Burning Angel

Chapter 25

By Monday morning nothing had happened. No knock at the door from New Orleans plainclothes, no warrant cut. To my knowledge, not even an investigation in progress.

The sky was clear and blue, windless, the day warm, the sun as bright as a shattered mirror on the bayou’s surface. After the early fishermen had left the dock and I had started the fire in the barbecue pit for the lunches Batist and I would sell later, I called Clete at the office on Main.

“You need me for anything?” I said.

“Not really. It’s pretty quiet.”

“I’m going to work at the dock today.”

“He s coming, Dave.”

“I know.”

The priest sits next to me on the weathered planks of the bleachers by the baseball diamond at New Iberia High. The school building is abandoned, the windows broken by rocks, pocked with BB holes. The priest is a tall, gray, crewcut man who used to be a submarine pitcher for the Pelicans back in the days of the Evangeline League and later became an early member of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Today he belongs to the same AA group I do.

“Did you go to the restaurant with that purpose in mind?” he asks.

“No.”

“Then it wasn’t done with forethought. It was an impetuous act. That’s the nature of anger.”

It’s dusk and the owner of the pawn and gun shop on the corner rattles the glass in his door when he slams and locks it. Two black kids in ball caps gaze through the barred window at the pistols on display.

“Dave?”

“I tried to kill him.”

“That’s a bit more serious,” he says.

The black kids cross the street against the red light and pass close to the bleachers, in the shadows, oblivious to our presence. One picks up a rock, sails it clattering through a tree next to the school building.

I hear a faint tinkle of glass inside.

“Because of your friend, what was his name, Sonny Boy?” the priest says.

“I think he put the hit on Sonny. I can’t prove it, though.”

His hands are long and slender, with liver spots on the backs. His skin makes a dry sound when he rubs one hand on top of the other.

“What bothers you more than anything else in the world, Dave?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Vietnam? The death of your wife Annie? Revisiting the booze in your dreams?”

When I don’t reply, he lifts one hand, gestures at the diamond, the ruined school building that’s become softly molded inside the fading twilight. A torn kite, caught by its string on an iron fire escape, flaps impotently against a wall.

“It’s all this, isn’t it?” he says. “We’re still standing in the same space where we grew up but we don’t recognize it anymore. It’s like other people own it now.”

“How did you know?”

“You want absolution for what you did to this guy?”

“Yes.”

“Dave, when we say the Serenity Prayer about acceptance, we have to mean it. I can absolve sins but I can’t set either one of us free from the nature of time.”

“It has nothing to do with time. It’s what we’ve allowed them to do — all of them, the dope traffickers, the industrialists, the politicians. We gave it up without even a fight.”

“I’m all out of words,” he says, and lays his hand on my shoulder. It has the weightlessness of an old man’s. He looks at the empty diamond with a private thought in his eyes, one that he knows his listener is not ready to hear.

“Come on down to the office and talk to somebody for me, will you?” Clete said when I answered the phone early the next morning. Then he told me who.

“I don’t want to talk to him,” I said.

“You’re going to enjoy this. I guarantee it.”

Twenty minutes later I parked my truck in front of the office. Through the window I could see Patsy Dapolito sitting in a wood chair next to my desk, his brow furrowed as he stared down at the BB game that he tilted back and forth in his hands. His face looked like stitched pink rubber molded against bone.

I walked inside and sat behind my desk. The new secretary looked up and smiled, then went back to typing a letter.

“Tell Dave what’s on your mind, get his thoughts on it,” Clete said to the back of Patsy’s head.

“You guys hire operatives. Maybe we can work something out,” Patsy said.

“Like work for us, you mean?” I asked.

“Nobody catches any flies on you. I can see that,” he answered, and tilted more BB’s into the tiny holes of his game.

Clete widened his eyes and puffed air in his cheeks to suppress the humor in his face.

“We’re not hiring right now, Patsy. Thanks, anyway,” I said.

“Who tried to peel your box?” he said.

Clete and I looked at each other.

“You didn’t know your place got creeped?” He laughed, then pointed with his thumb to the safe. “You can punch ‘em, peel ‘em, or burn ‘em. The guy tried to do this one was a fish. He should have gone through the dial.”

Clete got up from his desk and rubbed his fingers along the prised edge of the safe, then went to the front and back doors. “How’d the guy get in?” he said to me, his face blank.

“It’s called a lock pick, Purcel,” Patsy said.

“There’re no scratches,” Clete said to me.

“Maybe the safe was already damaged when you got it from Nig,” I said. But Clete was already shaking his head.

Patsy lit a cigarette, held it upward in the cone of his fingers, blew smoke around it as though he were creating an artwork in the air.

“There’s a hit on me. I got a proposition,” he said.

“Tell me who Charlie is,” I said.

“Charlie? What the fuck you talking about?”

“Would you watch your language, please,” I said.

“Language? That’s what’s you guys got on your mind, I use bad language?” he said.

“You’re a beaut, Patsy,” I said.

“Yeah? Well, fuck you. The hit’s coming from Johnny Carp. You stomped the shit out of him, Robicheaux; Purcel bounced money off his face. That gives all of us a mutual interest, you get my drift?”

“Thanks for coming by,” I said.

He stood up, ground his cigarette out in an ashtray, stabbing it into the ceramic as though he were working an angry thought out of his mind. “Marsallus ever wash up on the shore?” he said.

“No, why?” I said.

“No reason. I wish I’d been there for it. It was time somebody broke that mutt’s legs.”

“Get out,” I said.

When he walked past the secretary, he drew his finger, like a line of ice water, across the back of her neck.

When I closed the bait shop that night and walked up the dock toward the house, I saw Luke Fontenot waiting for me in the shadows of the oaks that overhung the road. He wore a pair of pink slacks, a braided cloth belt, a black shirt with the collar turned up on the neck. He flipped a toothpick out onto the road.

“What’s up, partner?” I said.

“Come out to the plantation wit’ me.”

“Nope.”

“Ruthie Jean and me want to bring all this to an end.”

“What are you saying?”

“Moleen Bertrand gonna fix it so it come out right for everybody.”

“I’m afraid I’m not one of his fans, Luke.”

“Talk to my Aint Bertie. If it come from you, she gonna listen.” I could hear the strain, like twisted wire, in his throat.

“To what? No, don’t tell me. Somebody’s going to give y’all a lot of money. Sounds great. Except Bertie’s one of those rare people who’s not for sale and just wants her little house and garden and the strip Moleen’s grandfather gave y’all’s family.”

“You ain’t got to the part that counts most.”

He rubbed a mosquito bite on his neck, looked hotly into my face.

“Moleen and Ruthie Jean?” I said.

“That’s what it always been about, Mr. Dave. But if it don’t go right, if Aint Bertie gonna act old and stubborn... There’s some bad white people gonna be out there. I’m between Ruthie Jean and that old woman. What I’m gonna do?”

I followed him in my truck out to the Bertrand plantation. The sky was freckled with birds, the air heavy with smoke from a trash fire, full of dust blowing out of the fields. The grove of gum trees at the end of the road thrashed in black-green silhouette against the dying sun. While he told me a story of reconciliation and promise I sat with Luke on the tiny gallery of the house from which he and Ruthie Jean had been evicted, and I wondered if our most redeeming quality, our willingness to forgive, was not also the instrument most often used to lay bare and destroy the heart.

Moleen had found Luke first, then Ruthie Jean, the latter in a motel in a peculiar area of north Lafayette where Creoles and blacks and white people seemed to traverse one another’s worlds without ever identifying with any one of them. He spent the first night with her in the motel, a low-rent 19405 cluster of stucco boxes that had once been called the Truman Courts. While he made love to her, she lay with her head propped up on pillows, her hands lightly touching his shoulders, her gaze pointed at the wall, neither encouraging nor dissuading his passion, which seemed as insatiable as it was unrequited.

Then in the middle of the night he sat naked on the side of the bed, his skin so white it almost glowed, his forearms on his thighs, his confession of betrayal and hypocrisy so spontaneous and devoid of ulterior motive that she knew she would have to forgive whatever injury he had done her or otherwise his sin would become her own.

She rose to her knees, pressed him back on the pillow, then mounted him and kissed his face and throat, made love to him almost as though he were a child.

When the light broke against the window curtains in the morning and she heard the sound of diesel trucks outside, car doors slamming, people talking loudly because they didn’t care if others slept or not, all the hot, busy noise of another day in the wrong part of town, she could feel the nocturnal intimacy of their time together slipping away from her, and she knew he would shower soon, drink coffee with her, be fond, even affectionate, while the attention in his eyes wandered, then begin to refocus on the world that awaited him with all the guarantees of his race and position as soon as he left the motel.

But instead he drove them to Galveston, where they ate lunch at a hotel restaurant on the beach, rented a boat and fished for speckled trout in the deep drop-off beyond the third sandbar, walked barefoot along the edge of the surf by the old World War I fort at sunset, and on a whim flew to Monterrey to watch a bullfight the next afternoon.

By the time they returned to Lafayette, Ruthie Jean believed her life had turned a corner she had not thought possible.

“He’s leaving his wife?” I said.

“He give his word. He cain’t stay with Miss Julia no more,” Luke said.

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

“You’re a smart man, Luke. Where’s he going to take his law practice?”

“He sell the property, they ain’t gonna have to worry.”

“I see.”

I had an indescribably sad feeling inside that I could not translate into words. Then I saw Ruthie Jean come out of Bertie’s house and walk on her cane toward us. She looked beautiful. Her hair was brushed in thick swirls that curved on her high cheekbones, and the low-cut white knit dress she wore showed every undulation in her body. When she recognized me in the gloom, she went through the back door of the house.

“Are y’all staying here now?” I asked Luke.

“Yes, suh.”

“But it was Julia Bertrand who evicted y’all, wasn’t it?”

He studied the grove of gum trees at the end of the road.

“So it must be with her knowledge y’all are back here. Does that make sense to you?” I said.

“Talk to Aint Bertie, Mr. Dave.”

“I have too much respect for her. No offense meant. I’ll see you, Luke.”

“Moleen Bertrand gonna keep his word.”

When I started my truck he was standing alone in his yard, a jail-wise hustler, pulled from the maw of our legal killing apparatus, who grieved over his elderly aunt and put his trust in white people, whom a behaviorist would expect him to fear and loathe.

I wondered why historians had to look to the Roman arena for the seeming inexhaustible reservoirs of faith that can exist in the human soul.

The next evening, after I had closed the bait shop and dock, I put on my running shoes and gym shorts and worked out with my weights in the backyard. I did three sets of curls, dead lifts, and military presses, then jogged through the tunnel of trees by the bayou’s edge. The sky was the color of gunmetal, the sun a crack of fire on the western horizon. I came out of the trees, the wind in my face, and headed for the drawbridge.

For some reason I wasn’t even surprised when he came out of the shadows and fell in next to me, his tennis shoes powdering the dust in sync with mine, the granite head hunched down on his oily shoulders as though the neck had been surgically removed, his evenly measured breath warm with the smell of beer and tobacco.

“I saw you working out on the speed bag at Red Lerille’s Gym,” he said. “The trick’s to do it without gloves.” He held out his square, blunt hands, his words bouncing up and down in his throat. “I used to wrap mine with gauze soaked in lye water. Puts a sheath of callus on the outside like dry fish scale. The problem today is, some faggot cuts his hand on the bag, then you skin your hand on the same bag and you got AIDS, that’s what these cocksuckers are doing to the country.”

“What’s your problem, Pogue?”

“You gonna dime me?”

“I’m not a cop anymore, remember?”

“So the bar’s open,” he said, and pointed toward a brown Nissan parked by the side of the road.

“I’m tied up.”

“I got the cooler on the backseat. Take a break, chief. Nobody’s after your cherry,” he said.

Up ahead I could see the drawbridge and the bridge tender inside his little lighted house. Emile Pogue tugged his cooler out onto the road, stuck his corded forearm down into the water and melting ice, and pulled out two bottles of Coors.

“No, thanks,” I said.

He twisted off the cap on one bottle and drank it half-empty. His torso looked as taut and knurled as the skin on a pumpkin, crisscrossed with stitched scars, webbed with sinew like huge cat’s whiskers above the rib cage. He worked his arms through a sleeveless, olive green shirt.

“You don’t like me?” he said.

“No.”

He pinched his nostrils, flexed his lips back on his gums, looked up and down the road. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You put a stop to what’s happening, I’ll rat-fuck any grease ball you want, then I’m gone.”

“Stop what?”

“That demented guy, the one looks like a dildo you scrambled, Patsy Dapolito, he thinks Johnny Carp’s got a hit on him. It ain’t coming from Johnny, though.” His breath was like a slap, his body auraed with a fog of dried sweat and testosterone. He tapped me on the chest with his finger. “Look at me when I’m talking to you. Sonny killed my brother. So I had a personal and legitimate hard-on for the guy.”

“I hear you.”

“But that ain’t why Sonny’s back.”

I stared at him, open-mouthed. His eyes had the dead quality of ball bearings. He breathed loudly through his nose.

“Back?” I said.

“Get you some Q-Tips, open up the wax. Don’t tell me what I seen. Look, chief, till you been down in the bush with the Indians, done a few mushrooms with these fuckers, I’m talking about on a stone altar where their ancestors used to tear out people’s hearts, don’t knock what somebody else tells you he sees.”

“You lost me.”

“I saw him at a camp I use out in the Atchafalaya. I looked out in the trees, inside all this hanging moss, there was a swarm of moths or butterflies, except they were on fire, then they formed a big cluster in the shape of a guy, and the guy walked right through the trunk of a tree into the water. It was Sonny Marsallus, he was burning like hundreds of little tongues of flame under the water. I ain’t the only one seen it, either.”

His hand was squeezed like a huge paw around his beer bottle, his mouth an expressionless slit.

“I think we’re talking about an overload of acid or steroids, Emile,” I said.

“You get word to Sonny,” he said. “That Mennonite’s words... they were a curse. I’m saying maybe I’m damned. I need time to get out of it.”

His breath was rife with funk, his eyes jittering, riveted on mine.

“What Mennonite?” I said.

Sometimes you pull aside the veil and look into the Pit. What follows is my best reconstruction of his words.