Burning Angel

Chapter 19

The next morning I drove out to the Bertrand plantation to talk to Ruthie Jean, but no one was at home. I walked next door to Bertie’s and knocked on the screen. When she didn’t answer, I went around the side and saw her get up heavily from where she had been sitting on the edge of the porch. Her stomach swelled out between her purple stretch pants and oversize white T-shirt. She unhooked a sickle from the dirt and began slicing away the dead leaves from the banana trees that grew in an impacted clump against the side wall of the house.

I had the impression, however, she had been doing something else before she saw me.

“I’m worried about Ruthie Jean, Bertie,” I said. “I think she nursed a man named Jack who died in the trailer behind the juke. She probably heard and saw things other people don’t want her to talk about.”

“You done already tole her that.”

“She’s not a good listener.”

“There’s two kinds of trouble. What might happen, and what done already happen. White folks worry about might. It ain’t the same for everybody, no.”

“You lost me.”

“It ain’t hard to do,” she said. She ripped a tangle of brown leaves onto the ground, then lopped a stalk cleanly across the middle. The cut oozed with green water.

On the planks of the porch I saw a square of red flannel cloth, with a torn root and a tablespoon of dirt in the middle. I saw Bertie watch me out of the corner of her eye as I walked closer to the piece of flannel. Among the grains of dirt were strands of hair, what looked like a shirt button, and a bright needle with blood on it.

“I’m going to take a guess — dirt from a grave, root of a poison oak, and a needle for a mess of grief,” I said.

She whacked and lopped the dead stalks and flung the debris behind her.

“Did you get Moleen’s hair and shirt button out of the shack by the treeline?” I asked.

“I ain’t in this world to criticize. But you come out here and you don’t do no good. You pretend like you know, but you playing games. It ain’t no fun for us.”

“You think putting a gris-gris on Moleen is going to solve your problems?”

“The reason I put it on him is ‘cause she ain’t left nothing out here so I can put it on her.”

“Who?”

“Julia Bertrand.” She almost spit out the words. “She already been out here once this morning. With that man work down the hall from you. Ruthie Jean ain’t got her house no more. How you like that?”

I blew out my breath.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

She tossed the sickle in the flower bed.

“That’s my point,” she said, and went in her house.

A few minutes later, almost as though Bertie had planned Julia appearance’s as part of my ongoing education about the realities of life on a corporate plantation, I saw Julia’s red Porsche turn off the highway and drive down the dirt road toward me. Rufus Arceneaux sat next to her in a navy blue suit that looked like pressed cardboard on his body.

When she stopped next to me, her window down, her face cheerful, I tried to be pleasant and seem unknowing, to mask the embarrassment I felt for her and the level of vindictiveness to which she had devoted herself.

“Bertie doesn’t have you digging holes after pirate’s treasure, does she, Dave?” she said.

“She told me something disturbing,” I said, my voice bland, as though she and I were both concerned about the ill fortune of a third party. “It looks like Ruthie Jean and Luke are being evicted.”

“We need the house for a tenant family. Ruthie Jean and Luke don’t work on the plantation, nor do they pay rent. I’m sorry, but they’ll have to find a new situation.”

I nodded, my face blank. I felt my fingers tapping on the steering wheel. I cut my engine.

“You already dropped the dime on her and had her locked up. Isn’t that enough?” I said.

“Whatever do you mean?” she said.

I opened my door partway to let the breeze into the truck’s cab. I felt my pulse beating in my neck, words forming that I knew I shouldn’t speak.

“With y’all’s background and education, with all Moleen’s money, can’t you be a little forgiving, a little generous with people who have virtually nothing?” I said.

Rufus bent down in the passenger’s seat so I could see his face through the window. He had taken off his pilot’s sunglasses, and his eyes looked pale green and lidless, the pupils as black and small as a lizard’s, the narrow bridge of his nose pinched with two pink indentations.

“You’re operating without your shield, Dave. That’s something IA doesn’t need to hear about,” he said.

She placed her hand on his arm without looking at him.

“Dave, just so you understand something, my husband is a charming man and a wonderful litigator who also happens to be a financial idiot,” she said. “He has no money. If he did, he’d invest it in ski resorts in Bangladesh. Is Ruthie Jean home now?”

Her eyes fixed pleasantly on mine with her question. Her lips ticked smile looked like crooked red lines drawn on parchment.

I dropped the truck into low and drove under the wisteria-hung iron trellis of the Bertrand plantation, wondering, almost in awe, at the potential of the human family.

That afternoon Batist called me from the phone in the bait shop.

“Dave, there’s a man out on the dock don’t belong here,” he said.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I ax him if he want a boat. He says, “Give me a beer and a sandwich.” An hour later he’s sitting at the table under the umbrella, smoking a cigarette, he ain’t eat the sandwich, he ain’t drunk the beer. I ax him if there’s any ting wrong with the food. He says, “It’s fine. Bring me another beer.” I say, “You ain’t drunk that one.” He says, “It’s got a bug in it. You got the afternoon paper here?” I say, “No, I ain’t got the paper.” He says, “How about some magazines?”

“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said.

“I ought to brought him a paper bag.”

“What d’ you mean?”

“To put over his head. He looks like somebody took a sharp spoon and stuck it real deep all over his face.”

“Stay in the bait shop, Batist. You understand me? Don’t go near this man.”

I hung up, without waiting for him to reply, called the department for a cruiser, took my .45 out of the dresser drawer, stuck it through the back of my belt, and hung my shirt over it. As I walked down the slope through the broken light under the pecan and oak trees, I could see a strange drama being played out among the spool tables on the dock. Fishermen who had just come in were drinking beer and eating smoked sausage and boudin under the umbrellas, their faces focused among themselves and on their conversations about big-mouth bass and goggle-eye perch, but in their midst, by himself, smoking a cigarette with the concentrated intensity of an angry man hitting on a reefer, was Patsy Dapolito, his mouth hooked downward at the corners, his face like a clay sculpture someone had mutilated with a string knife.

I remembered a scene an old-time gun bull had once pointed out to me on the yard, inside the Block, at Angola Penitentiary. Inmates stripped to the waist, their apelike torsos wrapped with tattoos, were clanking iron, throwing the shot put and ripping into heavy bags with blows that could eviscerate an elephant. In the center of the lawn was a tiny, balding, middle-aged man in steel-rimmed spectacles, squatting on his haunches, chewing gum furiously, his jaws freezing momentarily, the eyes lighting, then the jaws moving again with a renewed snapping energy. When a football bounced close to the squatting man, a huge black inmate asked permission before he approached to pick it up. The squatting man said nothing and the football remained where it was.

“Forget about them big ‘uns,” the gun bull told me. “That little fart yonder killed another convict while he had waist and leg chains on. I won’t tell you how he done it, since you ain’t eat lunch yet.”

I looked down at Patsy Dapolito’s ruined face. His pale eyes, which were round like an outraged doll’s, clicked upward into mine.

“You made a mistake coming here,” I said.

“Sit down. You want a beer?” he said. He picked up a bottle cap from the tabletop and threw it against the screen of the bait shop. “Hey, you! Colored guy! Bring us a couple more beers out here!”

I stared at him with my mouth open. Batist’s head appeared at the screen, then went away.

“You’ve pulled some wiring loose, partner,” I said.

“What, I don’t got a right to drink a beer in a public place?”

“I want you out of here.”

“Let’s take a ride in a boat. I ain’t never seen a swamp. You got swamp tours?” he said.

“Adios, Patsy.”

“Hey, I don’t like that. I’m talking here.”

I had already turned to walk away. His hand clenched on my forearm, bit into the tendons, pulled me off balance into the table.

“Show some courtesy, act decent for a change,” he said.

“You need some help, Dave?” a heavyset man with tobacco in his jaw said at the next table.

“It’s all right,” I said. People were staring now. My .45 protruded from under my shirt. I sat down on a chair, my arms on top of the spool table. “Listen to me, Patsy. A sheriff’s cruiser is on its way. Right now, you got no beef with the locals. As far as I see it, you and I are slick, too. Walk away from this.”

His teeth were charcoal colored and thin on the ends, almost as though they had been filed. His short, light brown hair looked like a wig on a mannequin.

His eyes held on mine. “I got business to do,” he said.

“Not with me.”

“With you.”

The fishermen at the other tables began to drift off toward their cars and pickup trucks and boat trailers.

“I want part of the action,” he said.

“What action?”

“The deal at the plantation. I don’t care what it is, I want in on it. You’re on a pad for Johnny Carp. That means you’re getting pieced off on this deal.”

“A pad for—”

“Or you’d be dead. I know Johnny. He don’t let nobody skate unless it’s for money.”

“You’re a confused man, Patsy.”

He pinched his nose, blew air through the nostrils, looked about at the sky, the overhang of the trees, a cloud of dust drifting from a passing pickup through a cane brake. “Look, there’s guys ain’t even from the city in on this deal, military guys think they’re big shit because they cooled out a few gooks and tomato pickers. I did a grown man with a shank when I was eleven years old. You say I’m lying, check my jacket.”

“It’s Johnny you want to bring down, isn’t it?” I said.

He kept huffing puffs of air through his nostrils, then he pulled a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose in it.

“Johnny don’t show it, but he’s a drunk,” Dapolito said. “A drunk don’t look after anybody but himself. Otherwise you’d be fish bait, motherfucker.”

I walked out to meet the cruiser sent by the dispatcher. The deputy was a big red bone named Cecil Aguillard whose face contained a muddy light people chose not to dwell upon.

“You t’ink he’s carrying?” Cecil said.

“Not unless he has an ankle holster.”

“What he’s done?”

“Nothing so far,” I said.

He walked down the dock ahead of me, his gunbelt, holster, and baton creaking on his hips like saddle leather. The umbrella over Patsy’s head tilted and swelled in the wind. Cecil pushed it at an angle so he could look down into his face.

“Time to go,” Cecil said.

Patsy was hunkered down over the tabletop, scowling into a state fish and game magazine. He made me think of a recalcitrant child in a school desk who was not going to let a nun’s authority overwhelm him.

“Dave don’t want you here,” Cecil said.

“I ain’t done nothing.” His shoulders were hunched, his hands clenched into fists on the edges of the magazine, his eyes flicking about the dock.

Cecil looked at me and nodded his head toward the bait shop. I followed him. “Clear everybody out of here, Dave, I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“It won’t work on this guy.”

“It’ll work.”

“No, he’ll be back. Thanks for coming out, Cecil. I’ll call you later if I have to.”

“It ain’t smart, Dave. You turn your back on his kind, he’ll have your liver flopping on the flo’.”

I watched Cecil drive down the road in the deepening shadows, then I helped Batist seine the dead shiners out of our bait tanks and hose down the boats we had rented that day. Patsy Dapolito still sat at his table, smoking cigarettes, popping the pages in his magazine, wiping bugs and mosquitoes from in front of his face.

The sun had dipped behind my house, and the tops of the cypress in the swamp had turned a grayish pink in the afterglow.

“We’re closing up, Patsy,” I said.

“Then close it up,” he said.

“We’ve got a joke out here. This fellow woke up on his houseboat and heard two mosquitoes talking about him. One said, “Let’s take him outside and eat him.” The other one said, “We’d better not. The big ones will carry him off for themselves.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Have a good one,” I said, and walked up the slope to the house.

Two hours later it was dark. I used the switch inside the house to turn on the string of lights over the dock. Patsy Dapolito still sat at his table, the Cinzano umbrella furled above his head. His hard, white body seem to glow with electrified humidity.

Later, Bootsie and Alafair pulled into the drive, the car loaded with bags of groceries they had bought in Lafayette.

“Dave, there’s a man sitting on the dock,” Bootsie said.

“It’s Patsy Dap,” I said.

“The man you—” she began.

“That’s the one.”

“I can’t believe it. He’s on our dock?”

“He’s not going to do anything,” I said.

“He’s not going to have a chance to. Not if I have anything to do with it,” she said.

“I think Johnny Giacano’s cut him loose. That’s why he’s here, not because of me. He couldn’t think his way out of a wet paper bag, much less rejection by the only form of authority he’s ever respected.”

But she wasn’t buying it.

“I’ll get rid of him,” I said.

“How?”

“Sometimes you’ve got to make their souls wince.”

“Dave?”

I carried a sack of groceries inside, then wrapped both my .45 and nine-millimeter Beretta inside a towel, took a tube of first-aid cream from the medicine cabinet, and walked down to the dock. Patsy’s elbows were splayed on the table, his face pale and luminous with heat and perspiration. The tide was out and the current was dead in the bayou.

Patsy worked a thumbnail between his teeth and stared at me.

“Put some of this stuff on those mosquito bites,” I said.

He surprised me. He filled both palms with white cream and rubbed it into his forearms and on his face and neck, his round chin pointed up in the air.

I unfolded the towel on the table. His eyes dropped to the pistols, then looked up at me.

“What, you got cold pieces for sale?” he said.

I released the magazine from the butt of each automatic so he could see the top round, inserted it again, chambered the round, set the safety, and placed both weapons butt to butt in the center of the table. Then I sat down across from him, my eyes stinging with salt. Up the slope, I could see Bootsie under the light on the gallery.

“If you want to square what I did to you, now’s the time,” I said. “Otherwise, I’m going to mop up the dock with you.”

He smiled and screwed a fresh cigarette in his mouth, crumpled up the empty pack. “I always heard you were a drunk. That ain’t your problem. You’re fucking stupid, man,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I want to make somebody dead, I don’t even have to get out of bed. Don’t try to shine me off, worm man. Tell Johnny and those military as swipes they piece me off or I leave hair on the walls.”

He walked on the balls of his feet toward his automobile, lifting his arm to smell himself again.

Sometimes they don’t wince.