and he ripped his fists into the heavy bag and sent it spinning on the chain, then speared it with his feet, hard enough to almost knock down a kid who was walking by.

He grinned at the boy by way of apology, then moved over to the speed bag and began whacking it against the rebound board, without rhythm or timing, slashing it for the effect alone.

“You were at Cisco’s house. You’re Mr. Robicheaux,” a woman’s voice said behind me.

It was Billy Holtzner’s daughter. But her soapy blue eyes were focused now, actually pleasant, like a person who has stepped out of one identity into another.

“You remember me?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“We didn’t introduce ourselves the other day. I’m Geraldine Holtzner. The boxer down there is Anthony. He’s an accountant for the studio. I’m sorry for our rudeness.”

“You weren’t rude.”

“I know you don’t like my father. Not many people do. We’re not problem visitors here. If you have one, it’s Cisco Flynn,” she said.

“Cisco?”

“He owes my father a lot of money. Cisco thinks he can avoid his responsibilities by bringing a person like Swede Boxleiter around.”

She gripped the handrail and extended one leg at a time behind her. Her wild, brownish-red hair shimmered with perspiration.

“You let that guy down there shoot you up?” I asked.

“I’m all right today. Sometimes I just have a bad day. You’re a funny guy for a cop. You ever have a screen test?”

“Why not get rid of the problem altogether?”

But she wasn’t listening now. “This area is full of violent people. It’s the South. It lives in the woodwork down here. This black man who’s coming after the Terrebonnes, why don’t you do something about him?” she said.

“Which black man? Are you talking about Cool Breeze Broussard?”

“Which? Yeah, that’s a good question. You know the story about the murdered slave woman, the children who were poisoned? If I had stuff like that in my family, I’d jump off a cliff. No wonder Lila Terrebonne’s a drunk.”

“It was nice seeing you,” I said.

“Gee, why don’t you just say fuck you and turn your back on people?”

Her skin was the color of milk that has browned in a pan, her blue eyes dancing in her face. She wiped her hair and throat with a towel and threw it at me.

“That kick-boxing stuff Anthony’s doing? He learned it from me,” she said.

Then she raised her face up into mine, her lips slightly parted, speckled with saliva, her eyes filled with anticipation and need.

ON THE WAY BACK home I stopped in the New Iberia city library and looked up a late-nineteenth-century reminiscence written about our area by a New England lady named Abigail Dowling, a nurse who came here during a yellow fever epidemic and was radicalized not by slavery itself and the misery it visited upon the black race but by what she called its dehumanizing effects on the white.

One of the families about which she wrote in detail was the Terrebonnes of St. Mary Parish.

Before the Civil War, Elijah Terrebonne had been a business partner in the slave trade with Nathan Bedford Forrest and later had ridden at Forrest’s side during the battle of Brice’s Crossing, where a minié shattered his arm and took him out of the war. But Elijah had also been below the bluffs at Fort Pillow when black troops who begged on their knees were executed at point-blank range in retaliation for a sixty-mile scorched-earth sweep by Federal troops into northern Mississippi.

“He was of diminutive stature, with a hard, compact body. He sat his horse with the rigidity of a clothes pin,” Abigail Dowling wrote in her journal. “His countenance was handsome, certainly, of a rosy hue, and it exuded a martial light when he talked of the War. In consideration of his physical stature I tried to overlook his imperious manner. In spite of his propensity for miscegenation, he loved his wife and their twin girls and was unduly possessive about them, perhaps in part because of his own romantic misdeeds.

“Unfortunately for the poor black souls on his plantation, the lamps of charity and pity did not burn brightly in his heart. I have been told General Forrest tried to stop the slaughter of negro soldiers below the bluffs. I believe Elijah Terrebonne had no such redemptive memory for himself. I believe the fits of anger that made him draw human blood with a horse whip had their origins in the faces of dead black men who journeyed nightly to Elijah’s bedside, vainly begging mercy from one who had murdered his soul.”

The miscegenation mentioned by Abigail Dowling involved a buxom slave woman named Lavonia, whose husband, Big Walter, had been killed by a falling tree. Periodically Elijah Terrebonne rode to the edge of the fields and called her away from her work, in view of the other slaves and the white overseer, and walked her ahead of his horse into the woods, where he copulated with her in an unused sweet potato cellar. Later, he heard that the overseer had been talking freely in the saloon, joking with a drink in his hand at the fireplace, stoking the buried resentment and latent contempt of other landless whites about the lust of his employer. Elijah laid open his face with a quirt and adjusted his situation by moving Lavonia up to the main house as a cook and a wet nurse for his children.

But when he returned from Brice’s Crossing, with pieces of bone still working their way out of the surgeon’s incision in his arm, the Teche country was occupied, his house and barns looted, the orchards and fields reduced to soot blowing in the wind. The only meat on the plantation consisted of seven smoked hams Lavonia had buried in the woods before the Federal flotilla had come up the Teche.

The Terrebonnes made coffee out of acorns and ate the same meager rations as the blacks. Some of the freed males on the plantation went to work on shares; others followed the Yankee soldiers marching north into the Red River campaign. When the food ran out, Lavonia was among a group of women and elderly folk who were assembled in front of their cabins by Elijah Terrebonne and then told they would have to leave.

She went to Elijah’s wife.

Abigail Dowling wrote in the journal, “It was a wretched sight, this stout field woman without a husband, with no concept of historical events or geography, about to be cast out in a ruined land filled with night riders and drunken soldiers. Her simple entreaty could not have described her plight more adequately: ‘I’se got fo’ children, Missy. What’s we gonna go? What’s I gonna feed them with?’”

Mrs. Terrebonne granted her a one-month reprieve, either to find a husband or to receive help from the Freedmen’s Bureau.

The journal continued: “But Lavonia was a sad and ignorant creature who thought guile could overcome the hardness of heart in her former masters. She put cyanide in the family’s food, believing they would become ill and dependent upon her for their daily care.

“Both of the Terrebonne girls died. Elijah would have never known the cause of their deaths, except for the careless words of Lavonia’s youngest child, who came to him, the worst choice among men, to seek solace. The child blurted out, ‘My mama been crying, Mas’er. She got poison in a bottle under her bed. She say the devil give it to her and made her hurt somebody with it. I think she gonna take it herself.’

“By firelight Elijah dug up the coffins of his children from the wet clay and unwound the wrappings from their bodies. Their skin was covered with pustules the color and shape of pearls. He pressed his hand on their chests and breathed the air trapped in their lungs and swore it smelled of almonds.

“His rage and madness could be heard all the way across the fields to the quarters. Lavonia tried to hide with her children in the swamp, but to no avail. Her own people found her, and in fear of Elijah’s wrath, they hanged her with a man’s belt from a persimmon tree.”

WHAT DID IT ALL mean? Why did Geraldine Holtzner allude to the story at Red’s Gym in Lafayette? I didn’t know. But in the morning Megan Flynn telephoned me at the dock. Clete Purcel had been booked on a DWI and a black man had started a fire on the movie set in the Terrebonnes’ front yard.

She wanted to talk.

“Talk? Clete’s in the bag and you want to talk?” I said.

“I’ve done something terribly wrong. I’m just down the road. Will it bother you if I come by?”

“Yes, it will.”

“Dave?”

“What?”

Then her voice broke.

THIRTEEN

MEGAN SAT AT A BACK table in the bait shop with a cup of coffee and waited for me while I rang up the bill on two fishermen who had just finished eating at the counter. Her hat rested by her elbow and her hair blew in the wind from the fan, but there was a twisted light in her eyes, as though she could not concentrate on anything outside her skin.

I sat down across from her.

“Y’all had a fight?” I asked.

“It was over the black man who started the fire,” she said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“It’s Cool Breeze Broussard. It has to be. He was going to set fire to the main house but something scared him off. So he poured gasoline under a trailer on the set.”

“Why should you and Clete fight over that?”

“I helped get Cool Breeze out of jail. I knew about all his trouble in St. Mary Parish and his wife’s suicide and his problems with the Terrebonne family. I wanted the story. I pushed everything else out of my mind… Maybe I planted some ideas in him about revenge.”

“You still haven’t told me why y’all fought.”

“Clete said people who set fires deserve to be human candles themselves. He started talking about some marines he saw trapped inside a burning tank.”

“Breeze has always had his own mind about things. He’s not easily influenced, Megan.”

“Swede will kill him. He’ll kill anybody he thinks is trying to hurt Cisco.”

“That’s it, huh? You think you’re responsible for getting a black man into it with a psychopath?”

“Yes. And he’s not a psychopath. You’ve got this guy all wrong.”

“How about getting Clete into the middle of it? You think that might be a problem, too?”

“I feel very attached—”

“Cut it out, Megan.”

“I have a deep—”

“He was available and you made him your point man. Except he doesn’t have any idea of what’s going on.”

Her eyes drifted onto mine, then they began to film. I heard Batist come inside the shop, then go back out.

“Why’d you want to put him on that movie set?” I said.

“My brother. He’s mixed up with bad people in the Orient. I think the Terrebonnes are in it, too.”

“What do you know about the Terrebonnes?”

“My father hated them.”

A customer came in and picked a package of Red Man off the wire rack and left the money on the register. Megan straightened her back and touched at one eye with her finger.

“I called the St. Mary Sheriff’s Department. Clete will be arraigned at ten,” I said.

“You don’t hold me in very high regard, do you?”

“You just made a mistake. Now you’ve owned up to it. I think you’re a good person, Meg.”

“What do I do about Clete?”

“My father used to say never treat a brave man as less.”

“I wish Cisco and I had never come back here.”

But you always do, I thought.
Because of a body arched into wood planks, its blood pooling in the dust, its crusted wounds picked by chickens
.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

“I’m going. I’ll be at Cisco’s house for a spell.”

She put a half dollar on the counter for the coffee and walked out the screen door. Then, just before she reached her automobile, she turned and looked back at me. She held her straw hat in her fingers, by her thigh, and with her other hand she brushed her hair back on her head, her face lifted into the sunlight.

Batist flung a bucket full of water across one of the spool tables.

“When they make cow eyes at you, it ain’t ‘cause they want to go to church, no,” he said.

“What?”

“Her daddy got killed when she was li’l. She always coming round to talk to a man older than herself. Like they ain’t no other man in New Iberia. You got to go to collitch to figure it out?” he said.

TWO HOURS LATER HELEN and I drove over to Mout’ Broussard’s house on the west side of town. A black four-door sedan with tinted windows and a phone antenna was parked in the dirt driveway, the back door open. Inside, we could see a man in a dark suit, wearing aviator glasses, unlocking the handcuffs on Cool Breeze Broussard.

Helen and I walked toward the car as Adrien Glazier and two male FBI agents got out with Cool Breeze.

“What’s happenin’, Breeze?” I said.

“They give me a ride to my daddy’s,” he replied.

“Your business here needs to wait, Mr. Robicheaux,” Adrien Glazier said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the male agents touch Cool Breeze on the arm with one finger and point for him to wait on the gallery.