Sunset Limited

THIRTEEN

MEGAN SAT AT A BACK table in the bait shop with a cup of coffee and waited for me while I rang up the bill on two fishermen who had just finished eating at the counter. Her hat rested by her elbow and her hair blew in the wind from the fan, but there was a twisted light in her eyes, as though she could not concentrate on anything outside her skin.

I sat down across from her.

"Y'all had a fight?" I asked.

"It was over the black man who started the fire," she said.

"That doesn't make any sense," I said.

"It's Cool Breeze Broussard. It has to be. He was going to set fire to the main house but something scared him off. So he poured gasoline under a trailer on the set."

"Why should you and Clete fight over that?"

"I helped get Cool Breeze out of jail. I knew about all his trouble in St. Mary Parish and his wife's suicide and his problems with the Terrebonne family. I wanted the story. I pushed everything else out of my mind… Maybe I planted some ideas in him about revenge."

"You still haven't told me why y'all fought."

"Clete said people who set fires deserve to be human candles themselves. He started talking about some marines he saw trapped inside a burning tank."

"Breeze has always had his own mind about things. He's not easily influenced, Megan."

"Swede will kill him. He'll kill anybody he thinks is trying to hurt Cisco."

"That's it, huh? You think you're responsible for getting a black man into it with a psychopath?"

"Yes. And he's not a psychopath. You've got this guy all wrong."

"How about getting Clete into the middle of it? You think that might be a problem, too?"

"I feel very attached-"

"Cut it out, Megan."

"I have a deep-"

"He was available and you made him your point man. Except he doesn't have any idea of what's going on."

Her eyes drifted onto mine, then they began to film. I heard Batist come inside the shop, then go back out.

"Why'd you want to put him on that movie set?" I said.

"My brother. He's mixed up with bad people in the Orient. I think the Terrebonnes are in it, too."

"What do you know about the Terrebonnes?"

"My father hated them."

A customer came in and picked a package of Red Man off the wire rack and left the money on the register. Megan straightened her back and touched at one eye with her finger.

"I called the St. Mary Sheriffs Department. Clete will be arraigned at ten," I said.

"You don't hold me in very high regard, do you?"

"You just made a mistake. Now you've owned up to it. I think you're a good person, Meg."

"What do I do about Clete?"

"My father used to say never treat a brave man as less."

"I wish Cisco and I had never come back here."

But you always do, I thought. Because of a body arched into wood planks, its blood pooling in the dust, its crusted wounds picked by chickens.

"What did you say?" she asked.

"Nothing. I didn't say anything."

"I'm going. I'll be at Cisco's house for a spell."

She put a half dollar on the counter for the coffee and walked out the screen door. Then, just before she reached her automobile, she turned and looked back at me. She held her straw hat in her fingers, by her thigh, and with her other hand she brushed her hair back on her head, her face lifted into the sunlight.

Batist flung a bucket full of water across one of the spool tables.

"When they make cow eyes at you, it ain't 'cause they want to go to church, no," he said.

"What?"

"Her daddy got killed when she was li'l. She always coming round to talk to a man older than herself. Like they ain't no other man in New Iberia. You got to go to collitch to figure it out?" he said.

TWO HOURS LATER HELEN and I drove over to Mout' Broussard's house on the west side of town. A black four-door sedan with tinted windows and a phone antenna was parked in the dirt driveway, the back door open. Inside, we could see a man in a dark suit, wearing aviator glasses, unlocking the handcuffs on Cool Breeze Broussard.

Helen and I walked toward the car as Adrien Glazier and two male FBI agents got out with Cool Breeze.

"What's happenin', Breeze?" I said.

"They give me a ride to my daddy's," he replied.

"Your business here needs to wait, Mr. Robicheaux," Adrien Glazier said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the male agents touch Cool Breeze on the arm with one finger and point for him to wait on the gallery.

"What are you going to do with him?" I asked Adrien Glazier.

"Nothing."

"Breeze is operating out of his depth. You know that. Why are you leaving the guy out there?" I said.

"Has he complained to you? Who appointed you his special oversight person?" she replied.

"You ever hear of a guy named Harpo Scruggs?" I asked.

"No."

"I think he's got the contract on Breeze. Except he's supposed to be dead."

"Then you've got something to work on. In the meantime, we'll handle things here. Thanks for dropping by," the man who had uncuffed Cool Breeze said.

He was olive-skinned, his dark blond hair cut short, his opaque demeanor one that allowed him to be arrogant without ever being accountable.

Helen stepped toward him, her feet slightly spread.

"Reality check, you pompous fuck, this is our jurisdiction. We go where we want. You try to run us off an investigation, you're going to be picking up the soap in our jail tonight," she said.

"She's the one busted up Boxleiter," the other male agent said, his elbow hooked over the top of the driver's door, a smile at the edge of his mouth.

"Yes?" she said.

"Impressive… Mean shit," he said.

"We're gone," Adrien Glazier said.

"Run this guy Scruggs. He was a gun bull at Angola. Maybe he's hooked up with the Dixie Mafia," I said.

"A dead man? Right," she said, then got in her car with her two colleagues and drove away.

Helen stared after them, her hands on her hips.

"Broussard's the bait tied down under the tree stand, isn't he?" she said.

"That's the way I'd read it," I said.

Cool Breeze watched us from the swing on the gallery. His brogans were caked with mud and he spun a cloth cap on the tip of his index finger.

I sat down on the wood steps and looked out at the street.

"Where's Mout'?" I asked.

"Staying at his sister's."

"You're playing other people's game," I said.

"They gonna know when I'm in town."

"Bad way to think, podna."

I heard the swing creak behind me, then his brogans scuffing the boards under him as the swing moved back and forth. A young woman carrying a bag of groceries walked past the house and the sound of the swing stopped.

"My dead wife Ida, I hear her in my sleep sometimes. Talking to me from under the water, wit' that icy chain wrapped round her. I want to lift her up, out of the silt, pick the ice out of her mout' and eyes. But the chain just too heavy, I pull and pull and my arms is like lead, and all the time they ain't no air getting down to her. You ever have a dream like that?" he said.

I turned and looked at him, my ears ringing, my face suddenly cold.

"I t'ought so. You blame me for what I do?" he said.

THAT AFTERNOON I MADE telephone calls to Juarez, Mexico, and to the sheriffs departments in three counties along the Tex-Mex border. No one had any information about Harpo Scruggs or his death. Then an FBI agent in El Paso referred me to a retired Texas Ranger by the name of Lester Cobb. His accent was deep down in his breathing passages, like heated air breaking through the top of oatmeal.

"You knew him?" I said into the receiver.

"At a distance. Which was as close as I wanted to get."

"Why's that?"

"He was a pimp. He run Mexican girls up from Chihuahua."

"How'd he die?"

"They say he was in a hot pillow joint acrost the river. A girl put one in his ear, then set fire to the place and done herself."

"They say?"

"He was wanted down there. Why would he go back into Juarez to get laid? That story never did quite wash for me."

"If he's alive, where would I look for him?"

"Cockfights, cathouses, pigeon shoots. He's the meanest bucket of shit with a badge I ever run acrost… Mr. Robicheaux?"

"Yes, sir?"

"I hope he's dead. He rope-drug a Mexican behind his Jeep, out through the rocks and cactus. You get in a situation with him… Oh, hell, I'm too damn old to tell another lawman his business."

IT RAINED THAT EVENING, and from my lighted gallery I watched it fall on the trees and the dock and the tin roof of the bait shop and on the wide, yellow, dimpled surface of the bayou itself.

I could not shake the images of Cool Breeze's recurring dream from my mind. I stepped out into the rain and cut a half dozen roses from the bushes in the front garden and walked down the slope with them to the end of the dock.

Batist had pulled the tarp out on the guy wires and turned on the string of electric lights. I stood at the railing, watching the current drift southward toward West Cote Blanche Bay and eventually the Gulf, where many years ago my father's drilling rig had punched into an early pay sand, blowing the casing out of the hole. When the gas ignited, a black-red inferno ballooned up through the tower, all the way to the monkey board where my father worked as a derrick man. The heat was so great the steel spars burned and collapsed like matchsticks.

He and my murdered wife Annie and the dead men from my platoon used to speak to me through the rain. I found saloons by the water, always by the water, where I could trap and control light and all meaning inside three inches of Beam, with a Jax on the side, while the rain ran down the windows and rippled the walls with neon shadows that had no color.

Now, Annie and my father and dead soldiers no longer called me up on the phone. But I never underestimated the power of the rain or the potential of the dead, or denied them their presence in the world.

And for that reason I dropped the roses into the water and watched them float toward the south, the green leaves beaded with water as bright as crystal, the petals as darkly red as a woman's mouth turned toward you on the pillow for the final time.

ON THE WAY BACK up to the house I saw Clete Purcel's chartreuse Cadillac come down the dirt road and turn into the drive. The windows were streaked with mud, the convertible top as ragged as a layer of chicken feathers. He rolled down the window and grinned, in the same way that a mask grins.

"Got a minute?" he said.

I opened the passenger door and sat in the cracked leather seat beside him.

"You doing okay, Cletus?" I asked.

"Sure. Thanks for calling the bondsman." He rubbed his face. "Megan came by?"

"Yeah. Early this morning." I kept my eyes focused on the rain blowing out of the trees onto my lighted gallery.

"She told you we were quits?"

"Not exactly."

"I got no bad feelings about it. That's how it shakes out sometimes." He widened his eyes. "I need to take a shower and get some sleep. I'll be okay with some sleep."

"Come in and eat with us."

"I'm keeping the security gig at the set. If you see this guy Broussard, tell him not to set any more fires… Don't look at me like that, Streak. The trailer he burned had propane tanks on it. What if somebody had been in there?"

"He thinks the Terrebonnes are trying to have him killed."

"I hope they work it out. In the meantime, tell him to keep his ass off the set."

"You don't want to eat?"

"No. I'm not feeling too good." He looked out into the shadows and the water dripping out of the trees. "I got in over my head. It's my fault. I'm not used to this crap."

"She's got strong feelings for you, Clete."

"Yeah, my temp loves her cat. See you tomorrow, Dave."

I watched him back out into the road, then shift into low, his big head bent forward over the wheel, his expression as meaningless as a jack-o'-lantern's.

AFTER BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR and I ate dinner, I drove up the Loreauville road to Cisco Flynn's house. When no one answered the bell, I walked the length of the gallery, past the baskets of hanging ferns, and looked through the side yard. In back, inside a screened pavilion, Cisco and Megan were eating steaks at a linen-covered table with Swede Boxleiter. I walked across the grass toward the yellow circle of light made by an outside bug lamp. Their faces were warm, animated with their conversation, their movements automatic when one or the other wanted a dish passed or his silver wine goblet refilled. My loafer cracked a small twig.

"Sorry to interrupt," I said.

"Is that you, Dave? Join us. We have plenty," Cisco said.

"I wanted to see Megan a minute. I'll wait out in my truck," I said.

The three of them were looking out into the darkness, the tossed salad and pink slices of steak on their plates like part of a nineteenth-century French still life. In that instant I knew that whatever differences defined them today, the three of them were held together by a mutual experience that an outsider would never understand. Then Boxleiter broke the moment by picking up a decanter and pouring wine into his goblet, spilling it like drops of blood on the linen.

Ten minutes later Megan found me in the front yard.

"This morning you told me I had Boxleiter all wrong," I said.

"That's right. He's not what he seems."

"He's a criminal."

"To some."

"I saw pictures of the dude he shanked in the Canon City pen."

"Probably courtesy of Adrien Glazier. By the way, the guy you think he did? He was in the Mexican Mafia. He had Swede's cell partner drowned in a toilet… This is why you came out here?"

"No, I wanted to tell you I'm going to leave y'all alone. Y'all take your own fall, Megan."

"Who asked you to intercede on our behalf anyway? You're still pissed off about Clete, aren't you?" she said.

I walked across the lawn toward my truck. The wind was loud in the trees and made shadows on the grass. She caught up with me just as I opened the door to the truck.

"The problem is you don't understand your own thinking," she said. "You were raised in the church. You see my father's death as St. Sebastian's martyrdom or something. You believe in forgiving people for what's not yours to forgive. I'd like to take their eyes out."

"Their eyes. Who is their, Megan?"

"Every hypocrite in this-" She stopped, stepping back as though retreating from her own words.

"Ah, we finally got to it," I said.

I got in the truck and closed the door. I could hear her heated breathing in the dark, see her chest rise and fall against her shirt. Swede Boxleiter walked out of the side yard into the glow of light from the front gallery, an empty plate in one hand, a meat fork in the other.