Chapter Two

I was scheduled to visit a convict in Huntsville at eleven A.M. But I didn’t show up until four in the afternoon because I idled away the morning in Hermann Park Zoo and also watched some boys play softball. I wasn’t looking forward to my visit with an inmate named Marcel LaForchette, and I was tired of evil and all its manifestations and our attempts to explain its existence. If you’ve ever dealt with evil, the real deal, up close and personal, you know what I mean.

How do you explain the Hillside Strangler or Ted Bundy? Childhood trauma? Maybe. When you read the details of what they did, you feel a sadness and a sense of revulsion that makes you wonder if we all descend from the same tree.

I don’t mean Marcel was a ghoul or he would sexually torture and murder a woman or girl the way Bundy did. Marcel was made out of different clay, I just didn’t know what. He was from the little town of Jeanerette, down the bayou from New Iberia, and came from a background not much different than mine, poor illiterate Cajuns like my mother, who worked in a laundry, and my father, who trapped and fished and racked pipe on the monkey board of an offshore drilling rig.

I graduated high school when I was seventeen. At the same age, in the same year, Marcel started a three-to-five bit in an adult prison for grand auto. When he was still a fish, he was cannibalized and made the punk of a half-dozen degenerates. You know what was oddest about Marcel? He never got tattooed, and this was in an environment where men wear sleeves from the wrist to the armpit as an indicator of their jailhouse mileage.

The other peculiarity about Marcel was his eyes. They were turquoise, the radiance trapped inside them so intense you couldn’t read them. His thoughts could have been ethereal in nature or straight from the Marquis de Sade, but few people wanted to find out. Marcel was a button man. When Marcel pushed the “off” button, the target hit the floor like a sack of early potatoes.

Twenty miles from the pen, on the two-lane back road, I saw a purple Oldsmobile make the curve behind me. I thought I remembered seeing it at the zoo in Houston, but I couldn’t be sure. I pulled in to a roadside park inside a grove of slash pines. The Olds passed me; its windows were tinted, the license plate caked with mud. Then a phenomenon occurred that I had seen twice before: A wide column of tarantulas crossed the road like a stream of wet tar in a creek bed. Years ago the tarantulas had come to the Texas coast on banana boats and spread inland, hence their presence on a state highway far from Galveston. Nonetheless, I wondered if I was watching an omen, one that meant no good would come from my visit with Marcel, a man whom I could have become or perhaps who could have dressed in my skin.


My relationship with the assistant warden got me in, but it didn’t get me liked. Back then I didn’t have a good reputation, and I was late on top of it, and to make it worse, at least in terms of my conscience, I had lied and told an administrative officer I was investigating a crime in Louisiana and hoped to get some help from Marcel.

Two gun bulls brought him from the field in waist and ankle chains, and sat him down in a small concrete-floored room with two chairs and a wood table and a window that looked out on the Walls, the huge redbrick complex of buildings and ramparts that were an architectural emanation of the original 1848 structure. Both gun bulls were big men with big hands and wore coned cowboy hats, their armpits dark and looped with sweat, their thoughts hidden behind their shades.

“Sorry to make a problem for you guys,” I said.

One of them sucked a tooth. “We don’t have anything else to do,” he said. The door was constructed of both bars and heavy steel plates. He slammed it into the jamb and twisted a tiny key in the lock, a drop of sweat leaking from his hairline.

Marcel was wearing work boots that looked as stiff and uncomfortable as iron, and a dirty white pullover and white pants stained at the knees. He had a Gallic nose and a high forehead and sweaty salt-and-pepper hair; his body was taut as whipcord. He gave me a lopsided grin but did not speak. His eyes were unblinking, the pupils no more than small black dots, as though he were staring at a bright light.

“Why the chains?” I said.

“This is Texas, second only to Arkansas when it comes to the milk of human kindness,” Marcel answered.

“In your postcard you said you had a gift for me.”

“Information.”

“But you want something first?”

“Know what it’s like here when the lights go out? Show a li’l respect.”

I looked at my watch. “I want to get back to New Iberia this evening.”

He worked a crick out of his neck, his chains tinkling. “I’m doing eleven months and twenty-nine days, two jolts back to back. Follow me?”

“No.”

“The judge gave me one day less than a year so I’d have to serve my sentences in a county bag that’s making money off the head count. Except somebody screwed up and sent me to Huntsville. My lawyer is getting me paroled. But I’ll have to do my parole time in Texas.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“I want to go back to Louisiana. I want to go straight.”

“You?”

“Maybe I could do security work. Or be a PI.”

“You were a mechanic, Marcel.”

“No, I got caught up in a gang war in Brooklyn. Then there was a li’l trouble in New Orleans. But I never clipped nobody for hire.”

“Why are you in chains?”

“A Mexican got shanked in the chow line. I was in the vicinity.”

“You didn’t do it?”

“I’d joog a guy when I’m about to go home?”

“Yeah, if he got in your face, you would,” I said.

The sun was a dull red in the west, and I could see dust devils spinning out of a cotton field, breaking apart in the wind. Six mounted gun bulls were silhouetted like black cutouts against a horizon that could have been the lip of the Abyss. “Didn’t you work for the Balangie family?”

“Briefly.”

“I ran into Isolde Balangie last night. At an amusement pier. She was there to see Johnny Shondell.”

“Get the fuck outta here.”

“Teenage girls aren’t drawn to guys like Johnny Shondell?”

“The Balangie and the Shondell families get along like shit on ice cream.”

“What if I told you Isolde Balangie was being delivered to Mark Shondell?”

“ ‘Delivered,’ like to be deflowered?”

“I don’t think she’ll be working in the kitchen,” I said.

I stood up and rattled the door for the screw. Marcel blew out his breath. “I need a sponsor if I’m gonna get out-of-state parole.”

“I have a serious character defect, Marcel,” I said. “I don’t like people using me.”

“Your mother probably got knocked up by a whiskey bottle, but you’re on the square. You know the people on the parole board.”

“You need to rethink how you talk to other people, Marcel,” I said.

“Come on, Dave. I’m telling you the troot’. I want to go straight.”

“What’s the information?”

“Sit down.”

“No.”

The room was growing hotter. I could smell his odor, the dirt and cotton poison, the sweaty socks that probably hung on a line in his cell and never dried, the fermented pruno that was a constant cause of inmate incontinence.

“I ain’t asking much,” he said.

I haven’t been honest. I wasn’t there out of humanity or duty. I was there because I wanted to believe that evil has an explainable origin, one that has nothing to do with unseen forces or even a cancerous flaw in the midst of Creation, and that even the worst of men could reclaim the light they had banished from their souls. I retook my seat. His eyes resembled hundreds of tiny blue-green chips of glass.

“New Orleans was the staging area for the hit on John Kennedy,” he said.

“Old news,” I said. “No, not just old. Ancient.”

“I knew one of the guys in on it. He was an enforcer for the Mob in Brooklyn. His street name was Chicken Cacciatore. I ain’t putting you on. He got mixed up with the CIA and some blackmail schemes in Miami.”

I knew the name of the man he was talking about. He worked for the Miami Better Business Bureau and received paychecks from one of our national political parties as well. He also ran a car-theft ring. I knew that no one could have cared less.

“You just gonna look at me like that?” he said.

“I’ll see if I can help out with the interstate parole situation.”

“No kidding?”

“Why not? You said you’re going straight.”

“Like maybe you can get me a job?”

“Got any car wash experience?”

He lowered his eyes. He shrugged. “I’m up for whatever it takes.”

“That was a joke. You’d better not burn me, Marcel.”

“You still tight with Clete Purcel?” he said.

“He’s my best friend.”

“That’s like saying clap is my favorite shade of pink.”

I rattled the door again and this time called for the screw. “Don’t get your expectations up.”

“Come here,” he said.

There it was, the dictatorial command, the smugness and condescension that constitute the tone of every narcissist. I stepped toward him. “Change your tone,” I replied.

“I tole you I had some information. I was working your crank. I can’t do time no more. I got too many bad things in my head. Maybe I got to get something off my conscience.”

I didn’t want to become his confessor. But neither was I an admirer of the Texas prison system. I propped my arms on the table, my back to the door, blocking the screw’s view of Marcel. His face was narrow and furrowed, his cheeks unshaved, dirty-looking, as though rubbed with soot.

“I was the driver on a whack for the Balangie family,” he said. “The guy was a child molester. He’s in the swamp on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. There’s people in New Iberia who want to know where he’s at.”

“I don’t.”

“Are you serious?” he said.

Like most recidivists, Marcel had spent much of his life inside the system, and his knowledge of the outside world was like a collection of old postcards someone had to explain to him.

“Hey, you listening?” he said. “There’s no statute of limitations on homicide.”

“Put it in your memoir,” I said.

“Why’d you come here?”

“I wondered if you were born without a conscience or if you made yourself that way.”

“You cocksucker.”

“I’ll see what I can do about the parole.”

“I don’t want your help. Stay away from me. Don’t use my name.”

“A deal is a deal,” I said. “You’re stuck with me, Marcel. Disrespect my mother again and I’ll break your jaw.”

Ten minutes later, as I walked outside through the redbrick complex, I wondered which building had housed the electric chair, called Old Sparky by people who thought shaving the hair off a human being and strapping him to a chair and affixing a metal cap to his scalp and frying him alive was the stuff of humor. I also wondered again if the entirety of our species descended from the same antediluvian soup. My guess is that our origins are far more diverse; I also believe that the truth would terrify most of us. What if we had to accept the fact that we pass on the seed of the lizard in our most loving and romantic moments? That the scales of the serpent are at the corners of our eyes, that bloodlust can have its first awakening when the infant’s mouth finds the mother’s nipple?

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