Burning Angel

CHAPTER 11

"Why'd you do it, mon?“ Clete said outside.

We were standing between my truck and Sweet Pea's Cadillac convertible.

”He dealt it.“

I wiped the sweat off my face on my sleeve and tried to breathe evenly. My heart was beating against my rib cage. So far we had heard no sirens. Some of the restaurant's customers had come out the front door but none of them wanted to enter the parking lot.

”Okay… this is the way I see it,“ Clete said. ”You had provocation, so you'll probably skate with the locals. Patsy Dap's another matter. We'll have to do a sit-down with Johnny Carp.“

”Forget it.“

”You just left monkey shit all over the ceiling. We're doing this one my way, Streak.“

”It's not going to happen, Clete.“

”Trust me, big mon,“ he said, lighting a cigarette. ”What's keeping the locals?“

”It probably got called in as barroom bullshit in the black district,“ I said.

There was a whirring sound in my ears like wind blowing in seashells. I couldn't stop sweating. Clete propped his arm against the cloth top of Sweet Pea's car and glanced down into the backseat.

”Dave, look at this,“ he said.

”What?“

”On the floor. Under those newspapers. There's something on the carpet.“

The exposed areas of the carpet, where people's feet had crumpled and bunched the newspaper, looked brushed and vacuumed, but there were stains like melted chocolate in the gray fabric that someone had not been able to remove.

”We took it this far. You got a slim-jim in your tool box?“ Clete said.

”No.“

”So he needs a new top anyway,“ he said, and snapped open a switchblade knife, plunged it into the cloth, and sawed a slit down the edge of the back window. He worked his arm deep inside the hole and popped open the door.

”Feel it,“ he said a moment later, stepping aside so I could place my hand on the back floor.

The stain had become sticky in the enclosed heat of the automobile. Hovering like a fog just above the rug was a thick, sweet smell that reminded me in a vague way of an odor in a battalion aid station.

”Somebody did some major bleeding back there,“ Clete said.

”Lock it up again.“

”Wait a minute.“ He picked up a crumpled piece of paper that was stuck down in the crack of the leather seat and read the carbon writing on it. ”It looks like Sweet Pea's got lead in his foot as well as his twanger. Ninety in a forty-five.“

”Let's see it,“ I said. He handed it to me. Then he looked at my face again.

”It means something?“ he said.

”He got the ticket yesterday on a dirt road out by Cade. Why's he hanging around Cade?“

In the distance I could hear a siren on an emergency vehicle, as though it were trying to find a hole through traffic at an intersection.

”Wait here. Everything's going to be copacetic,“ Clete said. ”Don't go back in there.“

He walked fast across the lot, entered the side door of the restaurant, then came back out with his hand in one pocket.

”Why is it these dumb bastards always use the John to score? The owner's even got sandpaper glued on top of the toilet tank to keep the rag-noses from chopping up lines on it,“ he said.

He stood between my truck and the Cadillac and began working open a small rectangular cellophane-sealed container with two silhouetted lovers on it.

”You're one in a million, Cletus,“ I said.

He unrolled a condom, then removed a piece of broken talc from his pocket, crushed it into fragments and powder, poured it with his palm into the condom, and tied a knot in the latex at the top.

”There's nothing like keeping everybody's eye on the shit bags. By the way, they wrapped one of those roller towels from the towel machine around Patsy's head. Think of a dirty Q-Tip sitting in a chair,“ he said.

He dropped the condom on the floor of the Cadillac with two empty crack vials and locked the door, just before an Acadian ambulance, followed by a Lafayette city police car, turned into the parking lot.

”Party time,“ he said.

He crinkled his eyes at me and brushed his palms softly.

The sheriff had never been a police officer before his election to office, but he was a good administrator and his general decency and sense of fairness had gotten him through most of his early problems in handling both criminals and his own personnel. He had been a combat marine, an enlisted man, during the Korean War, which he would not discuss under any circumstances, and I always suspected his military experience was related to his sincere desire not to abuse the authority of his position. When I sat down in his office the sun was yellow and bright outside the window, and an array of potted plants on his windowsill stood out in dark silhouette against the light. His cheeks were red and grained and woven with tiny blue veins, and he had the small round chin of the French with a cleft in it.

He reread my report with his elbows on the desk blotter and his knuckles propped against his brow.

”I don't need this on Monday morning,“ he said.

”It got out of hand.“

”Out of hand? Let me make an observation, my friend. Clete Purcel has no business here. He causes trouble everywhere he goes.“

”He tried to stop it, Sheriff. Besides, he knows Sonny Marsallus better than anyone in New Orleans.“

”That's not an acceptable trade-off. What's this stuff about a dead coon?“

I cleared a tic out of my throat. ”That's not in my report,“ I said.

”Last night I got a call at home from the Lafayette chief of police. Let's see, how did he put it? ‘Would you tell your traveling clown to keep his circus act in his own parish?’ You want to hear the rest of it?“

”Not really.“

Because I knew my straying into another jurisdiction, or even the beer pitcher smashed into Patsy Dapolito's face, was not what was on the sheriff's mind.

”What have you held back from me?“ he said.

I looked at him blankly and didn't answer.

”You're not the only one who chooses what to file a report on and what not to, are you?“ he asked.

”Excuse me?“

”Saturday I ran into a friend of mine with the humane society. He's a friend of Helen Soileau's. He mentioned a certain event he thought I already knew about.“

The sheriff waited.

”I don't believe in using the truth to injure good people,“ I said.

”What gives you the right to make that kind of decision?“

My palms felt damp on the arms of the chair. I could feel a balloon of heat rising from my stomach into my throat.

”I never enjoyed the role of pin cushion,“ I said.

”You're being treated unfairly?“

I wiped my palms on my thighs and folded them in my lap. I looked out the window at the fronds on a palm tree lifting in the breeze.

”Somebody killed all her animals. You knew about it but you didn't report it and you went after Sweet Pea Chaisson on your own,“ he said.

”Yes, sir, that's correct.“

”Why?“

”Because some shitheads set her up for blackmail purposes.“

He brushed at the corner of his eye with his fingertip.

”I have a feeling they didn't catch her in the sack with a boyfriend,“ he said.

”The subject's closed for me, Sheriff.“

”Closed? Interesting. No, amazing.“ He swiveled his chair sideways, rocked back in it, pushing against his paunch with his stiffened fingers. ”Maybe you ought to have a little more faith in the people you work for.“

”She sent some inquiries through the federal computer. Somebody doesn't want her to pursue it,“ I said.

His eyes rested on the flowered teapot he used to water his plants, then they seemed to refocus on another concern. ”I've got the FBI bugging me about Sonny Marsallus. What's their interest in a Canal Street gum ball

“I don't know.”

“They know a lot about him and I don't think it's off a rap sheet. Maybe he got loose from the witness protection program.”

“Sonny's not a snitch,” I said.

“Great character reference, Dave. I bet he took his grandmother to Mass, too.”

I rose from the chair. “Are you going to tell Helen about our conversation?”

“I don't know. Probably not. Just don't try to take me over the hurdles again. Were you ever mixed up in army intelligence?”

“No, why?”

“This whole thing stinks of the federal government. Can you tell me why they have to track their shit into a town that's so small it used to be between two Burma-Shave signs?”

I sat back down. “I want to get a warrant to search Sweet Pea Chaisson's car.”

“What for?”

“There's dried blood on the back floor.”

“How do you know?”

“Clete and I were inside it … Clete salted the shaft but the Lafayette cops didn't find what they were supposed to.”

“I don't believe what you're telling me.”

“You said you wanted it straight.”

“This is the last time we're going to have this kind of conversation, sir.”

I picked up my mail and walked down to my office. Five minutes later the sheriff opened my door just far enough to lean his head in.

“You didn't skate after all,” he said. “Sweet Pea's lawyer, what's his name, that grease bag from Lafayette, Jason Darbonne, just filed a harassment complaint against you and the department. Another thing, too, Dave, just so we're clear on everything, I want this shit cleaned up and it'd better be damn soon.”

I couldn't blame him for his anger. The case drawers in our building were filled with enough grief, mayhem, perversity, and institutional failure to match the quality of life in the worst Third World nations on earth. Like case histories at a welfare agency, a police file, once opened, never seemed to close. Instead, it grew gene rationally the same family names appearing again and again, the charges and investigations marking the passage of one individual from birth to adolescence to adulthood to death, crime scene photo upon mug shot, yellowing page upon yellowing page, like layers of sedimentary accretion formed by sewage as it flows through a pipe.

Children aborted with coat hangers, born addicted to crack, scalded under hot faucets; teenage mothers with pipe cleaner legs living between detox, the welfare agency, and hooking on the street; high school kids who can let off a.44 Magnum point-blank into their classmates at a dance and seriously maintain they acted in self-defense because they heard firecrackers popping in the parking lot; armed robbers who upgrade their agenda to kicking ballpoint pens into the eardrums of their victims before they execute them in the back of a fast-food restaurant; and the strangest and most baffling phenomenon of all, the recidivist pedophiles who are repeatedly paroled until they not only sodomize but murder a small child.

At one time local AA meetings were made up largely of aging drunks like myself. Now kids who should be in middle school are brought to the meetings in vans from halfway houses. They're usually white, wear burr haircuts, floppy tennis shoes, and oversize baseball caps sideways on their heads and look like refugees from an Our Gang comedy, except, when it's their turn to talk, they speak in coon ass blue-collar accents about jone sing for crack and getting UA-ed by probation officers. You have the feeling their odyssey is just beginning.

Our best efforts with any of it seem to do no good. In dark moments I sometimes believed we should simply export the whole criminal population to uninhabited areas of the earth and start over again.

But any honest cop will tell you that no form of vice exists without societal sanction of some kind. Also, the big players would still be with us-the mob and the gambling interests who feed on economic recession and greed in politicians and local businessmen, the oil industry, which fouls the oyster beds and trenches saltwater channels into a freshwater marsh, the chemical and waste management companies that treat Louisiana as an enormous outdoor toilet and transform lakes and even the aquifer into toxic soup.

They all came here by consent, using the word jobs as though it were part of a votive vocabulary. But the deception wasn't even necessary.

There was always somebody for sale, waiting to take it on his knees, right down the throat and into the viscera, as long as the money was right.

The speeding ticket Clete had found in Sweet Pea's car had been written on the dirt road that led from the highway back to the juke joint operated by Luke and Ruthie Jean Fontenot. Before I left the office, I pulled the ten-year package we had on Luke. He had been extricated from the death house while a convict barber was in the act of lathering and shaving his head, the state's final preparation for the moment when Luke would sit in an oak chair while men he didn't know screwed a metal cap down on his sweating pate and strapped his arms and shinbones so tightly into the wood that his own rigid configuration would seem part of the chair itself. The call had come from the governor's office after Moleen Bertrand had hand-delivered depositions from two witnesses who swore the victim, a white sharecropper, had brought a pistol out from under the bouree table. According to the witnesses, a wet-brain in the crowd had stolen the gun before the sheriff's deputies arrived.

Luke received not only a stay but eventually a new trial, and finally a hung jury and a prosecutorial decision to cut him loose. His debt to Moleen was a large one. The morning was warm and humid and the breeze blew a fine dust out of the shell parking lot and powdered the leaves of the oak and hackberry trees that were clustered next to the juke joint. I drove through the empty lot and parked in the shady lee of the building. A trash fire was smoldering in a rusted oil barrel by one of the trailers. On the ground next to it, like a flattened snake with a broken back, was a long strip of crusted gauze. A black woman in purple shorts and an olive green V-neck sweater looked out the back screen and disappeared again. I kicked over the trash barrel, rolled it across the shells, and used a stick to pry apart a smoldering stack of newspaper and food-streaked paper plates, scorched boudin casings and pork rinds, until, at the bottom of the pile, I saw the glowing and blackened remains of bandages that dissolved into thread when I touched them with the stick. I went through the screen door and sat at the empty bar. Motes of dust spun in the glare of light through the windows.

The woman had big arms and breasts, a figure like a duck, a thick and glistening black neck hung with imitation gold chains. She walked toward me in a pair of flip-flops, holding a cigarette with two fingers, palm upward, by the side of her face, her hoop earrings swinging on her lobes.

“You gonna tell me you the tax man, I bet,” she said.

“Nope.”

“You ain't the beer man.”

“I'm not that either.”

“Sorry, sugar, if you come down to check the jellyroll. It's too early in the morning.”

“I came down to see you,” I said, and smiled.

“I knowed it soon as you come in.”

“Is Luke here?”

“You see him?”

“How about Ruthie Jean?”

“They come in at night. What you gonna have?” she said, and folded her arms on the bar so that her breasts swelled like cantaloupes out of her sweater. A gold tooth glinted in the corner of her mouth. “If you big enough, you can have anything you want. You big, ain't you?”

”How about a Dr. Pepper?“

I watched her uncap a bottle and fill a glass with ice, her thought patterns, her true attitudes toward whites, the plan or absence of a plan that governed her day, her feelings for a lover or a child, the totality of her life, all of it a mystery, hidden behind a coy cynicism that was as implacable as ceramic.

”Y'all don't have a gun-shot white man in one of those trailers, do you?“ I said, and drank out of my glass.

”Don't know nothing about guns.“

”I don't blame you. Who bled all over those bandages?“

Her mouth was painted with purple lipstick. She pursed her lips into a. large, thick button and hummed to herself.

”Here's a red quarter. Can you put it in the jukebox for me?“ she said. ”It got fingernail polish on it so the jukebox man don't keep it when he picks up the coins.“

I opened my badge holder on the bar.

”Do you mind if I look in your trailers?“ I said.

”I thought I had me a new boyfriend. But you just being on the job, ain't you?“

”I think there might be an injured man back there. So that gives me the right to go in those trailers. You want to help me?“

She pressed her fingertip on a potato chip crumb on the bar, looked at it, and flicked it away.

”I give away my heart and a man wipe his feet on it every time,“ she said.

I went back outside. The windows in both trailers were open, the curtains blowing in the breeze, but the doors were padlocked. When I reentered the bar the woman was talking on the pay phone in back. She finished her conversation, her back to me, and hung up.

”Had to find me a new man,“ she said.

”Can I have the key?“

”Sure. Why you ain't ax? You know how to put it in? Cain't every man always get it in by his self.”

I unlocked and went inside the first trailer. It stunk of insecticide and moist garbage; roaches as fat as my thumb raced across the cracked linoleum. In the center of the floor was a double cot with a rubber air mattress on it and a tangled sheet spotted with gray stains. The small tin sink was full of empty beer cans, the drain stoppered with cigarette butts.

The second trailer was a different matter. The floor was mopped, the tiny bathroom and shower stall clean, the two trash cans empty. In the icebox was a gallon bottle of orange juice, a box of jelly doughnuts, a package of ground chuck steak. The sheets and pillowcases had been stripped from the mattress on the bed. I grabbed the mattress by one end and rolled it upside down on the springs. In the center of the rayon cover was a brown stain the size of a pie plate that looked like the source had pooled and soaked deep into the fabric.

I opened my Swiss Army knife and grooved a line of crusted flakes onto the blade and wiped them inside a Ziploc bag. I locked the trailer and started to get in my truck, then changed my mind and went back inside the bar. The woman was mopping out the women's rest room, her stomach swinging under her sweater.

“He was a tall white man with a face full of wrinkles,” I said. “He probably doesn't like black people much, but he had at least one nine-millimeter round in him and wasn't going to argue when Sweet Pea drove him out here. How am I doing so far?”

“It ain't my bid’ness baby.”

“What's your name?”

“Glo. You treat me right, I light up. I light up your whole life.”

“I don't think you mean harm to anyone, Glo. But that man, the one with the wrinkles in his face, like old wallpaper full of cracks, he's a special kind of guy, he thinks up things to do to people, anybody, you, me, maybe even some Catholic nuns, I was told he threw two of them from a helicopter at a high altitude. Was the man in the trailer that kind of guy?”

She propped the head of the mop in a bucket of dirty water and worked her Lucky Strikes out of her shorts. Her right eye looked bulbous and watery as she held the Zippo's flame to the cigarette. She exhaled, pressed the back of her wrist to her eye socket, then cleared her throat and spat something brown into the wastebasket.

She tilted her chin up at me, her face unmasked, suddenly real, for the first time.

“That's the troot, what you saying about this guy?”

“As far as I know.”

“I'm locking up now, sugar, gotta take my little boy to the doctor today. There's a lot of grip going around.”

“Here my business card, Glo.”

But she walked away from me, her arms stiff at her sides, her hands extended at right angles, as though she were floating on currents of air, her mouth gathered into a silent pucker like a purple rose.

I drove across the cattle guard under the arched and wisteria-covered iron trellis at the entrance to the Bertrand plantation, down the dirt road to Ruthie Jean Fontenot's small white frame house, where I parked in the yard. The sun had gone behind a cloud, blanketing i o i the fields with shadow, and the breeze felt moist and warm blowing across the tops of the cane.

Ruthie Jean opened her door on a night chain.

“What you want?” she said.

“Question and answer time.”

“I'm not dressed.”

“I'm not going away.”

“Aren't you suppose to have a warrant or something?”

“No.”

She made a face, closed the door hard, then walked into the back of the house. I waited ten minutes among the gum trees where the dirt had been bladed and packed smooth by the earthmover. I picked up the twisted tongue of an old shoe. It felt as dry and light as a desiccated leaf. I heard Ruthie Jean slip the night chain on the door.

Her small living room was cramped with rattan furniture that had come in a set. The andirons in the fireplace were stacked with stone logs, a blaze of scarlet cellophane pasted behind them to give the effect of flames. Ruthie Jean stood on her cane in a white dress with a lacy neckline, black pumps, and a red glass necklace. Her skin looked yellow and cool in the soft light.

“You look nice,” I said, and instantly felt my cheeks burn at the license in my remark.

“What you want down here this time?”

Before I could answer, a phone rang in back. She walked back to the kitchen to answer it. On a shelf above the couch were a clutter of gilt-framed family photographs. In one of them Ruthie Jean was receiving a rolled certificate or diploma of some kind from a black man in a suit and tie. They were both smiling. She had no cane and was wearing a nurse's uniform. At the end of the shelf was a dust-free triangular empty space where another photograph must have been recently removed.

“Are you a nurse?” I asked when she came back in the room.

“I was a nurse's aide.” Her eyes went flat.

“How long ago was that?”

“What you care?”

“Can I sit down, please?”

“Suit yourself.”

“You have a phone,” I said.

She looked at me with an incredulous expression.

“Your Aunt Bertie told me she didn't have a phone and I'd have to leave messages for her at the convenience store. But you live just next door. Why wouldn't she tell me to call you instead?”

“She and Luke don't get along.” Her cheek twitched when she sat down on the couch. Behind her head was the shelf with the row of framed photographs on it.

“Because he's too close to Moleen Bertrand?” I said.

“Ax them.”

“I want the white man named Jack,” I said.

She looked at her nails, then at her watch.

“This guy's an assassin, Ruthie Jean. When he's not leaking blood in one of your trailers, he carries a cut-down twelve-gauge under his armpit.”

She rolled her eyes, a whimsical pout on her mouth, and looked out the window at a bird on a tree branch, her eyelids fluttering. I felt my face pinch with a strange kind of anger that I didn't quite recognize.

“I don't understand you,” I said. “You're attractive and intelligent, you graduated from a vo-tech program, you probably worked in hospitals. What are you doing with a bunch of lowlifes and white trash in a hot pillow joint?”

Her face blanched.

“Don't look injured. Sweet Pea Chaisson is supplying the girls at your club,” I said. “Why are you letting these people use you?”

“What I'm suppose to do now, ax you to hep us, same man who say he doesn't need a warrant just 'cause he's down in the quarters?”

“I'm not the enemy, Ruthie Jean. You've got bad people in your life and they're going to mess you up in a serious way. I guarantee it.”

“There's nothing y'all don't know,” she said. But her voice was thick now, tired, as though a stone bruise were throbbing deep inside a vulnerable place.

I started in again. “You're too smart to let a man like Sweet Pea or Jack run a game on you.”

She looked back out the window, a hot light in her eyes.

“Jack's got a friend who's built like an icebox. Did you see a guy who looks like that?” I said.

“I been polite but I'm axing you to leave now.”

“How do you think all this is going to end?”

“What you mean?”

“You think you can deal with these guys by yourself? When they leave town, they wipe everything off the blackboard. Maybe both you and your brother. Maybe Glo and your aunt, too. They call it a slop-shot.”

“You pretend you're different from other policemen but you're not,” she said. “You pretend so your words cut deeper and hurt people more.”

I felt my lips part but no sound came out.

“I promise you, we'll nail this guy to the wall and I'll keep you out of it,” I said finally, still off balance, my train of thought lost.

She leaned sideways on the couch, her hands tight on her cane, as though a sliver of pain were working its way up her spine into her eyes.

“I didn't mean to insult or hurt you,” I said.

I tried to organize my words. My eyes focused on the mole by her mouth and the soft curve of her hair against her cheek. She troubled me in a way that I didn't quite want to look at.

“This man Jack is probably part of an international group of some kind. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm convinced they're here to do grave injury to us. By that I mean all of us, Ruthie Jean. White people, black people, it doesn't matter. To them another human being is just a bucket of guts sewn up in a sack of skin.”

But it was no use. I didn't know what the man named Jack had told her, or perhaps had done to her, and I suspected his tools were many, but as was too often the case, I knew I was witnessing another instance when the fear that moral cretins could inculcate in their victims was far greater than any apprehension they might have about refusing to cooperate with a law enforcement agency.

I heard a car outside and got up and looked outside the window. Luke, in a 1970s gas guzzler, had driven just far enough up the lane to see my truck, then had dropped his car in reverse and floor boarded it back toward the entrance to the plantation, dirt rocketing off the tires like shards of flint.

“I'm beginning to feel like the personification of anthrax around here,” I said.

“You what?”

“Nothing. I don't want to see y'all go down on a bad beef. I'm talking about aiding and abetting, Ruthie Jean.”

She got up on her cane, her hand locking hard into the curved handle.

“I cain't sit long. I got to walk around, then do some exercises and lie down,” she said.

“What happened to you?”

“I don't have any more to say.”

“Okay, you do what you want. Here's my business card in case you or Luke feel like talking to me later,” I said, weary of trying to break through her fear or layers of racial distrust that were generations in the making. And in the next few moments I was about to do something that would only add to them.

“Could I have a glass of water?” I asked.

When she left the room I looked behind and under the couch. But in my heart I already knew where I was going to find it. When the perps are holding dope, stolen property, a gun that's been used in an armed robbery or murder, and they sniff the Man about to walk into their lives, they get as much geography as possible between them and it. But Ruthie Jean wasn't a perp, and when her kind want to conceal or protect something that is dear to them, they stand at the bridge or cover it with their person.

I lifted up the cushion she had rested her back against. The gilt-frame color photograph was propped against the bamboo supports and webbing of the couch.

I had never seen him with a suntan. He looked handsome, leaner, his blue air force cap set at an angle, his gold bars, pilot's sunglasses, unbuttoned collar, and boyish grin giving him the cavalier and romantic appearance of a World War II South Pacific aviator rather than a sixties intelligence officer who to my knowledge had never seen combat.

I heard her weight on a floor plank. She stood in the doorway, a glass of water in her hand, her face now empty of every defense, her secrets now the stuff cops talk about casually while they spit Red Man out car windows and watch black women cross the street at intersections.

“It must have fallen off the shelf,” I said, my skin flexing against my skull. I started to replace the photograph in the dust-free spot at the end of the shelf. But she dropped her cane to the floor, limped forward off balance, pulled the photo from my hand, and hurled the glass of water in my face.

At the front door I looked back at her, blotted the water out of my eyes on my sleeve, and started to say something, to leave a statement hovering in the air that would somehow redeem the moment; an apology for deceiving her, or perhaps even a verbal thorn because she'd both disturbed and bested me. But it was one of those times when you have to release others and yourself to our shared failure and inadequacy and not pretend that language can heal either.

I knew why the shame and anger burned in her eyes. I believe it had little to do with me. In a flowing calligraphy at the bottom of the photo he had written, This was taken in some God-forsaken place whose name, fortunately, I forget — Always, Moleen. I wondered what a plantation black woman must feel when she realizes that her white lover, grandiose in his rhetoric, lacks the decency or integrity or courage or whatever quality it takes to write her name and personalize the photo he gives her.