The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Sixteen

On private land just inside the Utah border, Desmond had constructed an environment meant to replicate nineteenth-century Indian territory and a stretch of the Cimarron River just north of the Texas Panhandle. He had diverted a stream and brought in water tanks and lined a gulley with vinyl and layered it with gravel, then placed a solitary horseman five hundred yards from the improvised riverbank.

Wexler was standing next to me. “This scene is going to cost the boys in Jersey over fifty grand. I hope they enjoy it.”

“Pardon?” I said.

“It’s the last scene in the picture, although we’re only a third into the story. The guy who wrote the book says it’s the best scene he ever wrote, and the last line in the scene is the best line he ever wrote. I bet our Jersey friends would love that.”

“Who are your Jersey friends?”

“Not the Four Seasons,” he answered.

The rider was a tall and lanky boy who looked no older than fifteen. His horse was a chestnut, sixteen hands, with a blond tail and mane. Desmond was talking to the camera personnel; then he flapped a yellow flag above his head. Through a pair of binoculars, I saw the boy lean forward and pour it on, bent low over the withers, his legs straight out, whipping the horse with the reins, his hat flying on a cord. The sun was low and red in the sky, the boy riding straight out of it like a blackened cipher escaping a molten planet. Two leather mail pouches were strung from his back, arrows embedded in them up to the shaft.

“The scene is about the Pony Express?” I said.

“On one level,” Wexler said. “But actually, it’s about the search for the Grail.”

I looked at him.

“Don’t worry if you’re confused,” he said. “Probably no one else will get it, either. Particularly that lovely bunch of gangsters on the Jersey Shore.”

“It’s an allegory?”

“Nothing is an allegory for Desmond. He hears the horns blowing along the road to Roncesvalles. Worse than I.”

The rider went hell for breakfast across the stream, the horse laboring, its neck dark with sweat, water splashing and gravel clacking.

“Cut!” Desmond said. “Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!”

After the boy dismounted, Desmond hugged him in a full-body press. I felt embarrassed for the boy. “Where’d you learn to ride?” Desmond said.

“Here’bouts,” the boy said, his face visibly burning.

“Well, you’re awfully fine,” Des said. “Get yourself a cold drink. I want to talk with you later. With your parents. You’re going somewhere, kid.”

That was Desmond’s great gift. He made people feel good about themselves, and he didn’t do it out of pride or compulsion or weakness or defensiveness or a desire to feel powerful and in control of others. He used his own success to validate what was best in the people around him. But there is a caveat implied in the last statement. The people who surrounded him were not simply employees, they were acolytes, and I suspected Bailey was about to become one of them. For that reason alone, I felt a growing resentment, one that was petty and demeaning.

“What’d you think, Dave?” Desmond said.

“That young fellow is impressive,” I replied.

“Come on, you’re a smart man. What do you think of us, tattered bunch that we are, talking trash about Crusader knights and trying to sell it to an audience that wants a fucking video game?”

“What do I know?”

Bailey Ribbons was standing thirty feet away, dressed like a fashionable pioneer woman. I had not spoken to her yet.

“What do you think of that scene, Bailey?” Wexler asked.

“I think it’s all grand,” she said. She walked toward us. Her hem went to the tops of her feet. Her frilly white blouse was buttoned at the throat, her hair piled on her head. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Dave?”

“You have to forgive me. I was hesitant to speak on the set.”

“You’re surprised to see me here?” she asked.

“If I’d known you were coming, I wouldn’t have asked Helen for some vacation days. She’s shorthanded now.”

“It wasn’t my intention to inconvenience anyone,” she said.

I looked at my watch. “I’d better get back to the hotel. I have to make some calls.”

“Will you have lunch with us?” she said.

“Let me see what Clete is doing.”

“Clete Purcel is here?” she said.

“He gets around,” I said.

“Well, I’m happy he was able to come out,” she said.

I didn’t know what else to say. I felt disappointed in Bailey and in myself. “Thanks for having me here, Des. I’ll see you later.”

I walked away, feeling foolish and inadequate, as though I were starting to lose part of myself.

“Don’t you want a lift?” Wexler said.

I had forgotten I’d ridden to the set with him and Alafair. “I’ll hitch a ride,” I said.

Three miles down the road, a man driving a chicken truck with glassless windows picked me up, and we drove across the state line into Arizona and a dust storm that turned the sun to grit.

At the hotel I called Helen and apologized for leaving her shorthanded.

“Forget it,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with Bailey when she gets back.”

“Why’d you let her come out here?”

“I figured what’s the harm? What are the things you regret most in your life, bwana?”

“Constantly taking my own inventory.”

“You know what I’m talking about. We regret the things we didn’t do, not the things we did. All the romances we didn’t have, the music we didn’t dance to, the children we didn’t parent. So I let her have her fling with Lotusland. Then I got mad at myself about it. By the way, I got a phone call from a federal agent regarding Hugo Tillinger.”

Of all the subjects she could bring up, Tillinger was the one I least wanted to hear about.

“This agent grew up with him,” she said. “He believes Tillinger may have killed a biker in the Aryan Brotherhood about ten years ago. The biker raped and broke the neck of an old woman in Corsicana. She belonged to the same church Tillinger did. Somebody tore the biker apart with a mattock.”

I felt my stomach constrict. “What’s the evidence?”

“None. The crime remains unsolved. Some fellow church members asked Tillinger about it. His answer was ‘I, the Lord, love justice.’ It’s from Isaiah.”

My head was coming off my shoulders.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ll let Clete tell you.”

This time she went silent. Then she said, “Dave, did Clete see Tillinger again?”

“He saw him save a little girl’s life at a filling station in Lafayette. Clete followed him to a motel north of Four Corners but cut him loose.”

“Son of a bitch,” she said. “How long have you known this?”

“A couple of days.”

“Why didn’t you report it?”

“I thought no good would come out of it.”

“No, you thought you’d write your own rules. You put your friendship with Clete ahead of the job. I’m pulling your ticket, Pops. I’m not going to take this shit.”

“I’m on the desk?”

“You’re on leave without pay. I’m referring this to Internal Affairs.”

“What about Clete?”

“He’d better get his fat ass back to New Orleans and stay there for a long time.”

“I made a mistake. So did Clete. We didn’t know about the biker murder.”

“You made your bed,” she said. “Dave, you use a nail gun on the people who love you most. You don’t know how much you hurt me.”

At midday, Alafair was still at the set. I ate lunch by myself and then lay down in my room and fell asleep. An hour later, I woke from a disturbing dream about a mountainous desert that was not a testimony to the curative beauty of the natural world but instead a crumbling artifice inhabited only by the wind. I sat on the side of the bed, gripping my knees, my head filled with a warm fuzziness that felt like the beginning of malarial delusions, a condition I’ve dealt with since childhood.

Perhaps I fell asleep again. I can’t remember. Then I went downstairs and sat for a long time by the entrance to the lounge and took a table in the dining room by the big window that gave onto the swimming pool and a vista like the long trail disappearing into the buttes in the final scene of My Darling Clementine. The waitress asked if I would like anything from the bar.

“A glass of iced tea,” I said.

She was pretty and young and had thick soft brown hair and an innocent pixie face. “Sure thing.”

She walked away, yawning slightly, looking through the window at the swimmers in the pool. I wondered if she dreamed about being among them. Many of them were celebrities, or the children or the lovers of celebrities, and those who were not celebrities were obviously well-to-do and carefree and, like the celebrities, enjoying the coolness and turquoise brilliance of the water and the heat of the sun on their bodies, as though all of it had been invented for them, as though the wind-carved shapes to the north had no connection to their lives.

The waitress put the tea and a coaster by my hand. “Are you with the film crew?”

“Afraid not. I’m just a tourist,” I said.

“Must be nice, huh?”

“What must be nice?”

“To live like that. To make movies and not have to worry about anything.”

“Could be,” I said.

“Let me know if you want anything.”

I watched her walk away and tried not to look below the level of her waist, then put the charge on my room and left a five-dollar bill under my glass, even though that was more than my personal budget allowed. I used the stairs rather than the elevator to reach my floor and spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. A faucet was ticking in the bathroom as loudly as a mechanical clock, with the same sense of urgency and waste. I tried to tighten the faucet but to no avail. I lay down and put a pillow over my head, the afternoon sun as red as fire behind my eyelids.

Alafair was late getting back from the set. I had dinner with Clete in a Mexican restaurant and told him about my phone call to Helen and the information I had given her about Clete’s decision to let Hugo Tillinger go. I also told him about the penalty she had imposed on me, as well as her feelings about Clete’s cutting Tillinger slack a second time.

“A fed says he tore up somebody in the AB with a mattock?” Clete said.

“Which means maybe he put the baton down Axel Devereaux’s throat.”

“Why didn’t the fed do something about it?” Clete said. “Why’s he dropping this on us?”

“Nobody is dropping anything on us. You made a choice, and so did I. It was the wrong choice.”

“Dave, I don’t have the legal power to arrest anyone. I can take skips into custody because they’re considered property, but that’s it. Helen is wrong on this.”

“No, she isn’t.”

“I’m sorry you got your ticket pulled, big mon.”

“Like you say, we’re getting too old for this crap.”

“Come in with me. We’ll put the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide back in business.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll sit around and suffer,” he said.

“Lay off it, Cletus. I don’t feel too well right now.”

“You really believe Tillinger would take out a guy with a mattock?” he asked.

“I think Tillinger and a few like him could found a new religion that would make radical Islam look like the teachings of Saint Francis.”

The tailings of the monsoon season moved across the sun that evening, darkening and wetting the land and lighting the sky with electricity that quivered and disappeared between the buttes and the clouds. It was Desmond Cormier’s birthday. The party began on the terrace, under canopies hung with Japanese lanterns. As the storm dissipated, the celebrants moved down the slope into a picnic area that had a wood dance floor and kiva fireplaces. A band featuring conga drums and horns and a marimba and oversize mariachi guitars played inside a gazebo. Desmond was soused to the eyes and dancing by himself with a bottle of champagne, dressed in tight cutoffs and a T-shirt scissored across the midriff, the smooth firmness of his physique and his wide-set washed-out eyes and his tombstone teeth and the bulge in his shorts and the solipsistic glaze on his face a study in sensuality.

Clete and Alafair and I sat at a table by one of the clay fireplaces and rolled lettuce and tomato and shredded cheese and strips of steak inside tortillas and watched Desmond dance. The flames from the gas lamps painted his body with bands of yellow and orange like the reflections of an ancient fire on a cave wall. A tall, very thin woman with jet-black hair and milk-white skin and a dress slit to the top of the thigh tried to dance with him, her eyes fastened on his. But if she desired to make use of the moment and become a soul mate with Des, she had underestimated the challenge. He scooped her up, one arm under her rump, and waltzed in a circle, holding up the magnum bottle with his other hand, while everyone applauded and the thin woman tried to hide her surprise and embarrassment.

I felt a shadow fall across the side of my face. I turned and looked up at Antoine Butterworth.

“Good evening, all,” he said.

“Hello, Antoine,” Alafair said. She looked worriedly at me and then at Clete. “I thought you were holding down things in New Iberia.”

“I had enough of the mosquitoes and humidity for a while,” he said.

Alafair looked at me again, then back at Butterworth. “Would you like to join us?”

“I didn’t mean to crash in on you,” he said.

“Sit down,” I said to him.

“Change of attitude?” he said. “Saw a revelation in the sky, that kind of thing?”

“I’m suspended from the department,” I said. “You’re safe.”

He pulled up a chair and fingered his chin. The skin on his face and his shaved head looked as tight as latex on a mannequin. “Could I ask why?”

“The sheriff likes to flush out the place on occasion,” I said. “Kind of like a reverse affirmative-action program.”

“Nothing to do with us, the California infidels?” he said.

“No, it has everything to do with me,” Clete said. “I cut slack to an escaped convict. Dave didn’t report me, so he took my weight. Know who Hugo Tillinger is?”

“Saw his picture in the paper. Man who burned up his wife and daughter,” Butterworth said. “Charming fellow, I’m sure. You say you turned him loose?”

“That’s the kind of thing I do,” Clete said. He was on his fourth Heineken. “I screw up things. You ever do that? Screw up things?”

“We all have our special talents,” Butterworth said.

“See, what bugs me is Tillinger was buds with a former Aryan Brotherhood member named Travis Lebeau, a guy who got chain-dragged on Old Jeanerette Road,” Clete said. “See, the AB might have been mixed up with a bad sheriff’s deputy who was pimping off some local working girls that maybe some Hollywood guys would dig as a change of pace. Know what I’m saying?”

“That’s enough, Clete,” Alafair said.

“It’s okay, isn’t it, fellow?” Clete said to Butterworth. “You guys float in and take a dip in the local pond, then head back to Malibu. Splish-splash.”

“Cool your jets, Clete,” I said.

“My bad,” he said, still talking to Butterworth. “That’s an expression you guys started. Samuel Jackson says it in a film, then all the locals are saying it. You guys have a big influence on Hicksville, did you know that?”

“Let’s go, Alf,” I said, getting up.

“Don’t bother,” Butterworth said. “I’ll be running along. Oh, look. Des seems to have found another dancing partner. My, my, and yum, yum.”

Desmond and Bailey Ribbons were waltzing in a wide circle. All the other dancers had left the floor, maybe realizing, as I did, that Des and Bailey had become Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs waltzing in the exaggerated fashion of frontier people in My Darling Clementine. In fact, the band had gone into the song; I didn’t know if they had been told to do so. I felt as though I had stepped into the film, [[p158]]but not in a good way. I should have been witnessing a tribute to a seminal moment in the history of film and the American West, but instead, Desmond’s drunkenness, the inscrutability of his eyes, the rawness of his half-clothed body, were all like a violation of a sacred space, one that had been hollowed out of a vast burial ground.

Alafair pulled on my arm. “Come on, Dave. Finish your supper.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m just a little off my feed today.”

But the moment wasn’t over. Bailey and Desmond sat down with their friends, and someone fired up a fatty and passed it. When it was Bailey’s turn, she leaned forward and took a toke, then passed it on, laughing as she exhaled. I dropped my napkin on the table and went to my room.

Fifteen minutes later, Bailey was at my door.

“What’s the haps?” I said.

“I was going to talk with you, but you stormed off,” she replied.

“Long day. I’m on the bench.”

“May I come in, or should I just stand here in the hall?”

I stepped aside and let her in. I could smell her perfume as she passed me. I closed the door.

“What do you mean, ‘on the bench’?”

“Helen has me on suspension without pay.”

“For what?”

“Dereliction of duty, I suspect. I held back information to keep Clete Purcel out of trouble.”

“Why are you angry with me?”

“Who said I was?”

“You’re filling the room with it right now.”

“You were smoking weed.”

“Clete Purcel doesn’t?”

“He’s not a cop. If you show contempt for your shield, why should anyone else respect it?”

Her face was tight, her eyes burning with anger, the rim of her nostrils white. “I didn’t know I could give you such discomfort.”

“It’s not about me. You took an oath. We set the standard or we don’t. If we don’t, dirty cops like Axel Devereaux do.”

“I won’t be an embarrassment to you again.”

“Are you going to throw in with these guys?” I said.

“Throw in with them? I’m going to have a small part in the film: a union woman who was at the Ludlow Massacre. Why are you talking to me like this?”

I thought more of you. “I read the book. It’s not a small part. You become the lifelong companion of a Texas Ranger who put John Wesley Hardin in jail.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re ashamed of me.”

I went to the window and opened the curtains and gazed at the buttes in the distance. The heat lightning had died, and the heavens were bursting with stars. I was sure the trail that Henry Fonda had followed into the buttes was still there, stretching over the edge of the earth, teasing us into tomorrow and the chance to build the life we should have had. I felt the room tilt under my feet. When I turned around, Bailey Ribbons was gone.