Sunset Limited

EIGHT

YOU READ THE JACKET ON a man like Swede Boxleiter and dismiss him as one of those genetically defective creatures for whom psychologists don't have explanations and let it go at that.

Then he does or says something that doesn't fit the pattern, and you go home from work with boards in your head.

Early Monday morning I called Cisco Flynn's home number and got his answering service. An hour later he returned my call.

"Why do you want Swede's address? Leave him alone," he said.

"He's blackmailing you, isn't he?"

"I remember now. You fought Golden Gloves. Too many shots to the head, Dave."

"Maybe Helen Soileau and I should drop by the set again and talk to him there."

BOXLEITER LIVED IN A triplex built of green cinder blocks outside St. Martinville. When I turned into his drive he was throwing a golf ball against the cement steps on the side of the building, ricocheting it off two surfaces before he retrieved it out of the air again, his hand as fast as a snake's head, click-click, click-click, click-click. He wore blue Everlast boxing trunks and a gauzy see-through black shirt and white high-top gym shoes and leather gloves without fingers and a white bill cap that covered his shaved and stitched head like an inverted cook pan. He glanced at me over his shoulder, then began throwing the ball again.

"The Man," he said. The back yard had no grass and lay in deep shade, and beyond the tree trunks the bayou shimmered in the sunlight.

"I thought we'd hear from you," I said.

"How's that?"

"Civil suit, brutality charges, that kind of stuff."

"Can't ever tell."

"Give the golf game a break a minute, will you?"

His eyes smiled at nothing, then he flipped the ball out into the yard and waited, his sunken cheeks and small mouth like those of a curious fish.

"I couldn't figure the hold you had on Cisco," I said. "But it's that photo that began Megan's career, the one of the black man getting nailed in the storm drain, isn't it? You told the cops where he was coming out. Her big break was based on a fraud that cost a guy his life."

He cleaned an ear with his little finger, his eyes as empty of thought as glass.

"Cisco is my friend. I wouldn't hurt him for any reason in the world. Somebody try to hurt him, I'll cut them into steaks."

"Is that right?"

"You want to play some handball?"

"Handball?"

"Yeah, against the garage."

"No, I-"

"Tell the dyke I got no beef. I just didn't like the roust in front of all them people."

"Tell the dyke? You're an unusual man, Swede."

"I heard about you. You were in Vietnam. Anything on my sheet you probably did in spades."

Then, as though I were no longer there, he did a handstand in the yard and walked on stiffened arms through the shade, the bottoms of his gym shoes extended out like the shoulders of a man with no head.

CLETE PURCEL SAT IN the bow of the outboard and drained the foam out of a long-necked bottle of beer. He cast his Rapala between two willow trees and retrieved it back toward him, the sides of the lure flashing just below the surface. The sun was low on the western horizon and the canopy overhead was lit with fire, the water motionless, the mosquitoes starting to form in clouds over the islands of algae that extended out from the flooded cypress trunks.

A bass rose from the silt, thick-backed, the black-green dorsal fin glistening when it broke the water, and knocked the Rapala into the air without taking the treble hook. Clete set his rod on the bow and slapped the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm.

"So this guy Cool Breeze is telling you a couple of crackers got the whack on him? One of them is maybe the guy who did these two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin?" he said.

"Yeah, that's about it."

"But you don't buy it?"

"When did the Giacanos start using over-the-hill peckerwoods for button men?"

"I wouldn't mark it off, mon. This greaseball in Igor's was complaining to me about how the Giacano family is falling apart, how they've lost their self-respect and they're running low-rent action like porno joints and dope in the projects. I say, 'Yeah, it's a shame. The world's really going to hell,' and he says, 'You telling me, Purcel? It's so bad we got a serious problem with somebody, we got to outsource.'

"I say, 'Outsource?'

"He goes, 'Yeah, niggers from the Desire, Vietnamese lice-heads, crackers who spit Red Man in Styrofoam cups at the dinner table.'

"It's the Dixie Mafia, Dave. There's a nest of them over on the Mississippi coast."

I drew the paddle through the water and let the boat glide into a cove that was freckled with sunlight. I cast a popping bug with yellow feathers and red eyes on the edge of the hyacinths. A solitary blue heron lifted on extended wings out of the grass and flew through an opening in the trees, dimpling the water with its feet.

"But you didn't bring me out here to talk about wise guy bullshit, did you?" Clete said.

I watched a cottonmouth extend its body out of the water, curling around a low branch on a flooded willow, then pull itself completely into the leaves.

"I don't know how to say it," I said.

"I'll clear it up for both of us. I like her. Maybe we got something going. That rubs you the wrong way?"

"A guy gets involved, he doesn't see things straight sometimes," I said.

"'Involved,' like in the sack? You're asking me if I'm in the sack with Megan?"

"You're my friend. You carried me down a fire escape when that kid opened up on us with a.22. Something stinks about the Flynn family."

Clete's face was turned into the shadows. The back of his neck was the color of Mercurochrome.

"On my best day I kick in some poor bastard's door for Nig Rosewater. Last week a greaseball tried to hire me to collect the vig for a couple of his shylocks. Megan's talking about getting me on as head of security with a movie company. You think that's bad?"

I looked at the water and the trapped air bubbles that chained to the surface out of the silt. I heard Clete's weight turn on the vinyl cushion under him.

"Say it, Dave. Any broad outside of a T amp;A joint must have an angle if she'd get involved with your podjo. I'm not sensitive. But lay off Megan."

I disconnected the sections of my fly rod and set them in the bottom of the boat. When I lifted the outboard and yanked the starter rope, the dry propeller whined like a chain saw through the darkening swamp. I didn't speak again until we were at the dock. The air was hot, as though it had been baked on a sheet of tin, the current yellow and dead in the bayou, the lavender sky thick with birds.

Up on the dock, Clete peeled off his shirt and stuck his head under a water faucet. The skin across his shoulders was dry and scaling.

"Come on up for dinner," I said.

"I think I'm going back to New Orleans tonight."

He took his billfold out of his back pocket and removed a five-dollar bill and pushed it into a crack in the railing. "I owe for the beer and gas," he said, and walked with his spinning rod and big tackle box to his car, his love handles aching with fresh sunburn.

THE NEXT NIGHT, UNDER a fan moon, two men wearing hats drove a pickup truck down a levee in Vermilion Parish. On either side of them marshlands and saw grass seemed to flow like a wide green river into the Gulf. The two men stopped their truck on the levee and crossed a plank walkway that oozed sand and water under their combined weight. They passed a pirogue that was tied to the walkway, then stepped on ground that was like sponge under their western boots. Ahead, inside the fish camp, someone walked across the glare of a Coleman lantern and made a shadow on the window. Mout' Broussard's dog raised its head under the shack, then padded out into the open air on its leash, its nose lifted into the wind.