A Stained White Radiance

CHAPTER 8

My truck was not repaired until six o'clock Friday evening. By the time I hit South Baton Rouge the sun was a red molten ball in the western sky. I crossed the Mississippi and swung off the interstate at Port Allen and continued through the Atchafalaya basin on the old highway.

The bar that Eddy Raintree may have been using as his mail drop was on a yellow dirt road that wound through thick stands of dead cypress and copper-colored pools of stagnant water.

It was hammered together from clapboard, plywood, and tarpaper, its screens rusted and gutted, the windows pocked from gravel flung against the building by spinning car tires; it sat up on cinder blocks like an elephant with a broken back. A half-dozen Harleys were parked on the side, and in the back a group of bikers were barbecuing in an oil drum under an oak tree. The yellow dust from the road drifted across their fire.

The Atchafalaya basin is the place you go if you don't fit anywhere else. It encompasses hundreds of square miles of bayous, canals, sandpits, willow islands, huge inland bays, and flooded woods where the mosquitoes will hover around your head like a helmet and you slap your arms until they're slick with a black-red paste. Twenty minutes from Baton Rouge or an hour and a half from New Orleans, you can punch a hole in the dimension and drop back down into the redneck, coonass, peckerwood South that you thought had been eaten up by the developers of Sunbelt suburbs. It's a shrinking place, but there's a group that holds on to it with a desperate and fearful tenacity.

I slipped my.45 in the back of my belt, along with my handcuffs, put on my seersucker coat, and went inside the bar. The jukebox played Waylon and Merle; the men at the pool table rifled balls into side pockets as though they wanted to drive pain into the wood and leather; and a huge Confederate flag billowed out from the tacks holding it to' the ceiling.

A metal sign, the size of a bumper sticker, over the men's room door said WHITE POWER. I used the urinal. Above it, neatly written on a piece of cardboard, were the words THIS IS THE ONLY SHITHOUSE WE GOT, SO KEEP THE GODDAMN PLACE CLEAN.

The bartender was a small, prematurely balding, suntanned man with thin arms who wore a wash-frayed suit vest with no shirt. On his right forearm was a tattoo of the Marine Corps globe and anchor. He didn't ask me what I wanted; he simply pointed two fingers at me with his cigarette between them.

"I'm looking for Elton Rupert," I said.

"I don't know him," he said.

"That's strange. He gets his mail here."

"That might be. I don't know him. What do you want?"

"How about a 7 Up?"

He took a bottle out of the cooler, snapped off the cap, and set it before me with a glass.

"The ice machine's broken, so there's no ice," he said.

"That's all right."

"That's a dollar."

I put four quarters on the bar. He scraped them up and started to walk away.

"It looks like you have some letters in a box up there. Would you see if Elton's picked up his mail?" I said.

"Like I told you, I don't know the man."

"You're the regular bartender, you're here most of the time?"

He put out his cigarette in an ashtray, mashing it methodly, then his eyes went out the open front door and across the road as though I were not there. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue.

"I'd appreciate your answering my question," I said.

"Maybe you should ask those guys barbecuing out back. They might know him."

"You were in the corps?"

"Yeah."

"You're only in the crotch once."

"You were in the corps?"

"No, I was in the army. That's not my point. You're only in the AB once, too."

He lit another cigarette and bit a hangnail on his thumb.

"I don't know what you're saying, buddy, but this is the wrong fucking place to get in somebody's face," he said.

A barmaid came in the side door, put her handbag in a cabinet, and carried a sack of trash out the back.

"You're saying you don't understand me, my words confuse you?" I asked.

"What's with you, man? Somebody shoved a bumblebee up your ass?"

"What's your name, podna?"

"Harvey."

"You're treating me like I'm stupid, Harvey. You're starting to piss me off."

"I don't need this shit, man." He looked out the back door at the men in jeans, cutoff denim jackets, and motorcycle boots, who were drinking canned beer in the barbecue smoke under the tree.

"It's just you and me, Harvey. Those guys don't have anything to do with it," I said.

The barmaid came back inside. She looked like she had dressed for work in a dime store. Her blond hair was shaved on one side, punked orange on the tips; she wore black fingernail polish, a pink top, black vinyl shorts, owl glasses with red frames, earrings made from chrorned.38 hulls.

"Give this guy a free 7 Up if he wants one. I'm going to the head," Harvey said to her.

I waited a moment, then followed him into the men's room and shot the bolt on the door. He was in the single stall, urinating loudly into the toilet bowl.

"Zipper it up and come out here, Harvey," I said.

He opened the stall door and stared at me, his mouth hanging open. I stuck my badge up close to his face.

"The man's real name is Eddy Raintree," I said. "Now don't you bullshit me. Where is he?"

"You can bust me, you can kick my ass, it don't matter, I don't know the sonofabitch," he said. "Guys get their mail here. They go behind the bar and pick it up. I don't know who they are, I don't ask. Check out those cats behind the building, man. There's one guy drove a pool cue through another guy's lung out there."

"Where's my man live, Harvey?"

He shook his head back and forth, his mouth a tight line.

I rested one hand on his shoulder and looked steadily into his face.

"What are you going to do when you walk out of here?" I said.

"What do you mean going-"

"You think you're going to make some mileage with my butt?"

"Look, man-" He started to shake his head again.

"Maybe ease on over to the phone booth. and make a call? Or take a round of beers to the outdoor geek show and mention that the heat is drinking 7 Up inside?"

"I'm neutral. I got no stake in this."

"That's right. So it's time for you to go. To tell the lady behind the bar you're taking off early tonight. We're understood on this, aren't we?"

"You're the man. I do what you say."

"But if I find out you talked to somebody you shouldn't, I'll be back. It's called aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice. What that means is I'll take you back with me to the Iberia Parish all. The guy who runs it is a three hundred-pound black homosexual with a sense of humor about which cells he puts you guys in."

He rubbed his mouth. His hand made a dry sound against his whiskers.

"Look, I didn't see you, I didn't talk to you," he said. "Okay? I'm going home sick. What you said about the AB, it's true, it's lifetime. If one guy doesn't take you out, another does. I'm a four-buck-an-hour beer bartender. I've got ulcers and a slipped disc. All I want is some peace."

"You've got it, partner. We'll see you around. Stay away from phones tonight, watch a lot of television, write some letters to the home folks."

"How about treating me with a little dignity, man? I'm doing what you want. I ain't a criminal, I ain't your problem. I'm just a little guy running around in a frying pan."

"You've probably got a point, Harvey."

I unbolted the door and watched him walk to the bar, say something to the barmaid, then leave by the side door and drive up the dirt road in a pointless pickup truck. The dust from the parking lot drifted back through the rusted screens in the late-afternoon sunlight. Once he was out of sight, it would not take Harvey long to decide that his loyalties to the bikers and Eddy Raintree were far more important to his welfare than his temporary fear of me and the Iberia Parish jail.

I returned to the bar and asked the barmaid for a pencil and a piece of paper. She tore a page from a notepad by the telephone and handed it to me. I scribbled two or three sentences on the back and folded it once, then twice.

"Would you give this to Elton for me?" I said.

"Elton Rupert?"

"Yeah."

"Sure." She took the note from my hand and dropped it in the letter box behind the bar. "You probably just missed him. He usually comes in about four o'clock."

"Yeah, that's what Harvey was saying. Too bad I missed him."

"Too bad?" She laughed. "You got stopped-up nostrils or something? Trying to open up your sinuses?"

"What?"

"The guy's got gapo that would make the dead get up and run down the road."

"He has what?"

"Gorilla armpit odor. You sure you know Elton? He stays in that shack by the levee and doesn't bathe unless he gets rained on. I don't know where he gets off knocking the niggers all the time."

"I like your earrings."

"I got them just the other day. You really like them?"

"Sure. I've never seen any made out of.38 shells."

"My boyfriend made them. He's a gun nut but he's real good at making jewelry and stuff. He's thinking of opening up a mail-order business."

"Elton doesn't have a phone, does he?"

"He doesn't have any plumbing. I don't know why he'd have a phone."

I looked at my watch.

"Maybe I have time to stop by his place just a minute. It's not far, is it?" I said.

"Straight down the road to the levee. You can't miss it. Just follow your nose. Hah!"

"By the way, how's Elton's eye?"

"It looks like worms ate it. Are you doing some kind of missionary work or something?"

The violet air was thick with insects as I drove down the yellow road toward the levee and the marsh. The road crossed the Southern Pacific tracks, then followed alongside a green levee that was covered with buttercups. On the other side of the levee were a canal, a chain of willow islands and sandbars, and a bay full of dead cypress. Three hundred yards from the track crossing was a fishing shack, a small box of a place with a collapsed gallery, an outhouse, an overflowing garbage barrel in back. Both a pirogue and a boat with an outboard engine were tied to wood stobs driven into the mudflat. A chopped-down Harley was parked on the far side of the gallery, its chrome glinting with the sun's last red light. The sky was black with birds.

I parked the truck down the levee, took my World War II Japanese field glasses from my locked toolbox, which the kids from the Iberville project hadn't gotten into, and waited. It was going to be a hot night. The air was perfectly still, heated from the long afternoon, stale with the smell of dead water beetles and alligator gars that fishermen had thrown up on the bank. I studied the shack through the field glasses. The garbage barrel boiled with flies, an. orange cat was eating a fishhead in a bowl on the shack step, a man walked past a window.

Then he was gone before I could focus on his face.

Finally it was dark, and the man inside the shack lit an oil lamp, opened a tin can at a table, and ate from it with a fork, hunched over with his back toward me. Then he urinated off the back steps with a bottle of beer in one hand, and I saw his big granite head in the light from the door, and the muscles that swelled in his shoulders like lumps of garden hose.

When he was back inside I got out of the truck with my.45 in my hand, crossed the levee, and moved through the darkness toward the shack. The willows were motionless, etched against a yellow moon, and I saw a moccasin as thick as my wrist uncoil off a log, drop into the water, and swim in a silvery V toward a dead neutria who had been hit by a boat propeller. The man moved in silhouette across the window, and I slid back the receiver on the.45, eased a hollow-point into the chamber, and walked quickly up the mud-bank to the back steps. I heard train cars jolt together, then a locomotive backing along the tracks on the far side of the levee.

Now, I thought, and I cleared the three steps in, one jump, burst into the shack, into a reek of stale sweat that was as close and gray as a damp cotton glove. His head looked up from the comic book that was spread on his knees. I aimed the.45 straight into the face of Eddy Raintree.

"Hands behind your neck, down on the floor! Do it, do it, do it!" I shouted.

The skin around his right eye was puckered with white sores. I shoved him off the chair amid a litter of newspapers, beer cans, and fast-food containers. His weight bowed the floor planks. I put the.45 behind his ear.

"All the way down on your face, Eddy," I said, and began to pull the handcuffs from the back of my belt.

That should have been the end of it. But I got careless.

Maybe my alcoholic dreams and sleeplessness of the previous night were to blame, or the eye-watering body odor that filled the room, or the sudden slamming of freight cars out in the darkness. But in the time it took the handcuffs to drop from my fingers, my vision to slip off the back of his head, he spun around like an animal turning in a box, grabbed the.45 with both hands, and locked his teeth on the knuckle of my right thumb.

His eyes were close-set like a pig's in the lamplight, his jaws knotted with cartilage, trembling with exertion. Blood spurted across the back of my hand; I could feel his teeth biting into the bone. I clubbed desperately at the back of his thick neck. His coarse, oily skin felt like rubber under my knuckles.

I was almost ready to drop the gun when he rammed his shoulder into my chest and dove headlong through the front window curtain.

My right hand quivered uncontrollably. I picked up the.45 with my left and went out the front door after him. He was running along the levee next to a stopped freight that must have been a mile long. The locomotive was haloed with white light and wisps of vapor, and in front of it gandy walkers were repairing track in the red glare of burning flares.

Eddy Raintree must have received his dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps before a DI could teach him to stay off the crests of hills and embankments and never run in a straight line when someone is making a study of you through iron sights.

It felt strange to fire the.45 with my left hand. It leaped upward in my grasp as though it had a life of its own. Both rounds whanged and sparked off the sides of a gondola, and Eddy Raintree kept running, his head hunched into his shoulders. I knelt in the weeds, sighted low to allow for the recoil, let out my breath slowly, and squeezed off another round. His right leg went out from under him as though it had been struck with a baseball bat, and he toppled down the far side of the levee to the railroad bed.

When I slid down the embankment and got to him he had his palm pressed tightly against his thigh and was trying to pull himself erect on a metal rung at the end of a boxcar.

His hand was shining and wet, and his face had already gone white with shock. A sweet, fetid odor came from the car, and then I saw that it was actually built of slats and contained cages.

"Sit down, Eddy," I said.

He breathed hard through his mouth. His eyes were bright and mean, the whites flecked with blood.

"It's over, partner. Don't have any wrong thoughts about that. Now sit down and give me your wrist," I said.

He tried not to grimace as he eased himself down on the gravel. I cuffed one wrist, looped the chain through the iron rung on the car, and cuffed the other wrist. Then I patted him down.

"What the fuck's this train carrying?" he said.

I split open his pants leg with my Puma knife. The entry hole in the skin was black and no bigger than the ball of my index finger. But it took my wadded handkerchief to cover the exit wound. I slipped my belt around his thigh and tightened it with a stick.

"What the fuck is in that car?" he said. His long hair hung from his head like string on a pumpkin.

"I'm going to give you the lay of the land, Eddy. You're leaking pretty bad. I'm going to run up ahead and ask those train guys to radio for an ambulance. But if we can't get one out here right away, I think we should dump you into my truck and head into Baton Rouge."

The side of his face twitched.

"What's the game?" he said.

"No game. You've got a big hole in you. You're going to need some blood."

"That's it? I'm suppose to get scared now? I had a nigger gunbull sweat me with a cattle prod till he ran out of batteries. Go fuck yourself."

"Read it like you want. I'm going to the head of the train, then I'll be back and we'll load you in my truck."

He twisted his head around at a sound inside the railroad car.

"There's fucking lions or tigers in there, man," he said.

"It's part of a circus. They're in cages. They can't hurt YOU."

"What if they back up the fucking train while you're taking a walk?"

"You dealt the play, Eddy. Live with it. Keep that belt tight and don't move your leg around."

"Hey, man, come here. Cuff me to that light over there."

"It's too far to move you."

"What the fuck's with you? You enjoy people's pain or something?"

"I'll be back, Eddy."

"All right, man, I'll trade. Jewel smoked the cop in the basement. But I didn't have any part in it. We were just there to creep the joint. You saw me, I didn't have a piece."

"That's not much of a trade."

He waited a moment, then he said, "There's a whack out On Sonnier and the broad, both."

"Which broad?"

"His sister." He wet his lips. "I can't swear it, but I think the whack's out on you, too. You're a hair in the wrong guy's nose."

"Which guy?"

"That's all you get, motherfucker. I cut a deal, it's in custody, with a lawyer and the prosecutor there."

"I think you're a gasbag, Eddy, but I don't want to see you die of fright." I uncuffed one wrist, then locked both of his arms behind him. "Lie quietly. I'm going to ask a couple of those gandy walkers to help me put you in the truck."

"Hey, man, those animals smell my blood. Hey, man, come back here!"

He lay on his side in the gravel and weeds, his face sallow and slick with sweat in the humid air. His manacled arms were ropy with muscle, as though he were being hung from a great height, as though his tattoos were about to pop from his skin. A breeze blew across the levee, and I could smell the moist odor of animal dung and almost taste Eddy Raintree's fear of his own kind.

I walked three hundred yards to the head of the train, showed my badge to the engineer, and told him to radio to Baton Rouge for an ambulance. Then I asked two black gandy walkers to help me with Eddy Raintree. They wore din-streaked undershirts, and their black skin was beaded with sweat in the red light of the track flares. They looked at their crew foreman, who was white.

"Go ahead, boys," he said.

They walked behind me, back toward where Eddy Raintree lay on his side in the weeds and gravel. I heard the deep-throated sound of a tiger or lion in the wind. I turned to say something light to the black men, when one of them pointed into the distance.

"You got somebody coming yonder on a motorcycle," he said.

I saw the headlight and the starlit silhouette of the bike and a small rider bounce down the side of the levee and come hard along the line of train cars. I could already see Eddy Raintree trying to rise to one knee, as he realized that he might still have another frolic in the funhouse.

It was very quick after that.

I pulled the.45 from my belt and broke into a run. The motorcycle passed Eddy Raintree, skidded in the gravel, and circled back in the direction it had come from, the headlight beam bouncing off the sides of the train. At first I thought the small rider was trying to swing Eddy up behind him, the way a rodeo pickup man scoops up a thrown cowboy. Then I saw a rigid object about two feet long in his hand, saw him extend it out beside him, and in my naivety I thought it might be bolt cutters, that Raintree would lift up his manacled wrists, and the small rider would snap him free and I would be left breathless and exhausted while they disappeared over the levee into the darkness.

But I was close enough now to see that it was a shotgun, with the barrel sawed off right in front of the pump. Eddy Raintree had made it to one knee and was frozen in the headlight's radiance, like an armless man trying to genuflect in church, when the shotgun roared upward three inches from his chin.

Then the small rider opened up his bike, one boot skipping along the rocks for balance, and wove the bike up the levee in a shower of dirt and divots of grass and buttercups.

My chest was heaving, my arm shaking, when I let off two rounds at his toylike silhouette just before he hit it full-bore, his head bent low, and disappeared in a long roll of diminishing thunder between the levee and the willow islands.

Eddy Raintree's buttocks were collapsed on his heels. His head was turned away from me, as though he were trying to hide his facial expression or a secret that he wished to take with him to another place. The animals in the circus car crashed wildly about in their wire cages. I touched Eddy Raintree lightly on the shoulder, and it rotated downward with gravity on the severed tendons in his neck.

One of the gandy walkers vomited.

"Oh Lord God, look what they done to that po' man," the other said. "His face hanging off the wrong side of his head."