Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Twenty-Five

The next day, in the late evening, a waxed purple Cadillac convertible with fins and chromed wheels and blue-dot taillights and a starched-white top drives slowly up my lane, passes the house, then stops and backs up the lane and into the driveway and all the way to the lawn. The driver cuts the lights but remains in the car. I click on the outside light and step outside. I can hear the heat ticking under the Caddy’s hood.

“Who’s that?” I say.

The driver rolls down the window and flicks a cigarette onto the lawn. Then he gets out and closes the door, which means he has fixed his interior lights so he cannot be illuminated when he enters and exits the car.

“I need to know who you are, partner,” I say.

There’s a mauve glow on the river and the meadowland beyond, enough to silhouette the driver but not enough to reveal his features.

“You want me to call 911?” I say.

He fires up another cigarette, the lighter’s flame as warm and soft as a candle’s. “I’m looking for a young fella,” he says. “Jack Wetzel is the name. I’d like to tell you I got a barrel of money for him, but truth is, I ain’t got dick except a message from his mother. Can I come up without getting shot?”

The accent is five-star peckerwood, like a bobby pin twanging. He walks into my outside light without waiting for an answer. He’s wearing shined needle-nose oxblood boots, a dull-white suit with a vest that has the color and design of a sliced pomegranate, and the most beautiful black John B. Stetson hat I have ever seen. His cigarette is of foreign make and gold-tipped. He takes it from his mouth and blows a smoke ring. “Where’s Jack at?”

“Jack who?”

“Jack Wetzel. My nephew.”

“He’s not here.”

His eyes are not symmetrical and his facial skin is like tallow and seems to knot and unknot itself. “Know where he went?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“The plumbing is stopped up.”

“You don’t have a shitter in back?” His face is solemn. Then he starts laughing. “Just kidding. Hang on.” He walks to the flower bed and unzips and urinates into the shadows. Then zips up and whistles. “Wow, I must have had a quart backed up. I tried not to hit your rosebushes.”

“You’re Jimmie Kale,” I reply. “A couple of cops told me you might be around. You were a country musician up in the Texas Panhandle.”

“Goddamn, son. You did your homework. Now, about Jack—”

“With respect, Mr. Kale, I can’t give out information about other people. I also have to get back to work.”

“I was hoping you’d h’ep me find him. I’ve had three or four people tell me he’s working for you. Is he staying with you or in town?”

“I think you bear Jack ill will.”

“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“This is about meth, Mr. Kale. I’m not fond of people who make or sell it. Neither are the Indians.”

He tries to see past me, his face knotting. “Who the hell is that? Why’s she giving me that look?”

I glance behind me. “What are you talking about?”

“The woman in your doorway.”

“What woman?”

“The squaw. Right yonder.”

I open the screen and stick my arm inside the door and click the overhead light off and on three times. “I’m the only person here.”

Half his face seems to soften, as though it’s beginning to melt and he has no control over it. “She’s gone now, but what I seen was a short little bitch in white buckskin with dark hair and a knife in her hand.”

“I’m afraid you didn’t.”

“She’s got knockers and deep-set eyes. She looked me up and down, like I was trash. I won’t abide that. Get her out here.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, partner.”

He’s breathing through his nose. But I am probably more disturbed than he is, particularly after his description of the Indian woman.

“Okay, I ain’t gonna press it,” he says. “Tell Jack I’m at the DoubleTree.”

“No, sir, I will not give him any message at all.”

“You’ve got yourself an attitudinal problem, Mr. Broussard. You’re too damn snooty for your britches.”

“The Indian woman you saw?”

His eyes fill with expectation. “She was there, wasn’t she?”

“You were probably looking at your worst nightmare, Mr. Kale.” I glance at his Caddy. “I love your wheels. Those were the days, weren’t they?”

He stares at me, his mouth open, waiting for me to continue. But I don’t.

I call Ruby and tell her what just happened.

“I’d get rid of Jack Wetzel,” she says.

“I can’t do that. I have to ask a question, Ruby. It’s about the Indian woman in the doorway.”

“You mean was it me?”

“Was it?”

“I took a nap this evening. That’s all I can tell you. I’m not holding back on you. I don’t have control over my life anymore.”

“The Indian woman was holding a knife.”

“Maybe there’s another answer here. Maybe Kale fried his circuits with his own product,” she says. “My advice, if he comes after you or Wetzel, is to cap him. This is still Montana.”

“I had a talk with John Culpepper. He told me he killed a Black child when he was in the Klan.”

“He confessed that to you?”

“He’s full of guilt. But I think he’s going to get himself killed.”

“Leave him alone, Aaron.”

“You know what happens doing discovery. A witness for the prosecution can end up on a meat hook.”

“Culpepper rolled the dice a long time ago,” she says.

I know my relationship with Jack Wetzel seems excessively charitable. But few people realize how the system works. The children of rich people do not go to juvie. Nor do they end up in shithole county jails where they get turned out and passed around. In a mainline joint they either get an “old man” or they’re cannibalized. I do not want to describe the details, because there are certain kinds of knowledge that leave a stone in your heart, and the sexual subculture in a prison is one of them.

The inhumanity in a prison is not planned. It’s inherent in the institution, feral in nature, sweaty, often depraved, and cruel to the bone. At age eighteen I was in a lockdown unit fifteen feet from the death cell in a Louisiana prison. My only possessions were my clothes, a tin cup, a tin plate, and a spoon. The food cart came into the bull run at 0700, grits and black coffee and one slice of white bread. At noon the cart returned with spaghetti or rice and gravy and again one slice of bread. There was no supper, but the trusties let us load up with leftovers from the noon meal that later we heated on a community stinger.

These things, however, are of small relevance. The inhumanity I witnessed was an execution fifteen feet from the lockdown unit in which I was confined. Back then, in Louisiana, the electric chair traveled from parish to parish. Two big generators on the back of a truck were brought to the jail by the executioner, and the rubber-encased power cables were roped through a barred window on the third floor and attached to the electric chair, whose nickname was Gruesome Gertie. That evening an electrical storm swept across the wetlands; the booms of thunder and sheets of rain slapping against the jail were deafening, augmented by the generators kicking to life, spinning with a whine and gaining speed until the centrifugal roar was louder than the storm.

I wanted the generators to drown out the sounds from what was called the death cell, the minister reading from his Bible, the condemned man whispering an apology, the strained creak of the leather when the first jolt hit him, his body vibrating against the oak frame of the chair, the metal cap on his head smoking and starting to rattle.

The rain had stopped. The sky was an ink wash, the willows and cypress and gum trees along the Calcasieu River half-submerged in the whitish-green blanket of lichen lifting and dropping with the tide. There was no glass in our windows and I waited in the silence for the cool sweetness of the storm to bloom inside the jail. Instead, our home in lockdown was visited by only one odor, like someone ironing damp clothes in an airless room on a summer day, the iron just hot enough to scorch.

So today when I see a kid like Jack Wetzel or Leigh Culpepper, I try to put a bandage on a hole in the dike. It’s like prayer. What’s to lose?

I call the Poverello and someone puts Jack Wetzel on the line.

“Jimmie Kale was just at my house,” I tell him. “Looking for you.”

“Oh, shit,” he says.

“I’ll make it short. He’ll find you at the Pov. I’m going to make arrangements for you in a motel in Bonner. I don’t want you to come to work for a couple of days because he’ll probably cruise the house. You copy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why’s he after you, Jack?”

“I muled his meth. I know his operation.”

“Good try. A guy like Kale doesn’t risk a homicide beef over the testimony of a drug transporter, partner.”

“Maybe I know where some bodies are buried.”

“You saw the bodies go into the ground?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Jack, it’s wake-up time. I’m the only friend you have.”

“Mr. Broussard, Jimmie the Digger isn’t human. People in Albuquerque are scared shitless of him. I ain’t gonna talk about him to anyone, not you or anyone else. If you don’t like it, I’ll take my chances on my own.”

“Did Kale kill your brother?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“We were standing by the railroad track on the res, like behind the nightclub. Then a guy came out of the fog with these other guys behind him. Clayton told me to run. I said I wasn’t going without him. They ripped him into pieces, his arms and legs and head, and I started running. I ran and ran until I fell down, then I got up and ran again.”

“Who were these guys, Jack?”

“They looked like they were in Civil War uniforms. They smelled like shit. I mean like for real, the way human shit smells.”

“Who was giving the orders?”

“The first guy to come out of the fog. He had those things on his shoulders.”

“Epaulettes?”

“Yeah, that’s it. He had on a sword and pistol, too. He looked like he’d been in a fire.”

“I’m going to call my friend at the motel now, then I’ll call you back. Jack?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You ought to be a writer. Think about it.”

I call my friend in Bonner, an old logging town eight miles from Missoula on the Blackfoot River, and make an arrangement for Jack at the motel. The Blackfoot Valley is the site of the book and the movie A River Runs Through It. On the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers is a legendary saloon named the Milltown Bar, Café, and Laundromat. It was once visited by Ernest Hemingway on his way to Ketchum, Idaho, where he took his life. A millworker at the bar looked at him and said, “Guess who thinks he’s Ernest Hemingway.”

Papa replied, “That’s because I’m Ernest Hemingway,” and bought the house a round.

True story, the kind that gives me an excuse to smile on a dark night.