The Neon Rain (25 page)

“What’d the guy look like?”

“The kid was scared shitless. He still is. We got him looking in mug books, but don’t expect anything.”

I clenched and unclenched my fists. The elevator was a slow one, and it kept stopping at floors where no one was waiting.

“Maybe this is the wrong time to tell you this, but some people are starting to think twice about your story,” the captain said.

“How’s that?”

“Maybe they were after you instead. Jimmie looks like your twin. There might be other explanations, but the local talent tends toward shotguns and car bombs.”

“It’s damn poor consolation to be believed because your brother was shot.”

“People are human. Give an inch.”

“I don’t have that kind of charity. That’s my whole family up there.”

“I can’t blame you. But for what it’s worth, we’ve got uniforms all over the floor. Nobody’ll get to him here.”

“If he doesn’t make it, you might be arresting me, Captain.”

“I hate to hear you talk like that, Dave. It brings me great worry,” he said.

Jimmie remained three more hours in the recovery room before they brought him into intensive care on a gurney. I wanted to go inside, but the surgeon wouldn’t let me. He said both rounds had hit Jimmie at an angle, which was the only factor that saved his life. One had caromed off the skull and exited the scalp at the back of the head, but the second round had fractured the skull and put lead and bone splinters into the brain tissue. The surgeon’s concern was about paralysis and loss of sight in one eye.

Captain Guidry had already gone back to the office, and I spent the rest of the afternoon alone in the waiting room. I read magazines, drank endless cups of bad coffee from a machine, and watched the light fade outside the window and the shadows of the oak trees fall on the brick-paved street down below. At eight o’clock I went downstairs and ate a sandwich in the cafeteria. I wanted to call Annie, but I thought I had already caused her enough traumatic moments and should spare her this one. Upstairs again, I talked with nurses, made friends with an elderly Cajun lady from Thibodaux who spoke English poorly and was afraid for her husband who was in surgery, and finally I watched the late news on television and went to sleep in a fetal position on a short couch.

In the morning a Catholic sister woke me up and gave me a glass of orange juice and told me it was all right to see my brother for a few minutes. Jimmie’s jaws and head were wrapped thickly with bandages, almost like a plaster cast. His face was white and sunken, and both eyes were hollow and blackened as though he had been beaten with fists. An IV needle was taped down to the blue vein inside his right arm; an oxygen tube was attached to his nose; his bare chest was crisscrossed with curlicues of electronic monitoring wires. He looked as though all the life had been sucked out of him through a straw and the lighted machines around him had more future and viability than he.

I wondered what my father would think of this. My father brawled in bars, but he always fought for fun and he never bore a grudge. He wouldn’t carry a gun for any reason, even when he played
bourée
with gamblers who were known as dangerous and violent men. But this was a different world from the New Iberia of the 1940s. Here people with the moral instincts of piranha would pump two bullets into the brain of a man they didn’t know and spend the contract money on cocaine and whores.

There were small lights in Jimmie’s dark eyes when he looked at me. His eyelids looked like they were made of paper, stained with purple dye.

“How you doing, boy?” I said. I rubbed the back of his arm and squeezed his palm. It was lifeless and felt like Johnny Massina’s had when I shook hands with him the night of his execution.

“Did you see who it was?”

His throat swallowed and his tongue made small saliva bubbles on his lower lip.

“Was it this guy Philip Murphy?” I asked. “A late-middle-aged, frumpy-looking guy with glasses? Like somebody who’d be selling dirty postcards around a schoolyard?”

His eyes looked away from me, the lids fluttering.

“How about a dark little guy?”

Jimmie started to whisper, then choked on the fluids in his throat.

“All right, don’t worry about it now,” I said. “You’re safe here. There’s three uniformed cops with you, and I’ll be in and out of here all the time. But while you get well, I’m going to find out who did this to us. You remember what the old man used to say—‘You pull on dat ‘gator’s tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him.’”

I smiled at him, then I saw his eyes flicker with an urgent light. His mouth opened and clicked dryly.

“Not now, Jim. There’ll be time later,” I said.

He worked his hand off the bed onto my chest. Then his fingers began to trace lines against my skin, but he was so weak that the frail pattern he made was like a cobweb spread across my breastbone. I nodded as though I understood, and placed his hand back on the bed. The energy and effort in his eyes were now used up, and he looked at the ceiling with the expression of those who are suddenly forced to deal in a very different and dark dimension.

“I’ve bent your ear too long. You sack out now. I’ll be back a little later,” I said.

But he was already disconnected from our conversation. I left the room quietly, with the sense of both guilt and relief that we feel when we’re allowed to walk away from the bedside of someone who reminds us of our mortality.

The two uniformed cops on the door nodded to me. At the end of the corridor I saw Captain Guidry walking toward me with a potted geranium wrapped in green and silver foil. The implants in his scalp had grown, and his head looked as though a badly made wig had been grafted to it.

“I’m going to leave this at the nurse’s station. How’s he doing?” he asked.

“He’s a tough little brother.”

“You look like hell. Go home and get some sleep.”

“I slept all right on the couch last night. I just need a shower and a change of clothes.”

Captain Guidry’s eyes stared into mine. “What did he tell you in there?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t jerk me around, Dave.”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“I’ve worked with you a long time. You don’t hide things well.”

“Ask the nurse. He can’t talk. I’m not sure he even knows how he got here.”

“Listen, I think you’re about to get out of all this trouble you’ve been in. Don’t blow it now with an obstruction charge.”

“Do I get my badge back?”

His lips pinched together, and he looked down the corridor.

“You shouldn’t have hit Baxter,” he said.

“So nothing is changed.”

“We do it one step at a time. Have some patience, will you? Trust people a little bit.”

“I’m out on ten thousand dollars’ bond. I’m going to have to go to trial unless I can negotiate a misdemeanor plea.”

“You’re a reader. You know about Saint John of the Cross and the long night of the soul. So this is your long night. Why make it longer?”

At the houseboat I took my Remington twelve-gauge pump out of its sheepskin-lined case. The blueing shone with the thin layer of oil that I kept on it. My father had given me the twelve-gauge when I went away to college in Lafayette, and I had knocked down mallards and geese with it from Cypremont Point to Whiskey Bay almost every year since. I rubbed my fingers along the polished, inlaid stock, then wrapped the barrel with a rag and locked it in the machinist’s vise that I kept anchored to one end of the drainboard. I made a pencil mark three inches in front of the pump, then sawed through the barrel with a hacksaw. The end of the barrel clanged to the floor. I picked it up and started to drop it in the garbage but, instead, ran a piece of Christmas ribbon through it and hung it on the wall over what was left of my historical jazz collection.

I sat at the kitchen table and rubbed the sawed edges of the gun’s muzzle smooth with emery paper and removed the sportsman’s plug from the magazine so that it would now hold five shells instead of three. I went to the closet and took out my duffel bag of decoys, my army field jacket, and the old army-surplus bandolier I used when the hunting weather was too warm for a coat. I emptied everything out on the table and stood all my shells up in an erect row like toy soldiers. Then I selected out the street cop’s buffet—deer slugs and double-ought buckshot—slipped them one at a time into the magazine with my thumb until the spring came tight, slid the breech shut, and clicked on the safety.

In my mind were images that I didn’t want to recognize. I looked out the window and saw a man turning a raw steak on a barbecue fire, saw two kids trying to burn each other out in a pitch-and-catch game, their faces sweaty and narrow, saw a waxed red car parked next to a sand dune under the murderous white sun.

Annie ate lunch every day in a delicatessen by Canal and Exchange, not far from where she worked at the social welfare agency. I sat in a wooden chair across the street and read the
Times-Picayune
and waited for her. Just after noon I saw her coming down the sidewalk in the lunchtime crowd, wearing sunglasses, her wide straw hat, and a pale yellow dress. She could live in New Orleans the rest of her life, I thought, but she would always be from Kansas. She had the tan of a farm girl, the kind that never seemed to change tone, and even though her legs were beautiful and her hips a genuine pleasure to look at, she walked in high heels as though she were on board a rocking ship.

I watched her sit by herself at a table, her back to me, remove her sunglasses, and give her order to the waiter while she moved both her hands in the air. He looked perplexed, and I could almost hear her ordering something that wasn’t on the menu, which was her habit, or telling him about some “weirdness” that she had seen on the street.

Then I heard the metal-rimmed wheels of a huge handcart on the pavement and an elderly black man’s voice crying out, “I got melons, I got ‘loupes, I got plums, I got sweet red strawberries.” His cart was loaded with tiers of fruit and also with boxes of pralines, roses wrapped in green tissue paper, and small bottles of grape juice shoved down in an ice bucket.

“How you doing, Cappie?” I said.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” he said, and grinned. His head was bald and brown, and he wore a gray apron. He had grown up in Laplace, next door to Louis Armstrong’s family, but he had sold produce in the Quarter for years and was so old that neither he nor anyone else knew his age.

“Is your wife still in the hospital?” I asked.

“No suh, she fit and fine and out do’-popping again.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“She do’-popping. She pop in dis do’, she pop out dat do’.You want your grape drink today?”

“No, I tell you what instead. You see that pretty lady in the yellow dress eating across the street?”

“Yes suh, I think so.”

“Give her some of these roses and a box of pralines. Here, you keep the change, Cappie.”

“What you want me to tell her?”

“Just tell her it’s from a good-looking Cajun fellow,” I said, and winked at him.

I looked once more in Annie’s direction. Then I turned and walked back to where I had left my rented car parked on Decatur Street.

The beach outside of Biloxi was white and hot-looking in the afternoon sun. The palm trees along the boulevard beat in the wind, and the green surface of the Gulf was streaked with light and filled with dark patches of blue, like floating ink. A squall was blowing up in the south, and waves were already breaking against the ends of the jetties, the foam leaping high into the air before you heard the sound of the wave, and in the groundswell I could see the flicker of bait fish and the dark, triangular outlines of stingrays, almost like oil slicks, that had been pushed in toward shore by the approaching storm.

I found the Gulf Shores restaurant, but the man who ran the valet parking service wasn’t there. I walked a short way down the beach, bought a paper plate of fried catfish and hush puppies from a food stand, and sat on a wooden bench under a palm tree and ate it. Then I read a paperback copy of
A Passage to India
, watched some South American teenagers play soccer in the sand, and finally walked out on the jetty and skipped oyster shells across the water’s surface. The wind was stiffer now, with a sandy bite in it, and as the sun seemed to descend into an enormous flame across the western sky, I could see thin white streaks of lightning in the row of black clouds that hovered low on the watery horizon in the south. When the sun’s afterglow began to shrink from the sky, and the neon lights of the amusement rides and beer joints along the beach began to come on, I walked back to my car and drove to the restaurant.

Two black kids and a white man in his thirties were taking cars from under the porch at the entrance and parking them in back. The white man had crewcut brown hair and small moles all over his face, as though they had been touched there with a paintbrush. I drove up to the entrance, and one of the black kids took my car. I went inside and ate a five-dollar club sandwich that I didn’t want. When I came back out, the white man walked up to me for my parking ticket.

“I can get it. Just show me where it is,” I said.

He stepped out of the light from the porch and pointed toward the lot.

“The second-to-last row,” he said.

“Where?”

He walked farther into the dark and pointed again.

“Almost to the end of the row,” he said.

“My girlfriend said you can sell me some sneeze,” I said.

“Sell you what?” He looked me up and down for the first time. The neon light from a liquor store next door made his lips look purple.

“A little nose candy for the sinuses.”

“You got the wrong guy, buddy.”

“Do I look like a cop or something?”

“You want me to get your car, sir?”

“I’ve got a hundred bucks for you. Meet me someplace else.”

“Maybe you should talk to the manager. I run the valet service here. You’re looking for somebody else.”

“She must have told me about the wrong place. No offense,” I said, and I walked to the back of the lot and drove out onto the boulevard. The palm trees on the esplanade were crashing in the wind.