The New Iberia Blues

by James Lee Burke

  “Abstinence,” he said. “I can’t say it’s a virtue with me, though.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I never saw the attraction. More liability than asset. My father was on the grog all his life and asked for a bottle of porter on his deathbed.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “You’re a quiet one, sir,” he said.

  Like most recovering drunks, I didn’t like to talk about alcohol or alcoholism with what we call earth people or flatlanders. “Call me Dave, please. What kind of movie are y’all making? How do you tie Arizona to Louisiana?”

  “It’s an epic film about three generations in a legendary family,” he said. “Southerners who migrated to the frontier, then ruined the frontier the way they ruined everything else they got their hands on.”

  “I take it you’re not a fan of manifest destiny.”

  He loaded a taco chip with guacamole and put it into his mouth and studied Desmond at the end of the table, talking to two beautiful women. A silver bowl filled with water and floating tropical flowers was in front of Wexler. The crumbs from his taco chip fell into it.

  “This film means a lot to Desmond,” he said. “In fact, it’s an obsession. He has seventy-five million dollars of other people’s money and thirty million of his own riding on it.”

  “Who put up the seventy-five?” I asked.

  “We used to soak the Japs until they figured out they were still paying for Pearl Harbor. The Arabs are a good source if you don’t think too hard about what they do in Saudi jails or to women who get out of line.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” I said.

  “That’s because I don’t intend to.” He laughed.

  “I saw your scar. You picked it up in Africa?”

  “A fellow hooked me with a machete. I thought it was time to find a better line of work. So now I do this stuff. Desmond is a good one to work for. No nonsense. If you’re wired, you’re fired.”

  “Why does he tolerate Antoine Butterworth?”

  “He thinks Antoine’s an artist rather than a sadistic degenerate with his head up a woman’s dress.”

  I looked around to see if anyone had heard him. If they had, they showed no sign. Wexler turned his face to a puff of cool air from the desert floor. “Tomorrow we’re shooting a remarkable scene. Probably few will take much heed of it, but if it works, it will be an extraordinary moment, the kind that brought to a close My Darling Clementine. It comes from the final scene of the novel that’s at the core of the script.”

  It had been a while since I had read the book or books from which the film was adapted, so I had a hard time tracking his line of thought.

  “Don’t pay attention to me, Mr. Robicheaux—I mean Dave,” he said. “I’m not a bad screenwriter, but I’m best at adapting the work of others. And like most producers, I’m great at calling up the caterer and taking wealthy bozos to lunch.”

  He looked at the final rays of sun streaking across the desert floor, the pools of shadow at the base of the buttes, the dust rising like strings of smoke from the crests into the light. “It’s like staring into infinity, isn’t it? Desmond believes death lies on the other side of the horizon, where the earth drops off and the sky begins. I think he’s wrong. It’s not death that’s waiting out there. Not at all.”

  The people who had gotten an early start were getting louder, their laughter cacophonous and disjointed. The evening air was suddenly cooler, the sandstone formations more lavender than red, more like tombstones than castles.

  “If it’s not death, what is it?” I asked.

  “Something unknowable.” His eyes were hollow, sightless, even though he was staring straight at me. “We drown in it. This is the omphalos, the center of it all. You were there, sir. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I was where?”

  “You bloody well know what I mean. Where you see the realities and never tell anyone.”

  I wondered if I was talking to a madman. Or someone who had been in the Garden. Or someone who shot up with hallucinogens.

  “Sorry. After seven in the evening I develop logorrhea,” he said.

  “You’re fine. I need to take a walk.”

  “What about dinner?”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have sciatica trouble sometimes.”

  “I’ll come along,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I see you walk with a purpose,” he said. “I can always tell a military man. You ever count cadence? It puts your blood to pumping, by God. Orwell said it. Maybe there’s something beautiful about war after all.”

  Wrong, I thought. But why argue with those who are proud of their membership in the Herd?

  • • •

  AT FIVE-THIRTY A.M., I went down to breakfast inside the hotel restaurant and thought I was seeing an apparition at a table by a big glass window that gave onto the desert. Clete was wearing his powder blue sport coat and gray slacks and shined oxblood loafers, his porkpie hat crown-down on the tablecloth. He was surrounded by a stack of pancakes inserted with sausage patties, scrambled eggs, hash browns, a bowl of milk gravy, toast, coffee, a pitcher of cream, and a glass of tomato juice with an orange slice notched on the rim.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Thought I’d get out of town in case Helen wanted to chat about Hugo Tillinger. Maybe I’ll hike in the hills. Lose a few pounds.”

  I sat down. “Are you up to something?”

  “No, you got my word.”

  “I know you, Clete.”

  “Bailey Ribbons is on her way. I heard Helen is beaucoup pissed.”

  “Bailey is coming here?”

  “Cormier is casting her. I didn’t know how you’d feel about that.”

  “She can do whatever she wants. Stop trying to micromanage my life.”

  “Want some pancakes?”

  • • •

  I WENT TO ALAFAIR’S room. She was just coming out the door. I told her what Clete had just told me.

  “Clete is here?” she said.

  “Helen isn’t in the best of moods.”

  “And Bailey Ribbons is joining the cast?” Alafair said.

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to say it again.

  “She’s hanging it up with the department?” Alafair said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t care, either.”

  She pulled me inside the room and closed the door. “How do you want me to say it? You lost two of your wives to violence and one to lupus. You’ll never get over your loss. But you won’t cure the problem with Bailey.”

  “We have four unsolved homicides on our desks,” I said. “That’s not an abstraction or part of a soap opera. I need her. I mean at the job.”

  “The homicides are not the issue, so stop fooling yourself and stop acting like a twit.”

  “Give it a rest, Alafair.”

  Her face was pinched, her hands knotting. “Okay, I’m sorry. I get mad at Bailey.”

  “Why?”

  “She went to the head of the line. She’s attractive and intelligent and has charm and an innocent way that makes men want to protect her. Helen Soileau earned her job. Bailey didn’t. Now she hangs you out to dry and leaves you at war with yourself.”

  “I’ll survive,” I replied, and tried to smile.

  “Pardon me while I go to the bathroom and throw up,” she said.

  I went to the window and looked at the miles and miles of mountain desert to the north, pink and majestic and desolate in the sunrise. It was a perfect work of art, outside of time and the rules of probability and governance of the seasons, as if it had been scooped out of the clay by the hand of God and left to dry as the seas receded and the dinosaurs and pterodactyls came to frolic on damp earth that, one hundred million years later, became stone. As I stared at the swirls of color in the hardpan, the sage clinging for life in the dry riverbeds, and the solemnity of the buttes, massive and yet miniaturized by the endless undulation of the mounta
in floor, I felt the pull of eternity inside my breast.

  I heard Alafair return from the bathroom and felt her standing behind me. “What are you thinking about?” she said.

  “Nothing. I bet Desmond casts Bailey as the IWW woman in the book. The one who was at the Ludlow Massacre.” Alafair was looking at me with an expression between pity and anger.

  “Can I visit the set?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I’d like to wish her luck.”

  “Better give your well wishes to Desmond. I think he might lose his shirt.”

  “I thought he had the Midas touch.”

  “He mortgaged his home and vineyard in Napa Valley. He reminds me of Captain Ahab taking on the white whale. He’s always talking about ‘the light.’ He says it’s a Plotinian emanation of the unseen world.”

  My attention began to wander. “Clete’s probably still in the dining room. Let’s join him.”

  “I have to confess something,” she said. “I think the killings in New Iberia are connected to us.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?” I asked.

  “Hollywood. The evil we can’t seem to get out of our lives. The legacy of slavery. Whatever.”

  “Quit beating up on yourself. We pulled the apple from the tree a long time ago, Alf.”

  “Yeah, that bad girl Eve. Save it, Dave.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  ON PRIVATE LAND just inside the Utah border, Desmond had constructed an environment meant to replicate nineteenth-century Indian territory and a stretch of the Cimarron River just north of the Texas Panhandle. He had diverted a stream and brought in water tanks and lined a gulley with vinyl and layered it with gravel, then placed a solitary horseman five hundred yards from the improvised riverbank.

  Wexler was standing next to me. “This scene is going to cost the boys in Jersey over fifty grand. I hope they enjoy it.”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “It’s the last scene in the picture, although we’re only a third into the story. The guy who wrote the book says it’s the best scene he ever wrote, and the last line in the scene is the best line he ever wrote. I bet our Jersey friends would love that.”

  “Who are your Jersey friends?”

  “Not the Four Seasons,” he answered.

  The rider was a tall and lanky boy who looked no older than fifteen. His horse was a chestnut, sixteen hands, with a blond tail and mane. Desmond was talking to the camera personnel; then he flapped a yellow flag above his head. Through a pair of binoculars, I saw the boy lean forward and pour it on, bent low over the withers, his legs straight out, whipping the horse with the reins, his hat flying on a cord. The sun was low and red in the sky, the boy riding straight out of it like a blackened cipher escaping a molten planet. Two leather mail pouches were strung from his back, arrows embedded in them up to the shaft.

  “The scene is about the Pony Express?” I said.

  “On one level,” Wexler said. “But actually, it’s about the search for the Grail.”

  I looked at him.

  “Don’t worry if you’re confused,” he said. “Probably no one else will get it, either. Particularly that lovely bunch of gangsters on the Jersey Shore.”

  “It’s an allegory?”

  “Nothing is an allegory for Desmond. He hears the horns blowing along the road to Roncesvalles. Worse than I.”

  The rider went hell for breakfast across the stream, the horse laboring, its neck dark with sweat, water splashing and gravel clacking.

  “Cut!” Desmond said. “Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!”

  After the boy dismounted, Desmond hugged him in a full-body press. I felt embarrassed for the boy. “Where’d you learn to ride?” Desmond said.

  “Here’bouts,” the boy said, his face visibly burning.

  “Well, you’re awfully fine,” Des said. “Get yourself a cold drink. I want to talk with you later. With your parents. You’re going somewhere, kid.”

  That was Desmond’s great gift. He made people feel good about themselves, and he didn’t do it out of pride or compulsion or weakness or defensiveness or a desire to feel powerful and in control of others. He used his own success to validate what was best in the people around him. But there is a caveat implied in the last statement. The people who surrounded him were not simply employees, they were acolytes, and I suspected Bailey was about to become one of them. For that reason alone, I felt a growing resentment, one that was petty and demeaning.

  “What’d you think, Dave?” Desmond said.

  “That young fellow is impressive,” I replied.

  “Come on, you’re a smart man. What do you think of us, tattered bunch that we are, talking trash about Crusader knights and trying to sell it to an audience that wants a fucking video game?”

  “What do I know?”

  Bailey Ribbons was standing thirty feet away, dressed like a fashionable pioneer woman. I had not spoken to her yet.

  “What do you think of that scene, Bailey?” Wexler asked.

  “I think it’s all grand,” she said. She walked toward us. Her hem went to the tops of her feet. Her frilly white blouse was buttoned at the throat, her hair piled on her head. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Dave?”

  “You have to forgive me. I was hesitant to speak on the set.”

  “You’re surprised to see me here?” she asked.

  “If I’d known you were coming, I wouldn’t have asked Helen for some vacation days. She’s shorthanded now.”

  “It wasn’t my intention to inconvenience anyone,” she said.

  I looked at my watch. “I’d better get back to the hotel. I have to make some calls.”

  “Will you have lunch with us?” she said.

  “Let me see what Clete is doing.”

  “Clete Purcel is here?” she said.

  “He gets around,” I said.

  “Well, I’m happy he was able to come out,” she said.

  I didn’t know what else to say. I felt disappointed in Bailey and in myself. “Thanks for having me here, Des. I’ll see you later.”

  I walked away, feeling foolish and inadequate, as though I were starting to lose part of myself.

  “Don’t you want a lift?” Wexler said.

  I had forgotten I’d ridden to the set with him and Alafair. “I’ll hitch a ride,” I said.

  Three miles down the road, a man driving a chicken truck with glassless windows picked me up, and we drove across the state line into Arizona and a dust storm that turned the sun to grit.

  • • •

  AT THE HOTEL I called Helen and apologized for leaving her shorthanded.

  “Forget it,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with Bailey when she gets back.”

  “Why’d you let her come out here?”

  “I figured what’s the harm? What are the things you regret most in your life, bwana?”

  “Constantly taking my own inventory.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. We regret the things we didn’t do, not the things we did. All the romances we didn’t have, the music we didn’t dance to, the children we didn’t parent. So I let her have her fling with Lotusland. Then I got mad at myself about it. By the way, I got a phone call from a federal agent regarding Hugo Tillinger.”

  Of all the subjects she could bring up, Tillinger was the one I least wanted to hear about.

  “This agent grew up with him,” she said. “He believes Tillinger may have killed a biker in the Aryan Brotherhood about ten years ago. The biker raped and broke the neck of an old woman in Corsicana. She belonged to the same church Tillinger did. Somebody tore the biker apart with a mattock.”

  I felt my stomach constrict. “What’s the evidence?”

  “None. The crime remains unsolved. Some fellow church members asked Tillinger about it. His answer was ‘I, the Lord, love justice.’ It’s from Isaiah.”

  My head was coming off my shoulders.

  “Are you there?” she asked.

  “Yes.”


  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll let Clete tell you.”

  This time she went silent. Then she said, “Dave, did Clete see Tillinger again?”

  “He saw him save a little girl’s life at a filling station in Lafayette. Clete followed him to a motel north of Four Corners but cut him loose.”

  “Son of a bitch,” she said. “How long have you known this?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Why didn’t you report it?”

  “I thought no good would come out of it.”

  “No, you thought you’d write your own rules. You put your friendship with Clete ahead of the job. I’m pulling your ticket, Pops. I’m not going to take this shit.”

  “I’m on the desk?”

  “You’re on leave without pay. I’m referring this to Internal Affairs.”

  “What about Clete?”

  “He’d better get his fat ass back to New Orleans and stay there for a long time.”

  “I made a mistake. So did Clete. We didn’t know about the biker murder.”

  “You made your bed,” she said. “Dave, you use a nail gun on the people who love you most. You don’t know how much you hurt me.”

  • • •

  AT MIDDAY, ALAFAIR was still at the set. I ate lunch by myself and then lay down in my room and fell asleep. An hour later, I woke from a disturbing dream about a mountainous desert that was not a testimony to the curative beauty of the natural world but instead a crumbling artifice inhabited only by the wind. I sat on the side of the bed, gripping my knees, my head filled with a warm fuzziness that felt like the beginning of malarial delusions, a condition I’ve dealt with since childhood.

  Perhaps I fell asleep again. I can’t remember. Then I went downstairs and sat for a long time by the entrance to the lounge and took a table in the dining room by the big window that gave onto the swimming pool and a vista like the long trail disappearing into the buttes in the final scene of My Darling Clementine. The waitress asked if I would like anything from the bar.

  “A glass of iced tea,” I said.

  She was pretty and young and had thick soft brown hair and an innocent pixie face. “Sure thing.”

  She walked away, yawning slightly, looking through the window at the swimmers in the pool. I wondered if she dreamed about being among them. Many of them were celebrities, or the children or the lovers of celebrities, and those who were not celebrities were obviously well-to-do and carefree and, like the celebrities, enjoying the coolness and turquoise brilliance of the water and the heat of the sun on their bodies, as though all of it had been invented for them, as though the wind-carved shapes to the north had no connection to their lives.