Purple Cane Road (16 page)

They walked up on each side of the limo. Micah’s windows were down now, and he heard the Velcro strap peeling loose on the holster of the man approaching the passenger door.

“Could I see your driver’s license, please?” the man at Micah’s window said. He wore pilot’s sunglasses and seemed bored, looking away at the sunset over the cane fields, his palm extended as he waited for Micah to pull his license from his wallet.

“What’s the problem?”

The man in sunglasses looked at the photo on the license, then at Micah’s face.

“You see what it says over your picture? ‘Don’t drink and drive…Don’t litter Louisiana,’” he said. “Every driver’s license in Louisiana has that on it. We’re trying to keep drunks off the road and the highways clean. You threw a beer can out the window back there.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Step out of the car, please.”

“You guys are from New Orleans. You don’t have authority here,” Micah said.

“Walk around the far side of the car, please, and we’ll discuss that with you.”

They braced him against the roof, kicked his ankles apart, ran their hands up and down his legs, and pulled his pockets inside out, spilling his change and wallet onto the shale.

A car passed with its lights on. The two cops watched it disappear between the cane fields. Then one of them swung a baton into the back of Micah’s thigh, crumpling it as though the tendon had been cut in half. He fell to one knee, his fingers trying to find purchase against the side of the limo.

The second blow was ineffective, across his shoulders, but the third was whipped with two hands into his tail-bone, driving a red shard of pain into his bowels. Micah rolled in the dirt, shuttering, trying to control his sphincter muscle.

The cop who had taken his license dropped it like a playing card into his face, then kicked him in the kidney.

“You got a sheet in New Mexico, Micah. Go back there. Don’t make us find you again,” he said.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said.

The cop with the baton leaned over and inserted the round, wooden end into Micah’s mouth, pushing hard, until Micah gagged and choked on his own blood.

“What’s that? Say again?” the cop said, bending down solicitously toward Micah’s deformed face.

CLETE CALLED ME the next afternoon and asked me to meet him in Armand’s on Main Street. It was cool and dark inside, and Clete sat at the antique, mirrored bar, a julep glass in his hand, an electric fan blowing across his face.

But there was nothing cool or relaxed about his demeanor. His tropical shirt was damp against his skin, his face flushed as though he had a fever. One foot was propped on the runner of the barstool; his knee kept jiggling-

“What is it, Clete?”

“I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have called you. Maybe I should just drive up the stock price on Jack Daniel’s by three or four points.”

“I got a call from Cora Gable. A couple of NOPD goons beat up her driver. She says they scared him so bad he won’t press charges.”

“Jim Gable wants him out of town?”

“The driver had just delivered a petition for Letty to Belmont Pugh. Maybe the message is for Cora.”

“What’s Gable’s interest in Letty Labiche?”

“I don’t know. You going to tell me why you called me down here?”

THE AFFAIR HAD STARTED casually enough. Clete had gone to her house at evening time and had found her working in back, carrying buckets of water in both hands from the house faucet to her garden. “Where’s your hose?” he asked.

“The boy who cuts the grass ran the lawn mower over it,” she replied.

They carried the water together, sloshing it on their clothes, pouring it along the rows of watermelons and strawberries, the sky aflame behind them. Her face was hot with her work, her dress blowing loosely on her body as she stooped over in the row. He walked back to the house and filled a glass of water for her and carried it to her in the garden.

She watched his face over the top of the glass as she drank. Her skin was dusty, the tops of her breasts golden and filmed with perspiration in the dying light. She lifted her hair off her neck and pulled it on top of her head.

He touched the roundness of her upper arm with his fingertips.

“You’re a strong “woman,” he said.

“Overweight.”

“Not to me,” he replied.

She kept brushing her hair back from the corner of her mouth, not speaking, letting her eyes meet his as though she knew his thoughts.

“I drink too much. I lost my badge in a bad shooting. I did security for Sally Dio in Reno,” he said.

“I don’t care.”

She tilted up her face and looked sideways with her eyes, the wind blowing her hair back from her face.

“My ex said she could have done better at the Humane Society,” he said.

“What somebody else say got nothing to do wit’ me.”

“You smell like strawberries.”

“That’s ‘cause we standing in them, Clete.”

She pushed the soft curve of her sandal across the hardness of his shoe.

They went upstairs to the third story of the house and made love in an oversized brass bed that was surrounded by three electric fans. She came before he did, then mounted him and came a second time, her hands caressing his face simultaneously. Later she lay close to him and traced his body with her fingertips, touching his sex as though it were a source of power, in a way that almost embarrassed him and made him look at her quizzically.

She wanted to hear stories about the Marine Corps and Vietnam, about his pouring a container of liquid soap down a hood’s mouth in the men’s room of the Greyhound bus depot, about growing up in the Irish Channel, how he smashed a woman’s greenhouse with rocks after he found out her invitation for ice cream had been an act of charity she extended at her back door to raggedy street children.

“I’m a professional screwup, Passion. That’s not humility, it’s fact. Dave’s the guy with the history,” he said.

She pulled him against her and kissed his chest. He stayed away for two days, then returned to her house at sunrise, his heart beating with anticipation before she opened the door. She made love with him as though her need were insatiable, her thighs fastened hard around him, the small cry she made in his ear like a moment of exorcism.

Two weeks later he sat in her kitchen, a blue and white coffeepot by his empty plate, while Passion rinsed a steak tray under the faucet.

He ran his nails through his hair.

“I think you’re looking for an answer in a guy who doesn’t have any,” he said.

When she didn’t reply, he smiled wanly. “I’m lucky to have a P.I. license, Passion. New Orleans cops cross the street rather than talk to me. I’ve had the kind of jobs people do when they’re turned down by the foreign legion.”

She stood behind him, kneading his shoulders with her large hands, her breasts touching the back of his head.

“I have to go to the doctor in the morning. Then I want to visit my sister,” she said.

CLETE DRANK OUT of his julep and stirred the ice in the bottom of the glass.

“She told me all the details about what Carmouche did to her and Letty. Somebody should dig that guy up and chain-drag the corpse through Baton Rouge,” he said. Then he seemed to look at a thought inside his head and his face went out of focus. “Passion would let him exhaust himself on her so he’d go easier on her sister.”

“Get this stuff out of your mind, Clete.”

“You think she’s playing me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Give me another julep,” he said to the bartender.

BOOTSIE WAS WAITING for me in the parking lot after work.

“How about I buy you dinner, big boy?” she said.

“What’s going on?”

“I just like to see if I can pick up a cop once in a while.”

We drove to Lerosier, across from the Shadows, and ate in the back room. Behind us was a courtyard full of roses and bamboo, and in the shade mint grew between the bricks.

“Something happen today?” I said.

“Two messages on the machine from Connie Deshotel. I’m not sure I like other women calling you up.”

“She probably has my number mixed up with her Orkin man’s.”

“She says she’s sorry she offended you. What’s she talking about?”

“This vice cop, Ritter, taped an interview with a perpetrator by the name of Steve Andropolis. The tape contained a bunch of lies about my mother.”

Bootsie put a small piece of food in her mouth and chewed it slowly, the light hardening in her eyes.

“Why would she do that?” she said.

“Ask her.”

“Count on it,” she said.

I started to reply, then looked at her face and thought better of it.

BUT CONNIE DESHOTEL was a willful and determined woman and was not easily discouraged from revising a situation that was somehow detrimental to her interests. The next evening Belmont Pugh’s black Chrysler, followed by a caravan of political sycophants and revelers, parked by the boat ramp. They got out and stood in the road, blinking at the summer light in the sky, the dust from their cars drifting over them. All of them had been drinking, except apparently Belmont. While his friends wandered down toward the bait shop for food and beer, Belmont walked up the slope, among the oaks, where I was raking leaves, his face composed and somber, his pinstripe suit and gray Stetson checkered with broken sunlight.

“Why won’t you accept that woman’s apology?” he asked.

“You’re talking about Connie Deshotel?”

“She didn’t mean to cast an aspersion on your mother. She thought she was doing her job. Give her a little credit, son.”

“All right, I accept her apology. Make sure you tell her that for me, will you? She actually got the governor of the state to drive out here and deliver a message for her?”

He removed his hat and wiped the liner out with a handkerchief. His back was straight, his profile etched against the glare off the bayou. His hair had grown out on his neck, and it gave him a distinguished, rustic look. For some reason he reminded me of the idealistic young man I had known years ago, the one who daily did a good deed and learned a new word from his thesaurus.

“You’re a hard man, Dave. I wish I had your toughness. I wouldn’t be fretting my mind from morning to night about that woman on death row,” he said.

I rested the rake and popped my palms on the handle’s end. It was cool in the shade and the wind was blowing the tree limbs above our heads.

“I remember when a guy offered you ten dollars to take a math test for him, Belmont. You really needed the money. But you chased him out of your room,” I said.

“The cafeteria didn’t serve on weekends. You and me could make a can of Vienna sausage and a jar of peanut butter and a box of crackers go from Friday noon to Sunday night,” he said.

“I’ve witnessed two executions. I wish I hadn’t. You put your hand in one and you’re never the same,” I said.

“A long time ago my daddy said I was gonna be either a preacher or a drunk and womanizer. I wake up in the morning and have no idea of who I am. Don’t lecture at me, son.” His voice was husky, his tone subdued in a way that wasn’t like Belmont.

I looked beyond him, out on the dock, where his friends were drinking can beer under the canvas awning. One of them was a small, sun-browned, mustached man with no chin and an oiled pate and the snubbed nose of a hawk.

“That’s Sookie Motrie out there. I hear he’s the money behind video poker at the tracks,” I said.

“It’s all a trade-off. People want money for schools but don’t like taxes. I say use the devil’s money against him. So a guy like Sookie gets to be a player.”

When I didn’t reply, he said, “A lot of folks think Earl K. Long was just an ignorant redneck. But Earl did good things people don’t know about. A whole bunch of Negro women graduated from a new nursing program and found out right quick they couldn’t get jobs nowhere. So Earl hears about it and says he wants a tour of the state hospital. He pumps hands all over the building, sticks his head in operating rooms, flushes toilets, then gets all the hospital’s administrators in one room and locks the door.

“He says, ‘I just seen a shameful spectacle here. Y’all got white nurses hand-waiting on nigra patients, carrying out their bedpans and I don’t know what all, and I ain’t gonna stand for it. You either hire nigra nurses in those wards or every damn one of you is gonna be out of a job.’

“The next week the state hospital had two dozen black nurses on staff.”

“Makes a good story,” I said.

“Stories are all the human race has got, Dave. You just got to find the one you like and stay with it,” he replied.

“Are you going to execute Letty Labiche?”

He replaced his hat on his head and walked down the slope to rejoin his entourage, jiggling his hands in the air like a minstrel man.

14

F
ARTHER TO THE SOUTH of us, in the working-class community of Grand Bois, a young attorney, two years out of law school, filed suit on behalf of the local residents against a large oil corporation. The locals were by and large Cajuns and Houma Indians, uneducated, semiskilled, poor, without political power, and bewildered by the legal apparatus, the perfect community to target as the open-pit depository of oil sludge trucked in from a petroleum treatment plant in Alabama.

Company officials didn’t argue with the contention the pits contained benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and arsenic. They didn’t have to. Years ago, during a time of gas shortages, the U.S. Congress had granted the oil industry blanket exemptions from the regulations that govern most toxic wastes. Secondly, the state of Louisiana does not define oil waste as hazardous material.

The state, the oil corporation, and the community of Grand Bois were now in court, and Connie Deshotel’s office was taking depositions from the people in Grand Bois who claimed their children were afflicted with vertigo, red eyes, skin rashes, and diarrhea that was so severe they had to keep buckets in their automobiles.

Two of those Grand Bois families had moved to New Iberia and were now living up on the bayou road, not far from Passion Labiche’s nightclub. On Monday Helen Soileau was assigned to drive Connie Deshotel and her assistant out to their homes.