Purple Cane Road (34 page)

I was trembling all over, as though I had malaria. My head thundered and my palms were wet on the plastic stock of the rifle. I leaned over and vomited into the water.

I walked up the boat ramp, then onto the dock, and pulled off my T-shirt and sat down on the planks and pulled my knees up in front of me and rested my face on top of them.

I stayed there until the sun rose, then got up and slung the AR-15 muzzle-down on my shoulder and walked up the slope through the trees with the knowledge I had deliberately set out to murder another human being and had simultaneously failed as both assassin and police officer.  

28

T
HAT AFTERNOON I got a call from Wally, our departmental comedian.

“Enjoying your days off?” he asked.

“I’m cleaning the grease trap right now. Come on over.

“I got a little problem. I’d like to finish my shift without being taken out of here in a box. My systolic is 190. I don’t need race riots. I don’t need black people shouting into the phone at me. I don’t need no white lesbian crazy woman firing up a mob over on Hopkins.”

“You’re talking about Helen Soileau?”

“I knew you could think it out. Way to go, Dave.”

I drove into town, then over to the west side to Hopkins Street, which, along with Railroad, used to comprise New Iberia’s red-light district. Helen Soileau had just handcuffed two black kids, about age fifteen, through the cap chain on a fire hydrant.

I parked the pickup in front of a liquor store and walked through the crowd that had formed on the sidewalk and the lawn of two houses. Helen was bent over at the waist, her hands on her hips, venting her spleen at the two kids sitting on the cement. A city cop in a uniform was looking nervously up and down the street.

Helen raised up and stared at me, her face still heated. Her slacks were torn at the thigh and mud was smeared on her white shirt. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“I just happened by. What’d these guys do?”

“Not much. One shot a BB into a passing car and hit a six-week-old baby. This other little fuck put an M-80 under an old woman’s bedroom floor.”

“I think we need to turn the butane down.”

“They’re going to tell me where that BB gun is or stay here till they have to eat the paint on that hydrant. You hear that, you little pukes?”

“Walk over here with me, Helen,” I said.

“You got no business telling me what to do,” she replied.

“I can’t argue with that. But we’re on city turf. Let them handle it.”

She lifted her face into mine. Her eyes were blazing, her thick arms pumped.

“I’d like to punch you out, Dave. All the skipper needs is an apology and you’re back on the clock,” she said.

“So let the city guy do his job and take the kids down.”

“Yeah, I give a shit,” she said, and bent over and unlocked the handcuffs on the boys’ wrists, then cuffed them again and walked them to the city cruiser and shoved them inside and slammed the door behind them. Then she walked back to me and said, “Buy me coffee, Pops.”

I EXPECTED ONE of Helen’s harangues, but I was wrong. We went to the McDonald’s on East Main and sat by the window. The sky had turned green and the wind was

blowing the oaks on the street, and leaves were rising out of the crown of the trees high in the air.

“I was in Lafayette this morning. You know that tattoo and fortune-telling place right off the four-lane?” she said.

“An old cypress cabin with beads and colored lights hanging all over the gallery?”

“I saw Passion Labiche go in there. That girl bothers me.”

“How?”

“Vachel Carmouche was a shithead and everybody knew it. That whole trial sucked. I get pissed off every time somebody tells me Carmouche was a lawman…Why the face?”

“I found evidence she didn’t do it by herself.”

“You’re telling me Passion helped her?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Big revelation,” Helen said. “What else is bothering you today?”

“I set up an ambush on Johnny Remeta last night.”

“You did what?”

“I was going to flush his grits. I couldn’t pull the trigger.”

She cleaned up our mess from the table and walked to the trash basket and stuffed it inside and came back to the table.

“This is a noisy place full of teenagers and echoes and cooks yelling and I couldn’t quite make out what you were saying. See you around, bwana,” she said.

She walked out to her cruiser and drove away.

I SLEPT THAT NIGHT with the remote phone under the bed. It rang just after 11 P.M. I picked it up and went into the kitchen before I clicked it on.

“You’re in it for the long haul,” I said without waiting for him to speak.

“I figured you wrong last night. I thought honor required I tell you that, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Honor?”

“I said you didn’t have in it you to drop the hammer on me. I know who popped your mother. That’s why you let me live.”

“You’re not even close, partner.”

I could hear him breathing on the mouth of the receiver. “We’re alike. I’ve seen it in your eyes,” he said.

“I always thought my mother betrayed me, Johnny. But I learned to forgive her. I did that so I don’t have to be a drunk anymore.”

“You saying something about my mother now?”

“You’re smart. Read Chaucer’s story about the three guys who set out to find Death and slay him once and for all. They found him, all right. But things didn’t work out as they expected.”

“Let me tell you what real revenge is. I’m gonna shake down the people who did your mother, then I’m gonna leave the country and have them killed by somebody else. But you’ll never know for sure who they were.”

“Pull on your own pud, Johnny. This stuff is a real drag,” I said, and clicked off the phone. Then I walked through the house and pulled the phone connections from all the wall jacks.

THE SHERIFF LIVED up Bayou Teche in a yellow and gray frame house with a wide gallery, set back under huge cedar and oak trees. When I drove out there Saturday afternoon, he was trimming back the climbing roses in his flower bed while his grandchildren played in the side yard. He wore a tattered straw hat to protect his head from the thorns, and his stomach hung heavily over his belt. In his home setting, cupping flowers and placing them gingerly in a bowl of water, his clothes stained with fungicide and house paint, the sheriff looked much older than he did at the department and nothing like a law officer.

I sat down on the front steps and picked up some pieces of bark from a bag of mulch and flicked them out into the grass.

“I made an ass out of myself when I attacked Jim Gable. I also brought shame on the department. I want to apologize,” I said.

“You got to rein it in, Dave.”

“I believe you.”

“Five-day suspension without pay, effective last Monday. A letter of reprimand in your jacket. Is that fair?”

“There’s something else I have to tell you,” I said. “Passion Labiche told me she helped her sister kill Vachel Carmouche.” I waited for him to speak but he didn’t. “Number two, I had the chance to plant one in Johnny Remeta’s cauliflower and didn’t do it.”

He paused in his work but his face showed no expression.

“You froze?” he asked.

“I had him set up. I was going to cut all his motors.”

A mosquito buzzed at his face and he rubbed his cheek with the back of his wrist.

“I’m going to retire soon. I’m glad you told me what you did.”

“Sir?”

“I’d like you to be my successor,” he said.

“Come again?”

“What are you going to do with Passion’s confession?” he asked, ignoring my incredulity.

“It’ll be dismissed as an eleventh-hour attempt to stop Letty’s execution,” I said.

“Maybe that’s just what it is. You think of that? Where’s Remeta now?”

“He inasmuch told me my mother’s killers are the same people who tried to have him killed on the Atchafalaya. He says he’s going to extort them, then hire a button man to take them out.”

“You actually had that guy locked down in your sights? Then didn’t say anything about it till today?”

“That’s it, more or less.”

He locked the clasp on his clippers and dropped them in his pants pocket and looked at his grandchildren playing.

“Remeta is going to take you to your mother’s killers, isn’t he?” he said.

“That wasn’t the reason, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, scratching inside his shirt. “Yeah—” But he didn’t bother to continue, as though he were weary of contending with the self-serving machinations of others.

I ATE AN EARLY dinner with Bootsie, then drove to New Orleans through Morgan City. The evening light still reached high into the dome of sky overhead when I parked my pickup truck down the block from Maggie Glick’s bar across the river in Algiers. The street was busy with the type of people whose Saturday nights were spent in a facsimile of the places their fellow countrymen enjoyed: elderly pensioners who ate in decrepit diners that served a free glass of domestic wine with the special; young white couples without geographical origins or means of support who lived in walk-ups with no air-conditioning and strolled the sidewalks with no apparent destination; and the men whose thoughts made them wake each morning with a longing that seldom found satiation.

I walked down the alley and entered Maggie Glick’s through the back door. It was crowded and dark and unbearably frigid inside. She was behind the bar, fixing a drink in a Collins glass, talking to a white man in a business suit. She had woven glass Mardi Gras beads into her hair and she wore a white knit blouse that exposed the roses tattooed on the tops of her breasts. The man did not sit but stood and grinned while she talked, his back stiff, his eyes drifting down the bar to a mulatto girl who could not have been older than eighteen.

His eyes met mine and he fiddled with a college or fraternity ring of some kind on his finger and turned his face away, as though he had heard a sudden noise outside, and walked down to the far end of the bar, then glanced back at me again and went out the door.

“My competition send you ‘round?” Maggie asked.

“Johnny Remeta says he was never in here. He says you were lying,” I said.

“You a sober, thinking man now. Let me ax you a question. Why would I lie and tell you a man like that was a customer? ‘Cause it gonna be good for my bid-ness?”

“That’s why I believe you.”

“Do say?”

“Where can I find him?” I asked.

“He
used
to come in here. He don’t now. Man shop for the trade in here got to be functional, know what I mean.”

 “No.”

“That boy get off with a gun. And it ain’t in his pants. Here, drink a free soda. I’ll bag it to go.”

“Jim Gable sprung you from St. Gabriel, Maggie?”

“I got sprung ‘cause I was innocent. Have a good night, darlin’,” she said, and turned her back to me, lighting a cigarette. Her hair was jet black, her skin as golden as a coin in the flare of light.

I walked toward the front of the building and was about to push open the door onto the street when I saw a muscular blond man in a pale blue suit with white piping on the lapels at the corner of the bar. His hair was clipped and combed neatly on the side of his head, one eye like a small marble inside the nodulous skin growth on the right side of his face.

“I thought maybe you’d gone back to New Mexico, Micah,” I said.

He had a long-neck bottle of beer and a shot glass in front of him, and he sipped from the shot, then drank a small amount of beer afterward, like a man who loves a vice so dearly he fears his appetite for it will one day force him to give it up.

“The heavyweight champion of the Shrimp Festival,” he said.

I sat down next to him and took a peanut out of a plastic bowl on the bar and cracked the shell and put the nut in my mouth.

“You ever see a guy by the name of Johnny Remeta in here?” I asked.

“What would you give to find out?”

“Not much.”

He lifted the shot glass again and tipped it into his mouth.

“I might buy half of a carnival. What do you think of that?” he said.

“Maybe you can give me a job. I got bumped from the department after I punched out Jim Gable.”

He watched an overweight, topless girl in heels and a sequined G-string walk out on a tiny stage behind the bar.

“Miss Cora give you a severance package?” I said.

“The smart man squeezes the man who milks the cow. That don’t mean anything to you. But maybe one day it will,” he said.

“Really?” I said.

“You’re an ignorant man.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, and slapped him on the back and caused him to spill his drink on his wrist.

I went outside and walked down to the old docks and pilings on the waterfront. It was dark now, and rain was falling on the river and I could see the nightglow of New Orleans on the far bank and, to the south, green trees flattening in the wind and the brown swirl of the current as it flowed around a wide bend toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Somewhere down on that southern horizon my father’s rig had blown out and he had hooked his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and bailed off the top of the derrick into the darkness. His bones and hard hat and steel-toed boots were still out there, shifting in the tidal currents, and I truly believed that in one way or another his brave spirit was out there as well.

The cops who had murdered my mother had rolled her body into a bayou, as contemptuous of her in death as they were of her in life. But eventually her body must have drifted southward into the salt water, and now I wanted to believe she and Big Al were together under the long, green roll of the Gulf, all their inadequacies washed away, their souls just beginning the journey they could not take together on earth.

The rain was blowing hard in the streets when I walked back to my truck, and the neon above the bars looked like blue and red smoke in the mist. I heard men fighting in a poolroom and I thought of Big Aldous Robicheaux and Mae Guillory and the innocence of a world in which inarticulate people could not tell one another adequately of either their pain or the yearnings of their hearts.