Creole Belle (17 page)

“So I don’t start stomping you into marmalade.”

When Frankie didn’t move, Clete pulled him erect by his shirtfront and swung him into the bedroom, knocking his head against the doorjamb and a bedpost. “Pack your suitcase,” he said. “You’re taking the first bus to either Los Angeles or New York, you choose.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“What do you care? You get to live.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Because you’re stupid.”

“You’re trying to save my life? You beat me up so you can save my life?”

“Yeah, the world can’t afford to lose a person of your brilliance. You’ve got three minutes.”

Frankie lifted a suitcase from a shelf in the closet and opened it on the bed and began pulling clothes off the hangers and laying them inside the case. “I got a piece in my sock drawer. I’m gonna take it with me.”

“No, you’re not,” Clete said. He moved between the dresser and Frankie and opened the top dresser drawer and reached inside and lifted out a black semi-automatic pistol. “Where you’d get a German Luger?”

“At a gun show.”

“You’re not a collector, and guys like you don’t buy registered firearms.”

“It was a gift. A guy owed me. So I took it. It’s mine. You don’t
have any right to it. Look at the Nazi stamps on it. It was used by the German navy. It’s worth at least two thousand bucks.”

“When you get situated in your new rathole, drop me a card and I’ll mail it to you.”

Frankie looked emptily into space, like a child whose alternatives had run out. “You’re really taking me to the bus station? ’Cause I heard a story about a guy you took out by the lake, a guy nobody saw again.”

“I’m doing you a favor, Frankie. Don’t blow it.” Clete dropped the Luger’s magazine from the frame and pulled back the slide to clear the chamber. He stuck the Luger in his belt. “Time to catch the Dog.”

“How about the airport?”

“The person who put the hit on you has probably broken into your credit cards. So I’m paying for your ticket out of my own pocket. That means you’re riding the Dog.”

“Bix had a new scam going. It was bringing in a lot of cash. But I don’t know what it was. I’m being honest here.”

“The day you’re honest is the day the plaster will fall from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Clete said.

“Why you got to run me down, man?”

Clete thought about it. “You’ve got a point,” he replied. “Come on, Frankie. Let’s see if we can’t get you on an express to L.A. You might even dig it out there. Here, wipe your nose.”

H
AVE YOU EVER
been told, either by friends or by a therapist, that you’re obsessive? If the answer is yes, I suspect that you, like most people of goodwill, had to accept one of two alternatives. You humbled yourself and ate your feelings and tried to change your emotional outlook, or you realized with a sinking of the heart that you were on your own and the problem you saw was not imaginary and others did not want to hear or talk about it or be reminded of it in any fashion, even though the house was burning down.

My obsession was Tee Jolie Melton. I could no longer be sure she had visited me in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, but I had no doubt her message to me was real, transmitted perhaps in ways that are not quite definable. Many years back I gave up all claim to a rational view of the world and even avoided people who believed that the laws of physics and causality have any application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.

There were only three leads in the disappearance of Tee Jolie, and all were tenuous: I had seen a group photo in her scrapbook taken at a zydeco club, with Bix Golightly in the background; at the recovery unit, she had indicated she feared for her life because of knowledge
she had about the oil-well blowout in the Gulf; the boat that abducted her sister may have been a Chris-Craft, with a thick-bodied fish painted on the bow.

I had left out one other element in the story: She was unmarried and pregnant, and the undivorced father of her child had asked if she wanted an abortion.

Where do you start?

Answer: Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive—money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire. Let’s face it, it’s hard to sell the virtues of poverty to people who have nothing to eat. In Louisiana, which has the highest rate of illiteracy in the union and the highest percentage of children born to single mothers, few people worry about the downside of casinos, drive-through daiquiri windows, tobacco depots, and environmental degradation washing away the southern rim of the state.

Oil and natural gas, for good or bad, comprise our lifeblood. When I was a boy, my home state, in terms of its environment, was an Edenic paradise. It’s not one any longer, no matter what you are told. When a group of lawyers at Tulane University tried to file a class action suit on behalf of the black residents whose rural slums were used as dumping grounds for petrochemical waste, the governor, on television, threatened to have the lawyers’ tax status investigated. The same governor was an advocate for the construction of a giant industrial waste incinerator in Morgan City. His approval ratings remained at record highs for the entirety of his administration.

In Louisiana, refined or extracted oil is everywhere, sometimes in barrels buried in the 1920s. Working-class people display bumper stickers that read
GLOBAL WARMING IS BULLSHIT
. Former vice president Al Gore is mocked and denigrated with regularity for his warnings about arctic melt.

Last spring, when the wind was out of the south, I could stand in
our front yard and smell oil. It was not buried in the ground, either. It was pouring in thick columns, like curds of smoke, from a blown casing five thousand feet below the Gulf’s surface.

This particular blowout has been referred to again and again as a “spill.” A spill has nothing to do with the events that occurred southeast of my home parish. A spill implies an accident involving a limited amount of oil, one that will seep from a tanker until the leak is repaired or the ship’s hold is drained. The oil leaking from the tanker is not pressurized or on fire and incinerating men on the floor of a drilling rig.

Even when a well is completed under normal circumstances, there is a cautionary tale buried inside the sense of accomplishment and prosperity that everyone on the rig seems to experience. At first you smell the raw odor of natural gas, like the stench of rotten eggs, then the steel in the rig seems to stiffen, as though its molecular texture is transforming itself into something alive; even in hundred-degree heat, the great pipes running out of the hole start to sweat with drops of moisture that are as cold and bright as silver dollars. The entire structure seems to hum with the power and intensity of forces whose magnitude we can only guess at. The driller touches a flaming board to a flare line to burn off excess gas, and a ball of fire rises into the blackness and snaps apart in the clouds and makes us wonder if our pride in technological success isn’t a dangerous presumption.

When a drill bit hits what is called an early pay sand, punching into an oil or natural gas dome unexpectedly, with no blowout preventer in place, the consequences are immediate. An unlimited amount of fossil decay and oceanic levels of natural gas that are hundreds of millions of years old are released in seconds through one aperture, blowing pipe, drilling mud, salt water, and geysers of sand up through the rig floor, creating havoc among the men working there and a cacophony of sound similar to a junkyard falling piece by piece out of the sky. The first spark off the wellhead ignites the gas. The explosion of flame is so intense in velocity and temperature that it will melt the spars of a rig and turn steel cable into bits of flaming string. In minutes the rig can take on the appearance of a model constructed from burned matchsticks.

My father, Big Aldous, was a fur trapper on Marsh Island and a commercial fisherman who, in the off-season, worked the monkey board high up on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He was illiterate and irresponsible and spoke English poorly and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans. He also had no understanding of how or why the Cajun world of his birth was coming to an end. My mother’s infidelities filled him with shame and anger and bewilderment, just as she in turn could not understand his alcoholism and barroom violence and apparent determination to gamble away their meager income at bourré tables and racetracks.

Big Al died in a blowout while I was in Vietnam. His body was never recovered, and I spent a great deal of time wondering whether he suffered greatly before his death. Sometimes I dreamed I saw him standing knee-high in the surf, giving me the thumbs-up sign, his hard hat tilted on his head, the swells around him denting with rain. I didn’t know what kind of death he died, but I knew one thing for sure about my old man: He was never afraid. And I knew in my heart, when the pipe came out of the hole on that windswept night decades ago, Big Al clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo line and jumped into the black with the courage of a paratrooper going out the door of a plane, and I also knew that as he plummeted toward the water with the tower coming down on top of him, his last thoughts were of me and my half brother, Jimmy, and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory. He died so we could have a better life. And that’s what I will always believe.

It seems to me a “spill” is hardly an adequate term to describe the fate of men who die inside a man-made inferno.

M
Y INTROSPECTION WASN’T
taking me any closer to solving the disappearance of Tee Jolie and the abduction and murder of her sister, Blue. When I came home from work on Thursday, Alafair was reading a glossy magazine at the kitchen table, both Snuggs and Tripod sitting in the open window behind her. Tripod was wearing a diaper. “What’s up, Alfenheimer?” I said.

“Dave, can you get rid of the stupid names?” she said without looking up from her magazine.

“I will. Someday. Probably. What are you reading?”

“There’s a showing of Pierre Dupree’s work in Burke Hall at UL. You want to drive over?”

“Not really.”

“What do you have against him?”

“Nothing. He’s just one of those guys who seems to have someone else living inside him, someone he wants none of us to meet.”

“His paintings aren’t bad. Look,” she said, handing me the magazine.

I glanced indifferently at the images on one page and started to return the magazine to her. Had I followed through, perhaps none of the events that would happen in the next days and weeks and months would have occurred, and maybe we all would have been the better for it. I’ll never know. I stared at the photograph of a painting on the second page of the article. In it a nude woman was reclining on a reddish-brown sofa, a white towel draped across her vagina. She wore a mysterious smile, and her hair was tied behind her head and touched with tiny pools of yellow, like buttercups. Her neck was swanlike, her eyes elongated, her nipples as dark as chocolate; because of her position, her breasts had flattened against her chest, and her body seemed to possess the warm softness of browned bread dough.

“Dave, your face is white,” Alafair said.

“Take a look at the woman on the sofa,” I said, handing back the magazine.

“What about her?”

“It’s Tee Jolie Melton.”

She shook her head and started to speak, then stopped. She rubbed the ball of one finger on her brow, as though a mosquito had bitten it, as though somehow our conversation could be diverted from the direction it was about to take. “The figure looks like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian natives,” she said. “The portrayal is almost generic. Don’t make it into something it’s not.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“I know Tee Jolie. That’s not her.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“I can’t prove it isn’t, but something else is going on in our lives that you won’t acknowledge.”

“Would you like to tell me what?”

“You’re imagining things about Tee Jolie Melton. Molly knows it and so do I and so does Clete.”

“Why would I imagine things about Tee Jolie?”

“To you, she represents lost innocence. She’s the Cajun girl of your youth.”

“That seems frank enough.”

“You asked me.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“You hear songs on an iPod that no one else can hear.”

“I’m going to fix a ham-and-onion sandwich. Do you want one?”

“I already made some. They’re in the refrigerator. I made some deviled eggs, too.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Are you mad?”

“I’ve never been angry at you, Alf. Not once in your whole life. Is that a fair statement?”