Purple Cane Road

31

THE NEXT MORNING I called Clete's motel but no one answered. I tried again later and a woman picked up the phone.

"Passion?" I said.

"What you want?"

"Where's Clete?"

"Asleep. Leave him alone."

"How about a little show of manners?" I said.

"I'll tell him you called. Right now he needs his rest," she said, and hung up.

That evening I drove to the motel. It had been hot all day, and the sky was purple and red in the west and it had just started to rain. When Clete opened the door his clothes looked like they had been slept in and I could smell alcohol deep down in his lungs.

"What's up, Streak?" he said.

"Did Passion tell you I called?"

"She must have forgot."

He closed the door behind me. The room was dark and in disarray. A red bandanna, like the one I had seen Passion wear around her neck, was on the nightstand.

He took an open can of beer out of the icebox and drank the can empty and dropped it in a trash basket.

"Jim Gable's chauffeur tried to hit Remeta. Remeta put one in him and then set his own apartment on fire," I said. I looked at the side of his face, his gaze that was focused on nothing. "Clete?"

"Remeta wanted everybody to think the chauffeur was him?"

"Or to buy time till he could find Gable and cook his hash."

"Gable set up the hit, huh?"

"That's my guess."

He turned on the tap in the sink and washed his face with his hands. "I'm out of hooch. I've got to get a drink," he said.

"I thought you were breaking it off with Passion."

"She's all alone. Her sister's going to be executed. She's got an incurable disease. What am I supposed to say? You were a good punch but hit the road?"

Then he started opening and closing cabinets, rooting in his suitcase, reopening the icebox, even though he already knew there was no more booze in the cottage.

"Passion wants me to go with her to Letty's execution. She got Letty to put my name on the list," he said. "You ever see the Stake in Saigon? I'm not up to this bullshit."

He waved one meaty hand in the air, as though warning away an imaginary adversary. I sat down on the side of his bed and waited for his anger to pass. Then my gaze alighted on one of the pillows by the headboard.

"Who was bleeding?" I asked.

"Go home, Dave. Let me alone for a while. I'll be all right. I promise," he said, and leaned heavily on the sink, his back swelling with breath like a beached whale's.

The next day I got another call from Connie Deshotel.

"I wasn't able to make any headway with Belmont," she said.

"I see."

"He's caught between his own inclinations and what his constituency wants. It's not easy for him," she said.

"His inclinations? I'll float that by Letty Labiche if I get a chance."

"I tried to help. I don't know what else you want."

"Where's Belmont now?"

"I wouldn't know. Try his office. But I'm out of this. You understand? Frankly, I just don't want any more of your rudeness," she said.

"What's your relationship with Jim Gable, Connie?" I said.

But the connection had already gone dead.

Connie Deshotel had said she didn't know Belmont Pugh's whereabouts. But today was Wednesday, and I knew where to find him. When Belmont had been a traveling preacher and broom salesman, he had made a regular midweek stop at a slat-board fundamentalist church outside the little settlement of Lottie, in the middle of the Atchafalaya Basin. The congregation had paid thirty-five dollars for every sermon Belmont gave, and today, either out of gratitude or the aura of humility his continued presence at the church brought him, Belmont was still a regular at Wednesday night meetings.

That evening I drove up through Opelousas and took Highway 190 toward Baton Rouge, then turned down a shale road and crossed a railroad track and went deeper into the Basin, past a community of small houses with rusted screens, to a church building with a blue neon cross on the roof.

The congregation had laid out dinner on plank tables by a grove of cedar trees. Among the cluster of pickup trucks and 1970s gas-guzzlers I saw Belmont 's black Chrysler, a patina of gray mud on the fenders.

The windows were down in the Chrysler, and when I walked past it I could see a bored state trooper behind the wheel and a woman in back who was smoking a cigarette. She looked like she had been reconstructed in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory, with silicone implants, a face tuck, chemically dyed skin, and industrial-strength perfume. She blew her nose on a Kleenex and dropped it out the window on the grass.

Belmont 's mouth was full of food, his Stetson pushed back on his head so that the ends of his hair were mashed against his forehead like a little boy's.

"You're not gonna punch nobody out, are you, son?" he said.

"I need to talk with you about Letty Labiche."

"I knew it."

"She's got two weeks."

"You don't need to remind me of that. I got people marching with signs in front of the capitol. I got Italians calling me from the Vatican."

"You don't want this on your conscience, Belmont."

He tossed a chicken bone over his shoulder and got up from the table.

"Walk with me," he said.

We went into the grove of cedars; the sky was purple now and filled with the drone of locusts. There was grease on his hands, and he kept opening and closing them and looking at the shine the grease made on his skin.

"I'll be right by the phone the night the death warrant is read. I get new evidence or hear from the federal court, I'll stop it. Otherwise, it goes forward," he said.

"It's wrong. You know it."

"I'm the governor. Not a judge. Not a jury. I didn't have a damn thing to do with that trial. It's on y'all's self, right down there in Iberia Parish. You quit carrying your guilt up to Baton Rouge and throwing it on my doorstep, you hear?"

He turned away from me and let out his breath. The curls on the back of his neck moved like chicken feathers in the breeze. In the distance his black Chrysler was painted with a red light against the western sun. Someone inside the church turned on the neon cross.

"Who's the lady in the car?" I asked.

"She's a missionary, as in 'missionary position.' I'm a sinner. I don't hide it. You stop climbing my back, Dave."

"Connie Deshotel warned me."

"What?"

"She said she didn't get anywhere with you. I don't know why I thought I could."

"It's Connie Deshotel been telling me Letty Labiche takes the needle or I go back to selling brooms and bathroom disinfectant. Where in God's name do you get your information, son?"

He walked back to the picnic and stopped by a water spigot. He turned it on and washed his hands, scrubbing them in the spray as though an obscene presence had worked its way into the grain of his skin. Then he pulled at least three feet of paper towel off a roll and wiped his hands and forearms and mouth and wadded up the paper and bounced it off the side of a trash barrel. His Stetson hat had turned a soft blue in the glow of the neon cross on the church.

Saturday afternoon Dana Magelli walked into my bait shop, carrying a tackle box and a spinning rod. His blue jeans and tennis shoes looked like they had just come out of the box.

"Got any boats for rent?" he asked.

"Take your pick," I said.

He pulled a soda out of the cooler and wiped the melted ice off the can and put a dollar on the counter and sat down on a stool. A customer was dipping shiners with a net out of the aerated tank in back and dropping them in a shiner bucket. Dana waited until the customer had finished and gone outside, then he said, "You and Purcel haven't been running a game on Jim Gable, have you?"

"What game?"

"He says he found glass in his soup at a restaurant. He says people are following him. He says he saw what he believes was a scoped rifle in a window."

"Gee, that's too bad."

"Evidently he's got a fuckpad with an unlisted number. One of his broads is getting calls that scare her shitless."

"You think Clete and I are behind this?"

"Purcel's an animal. He's capable of anything. Last night somebody blew out Gable's car window with double-ought bucks and missed his head by about two inches."

"It's Remeta."

"You're not involved? I have your word?"

"I'm not involved, Dana."

"You all right?" he said.

"Why?"

"Because you don't look it."

"Must be the weather."

He gazed at the sunlight and shadows on the bamboo and the willows bending in the breeze off the Gulf.

"You must have a funny metabolism," he said.

I HAD given my word to Dana that I was not involved in the harassing of Jim Gable or the shotgun attack upon him. I had said nothing about future possibilities.

Early Sunday morning I drove to Lafourche Parish and headed south through the cane fields toward the Gulf. The wind was blowing hard and the sky had turned black and I could feel the barometer dropping. I drove down Purple Cane Road, past the general store and the dance hall where my mother used to work, while raindrops as big as marbles broke against my windshield. In the distance I could see the three-story, coffee-colored stucco house where Jim and Cora Gable lived, the palm trees blowing above the roof.

But no one came to the door. I waited in my truck until almost noon under a sky sealed with clouds that looked like black ink floating inside an inverted bowl. I don't know what I expected to do or to find, but I knew that my mother's murderers would never be apprehended by my simply letting the system move forward of its own accord. The temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees and through the window I could smell speckled trout schooling up in the bay and the cool, wet odor of dust blowing out of the cane, and when I shut my eyes I was a little boy again, driving down Purple Cane Road with my mother and the bouree man named Mack, wondering what had happened to my father, Big Aldous, and our home on the bayou south of New Iberia.

Then the front door opened and Cora Gable looked out at my truck, her face as white and threaded with lines as old plaster, her scalp showing when the wind blew her hair. I got out of the truck and walked toward her. Her mouth was bright red in the gloom, and she tried to smile, but the conflict in her face made me think of a guitar string wound so tightly on its peg that it seems to tremble with its own tension.

"Oh, Mr. Robicheaux," she said.

"Is Jim home?"

"Sir, this upsets me. You attacked my husband. Now you're here."

"I think your husband is responsible for Micah's death, Miss Cora."

"Micah went back to New Mexico. Jim gave him money to go. What are you telling me?"

"May I come in?"

"No, you may not. Jim said you'd do something like this. I think I have some things of your mother's. Wasn't her name Guillory? They were in a shed. Maybe you should take them and go."

"You have belongings of my mother?"

"Yes, I think I do." Her face became disconcerted, wrapped in conflicting thoughts, as though she were simultaneously asking and answering questions inside her own head. "I don't know where they are right now. I can't be responsible for other people's things."

I stepped closer to the door. The rain was slanting out of the sky, running off the tiles on the roof, clicking on the banks of philodendron and caladium that lined the brick walkway.

"Go away before I call the police," she said, and closed the heavy door with both hands and shot the bolt inside.

I DROVE BACK up the dirt road. Just as I reached the general store, I felt my left front tire go down on the rim. I pulled into the store's parking lot and got the jack, lug wrench, a pair of cloth gloves, and the spare out of the back and squatted down by the front fender and began spinning the nuts off the flat. I heard a car pull in next to me and someone walk toward the entrance of the store, then pause.

"Lo and behold, it's the Davester," a man's voice said.

I looked up into the grinning face of Jim Gable. He wore a tweed sports coat and tan slacks and shined loafers and a pink shirt with a silver horse monogrammed on the pocket. There was only a yellow discoloration around one eye and the corner of his mouth from the blows he had taken at the Shrimp Festival.

He looked up at the gallery where an old man in overalls and a little boy sat on a wood bench, drinking soda pop and cracking peanuts.

"That's a mean-looking lug wrench in your hand. You're not in a volatile mood, are you?" he said.

"Not in the least, Jim."

"Don't get up. I suspect you've already bothered my wife. I'll get the feedback from her later," he said.

He walked past me, on up the steps and across the gallery, through the screen door and into the store. He shook hands with people, then opened the screen again in a gentlemanly fashion to let an elderly lady enter. I fitted the spare onto the axle and tightened down the wheel nuts and lowered the jack, then went inside the store.

Gable sat at a table with a checkerboard painted on top of it, drinking from a paper cup filled with coffee. The inside of the store smelled like cheese and lunch meat and microwave boudin and the green sawdust that was scattered on the floor. I turned a chair around and sat down facing Gable.

He grinned at me as he had outside, but his eyes wouldn't hold on mine.

"Remeta missed you with double-ought bucks? Maybe he's slipping. I'd hate to have him on my case," I said.

He pulled at his collar and looked sideways out the window at the abandoned nightclub next door and the old Jax beer sign swinging on its chains.

"You don't have any idea of what's going on, do you?" he said.

"I don't have to. Time and Remeta are on my side."

A family dressed in Sunday clothes came in, folding umbrellas, blowing and laughing at the rain.

"I've pulled your sheet. You have a violent, alcoholic history. You've spent a whole career discrediting yourself," he said.

I stared directly into Gable's eyes.

"I know you murdered my mother. I know the words she spoke just before you and your partner killed her. 'My name's Mae Robicheaux. My boy fought in Vietnam. My husband was Big Aldous Robicheaux.' I'm going to smoke you myself or be there when you ride the needle, Jim," I said.

He kept his eyes on mine now, so he would not have to look at the people who were staring at us from the grocery counter.

"I'm going to walk out of here now. These are my neighbors. You're not going to do anything. I'm carrying a weapon, but my hands are on the table. Everyone can see that," he said.

"I promised Boots I wouldn't repeat my old behavior. I'm usually pretty good about keeping my word, Jim, but I'm just human. Also, I want you to understand the nature of our relationship and to form an idea of what will probably happen whenever we meet. So, in that spirit-" I said, and balled up my fist inside my cloth glove and leaned across the table and hooked him in the eye and knocked him into a stack of canned vegetables.