DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

by James Lee Burke

  At the office the next morning I glanced at the state news section of the Times Picayune and saw an Associated Press article describing the homicide of a waitress outside Franklin, Louisiana. Her name was Ruby Gravano, a member of that group of marginal miscreants I had known for years in New Orleans, what I called the walking wounded, whose criminal deeds became a kind of incremental suicide, as though they were doing penancefor sins committed in a previous incarnation. The body had been found by a roadside, not far from the banks of Bayou Teche, the clothes torn off her back. The article described her injuries as massive, which usually meant the details could not be published in a family newspaper. I started out my door toward Helen's office and almost collided into Clete Purcel. He was dressed in a tan suit and a powder-blue shirt with a rolled collar and a tie with a horse painted on it and shined cordovan loafers. His cheeks were shiny with aftershave lotion. "Have a cup of coffee with me. I'm a little wired right now," he said. "Got a lot of work to do, Cletus," I said. "Fill me in on this Shanahan broad." "What?" "I asked her out to lunch. I told her I had some helpful information on an armed robber she's prosecuting." "Can't you let one day go by without stirring something up?" He snuffed down in his nose and nodded to a uniformed deputy passing in the corridor. The deputy did not acknowledge him. "I'm sorry. I'll catch you another time," Clete said. "Come inside," I said. I closed the office door behind us. Before he could speak, I said, "Remember Ruby Gravano?" "A hooker, used to live in a flophouse by Lee Circle?" "She was killed last night. Maybe beaten to death." "I heard she was out of the life. You talk to her pimp?" he said. "Beeler something?" "Beeler Grissum. I think she married him," Clete said. "Thanks, Cletus." He opened the office door. "I'll let you know how my lunch came out. This is a class broad, Dave." He blew his breath on his palm and sniffed it. "Oh, man, I smell like ; puke. I got to brush my teeth." The sheriffs wife, who was a mild and genteel woman, happened to be passing in the corridor. She shut and opened her eyes, as though she were riding in an airplane that had just hit an air pocket.

  Helen Soileau and I checked out a cruiser and drove the thirty miles down to Franklin, then stopped by the sheriffs department and got directions to Ruby Gravano's, which turned out to be a one-story, weathered, late-Victorian frame house, with ventilated window shutters and high windows and a wide gallery hung with flower baskets. An oak tree that must have been two hundred years old grew in the side yard, a broken rope swing dangling in the dust. Ruby's husband, Beeler Grissum, who was from north Georgia or South Carolina, sat on the steps, cracking peanuts and flicking them to a turkey in the yard. Two or three years ago, in a Murphy scam gone bad, a John had delivered a martial-arts kick into Beeler's face that had broken his neck Today his body had the contours of a sack of potatoes, his chin held erect by a leather and steel neck brace, so that his head looked like a separate part of his anatomy positioned inside a cage. His hair was dyed platinum, like a professional wrestler's, combed straight back on his scalp. He rotated his upper torso as we approached the steps, a vague recognition swimming into his face. "Sorry about your wife, Beeler," I said. He removed a peanut from the sack in his hand, then offered the sack to us. "No, thanks," I said. "The sheriff thinks maybe Ruby was thrown from a car." "He wasn't there. But if that's what he says," Beeler said. As I remembered him, he had been a carnival man before he was a pimp and had lived most of his life off the computer. His speech was flat, adenoidal, laconic, so lacking in joy or passion or remorse or emotion of any kind that the listener felt Beeler did not care enough about others or the world or even his own fate to lie. "Two women have been murdered recently in Iberia Parish. Maybe Ruby's death is connected to them," I said. He looked into space and seemed to think about my words. He scratched a place under his eye with one fingernail. "It ain't her death brought you here then. It's the cases you ain't been able to solve?" he said. "I wouldn't put it that way," I said. "Don't matter. It's my fault," he said. "I don't follow you," I said. "We had a fight. She took off in my truck. Sometimes she'd go to a colored blues joint, sometimes to the casino on the reservation. She kept all her tips in a fruit jar. She had a thing for poker machines." "Was she involved with another man?" Helen asked. "She was out of the life. She been a one-man woman since. Most ex-whores are. Don't be talking about her like that," he replied. "Can you let us have a picture of your wife?" Helen asked. "I reckon." He went into the house and returned with a photograph of Ruby and himself that was tucked with several others inside a gold-embossed Bible. He handed it to Helen. Ruby's hair was full and black, but the gauntness of her face made her hair look like a wig on a mannequin. "Ruby hooked for eleven years. Curbside, motels, truck stops. She seen it all, every kind of pervert and geek they is. The guy who got next to her? You ain't gonna catch him," he said. "You want to explain that?" Helen said. "I just did," Beeler replied. He shook the peanuts from his sack onto the ground for the turkey to eat and went back inside the gloom of his house without saying good-bye.

  That night I hosed down the dock and threaded a chain through the steel eyelet screwed into the bow of each of our rental boats and wrapped the chain around a dock piling and snapped a heavy padlock on it, then tallied up the receipts in the bait shop and turned off the lights and locked the door and walked up the dock toward the house. A brown and gray pickup truck, dented and work-scratched from bumper to bumper, was parked under the overhang of a live oak. A tall man in khaki clothes and a western straw hat stood by the tailgate, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette sparked in an arc when he tossed it into the road. "You looking for somebody?" I asked. "You," he said. "The man hepping that black bitch spread them rumor." He walked out of the shadows into the moonlight. The skin of his face was white, furrowed in vertical lines. One oily strand of black hair hung from under his hat, across his ear. "Mistake to come around my house, Legion," I said. "That's what you t'ink," he replied, and swung a blackjack down on my head, clipping the crown of the skull. I fell on the side of the road, against the embankment of my yard. I could smell leaves and grass and the moist dirt on my hands as he walked toward me. His blackjack hung from his fingers, like a large, leather-sheathed darning sock. "I'm a police officer," I heard myself say. "Don't matter what you are, no. When I get finish here, you ain't gonna want to tell nobody about it," he replied. He backstroked me across the side of the head, and when I tried to curl into a ball, he beat my arms and spine and kneecaps and shins, then pulled me by my shirt onto the road and laid into my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. The lead weight inside the stitched leather sock was mounted on a spring and wood handle, and with each blow I could feel the pain sink all the way to the bone, like a dentist's drill hollowing into marrow. He stopped and stood erect, and all I could see of him were his khaki-clad legs and loins and the western belt buckle on his flat stomach and the blackjack hanging motionlessly from his hand. I was sitting up now, my legs bent under me, my ears ringing with sound, my stomach and bowels like wetnewspaper torn in half. If he had hit me again, I couldn't have raised my arms to ward off the blow. He lifted me by the front of my shirt and dropped me in a sitting position on the embankment of my yard. He slipped the blackjack into his side pocket and looked down at me. "How you feel?" he asked. He waited in the silence for my reply. "I'll ax you again," he said. "Go fuck yourself," I whispered. He knotted my hair in his fist and wrenched back my head and kissed me hard on the mouth, pushing his tongue inside. I could taste tobacco and decayed food and bile in his saliva and smell the road dust and body heat and dried sweat in his shirt. "Go tell them all what I done to you. How I whipped you like a dog and used you for my bitch. How it feel, boy? How it feel?" he said.

  CHAPTER 10

  The sunrise in the morning was pink and misty, like the colors and textures inside a morphine dream, and through the window at Iberia General I could see palm trees and oaks hung with moss along the Old Spanish Trail and a white crane lifting on extended wings off the surface of the bayou. The sheriff sat hunched in a chair at the foot of my bed, staring at the steam rising fr
om his paper coffee cup, his face angry, conflicted with thought. Clete stood silently against one wall, rolling a match-stick from side to side in his mouth, his massive arms folded on his chest. Through the open door I saw Bootsie in the hall, talking to a physician in green scrubs. "The guy comes out of nowhere, beats the shit out of you with a sap, gives no explanation, and drives off?" the sheriff said. "That's about it," I said. "You didn't get a license number?" he asked. "The lights were off on the dock. There was mud on the tag." The sheriff started to look at Clete, then forced his eyes back on me, not wanting to recognize Clete as a legitimate presence in the room. "So I'm to conclude maybe one of our clientele got discharged from Angola and decided to square an old beef? Except the cop he clocked, one with thirty years' experience, didn't recognize him. That makes sense to you?" he said. "It happens," I said. "No, it doesn't," he replied. I kept my eyes flat, my expression empty. My face felt out of round, my forehead as large as a muskmelon. When I moved any part of my body, the pain telegraphed all the way through my system and a wave of nausea rose into my mouth. "You mind if we have a minute alone?" the sheriff said to Clete. Clete removed the matchstick from his mouth and flipped it into the wastebasket. "No, I don't mind. You might check the walls for bugs, though. You can never tell in a place like this," he said. The sheriff stared at Clete's back as he went out the door, then turned back toward me. "What's with that guy?" he asked. "Everybody wants respect, Sheriff. There're times Clete doesn't get it. He was a good cop. Why not give credit where it's due?" The sheriff leaned forward in his chair. "I learned in the Corps a good officer takes care of his people first Everything else is second. But you don't allow that to happen, Dave. You think you operate in your own time zone and zip code. And every time youget in trouble, your friend out there seems to be belly deep in it with you." "Sorry to hear you feel that way." The sheriff stood up from his chair and pulled at hiscoat sleeves until they were even on his wrists. "Youknow why the world's run by clerks? It's because our bestpeople flame out across the sky and never leave anythingbehind but a good light show. Is that what you want tobe, Dave? A light show? Damn, if you don't piss me off." After he was gone, Clete put ice in a water glass andinserted a straw in the ice and held the glass for me to drink. "What happened out there?" he asked. I told him of the systematic beating from head to foot, the contempt shown my person, the sense that I no longer possessed control over my life, that my confidence in myself, my ability to deal with the world, had always been the stuff of vanity. Then I told him about the kiss, a male tongue rife with nicotine pushed inside my mouth, over the teeth, into the throat, his saliva like an obscene burn on my chin. I looked up into Clete's face. His green eyes were filled with a mixture of pity and the kind of latent thoughts that made his enemies back out of rooms when they recognized them. "You're not going to file on this guy?" he asked. "No." "You feel ashamed because of what he did to you?" he asked. When I didn't reply, he walked to the window and looked at the trees out on the road and the moss on the limbs lifting in the wind. "I can set it up. He'll never know what hit him. I've got the throw-down, too, all numbers acid-burned and ground on an emery wheel," he said. "I'll let you know." "Yeah, I bet," he said, turning from the window. He picked his porkpie hat off the sill and slanted it on his brow. "I'll see you this afternoon, Streak. But with or without you, that cocksucker is going to get blown out of his socks." Bootsie came through the door with a vase of flowers and a box of doughnuts. She had slept all night in a chair under a rough woolen blanket, but her face, even without makeup, was as pink and lovely as the morning. "What's going on?" she said, looking from me to Clete.

  Two days later I left the hospital, limping on a cane, my head spinning with painkillers, one eye swollen almost shut, the side of my face inflated with a large yellow and purple bruise. It was Friday, a workday, but I did not go back to the office. Instead, I sat for a long time in the living room by myself, the blinds drawn, and listened to a strange whirring sound in my head. I found myself at the kitchen sink, first pouring a glass of iced tea and a second later opening the bottle of painkillers the doctor had given me. One or two to get back to normal can't hurt, I thought. Right. I poured the pills down the drain, then ran water on top of them and dropped the bottle in the garbage sack under the counter. Bootsie and I ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. It was shady and cool in the yard, and a gust of wind ruffled the periwinkles and bamboo that grew along the coulee, but there was no hint of rain in the air and dust blew in brown clouds out of my neighbor's cane field. Bootsie was talking about a college baseball game scheduled for that night in Lafayette. I tried to follow what she was saying, but the whirring sound began again in my head. "Do you?" she said. "Excuse me?" I said. "Do you want to go to the game tonight?" "Tonight? Who did you say was playing?" She set her fork down on her plate. "You have to get your mind off it. The sheriff will find this guy," she said. My eyes avoided hers. I felt her gaze sharpen and fix on the side of my face. "Right?" she said. "Not necessarily." "Take the marbles out of your mouth, Streak." "The sheriff doesn't know what to look for. I didn't tell him everything." "Oh?" "It was the man called Legion, the overseer from Poinciana Island. He put his tongue in my mouth. He called me his bitch." She was quiet a long time. "That's why you kept the sheriff in the dark?" "This guy Legion is seventy-four years old. Nobody would believe my story. Legion knew that. He really pushed the hook in deep." Bootsie got up from her bench and walked around the table and put her fingers in my hair and brushed her nails back and forth on my scalp. Then she kissed the top of my head. "Why didn't you tell me?" she said. "It wouldn't change anything." "Come inside, soldier," she said. We went into the bedroom. She closed the curtains on the window that looked out on the front yard, then disconnected the telephone cord from the jack in the wall and removed her blouse. "Unhook me, big guy," she said, turning her back to me while she unbuttoned her blue jeans and let them drop to her ankles. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the mouth. "You all right?" she said. "Fine." "Then how about getting undressed?" I took off my clothes and lay down gingerly on the bed. Bootsie slipped her fingers down inside the elastic of her panties and pushed them over her thighs and lay beside me, her head propped up on her elbow. "You told Clete about all this?" she asked. "Yes." "Before you told me?" "Yes." "You don't trust me? You believed I'd think less of you?" "It wasn't my proudest moment out there." "Oh, Dave, you're so crazy," she said, and put her face close to mine and touched my sex with her fingers. "The doc loaded me up on downers. I don't know if I'm up to it, Boots," I said. "That's what you think, bubba," she replied. She raised herself up and stroked my sex, then kissed it and placed it in her mouth. "Boots, you don't need to" I began. A moment later she spread her knees and sat on top of me and held me between her hands. As I looked up at her, the light from the side window woven in her hair, all the goodness and beauty in the world seemed to gather in her face. She placed me inside her, then leaned down and kissed me on the mouth again and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. I ran my hands over her back and pressed her down on top of me and kissed her hair and bit her neck. Then, for just a moment, all the pain and solitary rage, all the ugly images that the man called Legion had tried to leave forever in my memory, seemed to become as dross. The only sound in the room was the rise and fall of Bootsie's breath against my chest and the squeak of the bedsprings under our weight and occasionally a small moist, popping noise when her stomach formed a suction against mine. Then her body began to stiffen, the muscles in her back hardening, her thighs tightening on mine. Her eyes were closed now, her face growing small and soft and tense at the same time. I held her as close as I could, as though we were both balanced on the tip of a precipice, then I felt my sex harden and swell and burn in a way it never had, to a degree that made me cry outinvoluntarily, more like a woman than a man, and the entirety of my life, my identity itself, seemed to dissolve and break and then burst from my loins in a white glow, and in that moment I was joined with her, the
two of us locked inseparably together inside the heat of her thighs, the mystery of her womb, the beating of her heart, the sweat on her skin, the flush of blood in her cheeks, the odor of crushed gardenias that rose from her hair when I buried my face in it.

  After I showered and put on a fresh pair of khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, I took my holstered 1911-model .45 automatic from the dresser and placed it on the rail of the gallery, then went into the kitchen and rubbed Bootsie on the back and kissed her neck. "You're special, kid," I said. "I know," she replied. "I'll be gone for a little while. But I'll be back in time to go to the game." "What are you about to do, Dave?" "There's not a perp or lowlife or shitbag in Louisiana who would come after a cop with a blackjack unless he diought he was protected." "You and Clete are going to settle things on your own?" "I wouldn't say that." "Why not?" "Because Clete's out of it," I replied, and went out the front door and backed the truck down the drive. Through the windshield I saw Bootsie come out on the porch. I waved, but she didn't respond.

  Icrossed the freshwater bay onto Poinciana Island and followed the winding paved road through red-dirt acreage and hummocks and oaks green with lichen to Ladice Hulin's house, where she sat on the gallery, absorbed in a magazine, directly across from the scorched stucco shell of the place in which Julian LaSalle's wife had burned to death like a bird caught inside a cage. I got out of my truck and limped toward her with my cane. "May I sit down?" I asked. "Looks like you better. A train hit you?" she said. I eased myself down on the top step and propped my cane across the inside of my leg and looked at the peacocks picking in the grass across the road. In the distance I could see the sunlight on the bay, like thousands of coppery lights, and a boat with a sky-blue sail turning about in the wind. Neither of us spoke for a long time. "I want to take Legion down. Maybe blow up his shit," I said. "You use that kind of language in front of white ladies?" she asked. "Sometimes. With the ones I respect." Her eyes roved over my face. "Legion done this to you?" she asked. I nodded, my gaze fixed across the road. I heard her close her magazine and set it down on the gallery. "It ain't just the beating that bother you, though, is it?" she said. "I really don't know what I feel right now, Ladice," I lied. "He done somet'ing to you right befo' he finished, somet'ing that makes you feel dirty inside. You washyourself all over, but it don't do no good. Every place you go, you feel his hand on you. He always in your thoughts. That's what Legion know how to do to people. Every black woman on this plantation learned that," she said. I snuffed down in my nose and cleared my throat. I put on my sunglasses, even though there was no glare in the yard, and rubbed my palms on my knees. "Maybe I should go," I said. "Legion killed a man in Morgan City. A man from up Nort' who was down here writin' a book." "He was never arrested?" "The people in the bar said the man threatened Legion with a gun and Legion took it from him and shot him. It ain't true, though." "How do you know?" I asked. "A black man in the kitchen seen Legion get the gun from under the bar and follow him out in the parking lot. Legion shot the man so close his coat caught on fire. Then he shot him again on the ground. This was maybe t'urty or t'urty-five years ago." "Thanks for you help, Ladice." "Jimmy Dean Styles was out here." "When?" "Yesterday. He axed about my granddaughter, Rosebud, how's she doin' and all. Why would he come out here axing about Rosebud?" I remembered taking Rosebud's sketch of the reclining nude to the Carousel, the nightclub half-owned by Styles, and Styles stealing a look at it, his head tilted curiously. "Let me know if he comes around again," I said. I took off my sunglasses and folded them and replaced them in my shirt pocket and tried to seem casual. "You tell me only what you feel like I should know, huh? That's the way it's always been, Mr. Dave. Ain't changed. The little people ain't got the same rights as everybody else. That's how come Legion could take any black girl he wanted into the trees or the canebrake, make them carry his baby and never tell who the father was. When you talk down to me like you just done? You're no different from Legion, no."