A Stained White Radiance Read online

  But how do you cast out the canker from the rose, I thought.

  Then she put both her legs in mine, held me tightly inside her, her mouth open and wet against my cheek, and in my mind’s eye I saw a wave bursting in a geyser of foam against the hard outline of a distant jetty, a coral boulder ripping loose from the ocean’s floor, and a flurry of silver ribbon fish rising from the mouth of an underwater cave.

  BY THE NEXT AFTERNOON I had received the files and photos of Jewel Fluck and Eddy Raintree from the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C.; police departments in New Orleans, Jackson, Biloxi, and Baton Rouge; and Angola and Parchman penitentiaries. Both men belonged to the great body of psychologically misshapen people that I refer to as The Pool. Members of The Pool leave behind warehouses of official paperwork as evidence that they have occupied the planet for a certain period of time. Their names are entered early on in welfare case histories, child-abuse investigations, clinic admissions for rat bites and malnutrition. Later on these same people provide jobs for an army of truant officers, psychologists, public defenders, juvenile probation officers, ambulance attendants, emergency-room personnel, street cops, prosecutors, jailers, prison guards, alcohol- and drug-treatment counselors, bail bondsmen, adult parole authorities, and the county morticians who put the final punctuation mark in their files.

  The irony is that without The Pool we would probably have to justify our jobs by refocusing our attention and turning the key on slumlords, industrial polluters, and the coalition of defense contractors and militarists who look upon the national treasury as a personal slush fund.

  I looked at the mug shots of Fluck and Raintree and was reasonably sure that these were the same men who had been in Weldon’s house (I say “reasonably sure” because a booking-room photograph is often taken when the subject is tired, angry, drunk, or drugged, and recidivists constantly change their hairstyles, grow and shave mustaches and hillbilly sideburns, and become bloated on jailhouse fare like grits, spaghetti, and mashed potatoes).

  But Fluck’s file told me little that I didn’t already know, or couldn’t have guessed at. At seventeen he had pushed another boy down a stairs at the Superdome and broken his arm, but the charge had been dropped. He had been banned for life from Louisiana racetracks after he was caught feeding a horse a speedball; he had been in the New Orleans city prison twice, once for beating up a taxicab driver, a second time for distribution of obscene film materials. His mainline fall had been at Parchman, where he did a five-year jolt and went out on what is called “max-time,” which meant he either gave the hacks constant trouble and earned no good-time, or he refused parole because he didn’t want to go back on the street under supervision.

  But because he had gone out on max-time, Parchman had no address for him, and he hadn’t been arrested again in the two years since his discharge. His parents were deceased, and neither the New Orleans phone directory nor any of the utility companies listed anyone by the name of Fluck.

  Eddy Raintree’s photo stared at me out of his file with a face that had the moral depth and complexity of freshly poured cement. He had a sixth-grade education, a dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps, and had never had a more skilled job than that of fry cook and hod carrier. He had been in the Calcasieu, West Baton Rouge, and Ascension parish prisons for bigamy, check writing, arson, and sodomy with animals. He went down for three years in Angola for possession of stolen food stamps, and he spent two of those three years in lockdown with the big stripes (the violent and unmanageable) after he was suspected of involvement in a gang rape that left a nineteen-year-old convict dead in a shower stall.

  He, like Jewel Fluck, had gone out max-time three years ago, and there was no current address for him. But at the bottom of Raintree’s prison sheet was a notation that Captain Delbert Bean had recommended that this man be reclassified as a big stripe, and that no good-time be applied toward his early release from the farm.

  Early Monday morning I drove up to Angola, north of Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River, rolled across the cattle guard between the gun towers and the fences topped with rolls of razor wire, and followed the narrow road past the Block, an enormous fenced compound where both the snitches and the big stripes were kept in lockdown, through fields of sweet potatoes and corn and freshly plowed acreage that dipped all the way down to the river basin. I passed the old prison cemetery, where those who die while incarcerated do Angola time for all eternity; the bulldozed and weed-grown foundations of the sweat boxes on Camp A (there had been two of them, upright, narrow cast-iron places of torment, with a hole the diameter of a cigar to breathe through, the space so tight that if a convict collapsed, his knees and buttocks would wedge against the walls); the crumbled ruins of the stone buildings left over from the War Between the States (which for years had been used to house Negro inmates, including three of the best twelve-string blues guitarists I know of—Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, and Hogman Mathew Maxie); and finally the old Red Hat House down by the river bank, a squat, ugly off-white building that took its name from the red-painted straw hats worn by the big-stripe levee gangs who were locked there before the building became the home of the electric chair, which has since been moved to a more modern environment, one with tile walls that glow with the clean, antiseptic light of a physician’s clinic.

  The Mississippi was high and churning with mud and uprooted trees, and out on the flat, among the willows, I saw Captain Delbert Bean on horseback, a pearl-gray Stetson hat slanted on his head, working a gang of convicts who were filling sandbags out of a dump truck and laying them along the base of the levee.

  That levee is a burial ground for an untold number of convicts who were murdered, some as object lessons, by prison personnel. Ask anyone who ever worked in Angola, or did time there. I will not use their names, but there used to be two old-time gunbulls, brothers, who would get sodden and mean on corn whiskey, sometimes take a nap under a tree, then awake, single out some hapless soul, tell him to start running, and then kill him.

  Delbert Bean was a dinosaur left over from that era. He had been a prison guard for forty-seven years, and I don’t believe that in his life he had ever traveled farther away from the farm than New Orleans or Shreveport. He had no family or friends that I knew of, no external frame of reference, little knowledge of change in the larger world. His eyes were a washed-out blue, his skin covered with brown spots the size of dimes, his liver eaten away with cirrhosis. His stomach looked like a watermelon under his long-sleeved blue shirt. The accent was north Louisiana hill country, the voice absolutely certain when he spoke, and the face absolutely joyless.

  He was not a man whom you either liked or disliked. He had been jailing most of his life, and I suspected that at the center of his existence was a loneliness and perversion so great that if he ever became privy to it he would blow his brains all over the ceiling of the little frame house where he lived with others like himself in the free people’s compound.

  He handed the reins of his horse to a black inmate and walked with a cane up a path through the willows toward me. The bottom of the cane was seated inside a twelve-inch steel tube. A briar pipe protruded from inside the holster belt of his chrome-plated nine-millimeter automatic. He shook hands with the limpness of a man who was not used to social situations, filled his pipe, and pushed the tobacco down with his thumb while his eyes watched the men filling and hefting sandbags below us. I had known him for fifteen years, and I did not once remember his addressing me by name.

  “Eddy Raintree,” he said, acknowledging my question. “Yeah, he was one of mine. What about him?”

  “I think he helped kill a deputy sheriff. I’d like to run him to ground, but I’m not sure where to start.”

  He lit his pipe and watched the smoke drift off into the wind.

  “His kind used to run their money through their pecker on beer and women. Now they do it with dope. I caught him and another one once cooking down some blues to shoot in an eyedropper. They was using
the edge of a dollar bill for an insulator. No more sense than God give a turnip.”

  “Was he in any racial beefs?”

  “When you got nigger and white boys in the same cage, there ain’t any of them wouldn’t cut each other’s throats.”

  “Do you know if he was in the AB?”

  “The what?”

  “The Aryan Brotherhood.”

  “We ain’t got that in here.”

  “That’s funny. It’s the fashion everywhere else.” I tried to smile.

  But he was not given to humor about his job.

  “Let me sit down. My hip’s hurting,” he said. He raised his cane in the air and shouted, “Walnut!” A mulatto convict, his denims streaked with mud and sweat, dropped his shovel, picked up a folding chair, ran it up the incline, and popped it open for the captain.

  “Tell Mr. Robicheaux what you’re in for,” the captain said.

  “Suh?”

  “You heard me.”

  The convict’s eyes focused on a tree farther down the levee. “Murder, two counts,” he said, quietly.

  “Whose murder?” the captain asked.

  “My kids. They say I shot bof’ my kids. That’s what they say.”

  “Get on back to work.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  The captain waited until the convict was back down the mud-flat, then said, pointing with the steel tip of his cane, “See that big one yonder, the one flinging them bags up on the levee, he raped an eighty-five-year-old woman, then snapped her neck. You tell these white boys they’re gonna have to cell with niggers like them two out yonder or they’ll lose their good-time, what do you think’s gonna happen?”

  “I’m not following you.”

  He drew in on his pipe, his eyes hazy with a private knowledge. It was overcast, and his lips looked sick and purple against his liver-spotted skin.

  “We had two white boys shanked in the Block this year,” he said. “One a trusty, one a big stripe. We think the same nigger got both of them, but we can’t prove it. If you was a white person living up there, what would you do?”

  “So maybe there’s something like the AB in Angola?”

  “Call it what you want. They got their ways. The goddamn Supreme Court’s caused all this.” He paused, then continued. “They carve swastikas, crosses, lightning bolts on each other, pour ink in the sores. The black boys don’t tend to mess with them, then. Wait a minute, I’ll show you something. Shorty! Get it up here!”

  “Yow boss!” A coal-black convict, with a neck like a fire hydrant, his face running with sweat, heaved a sandbag against the levee and lumbered up the incline toward us.

  “What’d Boss Gilbeau put you in isolation for?” the captain asked.

  “Fightin’, boss.”

  “Who was you fighting with, Shorty?”

  “One of them boys back in Ash.” He grinned, his eyes avoiding both of us.

  “Was he white or colored, Shorty?”

  “He was white, boss.”

  “Show Mr. Robicheaux how you burned yourself when you got out of isolation.”

  “Suh?”

  “Pull up your shirt, boy, and don’t act ignorant.”

  The convict named Shorty unbuttoned his sweat-spotted denim shirt and pulled the tail up over his back. There were four gray, thin, crusted lesions across his spine, like his skin had been branded by heated wires or coat hangers.

  “How’d you burn yourself, Shorty?” the captain said.

  “Backed into the radiator, boss.”

  “What was the radiator doing on in April?”

  “I don’t know, suh. I wished it ain’t been on. It sure did hurt. Yes, suh.”

  “Get on back down there. Tell them others to clean it up for lunch.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  The captain knocked his pipe out on his boot heel and stuck it back in his holster belt. He gazed out on the wide yellow-brown sweep of the river and the heavy green line of trees on the far side. He didn’t speak.

  “That’s the way it is here, huh?” I said.

  “Besides dope, Raintree’s problem is his prick. He’s got rut for brains. It don’t matter if it’s male or female, if it’s warm and moving he’ll try to top it. The other thing you might look for is fortune-tellers. He had astrology maps all over his cell walls. He give a queer in Magnolia a carton of cigarettes a week to read his palm. By the way, it ain’t the AB you ought to have on your mind. Them with the swastikas I was telling you about, they get mail from some church out in Idaho called Christian Identity. Hayden Lake, Idaho.”

  He raised himself up on his cane to indicate that our interview was over. I could almost hear his bones crack.

  “I thank you for your time, captain,” I said.

  Then as an afterthought he said, “If you bust that boy, tell him he just as lief hang himself as come back here for killing a policeman.”

  His pupils were like black cinders in his washed-out blue eyes.

  I ARRIVED BACK at my office just in time to shuffle some papers around on my desk and sign out at five o’clock. I was tired from the round-trip drive up to Angola; my shoulder still hurt where Eddy Raintree had caught me with the crowbar, and I wanted to go home, eat supper, take a run along the dirt road by the bayou, and maybe go to a movie in Lafayette with Alafair and Bootsie.

  But parked next to my pickup truck was a waxed fire-engine-red Cadillac, with the immaculate white canvas top folded back loosely on the body. A man in ice-cream slacks lay almost supine across the leather seats, one purple suede boot propped up on the window jamb, a sequined sunburst guitar hung across his stomach.

  “Allons à Lafayette, pour voir les ’tites françaises,” he sang, then sat up, pulled off his sunglasses with his mutilated hand, and grinned at me. “What’s happening, lieutenant?”

  “Hello, Lyle.”

  “Take a ride with me.”

  “How many of these do you own?”

  “They actually belong to the church.”

  “I bet.”

  “Take a ride with me.”

  “I’m on my way home.”

  “You can blow a few minutes. It’s important.”

  “Do you have anything against talking to me during office hours?”

  “Somebody broke into Drew’s house last night.”

  “I didn’t hear anything about it. Did she report it to the city police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe I’ll explain that. Take a ride with me.” He lifted his guitar over into the back seat. I opened the door and sat back in the deep flesh-colored leather seat next to him. We clanked across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove out of town on East Main. He picked up a paper cup from the floor and drank out of it. A familiar odor struck my nostrils in the warm air.

  “Did you give yourself a dispensation today?” I said.

  “I preach against drunkenness, not drinking. There’s a big difference.”

  “Where are we going, Lyle?”

  “Not far. Right there,” he said, and pointed across a sugarcane field to a collapsed barn, a rusted and motionless windmill, and some brick pilings that had once supported a house. The field behind the barn was unplowed, and in it were a half-dozen oil wells.

  We pulled off the parish road into a weed-grown dirt lane that led back to the barn. Lyle cut the engine, removed a pint bottle of bourbon from under the seat, and unscrewed the cap with one thumb. His hair, which he wore on-camera in a waved conk that reminded me of a washboard, was windblown and loose and hanging in his eyes.

  “I own a third of it, a third of them wells out there, too,” he said. “But I’m not fond of coming out here. I surely ain’t.”

  “Why are we here, then?”

  “You got to go back where the dragons live if you want to get rid of them.”

  “I tried to make myself clear before, Lyle. I sympathize with the problems your family had in the past, but my concern now is with a murdered police officer.”

&
nbsp; “Drew came home last night from her Amnesty International meeting and she noticed the light on the back porch was out. She went on into the house, and there was a guy in the kitchen, in the dark, looking at her. He had something in his hand, a screwdriver or a knife. She ran back out the front of the house to the neighbor’s and tried to get hold of Weldon, then she called me up in Baton Rouge.”

  “Why didn’t she call the cops, Lyle?”

  “She thinks she’s protecting Weldon from something.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure. Neither one of them is real convinced about my religious conversion. They tend to think maybe my brain cells soaked up a little too much purple acid when I came back from Vietnam. So they don’t always confide everything in me. But it doesn’t matter. I know who that fellow was.”

  “Your father?”

  “I don’t have a doubt.”

  “Everybody else seems to, including me.”

  He took a sip from his pint bottle and looked away at the red sun over the bayou. The wind was warm, and I could smell the reek of natural gas from the wells.

  “What does Drew say? What did this man look like?” I asked.

  “She didn’t see his face.”

  “I’ll talk to her tomorrow. Now I’d better get back home.”

  “All right, I’m going to tell you all of it. Then you can do any damn thing you want with it, Loot. But by God, first, you’re going to listen.”

  The scars dripping down the side of his face looked like smooth pieces of red glass in the late sunlight.

  CHAPTER 5

  AND THIS IS the way Lyle told it to me, or as I have reconstructed it.

  His mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on a burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink uniform, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard, shucking off their feathers in a caldron of scalding water. The father, Verise, came home later than he should have, parked his pickup by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi’s. His shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with sweat and black hair.