The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Thirty-Four

Smiley did not measure time in terms of clocks or calendars. Time was a series of sensations, like bubbles rising from a caldron, without meaning or predictability. A therapist had told him he’d been raised in an environment where cruelty was masked as love, and the consequence would remain with him like a stone bruise on the soul for the rest of his life.

He associated sleep with a brief respite from the world, followed by a wet bed in the morning and a belt across his buttocks. Breakfast was a bowl of porridge and a glass of cold milk unless he was assigned to the punishment chair. As a runaway, he learned that the streets of Mexico City were shady and cool in the day and cold at night, and the male and female prostitutes in front of the cantinas were not his friends. He also learned that the hands and lips and genitalia that moved over his body were a testimony to his status in the world — namely, that Smiley Wimple was food, and the scabs and rags and stench on his body and the lice nits in his hair would never be a deterrent to the class of men who preyed upon him.

Two nights ago he had boosted an ice cream truck from inside the corporate creamery in Lafayette, and yesterday he had driven it to a playground in the little town of Sunset and handed out boxes of Popsicles and Eskimo Pies and ice cream sandwiches to a throng of black children. He did the same in back-of-town Lake Charles and a poor neighborhood in Baton Rouge. He changed license plates twice, although there was apparently no need. A sheriff’s deputy in West Baton Rouge Parish bought a frozen sundae from him.

Early this morning he had driven to New Iberia to try to get rid of his growing obsession with Clete Purcel. Why did this man bother him? Smiley wasn’t sure. Smiley trusted children and some people of color but few white adults, including himself, the latter in large part because he had been taught he was worthless.

So he kept his contact with others minimal. When he had a problem, he did what addicts and alcoholics call a geographic: He went somewhere else. That was why he liked airplanes. An airplane was an armored womb that not only protected him but was detached from the earth and all its troubles.

Regarding his line of work, he had no illusions. The people he worked for paid well and gave him Disney World tickets but laughed at him behind his back, at least until someone told them of his capabilities. In fact, Smiley had made a mental note long ago to get to know some of them better after he retired and could afford to do a freebie or two.

Then why the obsession with the man named Purcel?

The answer lay in the man’s eyes. There was a calmness in them, a lack of either fear or hostility, a green glow that was unreadable but seemed to absorb everything and nothing. The pale smoothness around the sockets was like a baby’s. Most of the people Smiley knew had scales around their eyes.

Maybe he needed to prove himself wrong about Clete Purcel. The people he had trusted usually turned out to be traitors, which meant they had to be punished. This man was different. He was a violent man capable of great kindness, a protector not only of abused children and women but people who had no voice or power and were used and discarded. He could have been the male companion of Wonder Woman. The two of them could have married and been Smiley’s parents. That thought filled him with a sensation like sinking in a bathtub of warm water.

He had followed the Caddy into East Texas and watched the graveyard service through the binoculars, then followed the Caddy back into Louisiana, even into the truck stop, where the man named Purcel had bought a thermos of coffee.

That was when Smiley, in his preoccupation with Purcel, got careless and picked up a tail of his own.

He recognized the vehicle from Miami’s Little Havana, a silver Camaro with oversize rear tires and a grille shaped like the mouth of a sea creature and mufflers that throbbed on the asphalt. The owner was Jaime O’Banion, a psychotic button man from New Orleans whom Tony Nemo used to call “half-spick, half-Mick, and half-anything-else-that-don’t-use-rubbers.”

Of course, Smiley had taken Tony Nemo off the board with a container of Drano and had always wanted to do the same for Jaime O’Banion. Word was Jaime had done a whole family with a bomb in Mexico City, children included. Jaime presented another problem. He was the only button man in the business who was so dangerous and good at his craft that he got away with hits inside Miami, which had been an open city since the days of Lansky and Trafficante. Worse, Jaime obviously knew Smiley was following Clete Purcel, and he may have seen Purcel check into the motel behind the truck stop.

Smiley had made a mess of things, as when he had messed in his underwear at the orphanage. He could almost hear the whistle of the belt. After sunset, he abandoned the ice cream truck and boosted a vintage pickup from behind a bar. He threw a backpack loaded with the tools of his trade onto the passenger seat and headed for the motel, wondering if his own time had come.

Clete could not explain the affliction that had spread through his body since the afternoon. It had begun with violent spasms he associated with food poisoning, an aggregate of intestinal pain worse than his wounds in Vietnam, coupled with the fever and chills that went with the malaria he had picked up in El Sal. He was curled in a ball under the bedcovers in the motel, his teeth clicking, the buzz of nonexistent mosquitoes in his ears, when he realized he was not alone.

A lamp burned on a table by the wall. A shadowy figure was pouring soup out of a can into a pot by a hot plate. Clete tried to raise himself and fell back on the pillow. “What are you doing here?”

“A bad man knows where you are,” Smiley said. “His name is Jaime O’Banion. You know him?”

Yes, Clete thought, but he was too weak to say the word. The night chain on the door had been snipped in half, the electric lock probably opened with a key card from a compliant desk clerk. Clete closed his eyes and breathed slowly in and out, his forehead sweating, cold as ice water.

“I need to get you away from here,” Smiley said.

“No,” Clete said.

“Yes. Do not argue.”

“Don’t talk to me that way,” Clete said.

Smiley didn’t reply. Clete could smell the soup heating in the pan; then he heard Smiley take the pan off the hot plate and pour it into the cup of an army-surplus mess kit. Smiley pulled up a chair next to the bed and filled a spoon with the soup.

“Eat.”

“No.”

“If you don’t eat, your liver will be hurt.”

“It’s already a football.”

“Open.”

Clete got up on one elbow and took the spoon out of Smiley’s hand and drank the soup off the spoon. He fell back on the pillow. “Where’s O’Banion?”

“He’s gone now. But he’ll be back about an hour after the bars close.”

Clete didn’t try to answer. Smiley knew the culture: The pavement princesses and the truckers on the prowl and anyone hooking up late would be doing the dirty bop by three a.m.

“Have some more,” Smiley said. He held out the aluminum cup so Clete could dip the soup from it. Clete dropped the spoon onto the rug. Smiley washed it in the sink. Clete reached for the drawer of the nightstand.

“What are you doing?” Smiley said.

“My piece is in there.”

“Not now, it isn’t.”

Clete lay back on the pillow, his arm over his eyes. “You need to go. I’ll call 911 for an ambulance.”

“He’s close by. He may be in the next room.”

“I’d rather be dead than have whatever is inside me.”

The room was quiet a long time. The pain was like glass twisting inside him. Then, when he thought he could stand it no longer, a strange transformation happened in his metabolism. The pincers that seemed to be tearing his intestines apart turned to snowmelt flooding his body. His head sagged as though his spinal cord has been severed; he felt himself drifting into a dark, safe place beneath the earth. Someone cupped his forehead, taking his temperature, and then the same person folded Clete’s .38 in his hand and placed his hand and weapon on his chest as though arranging a corpse in a coffin. Clete heard the door open and click shut, then he fell asleep.

When he woke, the room was completely dark, and his throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow. He fumbled for his cell phone and hit the speed dial. Come on, Streak, answer your phone.

“Clete?” a voice said.

“Yeah,” he rasped. “Mayday.”

“What?”

“I feel like I died. Remember when I told you we might be living among dead people?”

“Are you drunk?”

“Smiley Wimple was here. He said Jaime O’Banion is here, too. Don’t call the locals.”

“Why not?”

“They hate my guts. They’ll put me in the can. Or worse.”

“Where are you?”

Clete said the name of the truck stop and town and passed out again, the cell phone bouncing on the carpet.

Smiley was not equipped to understand a phrase like “intimations of mortality.” But he understood its smell. The smell was in the ditches behind the cantinas where the prostitutes poured their buckets at sunrise, and in the slums where the poor raked rotting food with their bare hands from a smoldering garbage dump, and under a bridge outside Torreón where the narco-gangsters hung their trophies from wire loops and left them for bats to eat.

Smiley never thought about what lay on the other side of death, but he knew one thing for sure — people killed other people all the time. They just did it in a different way. With bombs from an airplane. With drones or rockets. That way the images were reduced to a neat and tidy satellite video, one that had no sound.

Smiley was not one to argue. Nor did he brood upon the ways human beings conducted themselves. The issue for those at the bottom of the pile was simple: Don’t be drawn in by lies, and don’t let others use you. The only people who dismissed the importance of power were those who possessed it or those who liked their roles as human poodles.

The only true friend he ever had was a girl a little older than he in the orphanage. She loved him and washed his body in the morning and hid his wet sheets so he wouldn’t be punished, and sometimes read poetry to him. He understood little of the meaning, but occasionally a line stuck with him that somehow defined a central mystery in his life. He remembered one line in particular. It came at the end of what she called a sonnet, one written by a young man named John Keats: On the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Did that mean we were on our own, and that love and fame were of no value, and that neither the earth nor the crowd provided reward or succor? Did our only victory lie in survival, in solitude, far from the distant crowd? Or was the poet saying it was better to be the giver of death than its recipient?

Smiley chose to believe the latter. But now he was undoing his own ethos, helping the man named Purcel instead of taking care of business first, which in this instance meant dealing with Jaime O’Banion, known as the cruelest and smartest mechanic on the East Coast. The choice of O’Banion as the hitter meant the Mob was going to make an object lesson of Smiley, old-style, the way they did Tommy Fig in the Irish Channel years ago when they freeze-wrapped his parts and strung them from a wood-bladed ceiling fan in his own butcher shop.

Smiley’s problem with O’Banion wasn’t simply professional. They had run into each other at Disney World and at the track in Hialeah and also at the Jazz Festival in New Orleans. O’Banion wore white suits and silk shirts and tight vests and two-tone shoes and a Panama hat, and he had a coarse Irish face that reminded Smiley of a twisted squash. Sometimes a prostitute was glued to his arm. An entourage of sycophants usually followed him. O’Banion called Smiley gusano (worm) to his face; he once said to his friends as Smiley walked by, “Here comes queer-bait. Grab your cocks, boys.”

The sycophants snickered openly, safe in O’Banion’s presence.

Now Smiley was parked behind a truck stop in a stolen pickup, the stars bright, dawn one hour away, wondering how O’Banion would make his play. He reached inside his tool bag and retrieved a long-barreled, silenced, 22-magnum semi-auto, one of two that he had custom-made. He loved to touch the barrel and trace his fingertips up and down the coldness of the steel, his eyes closed, his wee-wee stiffening inside his pants. He could hear himself breathing inside the truck cab, his heart slipping into overdrive. He set down the pistol until his arousal went away, then swallowed and cupped his mouth, longing for the release his work gave him.

O’Banion would be coming soon. But where and how? The truck stop and motel employed servicepeople who came and went at odd hours. O’Banion was a legend when it came to disguises and deception. Wearing surgical garb, he had walked into an OR in Tampa and popped a confidential informant on the operating table. In horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed suit and a wig that fit his head like a football helmet, he’d followed a Mississippi judge into the men’s room of the county courthouse, exchanged pleasantries with him at the urinal, then, on his way out, casually blown the judge’s brains all over the mirror. He also used disposable backup, usually junkies and black gangsters who thought they were about to make the big score and ended up in a Dumpster.

Smiley took a breath. What was the smart thing to do? Easy answer. Let Purcel worry about himself and catch O’Banion down the road with one of his women on his arm, out in public. Yes, stipple his vest with tiny red flowers and look into O’Banion’s eyes while he did it.

Yes, yes, yes.

Smiley twisted the key in the ignition and felt the pickup’s engine jump to life. He saw a black man enter the side door of the motel, pulling a laundry cart behind him. A woman with a vacuum followed. A man in a delivery uniform was smoking a cigarette in front of the main entrance; he flipped it in a high arc and went inside the building. A couple got out of a cab, laughing, walking unsteadily, and also went inside.

Smiley cut the engine, his head pounding. It wasn’t fair. He was being given a choice between abandoning his entire ethos or abandoning Purcel. The only person whose advice he had ever sought and depended upon was the girl in the orphanage in Mexico. But he had killed her and her lover, and now he had only the voice of Wonder Woman to guide him.

What should I do?

Use your imagination, she said.

Go inside?

Pretend you have my magic bracelets and golden lariat.

Those are for women.

Don’t make sexist remarks.

I’m sorry.

I was teasing. I love you, Smiley. I’ll always be with you. These are evil people. You know what we do with evil people, don’t you?

I didn’t like not calling on the locals to help Clete. But I also trusted his intuition. He was the bane of the Mob, cops who extorted freebies from hookers, racists, misogynists, people who abused animals, slumlords, and child molesters. I knew insurance executives who probably would have him killed if they could get away with it. Clete was a one-man wrecking ball with steel spikes. He’d obliterated a mobster’s home with an earth grader on Lake Pontchartrain, thrown two pimps off a three-story roof through a pecan tree, dropped a Teamster out of a hotel window into a dry swimming pool, poured sand or sugar or both into the fuel tanks of a plane loaded with wiseguys, lodged the head of a New Orleans vice cop in a toilet bowl, taken out his flopper in the parking lot of the Southern Yacht Club and hosed down the upholstery in the car of Bobby Earl (Louisiana’s most infamous racist) where Bobby was about to get it on with his new socialite girlfriend.

The stories were endless. He was the bravest and most generous man I ever knew, and the most self-destructive. His most valued possession was his code of honor, and he would die rather than compromise it, and for that reason I never argued with him when he put principle ahead of safety.

I clamped an emergency light onto the roof of my pickup and kept the accelerator to the floor until I reached the truck stop and motel forty miles from the Texas line. The stars had started to fade, the darkness draining from the sky in the east. Outside the headlights, I could see the slash pines along the highway, puffing in a balmy breeze that should have marked the beginning of another fine day.

Up ahead, emergency vehicles were pulling into the truck stop, all of them lit up like kaleidoscopes. I saw a fat woman in a bathrobe wailing as she ran from the motel, her eyes as big as half dollars, her hands raised to the heavens.