The New Iberia Blues

Chapter Six

The helicopter, a vintage Huey that had no external armament — what we called a “slick” in Vietnam — came in low over the water, yawing, smoke twisting from the airframe, the Plexiglas pocked from automatic-weapons fire, a bloody bandage taped over one eye of the kid on the joystick.

An actor dressed like a third-world peasant clung to one of the skids. The helicopter roared over our heads, flattening the sawgrass around the levee where we stood. The moment sent me back to the sights and sounds and collective madness of an Eden-like Asian country gone wrong, a place I had consigned to my dreams and hoped I’d never see again.

In the dreams I heard the metallic klatch on the night trail but not the explosion. Instead I was painted with light, my body auraed with cascading leaves and air vines and dirt that had a fecund odor, like that of a freshly dug grave. I watched my steel pot roll silently down the trail. To no avail, I opened and closed my mouth to force the deafness out of my ears. Inside the great green darkness of the trail, I could see the silhouettes of my patrol against the muzzle flashes of their weapons and also the weapons of the tiny men in pajamas who lived on one rice ball a day and wore sandals made from rubber tires and drank mosquito-infested water hand-cupped from a stream. The flashes resembled electricity leaping inside a cloud of dust and smoke that blotted out the stars.

A black medic from Jersey City, whom we called Spaceman because he was the bravest kid in the unit and also a Section Eight in the making, was suddenly sitting on top of me, pasting a cellophane cigarette wrapper over the hole in my chest, thumping my chest with his fist. There was a rush of air into my lungs, and my hearing came back, and I heard him say, “Breathe, Loot. Chuck got to breathe. One, two. One, two. My main man goin’ back alive in ’65. Motherfucker got it made.”

My patrol rigged a stretcher with web gear and carried me all night while shells from an offshore battery arced overhead and exploded with a whump in the jungle. At first light we could see the LZ in the distance, flames climbing inside the elephant grass on the hillside, men in black picking over the dead. I heard someone say “We’re fucked.”

Then the slick came out of a molten sun, already loaded with wounded grunts, a Vietnamese civilian dangling from one of the skids. He let go and fell sixty feet into the jungle, grinding his legs like a man on a bicycle. The pilot was a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from Galveston. A compress was tied on one side of his face, his cheek streaked with blood. When he landed, I saw a decal of a death’s head on his helmet. Under the image were the words “I am the giver of death.”

I became one of many on the floor of the slick. The others had an M for morphine painted on their foreheads. I never had a chance to thank the pilot. I heard later that he did not survive the war.

I was not fond of talking about the war or even remembering it. And grand as the intention might be, I hated ceremonies that took me back to it. I had laid down my sword and shield a long time ago, down by the riverside, and did not want to pick them up again.

“You okay?” I heard Bailey say.

“Sure,” I said.

We had just arrived and hadn’t spoken to anyone on the set. The helicopter landed on the levee, descending slowly enough to let the stuntman drop safely to the ground. He limped away, holding his back.

“Good job, but we got to shoot it again,” Desmond said. “A cloud went across the sun. We need the silhouette of the impaled man against a red sun.”

“I’m done, Des,” the stuntman said. “I think I tore my sciatica.”

“Give me your clothes.”

“Here?”

“Where else?” Desmond said.

The stuntman went behind the helicopter to undress. Desmond wasn’t so shy. He worked off his golf shirt, stuffed it into a pants pocket, and stripped down to his jockstrap, balancing on one foot.

“You want a codpiece, Des?” someone called out.

“I left it in your mother’s bedroom,” he replied.

He dressed in the clothes of the peasant and turned around. He had not seen us arrive. His face was bright red, and not from sunburn. “Don’t tell me you just watched this.”

I shrugged. Bailey’s gaze wandered over the set. Desmond closed and opened his eyes like a man who had stepped into an elevator shaft. “I’ve got to reshoot this scene, then I’m at your disposal.”

“Go right ahead,” Bailey said. “That’s okay, isn’t it, Dave?”

“Sure,” I said. “I should have called.”

Desmond pulled on a pair of leather gloves and stood under the helicopter blades as they began rotating. When the helicopter lifted, he sat on a skid as casually as someone taking a funicular ride. A safety belt was attached to one of the stanchions, but he didn’t use it. The helicopter rose higher, then tilted away over the water while Desmond sat with one hand on the skid and the other on the stanchion. After the pilot made his turn and headed back in, Desmond swung under the skid. His body looked twisted and tortured, his legs silhouetted against the sun, kicking as though somehow Desmond had stolen from my dreams and re-created the desperate man I had seen fall into the jungle decades ago.

The helicopter descended far enough for him to drop to the ground. He stooped under the blades and walked toward us smiling while everyone on the set applauded.

“We have champagne and soft drinks and cold cuts and potato salad over on the table,” he said. “Let’s put something in the tank, shall we?”

“Maybe we should talk business first,” Bailey said.

“Whatever I can do to help,” he said.

“It’s about Lucinda Arceneaux,” she said.

The light went out of his face.

“We’re pretty sure she knew people among your group,” I said. That was a lie, but that’s the way it works. You stretch the spider web across the doorway and hope the right person will walk through it.

“Like who in our group?” he said, looking around.

“She was young, idealistic, and naive,” I said. “A country girl full of dreams about Hollywood. Think any of these guys would latch on to a girl like that?”

“You’re tarring everybody with the same brush, Dave,” he said. “You put me in mind of those guys back in the fifties. Joe McCarthy and Nixon and the like.”

“Nothing so grandiose,” I said. “There’s a Texas convict on the ground here. His name is Tillinger. He’s a convicted killer. He believed Lucinda Arceneaux knew movie people who could help him get off death row. He headed here, to the place where she lived and where you’re making a film.”

“This is over my head,” Desmond said.

In the background I saw Antoine Butterworth and Lou Wexler arguing. Wexler was wearing white slacks. He had flattened his hands and stuck both of them into his back pockets, like a baseball manager giving it to an umpire. He stepped away from Butterworth and came toward us, flicking his fingers as though looking for a towel. “You’ve got to get that bloody sod off my back before I shove his head in one of these crawfish holes,” he said to Desmond.

“No more of this, Lou,” Desmond said.

“Very sorry to bring a problem to you,” Wexler said. “I thought you were the director.”

“What’s the issue?” Desmond said.

“I told him you wanted to pick it up at oh-six-hundred tomorrow,” Wexler said. “The weather forecast is perfect. We’ll have clouds across a pink sky, the shadows on the salt grass. The tide will be out, the sand slick, and driftwood sticking up like bones. The bastard doesn’t get it. He says the union will complain.”

“I’ll talk to him. We shoot at oh-six,” Desmond said. “No more spit fights.”

“I knew him in Africa, Des,” Wexler said. “He was afraid of the wogs and afraid of his own shadow. You ever meet a coward who wasn’t a backstabbing shit?”

“We don’t have that language on the set,” Desmond said.

Wexler looked at Bailey and me as though seeing us for the first time. “Sorry, all.”

“Forget it,” Desmond said. He put his arms over both Bailey’s shoulders and mine. “Let’s have something to eat.”

“We’ll pass on the food,” I said. “What’s that stuff about the wogs?”

“Lou likes to throw around mercenary references,” Desmond said. “Actually, he and Antoine made their money in video games.”

“What kind of video games?” I said.

“Urban guerrilla themes. Blowing things apart. A bit like Grand Theft Auto,” he replied.

“Themes?” I said.

“Come on, Dave,” he said. “Be a sport and enjoy life. Have some fun on the set. It’s like Burt Reynolds once told me: ‘Why grow up when you can make movies?’ ”

“Is that why you make them?” I said.

The sun was like a giant ruby nestled in a clump of purple clouds on the tip of the wetlands. He looked at me, his eyes full of thoughts I couldn’t read. “No, that’s not why I make them. Not at all.”

“So tell us why,” Bailey said.

“They allow you to place your hand inside eternity. It’s the one experience we share with the Creator. That’s what making films is about.”

I was sure at that moment that Desmond Cormier lived in a place few of us would have the courage — or perhaps the temerity — to enter.

After work the next day, Sean McClain pulled his pickup into my driveway, a pirogue in the bed. Two cane poles were propped on the tailgate. He didn’t get out. “Take a ride with me to Fausse Point.”

He had never asked me to go fishing before. “Anything going on?” I asked.

“Thought we’d entertain the bream. Last time out, I hooked myself in the neck with a Mepps spinner. Thought I’d keep it simpler, cane pole — style.”

I had no idea what was on his mind, but I knew it wasn’t fish. “Why not?” I said.

We drove up the Loreauville Road through fields of green cane channeled with wind, the sky marbled with purple and scarlet rain clouds. We put the pirogue in at Lake Fausse Point. I sat in the bow and he sat in the stern, and we paddled along the edge of dead tupelos that resonated like conga drums when you knocked on them. I unhooked the line at the base of my cane pole and threaded a worm on the hook, and swung the line and bobber and small lead weight next to the lily pads. The wind had dropped, and the water was as flat and still as a painting.

“There’s something maybe I should tell you,” Sean said.

“I thought you might.”

“You did?”

“You shot one of your colleagues?” I said.

“Maybe I was working up to it.”

I turned around and looked at him. “I was kidding.”

“No, I ain’t shot nobody,” he said. “Although maybe I was thinking about it. There’s some what needs it.”

“Can you please tell me what we’re talking about?”

“I was having coffee at the doughnut place, and some guys was shooting off their mouths about Miss Bailey. One guy in particular. He said she got her job on her back.”

“Which guy?”

“The one who got off on that charge at the parish prison.”

“Axel Devereaux?” I said.

“I told him a couple of things maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?”

“That he put me in mind of a shit-hog ear-deep in a slop bucket. That he’d better shut his face before I went upside his head.”

“Devereaux isn’t a man to provoke,” I said.

“I done it.”

“You did what?”

“Went upside his head with the paper-napkin dispenser. It knocked him out of the chair.”

“You hit Axel Devereaux with a napkin dispenser?”

“I also stepped on his face and told him he’d better stay where he was at before I mashed his ear into a grape.”

“You’re not putting me on?”

“No, sir. He wet his pants. Literally.” He glanced at the water by the lily pads. “There’s something on your line.”

The bobber traveled across the surface in a straight line, without sinking, making a V, then sank out of sight. I lifted the pole and pulled a sunfish out of the water and swung it flopping into the boat. I wet my hand and unhooked the fish and lowered it below the surface and watched it disappear into the murk like a gold and red bubble. I turned around on the seat and looked at Sean. He was too good a kid to get mixed up with men who never should have been given a gun or a badge.

“Talk to Helen,” I said.

“I ain’t a snitch.”

“You don’t want a guy like Devereaux as an enemy.”

“Him and his friends will let me go through a door and get shot, won’t they?”

“That’s the way his kind work.”

“If you was in the cafeteria, what would you have done?”

“Probably the same thing.”

“Somehow that don’t make me feel any better.”

“You’re stand-up, Sean. Nobody can take that from you. Secretly, Devereaux fears you.”

“You should have been a preacher.”

“If you have any more trouble with these guys, let me know.”

“Nope.”

“Nope, what?”

“My old man always said you got to carry your own canteen. I only told you because I thought you had a right to know what Devereaux and them others is up to.”

He lifted his line and dropped it in a different spot, his forehead pink with sunburn.

Two days passed with no progress in the bizarre murders of Lucinda Arceneaux and Joe Molinari. In fact, there was no evidence to link the two. Arceneaux’s death obviously had been committed by someone driven by ritualistic obsession, but the upside-down positioning of Molinari’s body in the fish net and the configuration of his legs could have been coincidental and not necessarily related to the tarot. Maybe the victim simply owed somebody money or slept with another man’s wife or ran into someone loaded on hallucinogens.

On Friday night Clete Purcel was knocking back shots with a beer chaser in a ramshackle black dump that offered blues from the Spheres and barbecue chicken that could break your heart, when a white man he didn’t want to see again came through the door and tried to pick up a black woman at the end of the bar. The man was unshaved and drunk, his face greasy with booze and presumption and a level of lust he didn’t try to disguise.

The bartender leaned in to Clete. “You know that guy down there?”

“Yeah.”

“Do him a favor.”

“He’s on his own,” Clete said.

“On his own is gonna get him facedown on a cooling board.” The bartender tipped a bottle of Jack into Clete’s glass. “On the house.”

Clete folded a five-spot and tucked it between the bartender’s fingers. “Maybe I’ll get time off from purgatory.”

He walked to the end of the plank bar and rested his hand on the drunk man’s shoulder. There were two blue stars tattooed on the back of his neck and a line of green tears dripping from one eye.

“Time to get some fresh air, Travis,” Clete said.

Travis’s bottom lip hung from his teeth; he resembled a fish with its mouth open. “You look like Clete Purcel.”

“I don’t believe this,” Clete said.

Two white men came through the front door and sat in the corner. Clete recognized one, a deputy sheriff out of uniform. What was the name? Axel Dickwad or something? Both were looking in Clete’s direction.

“That’s heat over there,” Clete said to Travis. “They jamming you?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Travis said. “Just bought a new car. Wanted to take this lady for a ride.”

“A ride, all right,” said the woman sitting next to him. Even though it was summer, she wore a short navy blue coat with big brass buttons, maybe because of the air-conditioning blowing on her neck. “This boy in the AB but that don’t mean he don’t like blackberries and cream.”

The two men in the corner had not ordered. The shorter one lit a cigarette, the flame flaring on his features. His nostrils were thick with hair.

“I think they’re dogging you, Travis,” Clete said.

“Only guy dogging me is you.”

“Glad you said that.” Clete slapped him hard on the back. A whoosh of BO welled out of his shirt. “Keep fighting the good fight.”

Clete went back to his shot glass of Jack and half glass of flat beer. Up on a stage a female guitarist in a purple dress sprinkled with sequins was seated on a high stool, a solitary spotlight trained on her hands and electric guitar. Her hair was jet-black, her lips covered with gloss, her nails arterial red. A scar as thick as a night crawler circumscribed half of her neck. She went into a song Clete had never heard a woman sing: I have a hard time missing you, baby, when my gun is in yo’ mouth.

Clete poured his shot glass into his beer and drank it to the bottom. He felt the hit spread through his stomach and loins and chest like an old friend putting a log on the fire. Two or three more, and his liver would go operatic. He looked at the singer’s mouth, the shine on her breasts, the way her nails seemed to click up and down on the frets. Rain was hitting on a window in back. He could almost smell an odor that was like the smell of a field mortuary in a tropical country, but he didn’t know why. You’re zoned, that’s all, he told himself. Slow it down.

He went into the restroom and unzipped and propped himself on one arm above the urinal and let go. Someone came through the door and let it slam on the spring. A shadow joined his on the wall.

“Mr. White Trash is in trouble.”

He turned around and looked into the face of the black woman Travis had tried to pick up. He zipped up and washed his hands in the sink.

“You deaf?” she said.

“If you haven’t noticed, this is the men’s room.”

“They about to take him off somewhere. When they get finished wit’ him, he won’t know his name.”

Clete dried his hands. “What’s it to you?”

“Axel Devereaux stuffed a dirty sock in my brother’s mout’ at the jail and almost choked him to deat’.”

Clete wadded up the paper towel and arced it at the trash can. It bounced onto the rim and fell on the floor. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

He went back to the bar and ordered a double shot and a longneck, ice-cold and ready to go down as hard as brass. The singer was smoking a cigarette on the stool, blowing the smoke in an upward stream. Her eyes seemed to fasten on his. He saw her lips move, as though she were whispering. He looked around the room. The wood trim was painted red. The lights above the back counter were red, too, although he had never noticed before. He wiped at his mouth, momentarily unsure where he was.

“Can you turn the air conditioner down?” he asked the bartender. “I think I’m getting a chill.”

The bartender’s head resembled a brown bowling ball that was too small for his shoulders. He dried a glass, not looking up.

“Do I need to use sign language?” Clete said.

“There’s bars down the bayou,” the bartender said.

“I asked you a question. The place is an icebox. Or maybe my malaria is kicking in.”

“Life’s a skull-fuck, then you die.”

“You learn that in a Buddhist monastery?”

The bartender didn’t answer. Clete tipped the shot glass to his lips, then did it a second time and drained it, chasing it with half the longneck. He took out his wallet. The bills in it seemed to go in and out of focus. His stomach was roiling. He knew the signs. Somewhere down in the basement, the cannon on the Zippo track had fired to life, arcing a flame into a straw hooch, the slick hovering overhead, people from the ville splashing into a rice paddy.

“We’re square,” the bartender said.

“You poisoned my drink?”

“We’re kind to people with pickled brains.”

Clete picked up his porkpie hat from the bar and put it on. “Don’t let me in here again.”

He went outside into a misting rain and the smell of the bayou. In the distance he could see lights burning in the sugarcane refinery and smoke rising from the stacks, electricity leaping through the thunderheads. A gas-guzzler was idling in the parking lot, the driver’s door open, the ignition wires hanging under the dashboard. Travis Lebeau had assumed the position, both hands on the hood, his legs spread.

Don’t do this, said a voice inside Clete’s head.

“Why y’all bracing this poor bastard?” Clete said.

“We know you?” Axel said.

“Clete Purcel. I got a PI office on Main Street.”

“So you know what ‘on the job’ means. In your case, it also means get lost.”

“This guy’s my confidential informant. That makes my lawyer his counsel. That means right of presence extends to me.”

Axel laughed. “Where’d you get that?”

“The guy’s trying to go straight,” Clete said. “Give him a break.”

“He stole this car,” Axel said. “Check the ignition.”

“I got the pink slip,” Travis said over his shoulder. “I lost the key.”

“I’ll take him home,” Clete said.

“You’re interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty,” Axel said.

“You were the guard who stuck a sock down an inmate’s throat?”

“No, this is what I did,” Axel said. “Because he doesn’t know when to leave the wrong broad alone.” He inserted a short wood club between Travis’s legs and wedged it into his colon. Travis clenched his buttocks, the blood draining from his face. “Got the message?” Axel said.

“Yeah!” Travis said, his knees shaking.

Axel pulled the club loose. “That’s better. We’re getting there.”

“You’re on a pad for a pimp?” Clete said to Axel.

“We’re telling you this guy is driving drunk and probably driving a stolen car,” the other man said. His hair was scalped on the sides. There was a circle of whiskers around his mouth. “We’ll put him on a D-ring and have his car towed, then buy you a drink. How about it?”

“Who’s the pimp y’all in with?” Clete said.

Axel turned around and rested the point of his club on Clete’s sternum. “You’re way over the line, lard-ass.” He moved the club up Clete’s chest to his throat and chin. “You copy?”

Clete’s right hand opened and closed in the darkness. He gazed at the rain rings on the bayou, the wobbling reflection of a house trailer on its surface. The wind changed, and he smelled an odor like mushrooms on a grave, like a disturbed bog deep in a swamp, the water swelling over his shoes and ankles. Someone pushed open the front door of the nightclub. Clete heard the woman on the stage singing a tale about the House of the Rising Sun.

“Take the baton out of my face, please,” he said.

“No problem,” Axel said. “We cool?”

“No.”

“You’re Robicheaux’s cornhole buddy, aren’t you.”

“We both worked homicide at NOPD. Before that we walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter.”

“He’s muffing his new partner?”

“Didn’t quite hear that,” Clete said.

“Tell him not to let his mustache get in the way. Or maybe he wants to smell it all day.”

Clete stepped backward, blood thudding in his wrists. He gazed at the bayou; wind wrinkled the surface. “I’m going to walk back inside.”

“I say something wrong?” Axel said. “We’re all ears.”

“I’ll follow y’all to the booking room,” Clete said. “My friend Travis better not have any alterations on him.”

“I heard you took juice when you worked vice,” Axel said. “You also chugged pud for the Mob in Vegas.”

“You probably heard right,” Clete said.

“You’re the great Clete Purcel, huh?” Axel said. “I’d better watch out for you.”

He and his partner cuffed Travis and put him into an unmarked car, hitting his head as they pushed him in the back seat. The rain was falling harder now, ticking on Clete’s porkpie hat. He thought he heard an electrical short buzzing inside his head. He watched the three men drive away, his viscera turning to water.

He went back inside and sat at the bar. He blotted the rain off his face with his sleeve. “Give the singer whatever she’s having. Same with the lady down the bar.”

“What happened out there?” the bartender said.

“Nothing. Who’s running the action?”

“What action?”

Clete nodded toward the end of the bar.

“Ain’t nobody running it. It runs itself. Don’t get your necktie in it, man. You’ll have your face in the garbage grinder.”