A Stained White Radiance

EPILOGUE

We took our vacation in Key West in late summer, when the weather is hot and bright, prices are cheap, the streets are empty of tourists, and the Gulf is lime green and streaked with whitecaps as far as the eye can see, and dark patches of water, like clouds of India ink, drift across the coral reefs.

But it was more than simply a respite from police work.

I had taken indefinite leave from the sheriff's department. I let other people's problems, the seriousness, all the fury and mire and complexity, pull out of my grasp, in the same way that you finally tire of grief or guilt or a bonegrinding on going contention with the world. One morning, perhaps just before sunrise, you turn your eyes in a different direction and notice a blue heron rising from the reeds along the bayou's edge, a gator's walnut-ridged eyes moving silently through a milky skim of algae and floating twigs, a glowing radiance on the earth's rim that suddenly breaks through the black trunks of the cypress trees with such a white brilliance that you want to shield your eyes.

Joey Gouza is back with the big stripes in Angola pen, but not for the murder of Garrett or Jewel Fluck, or even the assault-and-battery beef. Joey's final legal chapter was written in the New Orleans city prison. He set fire to his mattress, plugged up the commode with his clothes, flooded the whole cell block, and urinated through the bars on a gunbull. He tried to tell anyone who would listen that both the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia had put a hit on him. No one was interested, or perhaps, more accurately, no one cared.

Finally he was moved into an isolation cell with a solid iron door, because he was convinced that an AB member, with the consent of the Mafioso who had takena Taser dart in the neck that had been intended for Joey, was going to turn him into a flaming object lesson by hurling a Molotov cocktail through his bars.

Two days later a new guard walked him down to the shower stalls and the small concrete room that contained barbells and a broken universal gym, where Joey was supposed to shower and exercise by himself. Then the guard let eight other men out of their cells. Joey Gouza broke off a five-inch shank, made from a jagged sliver of window glass, in another inmate's shoulder.

The investigator's report stated that the other inmate had celled with Jewel Fluck in Parchman, that his upper torso was tattooed with swastikas and iron crosses, and that at the time of the attack he had been carrying a razor blade mounted on a toothbrush handle.

But who cared?

Joey Gouza went down for attempted murder.

I'd like to be able to tell you that Bobby Earl's political career ended, that somehow the events in the park revealed him publicly as a fraud or a physical coward, or that his followers turned against him. But it didn't happen. It couldn't.

I had been determined to prove that Bobby Earl was fronting points for Joey Gouza, or that he was connected with arms and dope trafficking in the tropics. I was guilty of that age-old presumption that the origins of social evil can be traced to villainous individuals, that we just need to identify them, lock them in cages, or even march them to the executioner's wall, and this time, yes, this time, we'll catch a fresh breeze in our sails and set ourselves on a true course.

But Bobby Earl is out there by consent. He has his thumb on a dark pulse, and like all confidence men, he knows that his audience wishes to be conned. He learned long ago to listen, and he knows that if he listens carefully they'll tell him what they need to hear. It's a contract of mutual deceit by which they open up their flak vests and take it right through the breastbone.

If it were not he, it would be someone like himmisanthropic, beguiling, educated, someone who, as an expresident's wife once said, allows the rest of us to feel comfortable with our prejudices.

I think the end for Bobby Earl will come in the same fashion as it does for all his kind. Unlike the members of The Pool and that great army of villainous buffoons trying to sneak through life on side streets, Bobby Earl's ilk want power so badly that at some point in their lives they make a conscious choice to embrace evil. It's not a gradual seduction. They do it without reservation, and that's when they leave the rest of us. You know it when it happens, too. No amount of cosmetic surgery can mask the psychological defonnity in their eyes.

Then unbeknown to themselves they set about erecting their own scaffolds; their most loyal adherents become their executioners, just as Mussolini's people hanged him upside down in a filling station and Robespierre's followers trundled him over their heads to the guillotine.

Then the audience moves on and seeks a new magician.

But people like Bobby Earl don't read history books.

As I watched Alafair dive off our rented boat, just the other side of Seven-Mile Reef, her tan body glazed with sunlight and saltwater, I thought of children everywhere, and I thought of the pain that can be inflicted on them like a stone bruise in the soul, like a convoluted, blood-red rose pushed deep into the tissue by a brutal thumb.

She floated above the reef, watching the schools of clown fish and mackerel, blowing saltwater out her snorkel, the small waves lapping across her back and thighs. Thirty feet below, the sand was like ground diamonds; you could see each black spike in the nests of sea urchins, and the fire coral was so bright it looked as if it would scorch your hand with the intensity of a hot stove.

Then I saw a long, tubular shadow ripple across the crown of the reef and flatten out on the ocean floor. It must have been eight feet long. A floating island of kelp obscured my angle of vision, then the shadow changed directions and I saw the glistening brown back of a hammerhead shark.

When he turned and flipped his tail fin I could see one round, flat, glassy eye, his gash of a mouth, the jagged row of razor teeth, the obscene pale whiteness of his stomach.

I yelled at Alafair, but her ears were half underwater and she didn't hear me. I kicked off my canvas shoes, stepped up on the gunwale, hit the water in a long, flat dive, and reached her in three strokes. By now she had seen the shark, and her face was terrified when I grabbed her around the waist and began swimming back to the boat. Then a peculiar thing happened. She knew that we were fighting against each other, that our legs were thrashing impotently in a shimmering cone of wet light above the shark's murderous gaze, and I saw a quiet, almost naive expression of resolution replace the fear in her face. She worked the mask and snorkel off her head, hooked them on her arm, and began to swim with me toward the boat ladder, her body horizontal, her head twisting from side to side so she could breathe above the chop.

I pushed her rump over the gunwale, then toppled over it myself onto the deck. I hugged her against me on the hot boards, and pressed her head tightly under my chin.

She looked up at me, and I saw concern coming back into her face.

"Wow!" I said, and tried to grin.

"What kind of shark was that, Dave?"

"It was a nurse shark. They're big wimps. But who wants to take any chances?"

"His head… it was ugly. It looked like he'd eaten a big brick." Then she smiled at her own joke.

"Those nurse sharks are not only wimps, they're dumb wimps. They're always swimming into the sides of boats and reefs and things," I said.

Her brown eyes were happy and full of light again.

"Hey, Dave, we gonna put out the lines and troll for mackerel?"

"Sure, little guy," I said, and squeezed her against my chest again, my eyes tightly shut, hoping that she would not feel the fearful beating of my heart.