Bandits

6

SHE BROUGHT HIM THROUGH a hall of dim portraits and framed pictures of Carnival balls, past sitting and dining rooms that were dark, formal, to a sun parlor that was startling, the atmosphere suddenly tropical as he looked at walls papered in a blaze of green-and-gold banana trees. Lamplight reflected on giant green fronds, on green-cushioned wicker, a ceiling fan, baskets of fern, a bar with bottles displayed against tinted glass. On the wicker coffee table was a glass of sherry. She was quiet, polite, wearing a white shirt now with tan slacks and sandals. She asked him if he’d help himself to a drink, then asked if he was sure he wasn’t hungry-as he poured vodka over ice-Dolores was fixing something for Amelita and it would be no trouble. He shook his head. She said Dolores had been to church. She said Dolores had been attending the African Baptist Church on Esplanade as long as she could remember. She said Dolores used to teach her hymns and it disturbed her mother to hear Protestant songs in the house. Jack took a sip of the drink and looked at her and said, “You’re not a sister anymore.”

She said, “No, I’m not.”

“I called you Sister.”

“Once or twice.”

“You sound different.”

She seemed to smile.

“I mean since this afternoon.”

She was looking at his drink and said, “Let me try that.” He handed her the glass. She took a sip of the vodka and looked at him with that round lower lip pouting as she swallowed, then shook her head. “I still don’t like it.”

“You’re trying different things again?”

She said, “The day I got back to New Orleans I called my mother for the name of a hairdresser. I’d made up my mind, after thinking about it for at least a year, I was going to get a perm. Curl my hair and change my image. I felt I needed to pick myself up. So I made the appointment… It wasn’t until I was in the chair, looking at myself in the mirror, I realized that a perm wasn’t going to do it.”

“Do what?”

“I mean it wasn’t necessary. I’d already changed. You said I sound different. I am, I’m not the same person I was a year ago or this afternoon, or the same person right now that I’m going to be.”

She was close enough to touch; not as tall as earlier today, in the heels. He said, “I think you made the right decision. That’s the way your hair should be, natural.” He thought a moment and said, “The day I got home from Angola, the first thing I was gonna do was get dressed up and head for the bar at the Roosevelt, like I’d never been away. But I didn’t. My parole came up the same time as a friend of mine, guy named Roy Hicks.” Jack felt himself start to smile. “Roy had a way of looking at you, with this cold stare, not putting much into it at all, but it was like he was asking if you wanted to die. He wasn’t that big, either.”

Lucy had started to smile because he did, but now the smile left her eyes. “I thought you said you were friends.”

“We were. Roy taught me how to jail. No, he didn’t give me the look, it was for guys who came onto him or got out of line… You know what I’m talking about?”

“I think so.”

He started to smile again, knowing what he was going to tell, and saw Lucy ready to smile, he was pretty sure. It encouraged him, made it all right to show off a little, slip into a role with her that was comfortable, natural; the feeling he could tell her anything he wanted.

“We get to New Orleans, Roy says he has some business to tend to and wants me to come along. We take a cab over to the projects, you know, off Rampart? We go up to a door, Roy bangs on it with his fist… I forgot to mention, Roy Hicks was a New Orleans cop at one time, but that’s another story.”

“What was he doing in prison?”

“That’s what I mean it’s another story; but a good one. We’re in the projects, this black guy opens the door I think I recognize. He doesn’t invite us in, but he knows us and we go in, and I see three more black guys sitting there. The place, I find out later, is a dope house. I’m thinking, what am I doing here, as Roy says to the black guy that runs it, ‘Shake hands, dude.’ But the guy doesn’t want to. By then I realize I know the guy; he was at Angola and got his release about six months before us. He ran a still while he was inside, made home brew out of fruit cocktail, rice, raisins, whatever he could find. It was terrible stuff. He’d sell it and give Roy a cut, something like half, ’cause Roy had given him permission to make it.” He saw Lucy frown and said, “Roy ran the dormitory we were in, Big Stripe, medium security.” He didn’t know what else to tell her. “It’s the way it is, part of the convict social structure… Anyway, Roy goes, ‘Shake hands, dude.’ Says it a couple more times and finally the guy sticks his hand out. Roy grabs it, gets an armlock on him, pulls a gun out of the guy’s pants, a P .38, with the three guys sitting there watching. Roy tells the guy he’s got in the armlock he left owing Roy money, and with accumulated interest the amount was now two thousand dollars. The guy told Roy he was crazy, couldn’t he see they were outside now? That kind a deal was over with. Roy goes, ‘It ain’t over till I say it is. Pay up, dude,’ never raising his voice or threatening the guy, and the guy finally gave him the money.”

Lucy was staring at him. “Amazing.”

“You understand, the guy might’ve owed him a few bucks, but this was a shakedown. Or with the gun you could even say it was a thinly disguised stickup. We get in the cab I ask Roy if he’s flipped out. He goes, ‘It’s like you fall off a bike you have to get right back on it again.’ I said to him, ‘Yeah, we took a fall, but I don’t see ripping off a dope house the same as getting back into what we were doing.’ Meaning neither of us, strictly speaking, had ever been into armed robbery. Roy goes, ‘What difference is it what statute you break, B and E or going in with a gun? You think you’re ever gonna live like a civilian?’ I told him I had every intention of trying. He goes, ‘Well, here’s a start.’ Counts out half the money, a thousand bucks, and hands it to me.”

She said it again. “Amazing.”

“I was thinking, that kind of scene is enough to curl your hair, if you don’t want to pay to get a perm.”

Lucy’s eyes raised. “It looks fairly straight now.”

“Yeah, well, that’s from working in a funeral home, seeing unexpected sights that get it to stand on end.”

“What’s your friend Roy doing?”

“He’s a bartender. Works in the Quarter.”

She took his glass and poured another vodka before looking up at him again. “Let’s sit down. I want to tell you something.”

“When my dad put up his new office building in Lafayette, he told me this at dinner, it was going to cost just over three million dollars. But they’d have to remove a live oak that was about a hundred and fifty years old. So my dad had the plans changed. He built his office at right angles, sort of around the tree, and it cost him another half million… What do you think that says about him?”

It was quiet in the room. Jack could feel the vodka, a good feeling in soft lamplight. He liked the fit of the deep-cushioned wicker chair; he could fall asleep here. Lucy waited, not far away, on the end of the sofa close to his chair, legs crossed. She leaned forward now to reach her sherry. He thought of ways to answer, moved only his arm, slowly, to raise the glass, and gazed at banana trees before taking a sip.

“He loves nature.”

“Is that why he’s contaminating the Gulf?”

“I thought he leased helicopters.”

“He’s in the oil business. He’s been in the oil business all his life. My mother calls him Texas Crude. Men in her family wore white linen suits and owned sugar plantations in Plaquemines.”

“I’m not good at environment,” Jack said. He could fall asleep by closing his eyes. “Or, what’s that other word, ecology. I’m weak in those areas.”

“You see my dad as a nice guy.”

“I think he works at it some. Wants to give you that impression, one of the boys.”

She said, “Then you know he’s not just good old Dick Nichols, he’s Dick Nichols Enterprises. He sings Cajun songs, eats squirrel and alligator tail, but he’s also been to the White House for dinner, twice. He loves nature as long as he and his pals can suck oil out of it and he doesn’t give a damn about that tree. He’s using it. He’s the guy at the Petroleum Club with the live oak that cost him a half million dollars. Not a yacht or a plane, they all have those, including my dad. No, this is a tree.”

Jack said, “Well, it’s nice to be rich.”

“Buy anything you want,” Lucy said. “My dad came to visit me in Nicaragua, seven years ago. An embassy limousine arrives, a long black Cadillac, and my dad steps out, the last person I ever expected to see. Except that he loves to surprise you and act very nonchalant about it. ‘Hi, Sis, how are you? Nice day, isn’t it?’ He knows he’s obvious, so it’s funny. I showed him around and he seemed interested enough, he was cordial. But he’d pretend not to see the lepers, the ones who were crippled or disfigured.”

“Wouldn’t shake hands with ’em.”

“Not even with the staff. He kept his hands behind his back. He said, ‘Sis, this place is awful. What do you need?’ I said, ‘How about giving the patients a ride in your car?’ I told him it would be an experience they’d never forget. He gave me a check for a hundred thousand dollars instead.”

Jack took a sip of his drink, wondering if her dad had kissed her when he arrived. He could understand her dad not being a toucher. How many people were? He said, “I know what you’re getting at.”

She said, “No, you don’t.”

“It’s easier to give to ’em than go near ’em.”

She said, “Jack,” not reacting, but with her quiet manner, knowing what she was going to say, “last week he wrote another check, this one for sixty-five thousand.”

“For the hospital?”

“For the man who destroyed the hospital, the man who burned it to the ground and hacked ten of the patients to death. I was there, Jack. I saw them drive up in a truck… The men got out and began firing, all of them with automatic weapons. They shot our dogs, they shot out the windows of the hospital… I came out of the sisters’ house and heard him yelling at them and thought he was trying to stop the firing. He was, he was yelling at them in Spanish, ‘With machetes! Do it with machetes!’ Some of the patients ran or were able to hide. I brought a few of them into our house. But the ones in the ward, who couldn’t run, were hacked to death in their beds, screaming… You know who I’m talking about, Dagoberto Godoy and his contras. When he came to kill Amelita and didn’t find her.” She paused and said, “I had never laid eyes on him before that day, and now I’ll never forget him.” She paused again and said, “Excuse me,” getting up now. “I’ll say good night to Amelita and fix you something to eat, if you’re hungry.”

She came back with a pack of Kools, tapping one out. Jack picked up the silver table lighter and held it to her cigarette. He watched her sit back blowing a slow stream of smoke, relaxing in the green cushions of the sofa, and he said, “You mind?” Picking up the pack of cigarettes and getting one for himself. He’d have one, and inhaled for the first time in nearly three years, telling her he still wasn’t hungry, not the least bit. He was keyed up and told her he was a little confused, trying to get all of it straight in his mind. He said it seemed like whenever she told him something else he’d have more questions and not know where to start.

She said, “What would you like to know?”

“This guy tries to kill Amelita and she says, well, he was angry, but he really wants her to be with him. She even calls him Bertie.”

Lucy’s head remained against the cushion. She said, “I know. Amelita’s a little screwed up. Bertie, I love it. He changed her life and she doesn’t want to believe he murders people. But she wasn’t at the hospital when he came. She was with her parents. That’s why I was able to get her out of there.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Of course not.”

“He killed them because they were lepers?”

“With machetes-he doesn’t need a reason. He shot Dr. Meza to death. He assassinated a priest while he was saying mass and formally executed six catechists in Estelí. They killed an agrarian reform worker with bayonets, shot his wife in the spine and left her for dead… She watched them strangle their year-old baby. Ask Bertie why he let his men do that. They slashed the throats of nine farmers near Paiwas, raped several of their daughters, raped and decapitated a fourteen-year-old girl in El Guayaba. Murdered five women, six men, and nine children in El Jorgito… Do you want a complete list? I’ll give you one. Do you want to see photos? I’ll show you those, too. Have you ever seen a little girl’s head on a stake?”

There was a silence in the room that seemed to Jack, for a moment, like a stage set: the backdrop of wallpapered banana trees as she told him about death in a tropical place.

“He did all that?”

“I haven’t counted the disappeared,” Lucy said, “or the ones who were only tortured. Or the ones who were killed with more sophisticated means. A priest in Jinotega opened the trunk of his car and was blown to bits. Bertie killed him. He found out it was the priest who drove us to León to buy the car, when we escaped. I have a letter from one of the sisters; I’d like to read it to you sometime.”

Jack felt awkward, not sure what to say.

“But what can you do? It’s a war.”

“Is that what you call it? Killing children, innocent people?”

“I mean you can’t have him arrested.”

“No, not even if he were still in Nicaragua. But now he’s here, raising money to buy more guns and pay his men. Three days ago in Lafayette my dad had Bertie to lunch, listened to the guy’s pitch, and gave him a check for sixty-five thousand dollars.”

“Your dad’s helping him? Why?”

“There are people, Jack, who believe that if you aren’t for Bertie you’re for communism. It’s much the same as saying, if you don’t like Dixie beer then you must like vodka.” She said it with that dry tone, the quiet look, her head resting against the cushion. “My dad and his friends are passing Bertie around, inviting him to their homes-he’s a celebrity. He has a letter from the President and that’s good for a check every time he shows it.”

“The president of what? You mean the president?”

“Of the United States of America. He calls the contras our brothers. ‘Freedom fighters.’ Quote. ‘The moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’ And if you believe that you can join my dad’s club. But here’s the part you’re not going to believe.”

He watched Lucy lean out of the chair to stub her cigarette in the ashtray, the light touching her dark hair. He was glad she didn’t get the perm.

“At dinner my dad began telling me about the Nicaraguan former embassy attaché war hero he invited to lunch, a personal friend of several important people in the White House.” As she sat back, Lucy said, “And anyone affiliated with that club is more than welcome at my dad’s, no questions asked. My dad hadn’t told me the hero’s name, but I knew it was Bertie. First, my dad tells me how this guy is a guerrilla commander, leading a dedicated fight against the Communists. And then he puts on his nonchalant act and says, ‘Oh, by the way. The colonel mentioned that you two have met, or you know each other from somewhere.’ I haven’t said a word yet. But now I’m pretty sure that when I do I’m going to let him have it. I could feel it tightening up in me. My dad says, ‘Yeah, he’s looking for some girl up here, a friend of his or used to be his sweetheart, and wonders if you might be able to help him find her.’ “ Lucy paused. “You like it so far?”

Jack didn’t say a word, waiting.

“I said, ‘Did the colonel tell you where we met?’ My dad shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t.’ I asked if the colonel had told him why he wants to find the girl. My dad said, ‘No, I don’t believe he did.’ I said, ‘Do you want me to tell you why?’ He said sure. I said, ‘Because he wants to fucking kill her, that’s why.’ ”

There was a silence. Jack didn’t move. She kept looking at him and he said to her, “So you let him have it.”

“I gave him every murder and atrocity I could remember. My dad said, ‘You don’t believe that stuff, do you?’ I said, ‘Dad, I was there. I saw it happen.’ He didn’t like that. He said, ‘Yeah, but it’s a war, Sis. Awful things happen in a war.’ I said, ‘How would you know? You don’t fight wars, you finance them.’ “ She raised her sherry and took a sip. “So much for dinner with dad… I had softshell crabs.”

Jack said, “Lucy Nichols, you’ve come a long way from the nunnery.”

She said, “But not from Nicaragua. He’s brought it here.”

Jack said, “Bertie knew it was your dad, huh?”

“He’s given a list, rich guys in the oil business. He looks at the names, he knows Amelita and I flew to New Orleans, he finds out I live here. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, I think the idea of using my dad has enormous appeal. He could be in Houston raising funds, but he’s not, he’s here. New Orleans is a contra shipping point; they have arms and supplies stored here waiting to go out.”

Jack felt an urge to get up, move. He reached for a cigarette instead. One more. If he ever started smoking again it wouldn’t be Kools. He sat back looking at her legs stretched out on the coffee table now, ankles crossed. One sandal was loose and he could see the curve of her instep. He wondered what she was like, when she was a girl, before she became a nun.

She said, “Sometime, within the next few days, I have to get Amelita on a flight to Los Angeles.”

“That doesn’t sound too hard.”

He wondered if she’d ever suddenly with somebody gone swimming in her underwear at night, in the Gulf of Mexico off Pass Christian.

She said, “I suppose not. If I’m careful.”

He watched her draw on her cigarette, turn her head slightly to exhale a slow stream.

“And somehow, before Bertie gets ready to leave with his funds, I have to think of a way to stop him.”

Jack waited a moment. He said, “And”-feeling himself alive but not wanting to move now, not wanting to ruin the mood-“you’re wondering if a person with my experience, not to mention the kind of people I know, might not be able to help you.”

Lucy’s eyes moved, her quiet gaze coming back to him. She said, “It crossed my mind.”

He wondered if she had ever made love on a beach. Or in bed. Or anywhere.

“What you’re saying,” Jack said, “you don’t care if Bertie leaves…”

“As long as the money stays here.”

Jack drew on his cigarette, taking his time. Shit, he could play this. This was his game.

“What does he do with the checks?”

“They’re made payable to, I think it’s the Committee to Free Nicaragua. Something like that.”

“He puts them in the bank?”

“I guess so.”

“Then what? Where would he buy the guns?”

“I suppose either here or in Honduras-that’s where their arms depots and training centers are. But I’m sure he’d take American dollars and exchange them for cordobas to pay his men.”

“How? By private plane?”

“Or in a boat.”

“From where?”

“I have no idea.”

“Ask your dad.”

“We’re not speaking.”

“Both of you aren’t, or just you?”

“I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Ask him where Bertie’s staying.”

“He’s at a hotel in New Orleans.”

“You’re kidding.”

“But I don’t know which one.”

“You’re gonna have to kiss and make up with your dad before we can start to move.”

Now Lucy was hesitant. “You’re saying you’re going to help me?”

“I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve never heard of one like this before. You’re breaking the law, a big one. But you can also look at it another way, that you’d be doing something for mankind.” Jack paused, realizing he had never used the word mankind before in his life. “I mean if you want to rationalize. You know, tell yourself it’s okay.”

“I don’t think we need to look for moral permission,” Lucy said. “I can justify this in my mind without giving it a second thought. But if the idea of saving lives doesn’t move you enough, think of what you might do with your share. I’d like to use half the money to rebuild the hospital. To me, that would seem all the justification we need. But the other half would be yours, if that’s agreeable.”

Jack took his time, wanting to be sure of this. “You’re telling me we’re gonna keep it?”

“We can’t very well give it back.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“He told my dad he’d like to raise five million.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jack said.

Lucy’s eyes smiled. “Our savior.”