A Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  The bar was over by Decatur, one of those places that never closes, where there is neither cheer nor anger nor expectation and no external measure of one’s own failure and loss.

  The bottles of bourbon, vodka, rum, gin, rye, and brandy rang with light along the mirror. The oak-handled beer spigots and frosted mugs in the coolers could have been a poem. The bartender propped his arms impatiently on the dish sink.

  “I’ll serve you, but you got to tell me what it is you want,” he said. He looked at another customer, raised his eyebrows, then looked back at me. He was smiling now. “How about it, buddy?”

  “I’d like a cup of coffee.”

  “You want a cup of coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “This looks like a place where you get a cup of coffee? Too much, too much,” he said, then began wiping off the counter with a rag.

  I heard somebody laugh as I walked back out onto the street. I sat on the railway tracks behind the French Market and watched the dawn touch the earth’s rim and light the river and the docks and scows over in Algiers, turn the sky the color of bone, and finally fill the east with a hot red glow like the spokes in a wagon wheel. The river looked wide and yellow with silt, and I could see oil and occasionally dead fish floating belly up in the current.

  CHAPTER 8

  MY TRUCK WAS NOT repaired until six o’clock Friday evening. By the time I hit South Baton Rouge the sun was a red molten ball in the western sky. I crossed the Mississippi and swung off the interstate at Port Allen and continued through the Atchafalaya basin on the old highway. The bar that Eddy Raintree may have been using as his mail drop was on a yellow dirt road that wound through thick stands of dead cypress and copper-colored pools of stagnant water.

  It was hammered together from clapboard, plywood, and tarpaper, its screens rusted and gutted, the windows pocked from gravel flung against the building by spinning car tires; it sat up on cinder blocks like an elephant with a broken back. A half-dozen Harleys were parked on the side, and in the back a group of bikers were barbecuing in an oil drum under an oak tree. The yellow dust from the road drifted across their fire.

  The Atchafalaya basin is the place you go if you don’t fit anywhere else. It encompasses hundreds of square miles of bayous, canals, sandspits, willow islands, huge inland bays, and flooded woods where the mosquitoes will hover around your head like a helmet and you slap your arms until they’re slick with a black-red paste. Twenty minutes from Baton Rouge or an hour and a half from New Orleans, you can punch a hole in the dimension and drop back down into the redneck, coonass, peckerwood South that you thought had been eaten up by the developers of Sunbelt suburbs. It’s a shrinking place, but there’s a group that holds on to it with a desperate and fearful tenacity.

  I slipped my .45 in the back of my belt, along with my handcuffs, put on my seersucker coat, and went inside the bar. The jukebox played Waylon and Merle; the men at the pool table rifled balls into side pockets as though they wanted to drive pain into the wood and leather; and a huge Confederate flag billowed out from the tacks holding it to the ceiling.

  A metal sign, the size of a bumper sticker, over the men’s-room door said WHITE POWER. I used the urinal. Above it, neatly written on a piece of cardboard, were the words THIS IS THE ONLY SHITHOUSE WE GOT, SO KEEP THE GODDAMN PLACE CLEAN.

  The bartender was a small, prematurely balding, suntanned man with thin arms who wore a wash-frayed suit vest with no shirt. On his right forearm was a tattoo of the Marine Corps globe and anchor. He didn’t ask me what I wanted; he simply pointed two fingers at me with his cigarette between them.

  “I’m looking for Elton Rupert,” I said.

  “I don’t know him,” he said.

  “That’s strange. He gets his mail here.”

  “That might be. I don’t know him. What do you want?”

  “How about a 7-Up?”

  He took a bottle out of the cooler, snapped off the cap, and set it before me with a glass.

  “The ice machine’s broken, so there’s no ice,” he said.

  “That’s all right.”

  “That’s a dollar.”

  I put four quarters on the bar. He scraped them up and started to walk away.

  “It looks like you have some letters in a box up there. Would you see if Elton’s picked up his mail?” I said.

  “Like I told you, I don’t know the man.”

  “You’re the regular bartender, you’re here most of the time?”

  He put out his cigarette in an ashtray, mashing it methodically, then his eyes went out the open front door and across the road as though I were not there. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue.

  “I’d appreciate your answering my question,” I said.

  “Maybe you should ask those guys barbecuing out back. They might know him.”

  “You were in the corps?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re only in the crotch once.”

  “You were in the corps?”

  “No, I was in the army. That’s not my point. You’re only in the AB once, too.”

  He lit another cigarette and bit a hangnail on his thumb.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying, buddy, but this is the wrong fucking place to get in somebody’s face,” he said.

  A barmaid came in the side door, put her handbag in a cabinet, and carried a sack of trash out the back.

  “You’re saying you don’t understand me, my words confuse you?” I asked.

  “What’s with you, man? Somebody shoved a bumblebee up your ass?”

  “What’s your name, podna?”

  “Harvey.”

  “You’re treating me like I’m stupid, Harvey. You’re starting to piss me off.”

  “I don’t need this shit, man.” He looked out the back door at the men in jeans, cutoff denim jackets, and motorcycle boots, who were drinking canned beer in the barbecue smoke under the tree.

  “It’s just you and me, Harvey. Those guys don’t have anything to do with it,” I said.

  The barmaid came back inside. She looked like she had dressed for work in a dime store. Her blond hair was shaved on one side, punked orange on the tips; she wore black fingernail polish, a pink top, black vinyl shorts, owl glasses with red frames, earrings made from chromed .38 hulls.

  “Give this guy a free 7-Up if he wants one. I’m going to the head,” Harvey said to her.

  I waited a moment, then followed him into the men’s room and shot the bolt on the door. He was in the single stall, urinating loudly into the toilet bowl.

  “Zipper it up and come out here, Harvey,” I said.

  He opened the stall door and stared at me, his mouth hanging open. I stuck my badge up close to his face.

  “The man’s real name is Eddy Raintree,” I said. “Now don’t you bullshit me. Where is he?”

  “You can bust me, you can kick my ass, it don’t matter, I don’t know the sonofabitch,” he said. “Guys get their mail here. They go behind the bar and pick it up. I don’t know who they are, I don’t ask. Check out those cats behind the building, man. There’s one guy drove a pool cue through another guy’s lung out there.”

  “Where’s my man live, Harvey?”

  He shook his head back and forth, his mouth a tight line. I rested one hand on his shoulder and looked steadily into his face.

  “What are you going to do when you walk out of here?” I said.

  “What do you mean going—”

  “You think you’re going to make some mileage with my butt?”

  “Look, man—” He started to shake his head again.

  “Maybe ease on over to the phone booth and make a call? Or take a round of beers to the outdoor geek show and mention that the heat is drinking 7-Up inside?”

  “I’m neutral. I got no stake in this.”

  “That’s right. So it’s time for you to go. To tell the lady behind the bar you’re taking off early tonight. We’re understood on this, aren’t we?”

  “You’re
the man. I do what you say.”

  “But if I find out you talked to somebody you shouldn’t, I’ll be back. It’s called aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice. What that means is I’ll take you back with me to the Iberia Parish jail. The guy who runs it is a three-hundred-pound black homosexual with a sense of humor about which cells he puts you guys in.”

  He rubbed his mouth. His hand made a dry sound against his whiskers.

  “Look, I didn’t see you, I didn’t talk to you,” he said. “Okay? I’m going home sick. What you said about the AB, it’s true, it’s lifetime. If one guy doesn’t take you out, another does. I’m a four-buck-an-hour beer bartender. I’ve got ulcers and a slipped disc. All I want is some peace.”

  “You’ve got it, partner. We’ll see you around. Stay away from phones tonight, watch a lot of television, write some letters to the home folks.”

  “How about treating me with a little dignity, man? I’m doing what you want. I ain’t a criminal, I ain’t your problem. I’m just a little guy running around in a frying pan.”

  “You’ve probably got a point, Harvey.”

  I unbolted the door and watched him walk to the bar, say something to the barmaid, then leave by the side door and drive up the dirt road in a paintless pickup truck. The dust from the parking lot drifted back through the rusted screens in the late-afternoon sunlight. Once he was out of sight, it would not take Harvey long to decide that his loyalties to the bikers and Eddy Raintree were far more important to his welfare than his temporary fear of me and the Iberia Parish jail.

  I returned to the bar and asked the barmaid for a pencil and a piece of paper. She tore a page from a notepad by the telephone and handed it to me. I scribbled two or three sentences on the back and folded it once, then twice.

  “Would you give this to Elton for me?” I said.

  “Elton Rupert?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure.” She took the note from my hand and dropped it in the letter box behind the bar. “You probably just missed him. He usually comes in about four o’clock.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Harvey was saying. Too bad I missed him.”

  “Too bad?” She laughed. “You got stopped-up nostrils or something? Trying to open up your sinuses?”

  “What?”

  “The guy’s got gapo that would make the dead get up and run down the road.”

  “He has what?”

  “Gorilla armpit odor. You sure you know Elton? He stays in that shack by the levee and doesn’t bathe unless he gets rained on. I don’t know where he gets off knocking the niggers all the time.”

  “I like your earrings.”

  “I got them just the other day. You really like them?”

  “Sure. I’ve never seen any made out of .38 shells.”

  “My boyfriend made them. He’s a gun nut but he’s real good at making jewelry and stuff. He’s thinking of opening up a mail-order business.”

  “Elton doesn’t have a phone, does he?”

  “He doesn’t have any plumbing. I don’t know why he’d have a phone.”

  I looked at my watch.

  “Maybe I have time to stop by his place just a minute. It’s not far, is it?” I said.

  “Straight down the road to the levee. You can’t miss it. Just follow your nose. Hah!”

  “By the way, how’s Elton’s eye?”

  “It looks like worms ate it. Are you doing some kind of missionary work or something?”

  The violet air was thick with insects as I drove down the yellow road toward the levee and the marsh. The road crossed the Southern Pacific tracks, then followed alongside a green levee that was covered with buttercups. On the other side of the levee were a canal, a chain of willow islands and sandbars, and a bay full of dead cypress. Three hundred yards from the track crossing was a fishing shack, a small box of a place with a collapsed gallery, an outhouse, an overflowing garbage barrel in back. Both a pirogue and a boat with an outboard engine were tied to wood stobs driven into the mudflat. A chopped-down Harley was parked on the far side of the gallery, its chrome glinting with the sun’s last red light. The sky was black with birds.

  I parked the truck down the levee, took my World War II Japanese field glasses from my locked toolbox, which the kids from the Iberville project hadn’t gotten into, and waited. It was going to be a hot night. The air was perfectly still, heated from the long afternoon, stale with the smell of dead water beetles and alligator gars that fishermen had thrown up on the bank. I studied the shack through the field glasses. The garbage barrel boiled with flies, an orange cat was eating a fïshhead in a bowl on the shack step, a man walked past a window.

  Then he was gone before I could focus on his face.

  Finally it was dark, and the man inside the shack lit an oil lamp, opened a tin can at a table, and ate from it with a fork, hunched over with his back toward me. Then he urinated off the back steps with a bottle of beer in one hand, and I saw his big granite head in the light from the door, and the muscles that swelled in his shoulders like lumps of garden hose.

  When he was back inside I got out of the truck with my .45 in hand, crossed the levee, and moved through the darkness toward the shack. The willows were motionless, etched against a yellow moon, and I saw a moccasin as thick as my wrist uncoil off a log, drop into the water, and swim in a silvery V toward a dead neutria that had been hit by a boat propeller. The man moved in silhouette across the window, and I slid back the receiver on the .45, eased a hollow-point into the chamber, and walked quickly up the mud-bank to the back steps. I heard train cars jolt together, then a locomotive backing along the tracks on the far side of the levee.

  Now, I thought, and I cleared the three steps in one jump, burst into the shack, into a reek of stale sweat that was as close and gray as a damp cotton glove. His head looked up from the comic book that was spread on his knees. I aimed the .45 straight into the face of Eddy Raintree.

  “Hands behind your neck, down on the floor! Do it, do it, do it!” I shouted.

  The skin around his right eye was puckered with white sores. I shoved him off the chair amid a litter of newspapers, beer cans, and fast-food containers. His weight bowed the floor planks. I put the .45 behind his ear.

  “All the way down on your face, Eddy,” I said, and began to pull the handcuffs from the back of my belt.

  That should have been the end of it. But I got careless. Maybe my alcoholic dreams and sleeplessness of the previous night were to blame, or the eye-watering body odor that filled the room, or the sudden slamming of freight cars out in the darkness. But in the time it took the handcuffs to drop from my fingers, my vision to slip off the back of his head, he spun around like an animal turning in a box, grabbed the .45 with both hands, and locked his teeth on the knuckle of my right thumb.

  His eyes were close-set like a pig’s in the lamplight, his jaws knotted with cartilage, trembling with exertion. Blood spurted across the back of my hand; I could feel his teeth biting into the bone. I clubbed desperately at the back of his thick neck. His coarse, oily skin felt like rubber under my knuckles.

  I was almost ready to drop the gun when he rammed his shoulder into my chest and dove headlong through the front window curtain.

  My right hand quivered uncontrollably. I picked up the .45 with my left and went out the front door after him. He was running along the levee next to a stopped freight that must have been a mile long. The locomotive was haloed with white light and wisps of vapor, and in front of it gandy walkers were repairing track in the red glare of burning flares.

  Eddy Raintree must have received his dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps before a DI could teach him to stay off the crests of hills and embankments and never run in a straight line when someone is making a study of you through iron sights.

  It felt strange to fire the .45 with my left hand. It leaped upward in my grasp as though it had a life of its own. Both rounds whanged and sparked off the sides of a gondola, and Eddy Raintree kept running, his head
hunched into his shoulders. I knelt in the weeds, sighted low to allow for the recoil, let out my breath slowly, and squeezed off another round. His right leg went out from under him as though it had been struck with a baseball bat, and he toppled down the far side of the levee to the railroad bed.

  When I slid down the embankment and got to him he had his palm pressed tightly against his thigh and was trying to pull himself erect on a metal rung at the end of a boxcar. His hand was shining and wet, and his face had already gone white with shock. A sweet, fetid odor came from the car, and then I saw that it was actually built of slats and contained cages.

  “Sit down, Eddy,” I said.

  He breathed hard through his mouth. His eyes were bright and mean, the whites flecked with blood.

  “It’s over, partner. Don’t have any wrong thoughts about that. Now sit down and give me your wrist,” I said.

  He tried not to grimace as he eased himself down on the gravel. I cuffed one wrist, looped the chain through the iron rung on the car, and cuffed the other wrist. Then I patted him down.

  “What the fuck’s this train carrying?” he said.

  I split open his pants leg with my Puma knife. The entry hole in the skin was black and no bigger than the ball of my index finger. But it took my wadded handkerchief to cover the exit wound. I slipped my belt around his thigh and tightened it with a stick.

  “What the fuck is in that car?” he said. His long hair hung from his head like string on a pumpkin.

  “I’m going to give you the lay of the land, Eddy. You’re leaking pretty bad. I’m going to run up ahead and ask those train guys to radio for an ambulance. But if we can’t get one out here right away, I think we should dump you into my truck and head into Baton Rouge.”

  The side of his face twitched.

  “What’s the game?” he said.

  “No game. You’ve got a big hole in you. You’re going to need some blood.”

  “That’s it? I’m suppose to get scared now? I had a nigger gunbull sweat me with a cattle prod till he ran out of batteries. Go fuck yourself.”