Sunset Limited

TWENTY-NINE

THAT EVENING I DROVE DOWN to Clete's cottage outside Jeanerette. He was washing his car in the side yard, rubbing a soapy sponge over the hood.

"I think I'm going to get it restored, drive it around like a classic instead of a junk heap," he said. He wore a pair of rubber boots and oversized swimming trunks, and the hair on his stomach was wet and plastered to his skin.

"Megan thinks the guys who did Ricky Scar might try to hurt Holtzner by going through his daughter. She thinks you shouldn't let her drive your car around," I said.

"When those guys want to pop somebody, they don't do it with car bombs. It's one on one, like Ricky Scar got it."

"Have you ever listened to me once in your life about anything?"

"On the perfecta that time at Hialeah. I lost three hundred bucks."

"Archer Terrebonne killed Cisco Flynn's father. I told Cisco that."

"Yeah, I know. He says he doesn't believe you." Clete moved the sponge slowly back and forth on the car hood, his thoughts sealed behind his face, the water from the garden hose sluicing down on his legs.

"What's bothering you?" I asked.

"Terrebonne's a major investor in Cisco's film. If Cisco walks out, his career's a skid mark on the bowl. I just thought he might have more guts. I bet a lot of wrong horses."

He threw the bucket of soapy water into a drainage ditch. The sun looked like a smoldering fire through the pine trees.

"You want to tell me what's really bothering you?" I said.

"I thought Megan and me might put it back together. That's why I scrambled Ricky Scar's eggs, to look like big shit, that simple, mon. Megan's life is international, I mean, all this local stuff is an asterisk in her career." He blew his breath out. "I got to stop drinking. I've got a buzz like a bad neon sign in my head."

"Let's put a line in the water," I said.

"Dave, those pictures Harpo Scruggs buried in the ground? That dude's got backup material somewhere. Something that can put a thumb in Terrebonne's eye."

"Yeah, but I can't find Scruggs. The guy's a master at going in and out of the woodwork," I said.

"Remember what that retired Texas Ranger in El Paso told you? About looking for him in cathouses and at pigeon shoots and dogfights?"

His skin was pink in the fading light, the hair on his shoulders ruffling in the breeze.

"Dogfights? No, it was something else," I said.

THE COCKFIGHTS WERE HELD in St. Landry Parish, in a huge, rambling wood-frame nightclub, painted bright yellow and set back against a stand of green hardwoods. The shell parking lot could accommodate hundreds of automobiles and pickup trucks, and the patrons (blue-collar people, college students, lawyers, professional gamblers) who came to watch the birds blind and kill each other with metal spurs and slashers did so with glad, seemingly innocent hearts.

The pit was railed, enclosed with chicken wire, the dirt hard-packed and sprinkled with sawdust. The rail, which afforded the best view, was always occupied by the gamblers, who passed thousands of dollars in wagers from hand to hand, with neither elation nor resentment, as though the matter of exchanging currency were impersonal and separate from the blood sport taking place below.

It was all legal. In Louisiana fighting cocks are classified as fowl and hence are not protected by the laws that govern the treatment of most animals. In the glow of the scrolled neon on the lacquered yellow pine walls, under the layers of floating cigarette smoke, in the roar of noise that raided windows, you could smell the raw odor of blood and feces and testosterone and dried sweat and exhaled alcohol that I suspect was very close to the mix of odors that rose on a hot day from the Roman arena.

Clete and I sat at the end of the bar. The bartender, who was a Korean War veteran named Harold who wore black slacks and a short-sleeve white shirt and combed his few strands of black hair across his pate, served Clete a vodka collins and me a Dr Pepper in a glass filled with cracked ice. Harold leaned down toward me and put a napkin under my glass.

"Maybe he's just late. He's always been in by seven-thirty," he said.

"Don't worry about it, Harold," I said.

"We gonna have a public situation here?" he said.

"Not a chance," Clete said.

We didn't have long to wait. Harpo Scruggs came in the side door from the parking lot and walked to the rail around the cockpit. He wore navy blue western-cut pants with his cowboy boots and hat, and a silver shirt that tucked into his Indian-bead belt as tightly as tin. He made a bet with a well-known cockfighter from Lafayette, a man who when younger was both a pimp and a famous barroom dancer.

The cocks rose into the air, their slashers tearing feathers and blood from each other's bodies, while the crowd's roar lifted to the ceiling. A few minutes later one of the cocks was dead and Scruggs gently pulled a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills from between the fingers of the ex-pimp he had made his wager with.

"I think I'm experiencing Delayed Stress Syndrome. There was a place just like this in Saigon. The bar girls were VC whores," Clete said.

"Has he made us?" I asked.

"I think so. He doesn't rattle easy, does he? Oh-oh, here he comes."

Scruggs put one hand on the bar, his foot on the brass rail, not three feet from us.

"Has that worm talked to you yet?" he said to Harold.

"He's waiting right here for you," Harold said, and lifted a brown bottle of mescal from under the bar and set it before Scruggs, with a shot glass and a saucer of chicken wings and a bottle of Tabasco.

Scruggs took a twenty-dollar bill from a hand-tooled wallet and inserted it under the saucer, then poured into the glass and drank from it. His eyes never looked directly as us but registered our presence in the same flat, lidless fashion an iguana's might.

"You got a lot of brass," I said to him.

"Not really. Since I don't think your bunch could drink piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel," he replied. He unscrewed the cork in the mescal bottle with a squeak and tipped another shot into his glass.

"Some out-of-town hitters popped Ricky Scar. That means you're out of the contract on Willie Broussard and you get to keep the front money," I said.

"I'm an old man. I'm buying quarter horses to take back to Deming. Why don't y'all leave me be?" he said.

"You use vinegar?" Clete said.

This time Scruggs looked directly at him. "Say again."

"You must have got it on your clothes. When you scrubbed the gunpowder residue off after you smoked Alex Guidry. Those.357s leave powder residue like you dipped your hand in pig shit," Clete said.

Scruggs laughed to himself and lit a cigarette and smoked it, his back straight, his eyes focused on his reflection in the bar mirror. A man came up to him, made a bet, and walked away.

"We found the photos you buried in the jar. We want the rest of it," I said.

"I got no need to trade. Not now."

"We'll make the case on you eventually. I hear you've got a carrot growing in your brain. How'd you like to spend your last days in the jail ward at Charity?" I said.

He emptied the mescal bottle and shook the worm out of the bottom into the neck. It was thick, whitish green, its skin hard and leathery. He gathered it into his lips and sucked it into his mouth. "Is it true the nurse's aides at Charity give blow jobs for five dollars?" he asked.

Clete and I walked out into the parking lot. The air was cool and smelled of the fields and rain, and across the road the sugarcane was bending in the wind. I nodded to Helen Soileau and a St. Landry Parish plainclothes who sat in an unmarked car.

An hour later Helen called me at the bait shop, where I was helping Batist clean up while Clete ate a piece of pie at the counter. Scruggs had rented a house in the little town of Broussard.

"Why's he still hanging around here?" I asked Clete.

"A greedy piece of shit like that? He's going to put a soda straw in Archer Terrebonne's jugular."

ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON I left the office early and worked in the yard with Alafair. The sun was gold in the trees, and red leaves drifted out of the branches onto the bayou. We turned on the soak hoses in the flower beds and spaded out the St. Augustine grass that had grown through the brick border, and the air, which was unseasonably cool, smelled of summer, like cut lawns and freshly turned soil and water from a garden hose, rather than autumn and shortening days.

Lila Terrebonne parked a black Oldsmobile with darkly tinted windows by the boat ramp and rolled down the driver's window and waved. Someone whom I couldn't see clearly sat next to her. The trunk was open and filled with cardboard boxes of chrysanthemums. She got out of the Oldsmobile and crossed the road and walked into the pecan trees, where Alafair and I were raking up pecan husks and leaves that had gone black with water.

Lila wore a pale blue dress and white pumps and a domed straw hat, one almost like Megan's. For the first time in years her eyes looked clear, untroubled, even happy.

"I'm having a party tomorrow night. Want to come?" she said.

"I'd better pass, Lila."

"I did a Fifth Step, you know, cleaning house. With an ex-hooker, can you believe it? It took three hours. I think she wanted a drink when it was over."

"That's great. I'm happy for you."

Lila looked at Alafair and waited, as though an unstated expectation among us had not been met.

"Oh, excuse me. I think I'll go inside. Talk on the phone. Order some drugs," Alafair said.

"You don't need to go, Alf," I said.

"Bye-bye," she said, jittering her fingers at us.

"I've made peace with my father, Dave," Lila said, watching Alafair walk up the steps of the gallery. Then: "Do you think your daughter should talk to adults like that?"

"If she feels like it."

Her eyes wandered through the trees, her long lashes blinking like black wire. "Well, anyway, my father's in the car. He'd like to shake hands," she said.

"You've brought your-"

"Dave, I've forgiven him for the mistakes he made years ago. Jack Flynn was in the Communist Party. His friends were union terrorists. Didn't you do things in war you regretted?"

"You've forgiven him? Goodbye, Lila."

"No, he's been good enough to come out here. You're going to be good enough to face him."

I propped my rake against a tree trunk and picked up two vinyl bags of leaves and pecan husks and carried them out to the road. I hoped that somehow Lila would simply drive away with her father. Instead, he got out of the Oldsmobile and approached me, wearing white trousers and a blue sports coat with brass buttons.

"I'm willing to shake hands and start over again, Mr. Robicheaux. I do this out of gratitude for the help you've given my daughter. She has enormous respect for you," he said.

He extended his hand. It was manicured and small, the candy-striped French cuff lying neatly across the wrist. It did not look like a hand that possessed the strength to whip a chain across a man's back and sunder his bones with nails.

"I'm offering you my hand, sir," he said.

I dropped the two leaf bags on the roadside and wiped my palms on my khakis, then stepped back into the shade, away from Terrebonne.

"Scruggs is blackmailing you. You need me, or someone like me, to pop a cap on him and get him out of your life. That's not going to happen," I said.

He tapped his right hand gingerly on his cheek, as though he had a toothache.

"I tried. Truly I have. Now, I'll leave you alone, sir," he said.

"You and your family pretend to gentility, Mr. Terrebonne. But your ancestor murdered black soldiers under the bluffs at Fort Pillow and caused the deaths of his twin daughters. You and your father brought grief to black people like Willie Broussard and his wife and killed anyone who threatened your power. None of you are what you seem."

He stood in the center of the road, not moving when a car passed, the dust swirling around him, his face looking at words that seemed to be marching by in front of his eyes.

"I congratulate you on your sobriety, Mr. Robicheaux. I suspect for a man such as yourself it was a very difficult accomplishment," he said, and walked back to the Oldsmobile and got inside and waited for his daughter.

I turned around and almost collided into Lila.

"I can't believe what you just did. How dare you?" she said.

"Don't you understand what your father has participated in? He crucified a living human being. Wake up, Lila. He's the definition of evil."

She struck me across the face.

I stood in the road, with the ashes of leaves blowing around me, and watched their car disappear down the long tunnel of oaks.

"I hate her," Alafair said behind me.

"Don't give them power, Alf," I replied.

But I felt a great sorrow. Inside all of Lila's alcoholic madness she had always seen the truth about her father's iniquity. Now, the restoration of light and the gift of sobriety in her life had somehow made her morally blind.

I put my arm on Alafair's shoulder, and the two of us walked into the house.