Burning Angel

CHAPTER 30

It was midmorning, the sun hazy through the oak trees that shaded the cluster of trailers and cottages where Patsy Dapolito lived east of town. Helen and I were parked in my truck behind a tin shed that had already started to creak with heat, watching Patsy shoot baskets in a dirt clearing by the side of a garage. His sock less ankles and white legs were layered with scar tissue and filmed with dust, his gym shorts knotted around his genitals like a drenched swimsuit, his T-shirt contoured against his hard body like wet Kleenex.

He whanged one more shot off the hoop, then dribbled the ball — bing, bing, bing — toward the door to his cottage. I got out of the truck, moved in fast behind him, and pushed him hard through the door. When he turned around, his mouth hooked like a cornered predator's, my .45 was pointed in the middle of his face.

”Oh, you again,“ he said.

I shoved him into a wood chair. My hand came away damp from his T-shirt.

The floor was littered with movie and wrestling and UFO magazines, hamburger containers, empty Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, dozens of beer and soda cans.

Helen came through the door with Clete's cardboard box hanging from her hand. She looked around the room.

”I think it needs a trough inset in the floor,“ she said.

”This my get-out-of-Shitsville roust?“ he said.

Helen gathered up his basketball, bounced it on the linoleum floor twice-bing, bing-then two-handed it off his forehead and caught the rebound between her palms. His head jerked, as though a thin wire had snapped behind his eyes, then he stared at her, with that bemused, inverted grin, the mouth turned downward at the corners, the teeth barely showing in a wet line above the lip.

”Your place got creeped, Patsy. We're returning your goods,“ I said. I replaced my .45 in my clip-on holster and one at a time removed the Tec-9, the handcuffs, and the blowtorch from the cardboard box and set them on his breakfast table. He fingered the half-moon scars and divots on his face, watched me as though I were a strange shadow moving about on a surreal landscape that only he saw.

”The contract you took from Johnny is already sour, Patsy,“ I said.

”There's a guy willing to give you up.“

”It must have been lard-ass that got in my place. He helped himself to the beer and potato salad in my icebox,“ Patsy said. There was a red spot, like a small apple, in the middle of his forehead.

”You going to do me?“ I said.

He picked at the calluses on his palm, looked up at me, breathed over the top of his teeth, his eyes smiling.

Helen caromed the ball off his head again.

”Hey!“ he said, swatting the air, his face knotting. ”Lay off that!“

I reached back down in the cardboard box and retrieved a manila folder that was almost three inches thick. I pulled out a chair and sat in it, spread the folder on one thigh.

”You did a nickel on Camp J, you've gone out max-time twice, we're not going to insult you by treating you like a fish. I'm talking about the consequences of harming a police officer,“ I said.

He crinkled his nose, looked at a spot three inches in front of his eyes. The shape of his head reminded me of a darning sock.

”But there's some weird stuff in your jacket, Patsy,“ I said. ”You got picked up in a porno theater in New York once. The owner was connected to a child prostitution ring. You remember that gig?“

His eyes lifted into mine.

”When you were thirty-eight you went down for statutory rape. She was fourteen, Patsy. Then way back here …“ I turned to the front of the folder, looked down at a page. ”It says here you got busted for abducting a little girl from a playground. The father wouldn't stand up so you walked. You see a pattern here?”

His hands shifted into his lap, his fingers netting together. Helen and I stared at him silently. His eyes blinked, looked back and forth between us, his nostrils whitening, as though he were breathing air off a block of ice.

“What?” he said. “What?”

“You're a button man, all right, but you're a pedophile first,” I said.

He churned the edges of his tennis shoes on the floor, his ankles bent sideways, his shoulders pinched forward, his neck hunched. I could hear him breathing, smell an odor like soiled cat litter that rose from his armpits. He started to speak.

“Here's the rest of it, Patsy. Your mother set fire to you in your crib,” I said.

His pale eyes stared back at me as though they had no lids. His mouth looked like a deformed keyhole in his face.

“You try to do me, all this becomes public knowledge,” I said. “Anytime you're around Four Corners, you'll be picked up as a sex predator. We'll put you with every open molestation case we have, we'll make sure NOPD Vice gets in on it, too.”

“They'll have your picture in the T and A joints on Bourbon, Patsy,” Helen said.

“They made that up about my mother. There was a fire in the project,” he said.

“Yeah, she set it. That's why she died in the insane asylum,” I said.

“The message is, you're a geek. You start some shit, we'll finish it. You still think this is just a roust in Bumfuck?” Helen said, stepping toward him, her arms pumped.

When we left him, he was still seated in the chair, his head canted to one side, his mouth indented like a collapsed football bladder, his ankles folded almost flat with the floor, his eyes staring into tunnels and secret rooms that only Patsy Dapolito knew about. Smoke “em or bust 'em, make their puds shrivel up and hide, Clete used to say. But how do you take pride in wrapping razor wire around the soul of a man who in all probability was detested before he left the womb?

It rained after sunset, and the mist floated like smoke out of the cypress in the swamp. The air was cool when I closed up the bait shop, and I could hear bass flopping back in the bays. Through the screen I saw Alafair walking Tripod on his chain down the dock, while his nose sniffed at the dried blood and fish scales baked into the planks. She came through the door, eased it back on the spring so it wouldn't slam, sat on a counter stool, and lifted Tripod into her lap. She had put on a fresh pair of blue jeans, a flowered cowboy shirt, and had tied her hair in back with a blue ribbon. But her face looked empty, her brown eyes remote with thoughts she couldn't resolve.

”What's the trouble, Alf?“ I said.

”It's gonna make you mad.“

”Let's find out.“

”A bunch of us were up by the bar, you know, Goula's, the other side of the drawbridge.“

”A bunch of you?“

”We were in Danny Bordelon's pickup truck. They wanted to get some beer.“ She watched my face. ”Danny had his brother's ID card. He went inside the bar and got it.“

“I see.”

”They were going to drink it down the road.“

”What happened?“

”Are you going to be mad at Danny?“

”He shouldn't be buying beer for you guys.“

”I got out of the truck and walked. I was scared. They were mixing it with something called ‘Ever Clear,’ it's like pure grain alcohol or something.“

”Danny didn't try to take you home?“

”No.“ She dropped her eyes to the floor.

”So we leave Danny alone in the future. You did the right thing, Alafair.“

”That's not all that happened, Dave … It started to rain and the wind was blowing real hard out of the swamp. A car came up the road with its lights on. The man who got Tripod out of the coulee, the man you handcuffed, he rolled down his window and said he'd take me home …“

”Did you get in the-“

”No. The way he looked at me, it was sickening. His eyes went all over me, like they were full of dirty thoughts and he didn't care if I knew it or not.“

I sat on the stool next to her, put my hand on her back.

”Tell me what happened, Alf,“ I said.

”I told him I didn't want a ride. I kept walking toward the house. The rain was stinging my face and he kept backing up with me, telling me to get in, he was a friend of yours, I was gonna catch cold if I didn't get in.“

”You didn't do anything wrong, Alf. Do you understand me?“

”He started to open his door, Dave. Then this other man came out of nowhere. He had red hair and a black rain hat on with rain pouring off it, and he walked like he was hurt. He said, ‘I don't want it to go down in front of a kid, Emile. Time for you to boogie.’ The man in the car turned white, Dave. He stepped on the gas and threw mud and water all over us. You could see sparks gashing off his bumper when he crossed the drawbridge.”

I looked out the window into the darkness, tried to clear an obstruction, like a fish bone, in my throat.

“Have you ever seen the man in the raincoat before?” I said.

“It was hard to see his face in the rain. It was pale, like it didn't have any blood… He said, ‘You shouldn't be out here by yourself.’ He walked with me till we could see the lights on the dock. Then I turned around and he was gone.”

I took Tripod out of her lap and set him on the counter, then bent over her and hugged her against my chest, pressed my cheek against the top of her head.

“You're not mad?” she said.

“Of course not.”

Her eyes crinkled at the corners when she looked up at me. I smiled emptily, lest she sense the fear that hovered like a vapor around my heart.

The next morning the sun rose yellow and hot into a bone white sky. There was no wind, and the trees and flowers in my yard were coated with humidity. At 9 A.M. I glanced through my office window and saw Luke Fontenot park his car on the street and walk toward the entrance of the sheriff's department, his rose-colored shirt peppered with sweat. Just before he went through the door, he rubbed his mouth unconsciously. When he sat down in the metal chair in front of my desk, he kept glancing sideways through the glass at the uniformed deputies who passed in the corridor.

“It's all right, Luke,” I said.

“I been in custody here. For killing a white man, back when things was a li'l different. You believe in the gris-gris, Mr. Dave?”

“No.”

“Aint Bertie do. She put the gris-gris on Moleen Bertrand, now she say she cain't get it off.”

“That stuff's superstition, partner.”

“Come out to the cafe where she work.”

“Bertie can take care of herself.”

“I ain't worried about that old woman. It's Ruthie Jean. Suh, ain't it time you listen a li'l bit to what black folks got to say?”

Bertie Fontenot worked off and on in a black-owned clapboard cafe up Bayou Teche in Loreauville. She sat under a tarp extended on poles behind the building, next to a worktable and two stainless steel cauldrons that bubbled on a portable butane burner. The surrounding fields were glazed with sunlight, the shade under the tarp as stifling as a wool blanket on your skin. Through the back screen I could hear the jukebox playing, I searched for you all night in vain, baby. But you was hid out wit' another man.

“Tell him,” Luke said.

“What for? Some people always know what they know,” she said. She lifted her mammoth weight out of the chair and poured a wood basket filled with artichokes, whole onions, corn on the cob, and peeled potatoes into the cauldrons. Then she began feeding links of sausage into the steam, her eyes watering in the evaporation of salt and cayenne pepper. Stacked on the table were three swollen gunnysacks that moved and creaked with live crawfish.

“Aint Bertie, he took off from his work to come up here,” Luke said.

She wiped the perspiration off her neck with a tiny handkerchief and walked to her pickup truck, which was parked by an abandoned and partially collapsed privy, and came back into the shade with an old leather handbag drawn together at the top by a leather boot lace. She put her hand inside and removed a clutch of pig bones. They looked like long pieces of animal teeth against her coppery palm.

“It don't matter when or where I trow them, they come up the same,” she said. “I ain't got no power over what's gonna happen. I gone along with Ruthie Jean, even though I knowed it was wrong. Now I cain't undo any of it.”

She cast the bones from her hand onto the plank table. They seemed to bounce off the wood as lightly as sewing needles.

“See, all the sharp points is at the center,” she said. “Moleen Bertrand dragging a chain I cain't take off. For something he done right here, it's got to do wit' a child, out on a dirt road, in the dark, when Moleen was drunk. There's a bunch of other spirits following him around, too, soldiers in uniforms that ain't nothing but rags now. Every morning he wake up, they sitting all around his room.”

“You told me you were worried about Ruthie Jean,” I said to Luke.

“She's in a rooming house in New Orleans, off Magazine by the river. Waiting for Moleen to get his bid ness things together, take her to the Islands,” he said.

“Some people give they heart one time, keep believing when they ain't suppose to believe no more,” Bertie said.

She unfolded the curved blade of a banana knife from its case, pulled a gunnysack filled with crawfish across the table toward her.

“Moleen gonna die. Except there's two bones in the middle of the circle. Somebody going wit him.”

“Maybe Moleen thinks New Orleans is a better place for her right now. Maybe he's going to keep his word,” I said.

“You wasn't listening, Mr. Dave,” Luke said. “We ain't tole you Moleen Bertrand sent her to New Orleans. It was a police officer, he come down here at night, carried her on down to the airport in Lafayette.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You got him right down the hall from you, Mr. White Trash himself, Rufus Arceneaux, same man run errands for Julia Bertrand,” she said.

She ripped the sack along the seam with her banana knife, then shucked it empty into the cauldron, where the crawfish stiffened with shock, as though they had been struck with electricity, and then roiled up dead in the churning froth.

That night the air was breathless, moonlit, filled with birds, stale with dust and the heat of the day that lingered in the baked wood and tin roofing of the house. It was long after midnight when the phone rang in the kitchen.

“You got the wrong signal, ace,” the voice said.

“Pogue?”

“Your little girl misunderstood.”

“No, you did. I told you not to come through the wrong man's perimeter.”

“I was there to help. They got a mechanic on you.”

“Come anywhere near my house, I'm going to take you off at the neck.”

“Don't hang up …” I could hear his breath rise and fall against the receiver. “The Dutchie don't let me alone. I think I got only one way out. I cool out the hitter, I don't let nobody hurt your family. The problem is, I got no idea who they sent in. I need time, man, that's what you fucking don't hear.”

“Do you know what 'roid-induced psychosis is?” I said.

“No.”

“Too many injections in the butt. Then you drink a few beers and the snakes put on a special floor show. Don't call here again.”

“You got cement around your head? I ain't a bad guy. We went into Laos twice to get your friend back. You know anybody else who gave a shit about him?”

“You frightened my daughter. One way or another, that's going to get squared, Emile.”

“Me? Marsallus was there. She didn't tell you?”

“Your wheel man, Jerry Jeff Hooker, is in custody. He gave you up. Come in and maybe we can get you into a federal hospital.”

“I could smell Marsallus's breath, it was like the stink when you pop a body bag. The Dutchie turned him loose on me. Laos, Guatemala, colored town out there on the highway, it's all part of the same geography. Hell don't have boundaries, man. Don't you understand that?”

The phone was silent a long time. In the moonlight I saw an owl sink its razored beak into a wood rabbit in my neighbor's field. Then Emile Pogue quietly hung up.