Sunset Limited (22 page)

“You see a percentage in this, Purcel?” Benny Grogan said.

Clete looked at the elderly woman squatted by her son.

“You should go to church today, burn a candle, Mouse,” he said.

He got in his convertible and drove to the corner, his tailpipe billowing white smoke, and turned down a shady side street toward St. Charles. He took his seal-top coffee mug off the dashboard and drank from it.

NINETEEN

IT WAS EARLY SATURDAY MORNING and Clete was changing a tire in my drive while he talked, spinning a lug wrench on a nut, his love handles wedging over his belt.

“So I took River Road and barrel-assed across the Huey Long and said goodbye to New Orleans for a while,” he said. He squinted up at me and waited. “What?” he said.

“Scarlotti is a small player in this, Clete,” I said.

“That’s why you and Helen were pounding on his cage?” He got to his feet and threw his tools in the trunk. “I’ve got to get some new tires. I blew one coming off the bridge. What d’you mean, small player? That pisses me off, Dave.”

“I think he and the Giacano family put the hit on Cool Breeze because he ratted them out to the Feds. But if you wanted to get even for Megan, you probably beat up on the wrong guy.”

“The greaseballs are taking orders, even though they’ve run the action in New Orleans for a hundred years? Man, I learn something every day. Did you read that article in the
Star
about Hitler hiding out in Israel?”

His face was serious a moment, then he stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and the smile came back in his eyes and he twirled his porkpie hat on his finger while he looked at me, then at the sunrise behind the flooded cypresses.

I HELPED BATIST AT the bait shop, then drove to Cool Breeze’s house on the west side of town and was told by a neighbor he was out at Mout’s flower farm.

Mout’ and a Hmong family from Laos farmed three acres of zinnias and chrysanthemums in the middle of a sugarcane plantation on the St. Martinville road, and each fall, when football season began, they cut and dug wagonloads of flowers that they sold to florists in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I drove across a cattle guard and down a white shale road until I saw a row of poplars that was planted as a windbreak and Cool Breeze hoeing weeds out in the sunlight while his father sat in the shade reading a newspaper by a card table with a pitcher of lemonade on it.

I parked my truck and walked down the rows of chrysanthemums. The wind was blowing and the field rippled with streaks of brown and gold and purple color.

“I never figured you to take up farming, Breeze,” I said.

“I give up on some t’ings. So my father made this li’l job for me, that’s all,” he said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Getting even wit’ people, t’ings like that. I ain’t giving nobody reason to put me back in jail.”

“You know what an exhumation order is?” I asked.

As with many people of color, he treated questions from white men as traps and didn’t indicate an answer one way or another. He stooped over and jerked a weed and its root system out of the soil.

“I want to have a pathologist examine your wife’s remains. I don’t believe she committed suicide,” I said.

He stopped work and rested his hands on the hoe handle. His hands looked like gnarled rocks around the wood. Then he put one hand inside the top of his shirt and rubbed his skin, his eyes never leaving mine.

“Say again?”

“I checked with the coroner’s office in St. Mary Parish. No autopsy was done on Ida’s body. It simply went down as a suicide.”

“What you telling me?”

“I don’t think she took her life.”

“Didn’t nobody have reason to kill her. Unless you saying I… Wait a minute, you trying to—”

“You’re not a killer, Breeze. You’re just a guy who got used by some very bad white people.”

He started working the hoe between the plants again, his breath coming hard in his chest, his brow creased like an old leather glove. The wind was cool blowing across the field, but drops of sweat as big as marbles slid off his neck. He stopped his work again and faced me, his eyes wet.

“What we got to do to get this here order you talking about?” he asked.

WHEN I GOT HOME a peculiar event was taking place. Alafair and three of her friends were in the front yard, watching a man with a flattop haircut stand erect on an oak limb, then topple into space, grab a second limb and hang from it by his knees.

I parked my pickup and walked across the yard while Boxleiter’s eyes, upside down, followed me. He bent his torso upward, flipped his legs in the air, and did a half-somersault so that he hit the ground on the balls of his feet.

“Alafair, would you guys head on up to the house and tell Bootsie I’ll be there in a minute?” I said.

“She’s on the gallery. Tell her yourself,” Alafair said.

”
Alf
…” I said.

She rolled her eyes as though the moment was more than her patience could endure, then she and her friends walked through the shade toward the house.

“Swede, it’s better you bring business to my office,” I said.

“I couldn’t sleep last night. I always sleep, I mean dead, like stone. But not last night. There’s some heavy shit coming down, man. It’s a feeling I get. I’m never wrong.”

“Like what?”

“This ain’t no ordinary grift.” He fanned his hand at the air, as though sweeping away cobweb. “I never had trouble handling the action. You draw lines, you explain the rules, guys don’t listen, they keep coming at you, you unzip their package. But that ain’t gonna work on this one.” He blotted the perspiration off his face with the back of his forearm.

“Sorry. You’re not making much sense, Swede.”

“I don’t got illusions about how guys like me end up. But Cisco and Megan ain’t like me. I was sleeping in the Dismas House in St. Louis after I finished my first bit. They came and got me. They see somebody jammed up, people getting pushed around, they make those people’s problem their problem. They get that from their old man. That’s why these local cocksuckers nailed him to a wall.”

“You’re going have to watch your language around my home, partner,” I said.

His hand shot out and knotted my shirt in a ball.

“You’re like every cop I ever knew. You don’t listen. I can’t stop what’s going on.”

I grabbed his wrist and thrust it away from me. He opened and closed his hands impotently.

“I hate guys like you,” he said.

“Oh?”

“You go to church with your family, but you got no idea what life is like for two-thirds of the human race.”

“I’m going inside now, Swede. Don’t come around here anymore.”

“What’d I do, use bad language again?”

“You cut up Anthony Pollock. I can’t prove it, and it didn’t happen in our jurisdiction, but you’re an iceman.”

“If I did it in a uniform, you’d be introducing me at the Kiwanis Club. I hear you adopted your kid and treated her real good. That’s a righteous deed, man. But the rest of your routine is comedy. A guy with your brains ought to be above it.”

He walked down the slope to the dirt road and his parked car. When he was out of the shade he stopped and turned around. His granny glasses were like ground diamonds in the sunlight.

“How many people did it take to crucify Megan and Cisco’s old man and cover it up for almost forty years? I’m an iceman? Watch out one of your neighbors don’t tack you up with a nail gun,” he yelled up the slope while two fishermen unhitching a boat trailer stared at him openmouthed.

I RAKED AND BURNED leaves that afternoon and tried not to think about Swede Boxleiter. But in his impaired way he had put his thumb on a truth about human behavior that eludes people who are considered normal. I remembered a story of years ago about a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in a small Mississippi town not far from the Pearl River. One afternoon he whistled at a white woman on the street. Nothing was said to him, but that night two Klansmen kidnapped him from the home of his relatives, shot and killed him, and wrapped his body in a net of bricks and wire and sank it in the river.

Everyone in town knew who had done it. Two local lawyers, respectable men not associated with the Klan, volunteered to defend the killers. The jury took twenty minutes to set them free. The foreman said the verdict took that long because the jury had stopped deliberations to send out for soda pop.

It’s a story out of another era, one marked by shame and collective fear, but its point is not about racial injustice but instead the fate of those who bear Cain’s mark.

A year after the boy’s death a reporter from a national magazine visited the town by the Pearl River to learn the fate of the killers. At first they had been avoided, passed by on the street, treated at grocery or hardware counters as though they had no first or last names, then their businesses failed—one owned a filling station, the other a fertilizer yard—and their debts were called. Both men left town, and when asked their whereabouts old neighbors would only shake their heads as though the killers were part of a vague and decaying memory.

The town that had been complicit in the murder ostracized those who had committed it. But no one had been ostracized in St. Mary Parish. Why? What was the difference in the accounts of the black teenager’s murder and Jack Flynn’s, both of which seemed collective in nature?

Answer: The killers in Mississippi were white trash and economically dispensable.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON I FOUND Archer Terrebonne on his side patio, disassembling a spinning reel on a glass table top. He wore slippers and white slacks and a purple shirt that was embroidered with his initials on the pocket. Overhead, two palm trees with trunks that were as gray and smooth as elephant hide creaked against a hard-blue sky. Terrebonne glanced up at me, then resumed his concentration, but not in an unpleasant way.

“Sorry to bother you on Sunday, but I suspect you’re quite busy during the week,” I said.

“It’s no bother. Pull up a chair. I wanted to thank you for the help you gave my daughter.”

You didn’t do wide end runs around Archer Terrebonne.

“It’s wonderful to see her fresh and bright in the morning, unharried by all the difficulties she’s had, all the nights in hospitals and calls from policemen,” he said.

“I have a problem, Mr. Terrebonne. A man named Harpo Scruggs is running all over our turf and we can’t get a net over him.”

“Scruggs? Oh yes, quite a character. I thought he was dead.”

“His uncle was a guy named Harpo Delahoussey. He did security work at y’all’s cannery, the one that burned.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“We think Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a black man named Willie Broussard and almost drowned Jack Flynn’s daughter.”

He set down the tiny screwdriver and the exposed brass mechanisms of the spinning reel. The tips of his delicate fingers were bright with machine oil. The wind blew his white-gold hair on his forehead.

“But you use the father’s name, not the daughter’s. What inference should I gather from that, sir? My family has a certain degree of wealth and hence we should feel guilt over Jack Flynn’s death?”

“Why do you think he was killed?”

“That’s your province, Mr. Robicheaux, not mine. But I don’t think Jack Flynn was a proletarian idealist. I think he was a resentful, envious troublemaker who couldn’t get over the fact his family lost their money through their own mismanagement. Castle Irish don’t do well when their diet is changed to boiled cabbage.”

“He fought Franco’s fascists in Spain. That’s a peculiar way to show envy.”

“What’s your purpose here?”

“Your daughter is haunted by something in the past she can’t tell anybody about. It’s connected to the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I wonder if it’s Jack Flynn’s death that bothers her.”

He curled the tips of his fingers against his palm, as though trying to rub the machinist’s oil off them, looking at them idly.

“She killed her cousin when she was fifteen. Or at least that’s what she’s convinced herself,” he said. He saw my expression change, my lips start to form a word. “We had a cabin in Durango at the foot of a mountain. They found the key to my gun case and started shooting across a snowfield. The avalanche buried her cousin in an arroyo. When they dug her out the next day, her body was frozen upright in the shape of a cross.”

“I didn’t know that, sir.”

“You do now. I’m going in to eat directly. Would you care to join us?”

When I walked to my truck I felt like a man who had made an obscene remark in the midst of a polite gathering. I sat behind the steering wheel and stared at the front of the Terrebonne home. It was encased in shadow now, the curtains drawn on all the windows. What historical secrets, what private unhappiness did it hold? I wondered if I would ever know. The late sun hung like a shattered red flame in the pine trees.

TWENTY

I REMEMBER A CHRISTMAS DAWN five years after I came home from Vietnam. I greeted it in an all-night bar built of slat wood, the floor raised off the dirt with cinder blocks. I walked down the wood steps into a deserted parking area, my face numb with alcohol, and stood in the silence and looked at a solitary live oak hung with Spanish moss, the cattle acreage that was gray with winter, the hollow dome of sky that possessed no color at all, and suddenly I felt the vastness of the world and all the promise it could hold for those who were still its children and had not severed their ties with the rest of the human family.

Monday morning I visited Megan at her brother’s house and saw a look in her eyes that I suspected had been in mine on that Christmas morning years ago.

Had her attackers held her underwater a few seconds more, her body would have conceded what her will would not: Her lungs and mouth and nose would have tried to draw oxygen out of water and her chest and throat would have filled with cement. In that moment she knew the heartbreaking twilight-infused beauty that the earth can offer, that we waste as easily as we tear pages from a calendar, but neither would she ever forget or forgive the fact that her reprieve came from the same hands that did Indian burns on her skin and twisted her face down into the silt.