Purple Cane Road

25

THE SHRIMP FESTIVAL was held each year at the end of summer down by the bay. On Friday, when the day cooled and the summer light rilled the evening sky, shrimp boats festooned with pennants and flags blew their horns in the canal and a cleric blessed the fleet while thousands wandered up and down a carnival midway, drinking from beer cups and eating shrimp off paper plates. College students, the working classes, and politicians from all over the state took part. Inside the cacophony of calliopes and the popping of.22 rifles in the shooting galleries and the happy shrieks that cascaded down from a Ferris wheel, the celebrants took on the characteristics of figures in a Brueghel painting, any intimations about mortality they may have possessed now lost in the balm of the season.

Belmont Pugh was there, and Jim Gable and his wife, and by the Tilt-A-Whirl I saw Connie Deshotel in an evening dress, carrying a pair of silver shoes in one hand, her other on her escort's arm for balance, her cleavage deep with shadow.

But the figure who caught my eye was outside the circle of noise and light that rose into the sky from the midway. Micah, Cora Gable's chauffeur, sat beside the Gables' limo on a folding canvas stool, tossing pieces of dirt at a beer can, his jaws slack, like a man who doesn't care what others think of his appearance or state of mind. A rolled comic book protruded from the side pocket of his black coat.

I left Bootsie at the drink pavilion and walked into the parking area and stood no more than three feet in front of him. He raised his eyes, then tinked a dirt clod against the beer can, his face indifferent.

"Looks like you're in the dumps, partner," I said.

He flexed his mouth, as though working a bite of food out of his gums. "I'm finishing out my last week," he replied.

"You're not working for Ms. Gable anymore?"

"She thinks I sassed her. It was a misunderstanding. But I guess it helped her husband."

"Sassed her?"

"We were passing all these shacks where the sugarcane workers used to live. Ms. Perez says to herself, 'The glory that was Rome.'

"So I say, 'It sure wasn't any glory, was it?'

"She says, 'Beg your pardon?'

"I say, 'Rich man got the poor whites to fight with the coloreds so the whole bunch would work for near nothing while the rich man got richer.' It got real quiet in the car."

"Sounds like you got your hand on it, Micah," I said.

"Tell me about it," he said resentfully. "I looked in the rearview mirror and her face was tight as paper, like it had got slapped. She says, 'This land belonged to my family. So I suggest you keep your own counsel.'"

He removed the comic book from his pocket and tapped it in his palm, his anger seeming to rise and fall, as though it could not find an acceptable target.

"Doesn't seem like that's enough to get a person fired," I said.

"Gable's been acting good to her lately. I think she's gonna let him have the money to build that racetrack out in New Mexico. I had to be a smart-ass at the wrong time and give him what he needed to get me canned."

"You cut up Axel Jennings, Micah?"

He opened his comic book and flopped the pages back on his knee, thinking, his deformed face like a melted candied apple in the glow from the midway.

"You're always trying to get another inch, aren't you? I'll give you something better to chew on," he said. "You know a woman named Maggie Glick, runs a bar full of colored whores in Algiers? It was Jim Gable got her out of prison. Gable's got a whole network of whores and dope peddlers working for him. That's the man gonna be head of your state police, Mr. Robicheaux. Play your cards right and there might be a little pissant job in it for you somewhere."

He smiled at the corner of his mouth, a glint in his good eye.

"Some people enjoy the role of victim. Maybe you've found what you were looking for, after all," I said, and walked away, wondering if I, too, possessed a potential for cruelty I had chosen not to recognize.

When I returned to the pavilion I realized I had made a mistake. Belmont Pugh had cornered Connie Deshotel and Bootsie and there was no easy way of getting away from the situation. Belmont had launched into one of his oratorical performances, guffawing, gesturing at the air like Huey Long, slinging shrimp tails out into the darkness, the damp rawness of his body reaching out like a fist. He squeezed Connie with one arm while his wife, a black-haired woman with recessed dark eyes and a neck like a hog, looked on sternly, as though her disapproval of Belmont 's behavior somehow removed her from all the machinations and carnival vulgarity that had placed her and her husband in the governor's mansion.

Sookie Motrie stood at Belmont 's elbow, dressed in the two-tone boots and clothes of a horse tout at a western track, his salt-and-pepper mustache clipped and trim, his snubbed, hawk nose moving about like a weather vane. For years he had been an ambulance chaser in Baton Rouge and had self-published a detective novel that he tried to unload on every movie representative who visited the area. But he had found his true level as well as success when he became a lobbyist for Vegas and Chicago gambling interests. Even though he had been indicted twice on RICO charges, no door in the state legislature or at any of the regulatory agencies was closed to him.

He laughed when Belmont did and listened attentively to Belmont 's coarse jokes, but still managed to watch everyone passing by and to shake the hand, even if quickly, of anyone he deemed important.

Jim and Cora Gable stood at the makeshift plank bar that sold mint juleps in plastic cups for three dollars. He wore a pale pink shirt and dark tie with roses on it and a white sports coat, his face glowing with the perfection of the evening. No, that's too simple. I had to hand it to Gable. He exuded the confidence and self-satisfaction of those who know that real power lies in not having to demonstrate its possession. Every gesture, every mannerism, was like an extension of his will and his ability to charm, a statement about a meticulous personality that allowed no exception to its own rules. He walked toward Belmont 's circle and lifted a sprig of mint from his drink and shook the drops from the leaves, bending slightly so as not to spot his shoes.

Cora Gable started to raise her hand, her lipsticked mouth twisting with alarm, like someone left behind unexpectedly at a bus stop. But almost on cue, as though Gable were privy to all the unconscious anxieties that drove her life, he turned and said, "I'll be just a minute, sweetheart. Order another julep."

Belmont asked Connie if she knew Jim Gable.

"I'm not sure. Maybe we met years ago," she replied.

"How do you do, Miss Connie? It's good to see you," Gable said.

They did not look directly at each other again; they even stepped backwards at the same time, like people who have nothing in common.

I stared at the two of them, as though the moment had been caught inside a cropped photograph whose meaning lay outside the borders of the camera's lens. Both Gable and Connie had come up through the ranks at NOPD back in the late 1960s. How could they have no specific memory of each other?

Then Connie Deshotel lit a cigarette, as though she were distracted by thoughts that would not come together in her mind. But she did not have the lighter I had seen her use by her swimming pool, the one that was identical to the thin leather and gold lighter owned by Jim Gable.

His face split with his gap-toothed smile.

"It's the Davester," he said.

"I was just talking with your chauffeur about your friendship with Maggie Glick," I said.

"Maggie, my favorite madam," he said.

"You got her out of prison?" I said.

"Right again, Davester. A wrong narc planted crystal on her. It's a new day in the department. Too bad you're not with us anymore," he replied.

It started to rain, thudding on top of the tents, misting on the neon and the strings of electric lights over the rides. A barman dropped a tarp on one side of the drink pavilion, and the air was sweet and cool in the dryness of the enclosure and I could smell the draft beer and whiskey and mint and sweet syrup and melted ice in the plastic cups along the bar.

"Remember me, Dave?" Sookie Motrie said, and put out his hand. After my hand was firmly inside his, he locked down on my fingers and winked and said, "When I used to write bonds for Wee Willie Bimstine, I went to see you in the lockup once. I think you were doing extracurricular research. Back in your days of wine and roses.

I took my hand from his and looked out into the rain, then said to Bootsie, "I promised Alf we'd be back early. I'll get the car and swing around behind the pavilion."

I didn't wait for her to answer. I walked into the rain, out beyond the noise of the revelers in the tents and the rides whose buckets and gondolas spun and dipped emptily under the electric lights.

You just walk away. It's easy, I thought. You don't provoke, you don't engage. You keep it simple and your adversaries never have power over you.

I started Bootsie’s car and drove through the mud toward the drink pavilion. Cora Gable had disappeared, but Jim Gable was at the plank bar, standing just behind Bootsie.

I kept working my twelve-step program inside my head, the way a long-distance ocean swimmer breathes with a concentrated effort to ensure he does not swallow water out of a wave and drown. I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that used to come aborning like a sul-furous match flaring off a thumbnail.

Through the rain and the beating of the windshield wipers I saw Jim Gable standing so close behind Bootsie that his shadow seemed to envelop her body. She was dabbing with a napkin at a spot on the plank bar where she had spilled a drink and was evidently not aware of his closeness, or the way his loins hovered just behind her buttocks, the glaze that was on his face.

I stopped the car and stepped out into the rain, the car door yawing behind me.

Gable's nostrils were dilated as he breathed in the smell of Bootsie's shampoo, the perfume behind her ears, the soap from her bath, the heat off her skin, the hint of her sex in her underthings. I could see the cloth of his slacks tightening across his loins.

Then I was running out of the rain toward him. I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman's blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table.

A man I didn't know grabbed my arm, and a big uniformed policeman crashed into me from the other side, wrestling with both of his big meaty hands to get his arms around me and smother me against his girth. But even while the two men tried to pull me off of Gable, I kicked him in the side of the head and kicked at him once more and missed his face and shattered his watch on the cement.

I fell over a chair and stared stupidly at the faces looking down at me, like a derelict who has collapsed on a sidewalk and must witness from the cement the pity and revulsion he inspires in his fellowman. Bootsie was between me and Gable now, her face incredulous. A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable's blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time of need.

Through the sweat and water that dripped out of my hair I saw the governor and people from the crowd lifting Jim Gable to his feet. He was smiling at me, his teeth like pink tombstones in his mouth.