Creole Belle

25

After supper on Wednesday evening, Alafair received a call on her cell phone from Gretchen Horowitz. “Take a ride with me,” she said.

Alafair shut and opened her eyes and wondered how she could hide the reluctance she felt in her chest. “Now?” she said.

“I need your advice.”

“About what?”

“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

“I was thinking of taking a walk in a few minutes.”

“Your father doesn’t want you around me?”

“It creates certain kinds of conflicts for him, Gretchen. Be realistic.”

“I bought a whole bunch of film equipment. I’m going to make the documentary on the 1940s music revue.”

“That’s not why you called.”

“I’ll be parked by the drawbridge on Burke Street. If you don’t feel like talking with me, don’t worry about it.”

“Gretchen-”

Minutes later, Alafair walked past the Shadows and the old brick building that had been a Buick agency and was now a law office. She turned up the street that fed onto the drawbridge and saw Gretchen’s chopped-down pickup parked by the corner, its exposed chrome-plated engine gleaming in the twilight. Gretchen got out on the sidewalk. “Thanks for coming,” she said.

“What’s the trouble?” Alafair said.

“Something happened today. I’m a little mixed up about it. You want a drink?”

“No. Tell me what it is.”

“I saw Pierre Dupree take a crippled child into the Catholic church in Broussard this morning. He saw me watching him and pulled into my driveway. He invited me to lunch.”

A pleasure boat loaded with revelers emerged from under the bridge and passed the old convent and hospital on the opposite side of the bayou. They were holding balloons and smiling, and their expressions seemed garish and surreal among the balloons. “You’re not going to say anything?” Gretchen asked.

“Did you go with him?”

“No.”

“I think you made a wise choice,” Alafair said.

Gretchen folded her arms on her chest and looked at the diners eating and drinking in the courtyard behind Clementine’s. There were white cloths and candles that flickered inside glass vessels on the dining tables, and the candles made shadows on the banana plants that grew along the restaurant’s walls.

“I called the church,” Gretchen said. “Pierre-”

“Pierre?”

“That’s his name, isn’t it? He not only paid for the crippled boy’s tuition, he set up a scholarship fund.”

“Don’t be taken in by this guy,” Alafair said.

“He had no way of knowing I’d see him at the church with the little boy.”

“I think something else is going on with you, Gretchen. You’re having second thoughts about your own life, and you want to believe that people can be redeemed. Pierre Dupree is no good.”

“Where do you get all this knowledge about what goes on in other people’s heads?”

“Sometimes I want to believe certain things for reasons I don’t want to accept,” Alafair said.

“You’re talking about me, not you, right? Don’t start that twelve-step psychobabble with me.”

“If you want to have lunch with him, do it,” Alafair said.

Gretchen’s face was flushed, her eyes moving from the bayou to the diners in the courtyard to the drawbridge, without seeming to see any of it. “You’re supposed to be my friend. I came to you for advice, nobody else.”

“Some people have to work at being assholes. That’s not true of Pierre Dupree. He was born one.”

“Explain to me how he knew I’d see him with the crippled boy.”

“He’s afraid of you. He knows what happened to Jesse Leboeuf. He doesn’t want to end up in a bathtub with a bullet in his brisket.”

“You’re saying I killed Leboeuf? You know that for a fact?”

“No, I don’t know anything. I don’t want to, either.”

“That’s a chickenshit attitude.”

“What other attitude can I have? You ask me for advice, then you argue about it.”

“The 1940s revue is this weekend. I thought you’d be there with me.”

“I’m trying to make some headway on my new novel.”

“You and Clete are the only two people I ever thought of as friends.”

“I think Pierre Dupree will hurt you. You’re not being honest with yourself. You’re about to let a bad man use you. The worst thing we can do to ourselves is to help other people injure us. The feeling of shame never goes away.”

“Anything else you want to say?”

“Yeah, I think it’s going to rain.”

Gretchen widened her eyes, her face hot and bright in the sunset. “I won’t call you again,” she said. “I’m really angry right now and having thoughts I don’t like to think.”

That same evening Clete had a caller he did not expect. When he opened the cottage door, he had to look down to see her face. She was holding a pot of soup with two hot pads. “I put too much in. It’s sloshing over the sides. Where can I put this down?” she said.

She went past him without waiting for him to answer. It was Julie Ardoin, the pilot who had flown him to the island southeast of the Chandeleurs. She set the pot heavily on the stove and turned around. “Dave said you were sick. So I took the liberty,” she said.

“Dave exaggerates. I had a nosebleed,” Clete said.

“Can I sit down?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry,” he said, pulling a chair out from the breakfast table.

“I’m not a ‘ma’am,’” she said.

“You want a drink or a beer?”

She looked around at the general disarray that characterized his room. She wore makeup and jeans and a short-sleeve embroidered shirt spotted with rain. Her hair was damp and shiny under the light. “I had another reason for coming here.”

“Yeah?” he replied.

“I know you and Dave had words on the island. He thinks the world of you. He’d do anything for you. I figured you ought to know that.”

“You came out in the rain to tell me that?”

“What, you think I’m minding y’all’s business or something?”

“No, I meant that’s a kind thing to do. Excuse the way the place looks. I was just cleaning up when you knocked.” He picked up the wastebasket and opened a cabinet under the sink and put it inside.

She glanced at his raincoat and hat on top of his bed. “You fixing to go out?”

“I’m moving my boat from East Cote Blanche Bay, but it can wait. What all did Dave tell you?”

“Just that you were sick and he was worried about you.”

“Out of nowhere he said that?”

“Not exactly. I asked him how you were getting along.”

“Yeah?”

“You want to try the soup?”

Clete sat down across from her. “I ate a little bit ago. Let me get you a Dr Pepper. I keep some iced down for Dave.”

“I need to get back home pretty soon. There’s something you did at the island that I thought was out of the ordinary.”

“Like what?”

“The hippie girl, Sybil. She made some sandwiches for y’all, but you forgot to take them. You went back for the sandwiches so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt.”

“It wasn’t a big deal.”

“So that’s why I asked Dave how you were doing. Some people you ask about, some you don’t. Do I make you uncomfortable?”

“No,” he said. He coughed softly into his palm and lowered his hand beneath the tabletop.

“Because you look like it,” she said.

He searched the room for the right words. “I’m an awkward guy. I have a way of messing up things. I’ve got a bad track record with relationships.”

“You ought to check out mine. I got married the first time when I was sixteen. My husband played for Jerry Lee Lewis. Does that tell you something?”

“I’m over the hill. I break the springs in bathroom scales. My doc says there’s enough cholesterol in my system to clog a storm drain.”

“You look okay to me.”

“I really like the way you pilot a plane.”

“Give me a monkey and three bananas, and I’ll give you a pilot. Ever hear that one?” she said.

“I know better than that. I was in Force Recon. I learned to fly a slick, and I learned enough to keep a fixed-wing plane in the air if the pilot got hurt.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “You hang out with old guys?”

“You’re not old.”

“Tell my liver that.”

“I heard maybe you and Varina Leboeuf were an item.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“It’s a small town.”

“We’re talking about the past tense. Anything bad that came out of that is on me, not her. Your husband took his life, Miss Julie?”

“I’m not a ‘miss,’ either. And we’re not on the plantation. Why do you ask about my husband?”

“Because it’s rough when you lose somebody that way. Sometimes a person reaches out for anybody who’s available and doesn’t think things through. I’ve got a sheet longer than most perps’. I capped a federal informant. There are some government guys who’ve got it in for me because I fought on the leftist side in El Salvador.”

“Who cares?”

“The government does.”

“I don’t,” she said.

“Streak said you’re stand-up. That’s his ultimate compliment.”

“I hope you like the soup.”

“Hey, don’t go off,” he said.

“Take care of yourself. Watch out for your cholesterol and give me a call if you really dig that old-time rock and roll.”

She opened the door and went outside, splashing through a puddle, getting into her car. He followed her, the rain blowing in his face. “I need to return your pot. Where do you live?” he said.

She rolled down the window and grinned as though the issue were of no consequence, then drove away.

If she had wanted to set the hook, she had done a proper job of it, he thought.

Clete Purcel’s deeds for the rest of the night and the early hours of the following day were not of a rational kind. Even to him, his behavior was bizarre. It had nothing to do with Julie Ardoin’s visit to his cottage, or his addictions, or his abiding need to find approval in the eyes of his father. The concerns that had beset Clete for most of his life had disappeared, only to be replaced by the conviction that every tick of the second hand on his wristwatch was an irrevocable subtraction from his time on earth.

He knew that death could come in many ways, almost all of them bad. Those who said otherwise had never smelled the odor of a field mortuary in a tropical country when the gas-powered refrigeration failed. Nor had they lain on a litter next to a black marine trying to hold his entrails inside his abdomen with his fingers. They had never heard a grown man cry out for his mother in a battalion aid tent. Death squeezed the breath from your chest and the light from your eyes. It was not kind or merciful; it lived in bedsheets that stuck to the body and wastebaskets filled with bloody gauze and the hollow-eyed stare of emergency room personnel who went forty-eight hours without sleep during Hurricane Katrina. It invaded your dreams and mocked your sunrise and stood next to your reflection in the mirror. Sex and booze and dope brought you no respite. When you lived in proximity to death, even a midday slumber was filled with needles and shards of glass, and the smallest sounds made the side of your face twitch like a tightly wound rubber band.

Once you understood that the great shade was your constant companion, a change took place in your life that you did not share with others. Sometimes you quickened your step when you walked through woods in the late fall; at other times indistinct figures beckoned to you from the edge of your vision, their voices as soft as the rustling of leaves, asking you to pause in your journey and rest with them awhile. Just when you thought you were onto their tricks, you discovered the joke that death had played upon you. While you were trying to avoid the natural cycle of the seasons, you empowered evil men to perpetrate upon you the greatest theft of all, enticing you into a manufactured crusade, taking you from your loved ones, robbing you of choices that should have been yours, separating you without warning from the gold-green cathedral given to you as your birthright.

These were the kind of reflections that lived behind the calmness of Clete’s intelligent green eyes. And these were what made him the brave man he was. He saw the truth but never pushed the burden onto someone else.

He drove his Caddy in the rain to the boatyard on East Cote Blanche Bay where he kept his eighteen-footer and his Evinrude seventy-five-horsepower engine. He went into the tin-roofed shed where his boat was moored to a post and winched it up on a trailer and hooked the trailer to his Caddy. The bay was chain-ringed with raindrops, the branches of the gum and willow trees along the shore flattening in the wind. He filled two five-gallon plastic containers with gasoline and hefted them inside the boat. Then he opened a steel lockbox he rented from the owner and removed two road flares, an entrenching tool, a KA-BAR knife attached to a web belt, a military-issue flashlight, an AK-47 modified into a semi-auto, and a scoped ’03 Springfield rifle that was heavily oiled and snugged up inside a canvas bag. Under the shed, he removed the Springfield from the bag and opened the bolt and placed his thumb in the empty chamber and closed the bolt. He wiped the excess oil from the stock and the steel surfaces of the rifle and placed it and a box of. 30–06 rounds in the bag and put the bag in the trunk of the Caddy.

By 4:15 A.M. he had off-loaded his boat into Bayou Teche and, with no lights on, had gone downstream ten miles to the back of Croix du Sud Plantation. The rain had stopped and the moon was up, and an elevated carriage lamp glowed inside the humidity in the backyard. When the wind blew, the yard was filled with moving shadows and rainwater that shone like crystal sprinkling from the trees. Clete had cut his engine upstream and allowed his boat to float silently through the shallows, past the cypress and oak trees and flooded canebrakes that bordered the back of the Dupree property. He picked up his anchor and lowered it over the gunwale and let the rope slide through his palm until the anchor sank in the mud and the rope tightened and the stern swung around and hung stationary in the current.

Someone turned on a light in the kitchen. Clete removed the Springfield from its canvas bag and opened the bolt and began thumb-loading a handful of soft-nosed rounds into the magazine. After he had locked down the bolt, feeding a bullet into the chamber, he set the safety and wiped his hand free of oil on his shirt and looked through the telescopic sight into the kitchen. The clarity of detail inside the lenses was stunning.

Alexis Dupree was eating a piece of cobbler and drinking a glass of milk at the kitchen table. He was wearing a striped robe, one that, paradoxically, might be confused with the striped pattern on the work uniforms of the inmates in Dachau and Buchenwald. His eyes were deep-set, his jowls flecked with tiny veins, his throat as coarse and wrinkled as a turtle’s. Hair grew out of his nose. His eyebrows looked feral; he scratched at a dark, crusty mole inside one sideburn. His tall frame had the stiffness of coat hangers. He ate with small bites, as though the process of eating were a joyless activity and should be undertaken only with measure and control. He gazed through the window at the backyard and at the giant trees that swelled with wind and scattered leaves on the bayou, and dabbed at a smear of cobbler on his chin.

Clete wondered if Alexis Dupree saw things inside the darkness that others did not. Had Dupree not only looked into the abyss but immersed himself in it, exchanging his soul for the black arts he unleashed on helpless people behind barbed wire? Or had he been little more than a cipher, a mindless bureaucrat carrying out the orders of other people, a man with the wingspan of a blowfly rather than a condor?

A flip of the safety mechanism, a squeeze of the trigger, and Clete could make all these questions moot. How would the world be the less? One squeeze, one bullet, and a few of Dupree’s victims would not have to wander the earth seeking justice.

Just do it and think about it later, Clete told himself.

Then he saw Pierre Dupree enter the kitchen, followed by a woman who remained in the background, her face obscured by the knives and skillets and cooking pans that hung from an iron rack suspended above a butcher block. Pierre was dressed in slacks and a snow-white shirt, and the woman wore a maroon skirt cinched with a gold belt. Clete suspected they were going on a trip or they would not have been up this early. He could not see the woman’s face or even the color of her hair, and he wondered who she could be.

He realized he had devoted too much attention to the scene and the people in the kitchen. In the corner of his vision, he saw the shape of a man by the gazebo on the left side of the backyard. Clete shifted his position in the boat and looked through the telescopic sight at the gazebo and the shadows in the yard, but the man who had been standing on the lawn seconds ago had disappeared. The wind gusted out of the north, blowing hundreds of unraked leaves across the Saint Augustine grass. While all the other shadows in the yard swayed back and forth, one remained starkly immobile. Then the figure lit a cigarette, the flame from his lighter flaring on his face. There was no mistaking the bump on his nose, the greased hair, or the scalp job around his ears. He was one of the men Clete had seen in Lafayette with Lamont Woolsey and the British oilman Hubert Donnelly.

Clete’s eyes were beginning to burn in the humidity. He lowered the rifle and wiped his eyes clear on his sleeve, then raised the telescopic sight again and scanned the area around the gazebo. The man with the bump on his nose was gone. His disappearance made no sense. Clete had a view of the entire yard, which was terraced like three stair steps, with gardens on each step. The gazebo and the latticework on it were silhouetted against the moonlit reflection of the house. In no more than three or four seconds, the Duprees’ sentinel had walked either to the house or out to a sugarcane field, neither of which seemed possible.

Clete moved the telescopic sight back onto the kitchen. Pierre Dupree was seated with his grandfather, dipping a powdered beignet into a cup of coffee, a napkin tucked into his collar. Clete could not see the woman. Then he realized she had gone out the French doors and was standing on a patio overhung by the limbs of a live oak. The light from the kitchen fell across her hips and lower back and calves but not her upper body or face. She turned briefly, and Clete caught sight of her hands and her broad, laminated gold belt and the plate and fork she was eating with. Fog had started to form on the bayou and drift through the trees, wrapping around her, almost as though she enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with it.

Downstream he heard the drawbridge closing, then the droning sounds of a tugboat pushing a huge barge against the tidal inflow, the wake slapping loudly in the trees along the bank. The woman walked out in the mist and gazed at the tug and barge passing beyond the tree trunks. Did the boat represent escape? Was it a reminder of a working-class world she had abandoned for the ambience the Duprees could provide her? Did she long for a better and simpler world than the one she lived inside? Was she Tee Jolie Melton? Or Varina Leboeuf? Or someone else?

Clete would not learn the answer to his questions, at least not that night. The woman went back into the house and fastened the French doors and disappeared into the room beyond the kitchen.

Clete pulled up the anchor and let the boat drift south of the Dupree property before he fired up his engine. He worked his way upstream toward New Iberia, the running lights off, keeping to the far side of the bayou so he would not be seen from the Dupree home.

He rounded a bend and angled his boat toward a spot at the extreme end of the Dupree property, then cut the gas feed and tilted the propeller out of the water. His bow slid up on the mudflat between two cypress trees, and he stepped into the shallows and pulled the boat’s hull farther up the bank. Through the trees, he could see the lights in the Dupree kitchen and a porch light that someone had turned on. He lifted the five-gallon gasoline containers out of his boat and set them on the mudflat, then retrieved his E-tool and dug a loamy hole on the edge of a wild blackberry bush spiked with thorns. He wrapped the containers and the road flares inside a plastic tarp and buried them in the hole, sweating inside his clothes, his breath coming hard in his chest. He spat in his palm and looked at it, then rubbed his palm clean on his pants and tried not to think about the pink tinge in his saliva.

He stared through the darkness at the house, his head as light as a helium balloon. “Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that or maybe a month down the road, I’m going to get you,” he said.

To whom was he speaking? The Duprees and their hired gumballs? Or the men who would probably try to kill Gretchen? No, Clete’s real enemy had been with him much longer. He had seen him the first time he lay in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands, dehydrated from blood expander, his face white from the concussion of a grenade, his neck beaded with dirt rings, his utilities fouled by his own urine. A corpsman had closed off an artery with his thumb, and suddenly the light had come back into Clete’s eyes and air had flowed into his lungs, as cool as if it were blowing across open water. That was when he saw the cloaked and hooded figure with the white face and thin lips and sunken cheeks. The figure smiled and leaned over and pressed his mouth to Clete’s ear, as though no one else were in the tent. His breath smelled like nightshade and lichen on damp stone and ponded water gone sour in a forest whose canopy seldom admits light. I can wait, the hooded figure whispered. But no matter where you go, you’re mine.