DR01 - The Neon Rain Page 13

  "Sure," I said. "Believe me."

  I started walking in the gray dawn toward the shining black outline of the Huey Long Bridge. I could hear car tires whir on the steel grid of the bridge. The air was cool and damp and smelled of the wet earth along the river-banks. I began the long walk up toward the apex of the bridge, my breath coming hard in my throat, my heart swelling with exertion. Far down below in the dark waters, a Standard Oil barge was headed north to the refineries in Baton Rouge. The spires, cables, and girders of the bridge seemed to sing and whip and groan in the wind. Then the sun broke through the clouds in a yellow ball, flooding the bridge with light, and for some reason I saw deep down in my mind a black cluster of jungle birds rise clattering into a hot tropical sky.

  Late that afternoon I sat under an umbrella on the deck of my houseboat and tried to mend my day and mind back together with a bottle of Jax. I wasn't having much luck. The sun reflected off the water and struck my eyes like broken shards from a mirror. I wanted to call Annie and apologize, but how do you explain that your craving for alcohol can be stronger than your need for someone's love? And in truth, at that moment I didn't have either the courage or the energy to face my own irresponsibility and weakness. Instead, I brooded on the relativity of time, the stark realization that no amount of years could successfully separate me from my nightmarish alcoholic past, that Philip Murphy's cocktail had launched me totally back into a surreal world where the dragons and monsters frolicked.

  I also brooded on my drowned father and wondered what he would have done in my situation. He was a big, powerful man, a dark laughing Cajun with white teeth and turquoise eyes who had been raised on boudin, cush-cush, and garfish balls. He had been a fur trapper on Marsh Island and a derrick man on oil rigs, working high up on the monkey board, and he had done his best to take care of Jimmie and me after my mother ran away with a bourée dealer from Morgan City. But when he was out of work he drank hard and sometimes brawled in bars and got thrown in the parish jail; the white streak in Jimmie's and my hair was caused by a vitamin deficiency associated with malnutrition. However, during those bad times he could be imaginative and kind in ways that we would never forget. On a Halloween evening, when the pecan trees stood full and black against the orange sky, he would come home with carved pumpkins, chopped lengths of sugar cane, and blocks of hot gingerbread, or at our birthday breakfasts we would find by our plates of cush-cush and boudin a dozen Civil War minié balls or rose quartz Indian arrowheads, and one time a rusty Confederate revolver he had dug out of the bank on Bayou Teche.

  He usually spoke to us in French, and he entertained us for years with an endless number of admonitions, observations, and folk stories that he said he'd learned from his father but that I think he made up as the situation demanded. An English paraphrase of a few:

  Never do anything you don't want to, you.

  If everybody agrees upon it, it's got to be wrong.

  Rather than the eagle, the crawfish should be the symbol of the United States. If you put an eagle on a rail road track and a train comes along, what's that eagle going to do? He's going to fly, him. But you put a crawfish on that railroad track and what's he going to do? He's going to put up his claws to stop that train, him.

  But there was a piece of serious advice that he used to give us, and I could almost hear him whispering it to me now from below the green depths far out in the Gulf: When you've hunted through the whole marsh for the bull 'gator that ate your hog and you come up empty, go back where you started and commence again. You walked right over him.

  A cop had never been given a better suggestion.

  I slept through the rest of the afternoon and woke in the cooling dusk when the cicadas were loud in the purple haze and the fireflies were lighting in the trees. I showered and felt some of the misery begin to go out of my mind and body, then I took a taxi to the Hertz agency and rented a small Ford.

  Because most of the Quarter was closed to automobile traffic at night, I parked the car near the French Market, by the river, and walked back to Bourbon. The street was loud with music from the bars and strip houses, and the sidewalks were filled with tourists, drunks, and street people who were trying to hold on to their last little piece of American geography. My favorite bunch of hustlers and scam artists, the black sidewalk tap dancers, were out in force. They wore enormous iron taps that clipped onto their shoes, and when they danced to the music from the bars, their feet rang on the concrete like horseshoes. A tap dancer would stop a tourist, rivet him in the eyes, and say, "I bet you a half-dollar I can tell you where you got yo' shoes." If the tourist accepted the wager, the dancer would then say, "You got yo' shoes on yo' feet, and yo' feet is on Bourbon Street. You ain't the kind, now, to back out on yo' bet, is you?"

  I went inside Plato's Adult Theater, stopped in the men's room, and removed the clip from my .45 automatic. I dropped the empty pistol in one coat pocket, the clip in the other, and opened Wesley Potts's office door without knocking.

  "What's happening Wes? Community Outreach here," I said.

  He sat behind the desk in his powder-blue polyester slacks, with his feet up in a chair, watching the baseball game on television and eating fried chicken out of a box propped on his stomach. His pate shone with hair oil, and his eyes looked at me like uncertain blue marbles. He resumed chewing, and swallowed the chicken in his mouth.

  "I'm looking for a fellow named Bobby Joe Starkweather," I said. "I suspect he's a fan of the Tijuana visual arts."

  His eyes clicked back and forth.

  "I hear they pulled your ticket, Lieutenant," he said.

  "You hear a lot of rumors in troubled times."

  "This is more like the Times-Picayune. "

  "Those are bureaucratic matters that guys like you and me don't need to pay much attention to."

  "I think I already went on the line once for you, Lieutenant. I didn't get nothing for it, either, except my films smashed up by Purcel. I could've got into some real ugly shit because of that."

  "I'm temporarily disconnected from the snitch fund, so we're operating on good faith here."

  "I went through a lot of anxiety because of that day. I think you ought to understand that. No matter what you think about me, I'm not some kind of geek for the mob that hops around in the pan like a piece of popcorn. I got a family, my kids go to Sunday school, I pay a lot of taxes. Maybe my IRS records are a little creative, but how about Nixon's? A guy wants a little respect, a little recognition that he's got his own space, his own problems."

  "I know all that, Wes. That's why it makes me feel bad when I do this to you."

  I took the .45 from my coat pocket, slid back the loading receiver, let it clack back loudly into place, and aimed it at a downward angle between his eyes so he could see the cocked hammer.

  He gasped, his face jumped, pinpoints of sweat broke out on his coarse skin, and his eyes almost crossed as they went out of focus on the pointed pistol. He fluttered his fingers at the barrel.

  "Don't point it at me, Lieutenant," he pleaded. "I was in the war. I can't take guns."

  "Your sheet says you got a peacetime BCD."

  "I don't care. I hate guns. I hate all violence. God, I'm gonna wet my pants!"

  He was trembling badly. The box of fried chicken had spilled to the floor, and he was swallowing dryly, the pulse jumping in his throat, and kneading and rubbing his hands in front of him as though something obscene were on them. Then he began to weep uncontrollably.

  "I can't do this to you. I'm sorry, Wesley," I said, and lowered the .45.

  "What?" he said weakly.

  "I apologize. I shouldn't have done that. If you don't want to drop the dime on somebody, that's your business."

  He couldn't stop hiccupping and shaking.

  "Lighten up. It was empty. Here, look." I pointed the barrel at my palm and snapped the trigger. His head jerked at the sound.

  "I'm gonna have a heart attack. I had rheumatic fever when I was a kid. I can't take high-level stres
s like this," he said.

  "I'll get you a whiskey from next door. What do you drink?"

  "A double Black Jack on ice, with a Tuborg chaser." He paused and blinked. "Make sure the beer's cold, too. The Jew that runs that joint is always trying to cut down on his refrigeration bill."

  I went to the bar next door and had to pay eight dollars for the imported beer and the double shot of Jack Daniel's in a cup of ice. When I got back to Wesley's office the air reeked of marijuana, and his face had the blank, stiff look of somebody who had just eaten the roach.

  "My doctor gives it to me for glaucoma," he said. "It's a condition I got in the army. A hand grenade blew up in one of the pits. That's how come I'm nervous all the time and can't take stress."

  "I see."

  "The beer cold?"

  "You bet. Are you all right now?"

  "Sure." He drank down the whiskey and crunched the ice between his teeth, his close-set eyes narrowing and focusing like BBs. "Lieutenant, I can give you that fucker."

  "Why is that?"

  "He's a creep. Besides, he was muling Mexican brown for Segura. I still live down in the Irish Channel. They hook up neighborhood kids with that stuff."

  "Yeah, the Rotary and the Knights of Columbus have been talking a lot about that lately. Have you been attending some of their breakfasts on that, Wes?"

  "I sell dirty fantasies in a dark theater. I don't steal people's souls. You haven't found that tattooed ass-wipe because he don't live in New Orleans. He's got a fish camp over by Bayou des Allemands in St. Charles Parish. He spends his time busting bottles in the backyard with a shotgun. The guy's a walking advertisement for massive federal aid to mental health."

  "Dropping the dime's not always enough."

  "I'm turning him for you. What else you want?"

  "You know the rules, Wes. We don't let the customers write the script. Give me the rest of it. Like Didi Gee told me, treat people with respect."

  He drank his beer and looked intently at the wall, his face coloring with remembered anger. I could hear his breath in his nose.

  "Segura invited a bunch of guys out to his pool to play cards, have drinks, and fool around with the gash. Starkweather is shooting off his mouth about how he was a Green Beret in 'Nam and how he cut some gooks' throats in their sleep and painted their faces yellow so the other gooks would wake up in the morning and find them like that. Except people are eating their shrimp salad and trying not to puke on the grass, and so I say, 'Hey, give it a break or hand out barf bags with all these sickening war stories.' He stared at me like I was some kind of bedbug. Then, right in front of all them people, with all them broads watching, he jabbed me in both eyeballs with his fingers, the way Moe Stooge was always doing to Shemp and Larry. A broad started laughing real loud, and then he pushed me in the pool."

  "Wes, somehow I believe you," I said.

  I waited until dawn to hit Starkweather's fish camp. Clouds of fog swirled off the bayou through the flooded woods as I banged over an old board road that had been cut through the swamp by an oil company. The dead cypresses were wet and black in the gray light, and green lichen grew where the waterline touched the swollen bases of the trunks. The fog was so thick and white in the trees that I could barely see thirty feet ahead of the car. A rotted plank snapped under my wheel and whanged off the oil pan. In the early morning stillness the sound made the herons and egrets rise in a sudden flapping of wings toward the pink light above the treetops. Then to one side of the road, in a scoured-out clearing in the trees, I saw a shack built of Montgomery Ward brick and clapboard, elevated from the muddy ground by cinder blocks and cypress stumps, with a Toyota jeep parked in front. A knobby beagle that looked like it had been hit with birdshot was tied to the front porch.

  I cut the car's ignition in the center of the road, opened the door quietly, and walked through the wet trees on one side of the clearing until I was abreast of the porch. The oaks that ringed the clearing were covered with shredded rifle targets; perforated tin cans and shattered bottles dangled from bits of baling wire; the bark on the trunks was ripped and gouged white by bullets.

  The screen door to the shack was ajar, but I couldn't see or hear any movement inside. Out back, hogs were snuffing and grunting inside a wood pen.

  I pulled back the receiver on my .45 and eased a round from the clip into the chamber. I took a deep breath, then raced across the dirt yard, cleared the porch steps in one jump, almost caused the beagle to break its neck on its rope, and crashed through the screen door.

  I crouched and swung the .45 around the room, my heart hammering against my ribcage, my eyes wide in the gloom. The wooden floor was littered with beer cans, bread wrappers, Red Man pouches, chicken bones, bottle caps, and the chewed stuffing from a rotted mattress that was piled in the corner. But there was nobody in the room. Then someone slid back the curtain on the doorway to the single bedroom in back. I aimed the .45 right at her face, both of my hands sweating on the grip.

  "Wow, who the fuck are you?" she said drowsily. She was maybe twenty and wore cut-off blue jeans and only a bra for a top. Her face looked numb, dead, and she had to keep widening her eyes to focus on me. Her hair was the color of weathered wood.

  "Where's Starkweather?" I said.

  "I think he went out back with that other dude. Are you the heat or something?"

  I pushed open the back screen and dropped into the yard. In the mist I could see an outhouse, an upside-down pirogue beaded with dew, a wooden hog pen, a wheelless and rusted-out car body pocked with silvery bullet holes. The sun was lighting the trees now, and I could see the dead green water in the swamp, the levee covered with buttercups, the Spanish moss that was lifting in the breeze off the Gulf. But there was no one back here. Then I heard the hogs grunting and snuffing again, and I realized they were eating something inside the pen.

  They were in a circle, their heads dipped down as though they were eating from a trough; then one of them would rattle its head, grunt, crunch something loudly in its jaws, and dip its snout down again. Their faces and mouths were shiny with gore; then I saw one of them tear a long string of blue entrails out of Bobby Joe Starkweather's stomach and run heavily across the pen with it. Starkweather's face was bloodless, the eyes and mouth open, his shaved scalp flecked with mud. Right above one eyebrow was a black hole the size of a dime.

  A bucket of kitchen slops was spilled on the ground. His arms were spread out beside him, and he looked as if he'd been shot from the front side of the pen. I looked carefully over the wet ground, which was dented with boot and dog and chicken prints, until I saw the smooth impression of a street shoe in a ridge of mud, and right in the center of it the stenciled outline of a pistol shell that the shooter must have stepped on and then prized up with his finger.

  I went back in the shack. The girl was fumbling in a food cabinet.

  "Are you heat?" she said.

  "It depends on who you talk to."

  "You got any whites?"

  "You look like you already did the drugstore."

  "If you had to ball him, you'd be doing Thorazines like M&M's."

  "I hope you got paid up front."

  Her eyes closed and opened and refocused on mine.

  "Where is he?" she said.

  "Feeding the pigs."

  She looked at me uncertainly, then started out the back door.

  "Let it go. You don't want to look back there," I said.

  But she didn't listen. A minute later I heard her make a sound like she had suddenly stepped into an envelope of fouled air. Her face was gray when she came back through the door.

  "That's gross," she said. "Shouldn't you take him to a funeral home or something? Yuk."

  "Sit down. I'll fix you a cup of coffee."

  "I can't hang around here. I've got an aerobics and meditation class at ten o'clock. The guy I work for enrolls us in the class so we won't build up a lot of tensions. He gets mad if I miss. God, how do I get around all these crazy people? You know what he did?
He got naked in his army boots and started lifting weights on the front porch. The dog got off the leash and chased a chicken into the privy and he shot the dog with a shotgun. Then he tied it up and gave it a bowl of milk like nothing had happened."

  "Who was the dude he went out back with?"

  "He looked like he had a pink bicycle patch on his face."

  "What?"

  "I don't know what he looked like. He was big. I was kind of indisposed, you know what I mean?"

  "Say it again about his face."

  "His nose and part of his eyebrow were messed up. Like with a scar."

  "What did he say?"

  Her eyes seemed to reach out into space. Her mouth was slightly parted, her facial muscles collapsed with thought.

  "He said, 'They want you to find some new geography. Work on your golf game.' Then what's-his-name said, 'Money talks and bullshit walks, biscuit-eater. I got to feed my pigs.'"

  She chewed on a hangnail and her eyes went flat again.

  "Look, I got a problem," she said. "He didn't pay me. I got to give the guy I work for twenty bucks when I get back to the bar. Will you get his wallet for me?"

  "Sorry. I think the hogs got it, anyway."

  "You want some action?"

  "I'll drop you where you want to go, kiddo. Then I'm going to call the sheriff's office about Starkweather. But I'll deal you out of it. If you want to tell them something later, that's up to you."

  "You are heat, aren't you?"

  "Why not?"

  "Why you cutting me loose? You got something in mind for later?"

  "They might lock you up as a material witness. That guy out there in the hog lot has killed dozens, maybe hundreds of people. But he was a novice and a bumbler compared to the people he worked for."

  She sat against the far door of my car, her face thick with a drug hangover, and didn't speak during the long ride through the marsh to the parish road. Her yellowed fingers were wrapped tightly in her lap.