Purple Cane Road (29 page)

“You might be righteous now. But you and your sister were always switching your rear ends around when you wanted something.”

“I can’t tell you how much I hate you,” Letty said, rising to her feet.

“What you hate are your own sins. Think back, Letty. Remember how you’d turn somersaults on the lawn, grinning and giggling at me? You were thirteen years old when you did that. Now you reprimand me and blaspheme God’s name in front of a child.”

Carmouche put his hand in Little Face’s and led her back onto his property. The white streaks of cornstarch that had been ironed into his gray clothes recalled an image out of Letty’s memory that made her shut her eyes.

LETTY WORKED IN the backyard, raking the winter thatch out of her garden, thrusting a spade deep into the black soil, taking a strange pleasure when the blade crushed a slug or cut through the body of a night crawler. Her flannel shirt became heavy with sweat and she flung the spade on the ground and went inside the house and showered with hot water until her skin was as red and grained as old brick.

“We’ll try to do something about him tomorrow,” Passion said.

“Do what?” Letty said, tying the belt around her terry-cloth robe.

“Call Social Services. Tell them about the little girl.”

“Maybe they’ll hep her like they hepped us, huh?”

“What else you want to do, kill him?” Passion said.

“I wish. I really wish.” Passion walked over to her sister and put her arms around her. She could smell a fragrance of strawberries in her hair.

“It’s gonna be all right. We can make him move away. We’re grown now. He cain’t hurt us anymore,” she said.

“I want him to pay.”

Passion held her sister against her, stroking her back, feeling her sister’s breath on her neck. Through the second-story window she could see down into Vachel Carmouche’s backyard. Her face tingled and a bilious taste rose into her mouth.

“What is it?” Letty said, stepping back and looking at her sister’s expression. Then she turned around and looked down into Vachel Carmouche’s yard.

He had set Little Face on his knee and was feeding ice cream to her with a spoon. Each time he placed the spoon between her lips he smoothed back her hair, then wiped the drippings from the corners of her mouth with the backs of his fingers. He kissed her forehead and filled another spoonful of ice cream and placed a fresh strawberry on it. She opened her mouth like a bird, but he withdrew the spoon quickly, offering and withdrawing it again and again, and finally putting it into her mouth and lifting the spoon handle up so as not to drop any of the melted ice cream on her chin.

Letty charged barefoot down the stairs, tearing the sole of one foot on an exposed nailhead. She found a pair of work shoes in the downstairs closet and leaned against the wall with one arm and pulled them on. “He used to keep a shotgun,” Passion said. “He put his hand on it, I’ll shove it up his ass. You coming or not?” Letty said.

They went out the back door, into the twilight, into the smell of spring and cut grass and newly turned dirt and night-blooming flowers opening in the cool of the evening. They crossed into Vachel Carmouche’s property, expecting to see him on his back porch with the little girl, expecting to confront and verbally lacerate him for a deed he had committed out in the open, upon the person of a third victim, a deed he could not possibly deny, as though Passion’s and Letty’s knowledge of their own molestation had long ago lost its viability and had to be corroborated by the suffering of another in order to make it believable.

But Carmouche was nowhere in sight. The little girl sat on the back step, coloring in a crayon book. “What did he do to you, honey?” Letty said.

“Ain’t done nothing. He gone inside to eat his dinner,” the girl replied.

“Did he touch you?” Passion said. The little girl did not look back at them. A bright silver dime was on the step by her shoe.

“Mr. Vachel gonna take me up to the video store to get some cartoons,” she said.

“You come home wit’ us. We’ll call your auntie,” Letty said.

“She at work. I ain’t suppose to go nowhere except Mr. Vachel’s.”

Letty mounted the steps and shoved open the back door. Carmouche was sitting at the kitchen table, his back erect, his whole posture as rectangular as his chair, a fork poised in front of his mouth. He laid the fork down and picked up a glass of yellow wine.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d show some respect toward my home,” he said.

“You sonofabitch,” she said, and stepped inside the room. When she did, the belt around her waist came loose and her terry-cloth robe fell open on her body.

Carmouche’s eyes moved over her breasts and stomach and thighs. He sipped from his wine and pushed back his chair and crossed his legs.

“Some say love’s the other side of hate. You’re a beautiful woman, Letty. An older man can bring a woman pleasure a younger man cain’t,” he said, his voice growing more hoarse with each word.

He rose from his chair and approached her, his eyes liquid and warm under the bare electric light. She clutched her robe with one hand and stepped backwards, then felt her work shoe come down on the iron head of the mattock that was propped against the wall, knocking the handle into her back.

She reached behind her and picked the mattock up with both hands, her robe falling open again, and swung it into his face.

His nose broke and slung a string of blood across his shoulder. He stared at her in disbelief and she hit him again, this time directly in his overbite, breaking his upper teeth at the gums. His face quivered as though he had been electrically shocked, then the thousands of tiny wrinkles in his face flattened with rage and he attacked her with his fists.

He swung wildly, like a girl, but he was strong and driven by his pain and the disfigurement she had already done his face and she knew it was only a matter of time until he wrested the mattock from her.

His hands locked on the handle, his nose draining blood across his mouth, his broken teeth like ragged pieces of ceramic in his gums. She closed her eyes against the stench of his breath.

Passion picked up the weed sickle from the porch step and came through the door and drove the curved point into Carmouche’s back, pushing with the heel of her hand against the dull side of the blade. His mouth fell open and his chin jutted upward like a man who had been garroted. He fell backwards, stumbling, reaching behind him with one hand as though he could insert a thumb in the hole that was stealing the air from his lung. He collapsed on one knee, his eyes suddenly luminous, like a man kneeling inside a cave filled with specters whose existence he had long ago forgotten.

Letty hit him again and again with the mattock while Passion shut the back door so the little girl could not see inside the house. Letty’s robe and work shoes and arms and thighs were splattered with Carmouche’s blood, but her violence and anger found no satiation, and a muted, impotent cry came from between her teeth each time she swung the mattock.

Passion put her hand on her sister’s shoulder and moved her away from Carmouche’s body.

“What? What is it?” Letty said, as though awakening from a trance.

Passion didn’t reply. Instead, she lifted the sickle above her head and looked into Carmouche’s eyes.

“Don’t… please,” he said, his hand fluttering toward his cowboy belt buckle.

Then Passion’s arm came down and Letty pressed both her forearms against her ears so she would not hear the sound that came from his throat.  

23

I
WENT HOME instead of returning to the office. I sat at one of the spool tables on the dock, the Cinzano umbrella popping in the breeze above my head, and looked at the blue jays flying in and out of the cypress and willow trees. I watched the clouds marble the swamp with shadow and light, and the wind from the Gulf straightening the moss on the dead snags. I stayed there a long time, although I didn’t look at my watch, like a person who has strayed unknowingly into the showing of a pornographic film and would like to rinse himself of a new and unwanted awareness about human behavior.

The story of Carmouche’s death was repellent. I wished I had not heard it, and I wished I did not have to make decisions about it.

I walked up to the house and told Bootsie of my morning with Passion Labiche.

She didn’t say anything for perhaps a full minute. She got up from the kitchen table and stood at the sink and looked into the yard.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, her back to me.

“Nothing she told me can help her sister.”

“You have the sickle in the truck?”

“I put it back under the house.” I went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee. She turned around and followed me with her eyes.

“You’re going across a line, Dave,” she said.

“I virtually coerced a confession out of her. I don’t know if Carmouche deserved to die the way he did, but I know the girls didn’t deserve what happened to them.” She walked to the stove and slipped her hand down my forearm and hooked her fingers under my palm.

“You know what I would do?” she said.

“What?” I said, turning to look at her.

“Start the day over. You set out to help Passion and Letty. Why bring them more harm? If Letty were tried today, she might go free. You want to enable a process that’s already ignored the injury done to two innocent children?”

Bootsie was forever the loyal friend and knew what to say in order to make me feel better. But the real problem was one that went beyond suppression of nonexculpatory evidence in a crime of eight years ago. I was tired of daily convincing myself that what I did for a living made a difference.

I fixed a ham and onion sandwich for myself and ate it on the picnic table in the backyard. A few minutes later Bootsie came outside and sat down across from me, a small cardboard box in her hand.

“I hate to hit you with this right now, but this came in the morning mail. Alafair left it on her bed. I shouldn’t have read the letter, but I did when I saw the name at the bottom,” she said.

The box was packed with tissue paper and contained a six-inch-high ceramic vase that was  painted with miniature climbing roses and a Confederate soldier and a woman in a hoop dress holding each other’s hands in an arbor of live oaks. The detail and the contrast of gray and red and green were beautiful inside the glazed finish.

The letter, handwritten on expensive stationery and folded in a neat square, read:

Dear Alafair,

I hope you don’t think too badly of me by this time. Your father cares for you and wants to protect you, so I don’t hold his feelings toward me against him. This is the vase I was working on. I tried to make the girl look like you. What do you think? You can’t see the face of the Confederate soldier. I’ll let you imagine who he is.

I wish I could have lived in a time like the soldier and the girl on the vase did. People back then were decent and had honor and looked after each other.

You’re one of the best people I ever met. If you ever need me, I promise I will be there for you. Nobody will ever make me break that promise.

Your devoted friend from the library,

Johnny          

“Where is she?” I asked.

“At the swimming pool.” Bootsie watched my face. “What are you thinking?”

“That boy is definitely not a listener.”

I WENT BACK to the office and placed another call to the psychologist at the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford. It wasn’t long before I knew I was talking to one of those condescending, incompetent bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to hold on to their jobs and hide their paucity of credentials.

“You’re asking me if he has obsessions?” the psychologist said.

“In a word, yeah.”

“We don’t have an adequate vocabulary to describe what some of these people have.”

“You don’t have to convince me of that,” I said. “He was a suspect in a killing here. A gasoline bomb thrown inside another inmate’s cell. Your man was probably raped. You were faxed everything we have. I don’t know what else to tell you about him.”

“Wait a minute. You didn’t know him?”

“No. I thought you all understood that. Dr. Louvas worked with O’Roarke, or Remeta, as you call him. Dr. Louvas is at Marion now.”

“Excuse me for seeming impatient, but why didn’t you tell me that?”

“You didn’t ask. Is there anything else?” I called the federal lockup at Marion, Illinois, and got Dr. Louvas on the phone. His was a different cut from his colleague in Florida.

“Yeah, I remember Johnny well. Actually I liked him. I wouldn’t suggest having him over for dinner, though,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“He has two or three personalities. Oh, I don’t mean he suffers dissociation, or any of that
Three Faces of Eve
stuff. He has an abiding sense of anger that he refuses to deal with. If he’d gotten help earlier, he might have turned out to be a writer or artist instead of a candidate for a lobotomy.”

“Because he was raped in prison?”

“His father would take him to a blind pig on skid row. That’s what they call after-hours places in Detroit. According to Johnny, a couple of pedophiles would use him while the old man got drunk on their tab. Family values hadn’t made a big splash in the Detroit area yet.”

“So he’s hung up over his father?”

“You got it all wrong, Mr. Robicheaux. He doesn’t blame the father for what happened to him. He thinks the mother betrayed him. He’s never gotten over what he perceives as her failure.”

“He’s making overtures to my daughter.”

There was no response.

“Are you there?” I asked.

“You’re asking me to tell you his future? My bet is Johnny will do himself in one day. But he’ll probably take others with him,” the psychologist said.

THE NEXT MORNING I drove to Baton Rouge and went to Connie Deshotel’s office. The secretary told me Connie used her lunch hour on Thursdays to play racquet-ball at a nearby club.