Sunset Limited (17 page)

The man in the outboard killed his engine and floated in to the cove, the hyacinths clustering against the bow. He wore yellow-tinted glasses, and he reached down in the bottom of his boat and fitted on a smoke-colored Stetson that was sweat-stained across the base of the crown. When he smiled his dentures were stiff in his mouth, the flesh of his throat red like a cock’s comb. He must have been sixty-five, but he was tall, his back straight, his eyes keen with purpose.

“I’m fixing to run out of gas. Can you spare me a half gallon?” he said.

“Maybe your high speed has something to do with it,” Father Mulcahy said.

“I’ll go along with that.” Then he reached out for an iron cleat on the houseboat as though he had already been given permission to board. Behind the seat was a paper bag stapled across the top and a one-gallon tin gas can.

“I know you,” Father Mulcahy said.

“Not from around here you don’t. I’m just a visitor, not having no luck with the fish.”

“I’ve heard your voice.”

The man stood up in his boat and grabbed the handrail and lowered his face so the brim of his hat shielded it from view.

“I have no gas to give you. It’s all in the tank,” Father Mulcahy said.

“I got a siphon. Right here in this bag. A can, too.”

The man in the outboard put one cowboy boot on the edge of the deck and stepped over the rail, drawing a long leg behind him. He stood in front of the priest, his head tilted slightly as though he were examining a quarry he had placed under a glass jar.

“Show me where your tank’s at. Back around this side?” he said, indicating the lee side of the cabin, away from the view of anyone passing on the channel.

“Yes,” the priest said. “But there’s a lock on it. It’s on the ignition key.”

“Let’s get it, then, Reverend,” the man said.

“You know I’m a minister?” Father Mulcahy said.

The man did not reply. He had not shaved that morning, and there were gray whiskers among the red and blue veins in his cheeks. His smile was twisted, one eye squinted behind the lens of his glasses, as though he were arbitrarily defining the situation in his own mind.

“You came to the rectory… In the rain,” the priest said.

“Could be. But I need you to hep me with this chore. That’s our number one job here.”

The man draped his arm across the priest’s shoulders and walked him inside the cabin. He smelled of deodorant and chewing tobacco, and in spite of his age his arm was thick and meaty, the crook of it like a yoke on the back of the priest’s neck.

“Your soul will be forfeit,” the priest said, because he could think of no other words to use.

“Yeah, I heard that one before. Usually when a preacher was trying to get me to write a check. The funny thing is, the preacher never wanted Jesus’s name on the check.”

Then the man in the hat pulled apart the staples on the paper bag he had carried on board and took out a velvet curtain rope and a roll of tape and a plastic bag. He began tying a loop in the end of the rope, concentrating on his work as though it were an interesting, minor task in an ordinary day.

The priest turned away from him, toward the window and the sun breaking through the flooded cypress, his head lowered, his fingers pinched on his eyelids.

The parishioner’s sixteen-gauge pump shotgun was propped just to the left of the console. Father Mulcahy picked it up and leveled the barrel at the chest of the man in the Stetson hat and clicked off the safety.

“Get off this boat,” he said.

“You didn’t pump a shell into it. There probably ain’t nothing in the chamber,” the man said.

“That could be true. Would you like to find out?”

“You’re a feisty old rooster, ain’t you?”

“You sicken me, sir.”

The man in yellow-tinted glasses reached in his shirt pocket with his thumb and two fingers and filled his jaw with tobacco.

“Piss on you,” he said, and opened the cabin door to go back outside.

“Leave the bag,” the priest said.

FIFTEEN

THE PRIEST CALLED THE SHERIFF’S office in St. Martin Parish, where his encounter with the man in the Stetson had taken place, then contacted me when he got back to New Iberia. The sheriff and I interviewed him together at the rectory.

“The bag had a velvet cord and a plastic sack and a roll of tape in it?” the sheriff said.

“That’s right. I left it all with the sheriff in St. Martinville,” Father Mulcahy said. His eyes were flat, as though discussing his thoughts would only add to the level of degradation he felt.

“You know why he’s after you, don’t you, Father?” I said.

“Yes, I believe I do.”

“You know what he was going to do, too. It would have probably been written off as a heart attack. There would have been no rope burns, nothing to indicate any force or violence,” I said.

“You don’t have to tell me that, sir,” he replied.

“It’s time to talk about Lila Terrebonne,” I said.

“It’s her prerogative to talk with you as much as she wishes. But not mine,” he said.

“Hubris isn’t a virtue, Father,” I said.

His face flared. “Probably not. But I’ll be damned if I’ll be altered by a sonofabitch like the man who climbed on my boat.”

“That’s one way of looking at it. Here’s my card if you want to put a net over this guy,” I said.

When we left, rain that looked like lavender horse tails was falling across the sun. The sheriff drove the cruiser with the window down and ashes blew from his pipe onto his shirt. He slapped at them angrily.

“I want that guy in the hat on a respirator,” he said.

“We don’t have a crime on that houseboat, skipper. It’s not even in our jurisdiction.”

“The intended victim is. That’s enough. He’s a vulnerable old man. Remember when you lived through your first combat and thought you had magic? A dangerous time.”

A half hour later a state trooper pulled over a red pickup truck with a Texas tag on the Iberia-St. Martin Parish line.

THE SHERIFF AND I stood outside the holding cell and looked at the man seated on the wood bench against the back wall. His western-cut pants were ironed with sharp creases, the hard points of his ox-blood cowboy boots buffed to a smooth glaze like melted plastic. He played with his Stetson on his index finger.

The sheriff held the man’s driver’s license cupped in his palm. He studied the photograph on it, then the man’s face.

“You’re Harpo Scruggs?” the sheriff asked.

“I was when I got up this morning.”

“You’re from New Mexico?”

“Deming. I got a chili pepper farm there. The truck’s a rental, if that’s what’s on your mind.”

“You’re supposed to be dead,” the sheriff said.

“You talking about that fire down in Juarez? Yeah, I heard about that. But it wasn’t me.”

His accent was peckerwood, the Acadian inflections, if they had ever existed, weaned out of it.

“You terrorize elderly clergymen, do you?” I said.

“I asked the man for a can of gas. He pointed a shotgun at me.”

“You mind going into a lineup?” the sheriff asked.

Harpo Scruggs looked at his fingernails.

“Yeah, I do. What’s the charge?” he said.

“We’ll find one,” the sheriff said.

“I don’t think y’all got a popcorn fart in a windstorm,” he said.

He was right. We called Mout’ Broussard’s home and got no answer. Neither could we find the USL student who had witnessed the execution of the two brothers out in the Atchafalaya Basin. The father of the two brothers was drunk and contradictory about what he had seen and heard when his sons were lured out of the house.

It was 8 p.m. The sheriff sat in his swivel chair and tapped his fingers on his jawbone.

“Call Juarez, Mexico, and see if they’ve still got a warrant,” he said.

“I already did. It was like having a conversation with impaired people in a bowling alley.”

“Sometimes I hate this job,” he said, and picked up a key ring off his desk blotter.

Ten minutes later the sheriff and I watched Harpo Scruggs walk into the parking lot a free man. He wore a shirt with purple and red flowers on it, and it swelled with the breeze and made his frame look even larger than it was. He fitted on his hat and slanted the brim over his eyes, took a small bag of cookies from his pocket and bit into one of them gingerly with his false teeth. He lifted his face into the breeze and looked with expectation at the sunset.

“See if you can get Lila Terrebonne in my office tomorrow morning,” the sheriff said.

Harpo Scruggs’s truck drove up the street toward the cemetery. A moment later Helen Soileau’s unmarked car pulled into the traffic behind him.

THAT NIGHT BOOTSIE AND I fixed ham and onion sandwiches and dirty rice and iced tea at the drainboard and ate on the breakfast table. Through the hallway I could see the moss in the oak trees glowing against the lights on the dock.

“You look tired,” Bootsie said. “Not really.”

“Who’s this man Scruggs working for?”

“The New Orleans Mob. The Dixie Mafia. Who knows?”

“The Mob letting one of their own kill a priest?”

“You should have been a cop, Boots.”

“There’s something you’re not saying.”

“I keep feeling all this stuff goes back to Jack Flynn’s murder.”

“The Flynns again.” She rose from the table and put her plate in the sink and looked through the window into the darkness at the foot of our property. “Why always the Flynns?” she said.

I didn’t have an adequate answer, not even for myself when I lay next to Bootsie later in the darkness, the window fan drawing the night air across our bed. Jack Flynn had fought at the battle of Madrid and at Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal; he was not one to be easily undone by company goons hired to break a farmworkers’ strike. But the killers had kidnapped him out of a hotel room in Morgan City, beaten him with chains, impaled his broken body with nails as a lesson in terror to any poor white or black person who thought he could relieve his plight by joining a union. To this day not one suspect had been in custody, not one participant had spoken carelessly in a bar or brothel.

The Klan always prided itself on its secrecy, the arcane and clandestine nature of its rituals, the loyalty of its members to one another. But someone always came forward, out of either guilt or avarice, and told of the crimes they committed in groups, under cover of darkness, against their unarmed and defenseless victims.

But Jack Flynn’s murderers had probably not only been protected, they had been more afraid of the people they served than Louisiana or federal law.

Jack Flynn’s death was at the center of our current problems because we had never dealt with our past, I thought. And in not doing so, we had allowed his crucifixion to become a collective act.

I propped myself up on the mattress with one elbow and touched Bootsie’s hair. She was sound asleep and did not wake. Her eyelids looked like rose petals in the moon’s glow.

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING I turned into the Terrebonne grounds and drove down the oak-lined drive toward the house. The movie set was empty, except for a bored security guard and Swede Boxleiter, who was crouched atop a plank building, firing a nail gun into the tin roof.

I stood under the portico of the main house and rang the chimes. The day had already turned warm, but it was cool in the shade and the air smelled of damp brick and four-o’clock flowers and the mint that grew under the water faucets. Archer Terrebonne answered the door in yellow-and-white tennis clothes, a moist towel draped around his neck.

“Lila’s not available right now, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“I’d very much like to talk to her, sir.”

“She’s showering. Then we’re going to a brunch. Would you like to leave a message?”

“The sheriff would appreciate her coming to his office to talk about her conversation with Father James Mulcahy.”

“Y’all do business in an extraordinary fashion. Her discussions with a minister are the subject of a legal inquiry?”

“This man was almost killed because he’s too honorable to divulge something your daughter told him.”

“Good day, Mr. Robicheaux,” Terrebonne said, and closed the door in my face.

I drove back through the corridor of trees, my face tight with anger. I started to turn out onto the service road, then stopped the truck and walked out to the movie set.

“How’s it hangin’, Swede?” I said.

He fired the nail gun through the tin roof into a joist and pursed his mouth into an inquisitive cone.

“Where’s Clete Purcel?” I asked.

“Gone for the day. You look like somebody pissed in your underwear.”

“You know the layout of this property?”

“I run power cables all over it.”

“Where’s the family cemetery?”

“Back in those trees.”

He pointed at an oak grove and a group of whitewashed brick crypts with an iron fence around it. The grass within the fence was freshly mowed and clipped at the base of the bricks.

“You know of another burial area?” I asked.

“Way in back, a spot full of briars and palmettos. Holtzner says that’s where the slaves were planted. Got to watch out for it so the local blacks don’t get their ovaries fired up. What’s the gig, man? Let me in on it.”

I walked to the iron fence around the Terrebonne cemetery. The marble tablet that sealed the opening to the patriarch’s crypt was cracked across the face from settlement of the bricks into the softness of the soil, but I could still make out the eroded, moss-stained calligraphy scrolled by a stone mason’s chisel:
Elijah Boethius Terrebonne, 1831—1878, soldier for Jefferson Davis, loving father and husband, now brother to the Lord
.

Next to Elijah’s crypt was a much smaller one in which his twin girls were entombed. A clutch of wild-flowers, tied at the stems with a rubber band, was propped against its face. There were no other flowers in the cemetery.

I walked toward the back of the Terrebonne estate, along the edge of a coulee that marked the property line, beyond the movie set and trailers and sky-blue swimming pool and guest cottages and tennis courts to a woods that was deep in shade, layered with leaves, the tree branches wrapped with morning glory vines and cobweb.