A Stained White Radiance Page 6

  “I’m going to have some breakfast. I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Do you want me to bring you anything?”

  “You listen—”

  “You can start yelling or banging around in here if you want and somebody’ll move you to the tank. I think today they have spaghetti for lunch. It’s not bad.”

  He looked simian in the chair, with one shoulder and taut arm stretched down toward the floor, his square face discolored with anger. Before he could speak again I closed the door behind me.

  I walked across the street in the sunshine and bought four doughnuts at a café, then returned to the office. I wasn’t gone more than ten minutes. I unlocked the handcuff from his wrist.

  “That’s what it’s like,” I said. “Except it’s twenty-four hours a day. You want to eat now?”

  He opened and closed his right hand and rubbed his wrist. His eyes measured me as though he were looking down a gun barrel.

  “You want a doughnut?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “You don’t trust people, Weldon. And maybe I can understand that. But it’s not a private beef anymore.”

  “I guess it’s not.”

  “Who are the three guys?”

  “I’ve heard the name Jewel before. In New Orleans.”

  “In connection with what?”

  “I flew for some people. Down in the tropics. A lot of different kinds of stuff goes in and out of there, you get my drift?” He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I never saw the guy. But you get in bad with the wrong people and guys like that get turned loose on you sometimes.”

  “Which people?”

  One tooth made a white mark on the corner of his lip.

  “I can’t tell you any more, Dave. If you want to lock me up, that’s the breaks. I’m living in a dark place, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to get out of it.”

  His face looked as flat and empty as melted tallow.

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON I drove out to his sister Drew’s place on East Main. East Main in New Iberia is probably one of the most beautiful streets in the Old South or perhaps in the whole country. It runs parallel with Bayou Teche and begins at the old brick post office and the Shadows, an 1831 plantation home that you often see on calendars and in motion pictures set in the antebellum South, and runs through a long corridor of spreading live oaks, whose trunks and root systems are so enormous that the city has long given up trying to contain them with cement and brick. The yards are filled with hibiscus and flaming azaleas, hydrangeas, bamboo, blooming myrtle trees, and trellises covered with roses and bugle vine and purple clumps of wisteria. In the twilight, smoke from crab boils and fish fries drifts across the lawns and through the trees, and across the bayou you can hear a band or kids playing baseball in the city park.

  Like the other Sonnier children, Drew had never been one to live a predictable life. She had used her share of Weldon’s oil strike on her father’s farm to buy a rambling one-story white house, surrounded with screened-in galleries, on a rolling, tree-shaded lot next to the old Burke home. She had been divorced twice, and any number of other men had drifted in and out of her life, usually to be cut loose unexpectedly and sent back to wherever they came from. She never did anything in moderation. Her love affairs were always public knowledge; she took indigent people of color into her home; she was inflexible in matters of principle and never gave an inch in an argument. She was robust and merry and big-shouldered, and sometimes I’d see her at the health club in Lafayette, clanking the weights up and down on the Nautilus machines, her shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face hot and bright with purpose, a red bandana tied in her wet black hair.

  But she did surprise us once, at least until we thought about it. She gave up men for a while and became a lay missionary with the Maryknolls in Guatemala and El Salvador. Then she almost died of dysentery. When she returned home she formed the first chapter of Amnesty International in New Iberia.

  I found her behind her house, trimming back the grapevines on the gazebo with two black children. She was barefoot and wore dirty pink shorts and a white T-shirt, and there were twigs and flecks of dead leaves in her hair.

  She had a pair of hedge trimmers extended high up on the vine when she turned her head and saw me.

  “Hi, Dave,” she said.

  “Hello, Drew. How’ve you been?”

  “Pretty good. How’s it with you?”

  “I’ve been kind of busy of late.”

  “I guess you have.”

  I looked down at the two black children, both of whom were about five or six years old. “I have a six-pack of Dr Pepper on the seat of my truck. Why don’t you guys go get it for us?” I said.

  They looked at Drew for approval.

  “Y’all go ahead,” she said.

  “You know a sheriff’s deputy was murdered last night at Weldon’s house?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would some people want to kill your brother, Drew?”

  “Isn’t he the one to ask?”

  “He seems to think that being a standup guy is the same thing as allowing someone to blow his head off. Except now an innocent man is dead.”

  She wiped the sweat out of her eyebrows with the back of her hand. The sun winked brightly off the bayou.

  “Come inside and I’ll give you some iced tea,” she said, wiped both of her hands on her rump, and walked ahead of me into the shade at the rear of her house. She pulled her damp T-shirt off her breasts with her fingers and shook the cloth as she opened the screen door. There was something too cavalier about her attitude, and I had the feeling that she had anticipated my visit and had already made a private decision about the outcome of our conversation.

  She took a pitcher of tea out of the icebox, picked up two glasses, and we walked through a dark, cool room that gave onto a side porch. On the wall above her desk were several framed photographs: Weldon in a navy aviator’s uniform; Lyle with his zydeco band, the name CATHAHOULA RAMBLERS written in white letters at the bottom; and a cracked black-and-white picture of two little boys and a little girl standing in front of a man and woman, with a Ferris wheel in the background. The little girl had a paper windmill in her hand, and the boys were smiling over the tops of their cotton candy. The woman was expressionless and thick-bodied, her shoulders slightly rounded, her straw purse the only ornament or bright thing on her person. The man was dark and had a narrow face and wore cowboy boots, a bolo tie, and a cowboy hat at a slant on his head. He was looking at something outside the picture.

  Drew had stopped in the doorway to the porch.

  “I was just admiring your photographs. Are those your parents?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I don’t remember them very well,” I said.

  “What are you asking me, Dave?”

  “Lyle says your father’s alive.”

  “My father was a sonofabitch. I don’t concern myself thinking about him.”

  “His picture’s hanging here, Drew.”

  She set down the iced tea and the glasses on the porch and came back in the room.

  “I keep it because my brothers and mother are in it,” she said. “It’s the only one I have of her. The day he drove her out of the house her car went through the railing on the Atchafalaya bridge. She drowned in fifty feet of water, down where it was so dark they had to use electric lights to find her.”

  “I don’t think your father has any connection with this case. But I had to ask anyway. I’m sorry to bring up bad memories.”

  “It’s the past. Who cares about it?”

  “But if you thought your father had anything to do with it, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you, Drew?” I looked her directly in the eyes. Her stare remained as intent as mine.

  “You should discount most of what Lyle tells you, Dave.”

  “And if you knew, you’d also tell me why three guys would tear Weldon’s house apart?”

  She pushed her tongue into her cheek an
d let her eyes rove over my face. No matter what the situation, Drew always gave me the feeling that she was about to step two inches from my face.

  “Come outside and sit down,” she said.

  I followed her out onto the porch, and after I had sat down in a canvas chair, she sat on the corner of a wrought-iron table, with her legs apart, and looked down at me. I looked away through the screening at some blue jays playing in the birdbath on the lawn.

  “I’m going to ask you to accept something,” she said. “I can’t help you out about Weldon. If I try to, I may hurt him. That’s something I’m not going to do.”

  “Maybe it’s not yours to decide what degree of involvement you’ll have with the law, Drew.”

  “You want to put that a little more clearly?”

  I raised my eyes to hers.

  “Earlier today I cuffed your brother to a D-ring in my office. It was for only a few minutes, but I hope the lesson wasn’t lost on him.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s an iron ring, like a tethering ring, inset in the floor. Sometimes we handcuff people in custody to it until we can move them into a holding area.”

  “That was supposed to impress Weldon? Are you serious?”

  I felt the skin of my face tighten.

  “Do you know the kind of life he had growing up?” she said. “I won’t even try to describe it to you. But no matter how bad it was, he’d give whatever he had to me and Lyle. And I mean he’d take the food out of his mouth for us.”

  I looked out at the lawn again.

  “You’ve got something to say?” she said.

  “I’m at a loss.”

  “We perplex you?”

  “Your family didn’t have the patent on hard times.”

  She rubbed the heels of her hands idly on her thighs.

  “You’ll never get my brother to cooperate with you by pushing him,” she said.

  “What’s he into, Drew?”

  “Forget the D-ring clown act and maybe one day he’ll tell you about it.”

  “I should revise my methods? That’s the problem?”

  “Stop acting like a simpleton.”

  “You always knew how to say it.”

  I could have pressed on with my questions, but Drew was not one to be taken prisoner. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I put my iced tea back on the table and stood up.

  “See you around,” I said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Why not? You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you?”

  I walked across the blue-green lawn through the shade trees and could almost feel her troubled, hot eyes on my neck.

  I WENT BACK to the office and talked with our fingerprint man, who told me that trying to sort out the prints in Weldon’s home was a nightmare. There was no single, significant object, such as a murder weapon, for him to work with, and virtually every inch of space inside the house had been touched, handled, or smeared by family members, house guests, servants, meter readers, and a crew of carpenters that Weldon had evidently hired to refurbish several rooms. The fingerprint man asked me if I would present him with an easier job next time, like recovering prints from the Greyhound bus depot.

  When I got home I found a note from Bootsie on the kitchen table, saying that she had taken Alafair with her to the grocery store in town. The evening was warm, the western sky maroon with low-hanging strips of cloud, and I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou’s edge. Gradually I could feel the fatigue and concerns of the day leave me, and at the drawbridge I turned around and hit it hard all the way home, the blood pounding in my neck, the sweat glazing on my chest. The house was in shadow now, the notched and pegged cypress planks as dark and hard-looking as iron, and I went into the backyard, where I could still see the late sun above the duck pond and the roofless barn at the foot of my property, and began alternating six sets of push-ups, leg lifts, and stomach crunches.

  I propped my feet on the bench of the redwood picnic table that we kept under the mimosa tree and did each push-up as slowly as I could, my back straight, touching my forehead lightly against the clipped grass, my muscles tightening across my ribs and through my shoulders and biceps. I was old enough to know that most of it was a narcissistic vanity, but at a certain age you’re given the luxury of no longer having to be an apologist for yourself. Sometimes it feels good to be over a half-century old and to still be a player, a bit scarred perhaps, but still out there on the mound, messing them up with sliders and spitters when your fastball won’t hum anymore. I had a round scar the diameter of a cigar on both sides of my left shoulder, where a psychopath had cored a hole right below my collarbone with a .38 round; a pungi-stick scar on my stomach that looked like a flattened gray worm; and a spray of raised welts across my thigh, like Indian arrowheads wedged under the tissue, a lover’s kiss from a bouncing Betty that lighted me on a night trail in Vietnam with such a heated brilliance that I believed my soul left my breast and I could look down and count my bones inside my skin.

  But I was all right, I thought. I no longer had dreams about the murder of my wife Annie, and the nocturnal film strips from Vietnam had become less and less distinct, as though the flattening elephant grass under the whirling helicopter blades, the grunts piling out of the Hueys and racing for the cover of the banyan trees, their pots clamped on their heads with one hand, the thump of mortars in a ville across the rice paddy, were all now part of someone else’s experience, not really mine anymore or maybe I had finally come to realize that I was only a small part of an army made up of blacks and slum kids and poor-whites from cotton-gin and lumber towns who had a collective cross dropped on them that no one should have to bear. But at least I knew now that it wasn’t mine to bear alone anymore, and so maybe I didn’t have to bear it at all.

  As always in my moments of self-indulgent reverie I had failed to notice an aluminum pot that was sitting in the middle of the redwood table. It was filled with shelled shrimp and an okra and tomato roux, and a red line of ants went from a crack in the table, up one side of the pot and down inside. I picked it up, took a spade from the tool shed, cleaned out the spoiled food in the vegetable garden by the coulee, and buried it.

  The doctors at Baylor in Houston and the specialist we used in Lafayette had tried to explain in their best way (and, like most physicians, they were inept with language, even though the compassion was obviously there in their voices) that there was no one answer for lupus. The steroids and medicines that we used to control it, to alleviate its symptoms, to knock it into remission, to protect the connective tissue and the kidneys, were hard to put into perfect balance, and sometimes an imbalance caused moments of hallucination, even temporary periods of psychosis.

  I had seen her sway once to music that was not there and had dismissed it; then on a second occasion she told me that perhaps in fact dead people had called me up on the phone when I was having delirium tremens years ago, because just minutes earlier the phone had rung and she had picked up the receiver and had heard the voice of her dead sister.

  An hour later she was fine and laughing at her own imagination.

  Tomorrow I would call the specialist in Lafayette and make another appointment. It was dusk now, and the purple air was thick with birds. I walked down to the dock to help Batist close up. He wore cutoff Levi’s, a tank top, and canvas boat shoes with no socks. His black body looked so hard and muscular you could break barrel slats across it. He was in the back of the bait shop, flinging cases of Jax and Dixie beer into a stack against the wall, an unlit cigar shoved back in his jaw like a stick.

  I seined some dead shiners out of the bait tank, then began restocking one of the coolers with long-necked bottles of beer.

  “Somet’ing wrong, Dave?” he asked.

  “No, not really.”

  I could feel his eyes on me.

  “Too much work at the office, I suppose,” I said.

  “That’s funny. It don’t usually bother y
ou.”

  “It’s just one of those days, Batist.”

  “When I got some trouble at home, sometimes trouble with my wife, my kids, I don’t like to tell nobody about it. So I just study on it. It ain’t smart, no.”

  “I worry about Bootsie. But there’s nothing for it.”

  “Don’t pretend you be knowing that. You don’t know that at all.”

  I didn’t say anything more. I pushed the bottles of beer deep into the crushed ice. The bare electric bulb overhead glinted dully off the smooth metal caps and filled the inside of the bottles with a trembling gold-brown light. My hands were numb up to my wrists.

  “We don’t need to ice down no more. We got enough for tomorrow,” Batist said.

  “I’ll finish closing up. Why don’t you go on home?”

  “I got to sweep out.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “I ain’t in no hurry, me.”

  I took another case of Jax off the wall and laid the bottles flat on the ice, between the necks of the bottles I had already loaded horizontally into the cooler. I slid the aluminum top shut with the heel of my hand.

  Batist was still watching me. Then he lit his cigar, flipped the match out the window into the dark, and began sweeping the plank floor. He was a good and kind man, and even though it might be a cliché for a southern white man to talk about the loyalty of a black person, I was convinced that if need be he would open his veins for me.

  I said goodnight to him and walked back up to the house. In the kitchen Bootsie and Alafair were taking pieces of pizza out of a box and putting them on plates.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NEXT MORNING I left early for New Orleans and spent two hours looking through mug books at my former place of employment, First District headquarters just outside the French Quarter, but I did not see any of the three men who had been inside Weldon’s house. Most of the men I used to work with were gone—burnt-out, transferred, retired, or dead—and the two detectives I talked with were of no help. One was a new man from Jefferson Parish, and the other was bored and uninterested by a case that had nothing to do with his workload. In fact, he kept yawning and playing with his empty coffee cup while I described the three intruders to him. Finally I said, “They don’t sound like local talent, huh?”