DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

by James Lee Burke

  On Thursday morning the sheriff called me down to his office. "You know a fellow named Legion Guidry?" he asked. "I know a man named Legion. I'm not sure if that's his first or last name, though. He used to be an overseer on Poinciana Island." "I got a call from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish. A couple of his deputies work at the casino in their off hours. One of them says you went into the lounge and spit in this fellow's food." There was a long silence. "I guess I was having a bad day," I said. The skin seemed to shrink on the sheriffs face. "You're telling me you actually did this?" he said. "This is a bad guy, Sheriff. A real bucket of shit left behind by the LaSalle family." "You want a lawyer in here?" "What for?" "Two nights ago somebody slashed all four of this fellow's truck tires. A filling-station operator saw a man in a rattletrap Cadillac convertible leaving the neighborhood." The sheriff picked up a yellow legal pad that he had written some notes on. "The filling-station operator said the driver looked like an albino ape with a little hat perched on his head. Sound like anybody you know?" "No, I don't know any albino apes," I replied. "You think this is funny?" "No, I don't." "I think your real beef is with the LaSalle family, Dave. You blame the rich for all our racial and economic problems. You forget the other canneries have shipped their jobs to Latin America. The LaSalles still take care of all their employees, all the way to the grave, no matter what it costs them." "This man Legion is a sexual predator. He was given free rein to sexually exploit black women on the LaSalle plantation. That doesn't seem like a protective attitude to me." "Then maybe they should have gotten jobs somewhere else." He stared hard at me, a piece of cartilage knotted in his jaw. "You got something you want to add?" I let my eyes slip off his face. "No, sir," I said. The sheriff bit a piece of loose skin on the ball of his thumb, then rose from his chair and put on his suit coat and picked up his Stetson. "You and Helen Soileau check out shotguns," he said. "What?" "We're going out to have a talk with Joe Zeroski and his friends. Doesn't Purcel live in that same motor court?" "Yes." "Sounds like he made a good choice."

  The motor court was out on East Main in a grove of live oak trees. The cottages were made of tan stucco and stayed in shade from morning to sunset, and each evening the smoke from meat fires drifted through the trees and bamboo onto Bayou Teche. Our caravan of six cruisers and a jail van slowed and turned into the motor court drive, passing a cottage at the entrance that had been converted into a barbershop, complete with a striped barber pole. At the end of the drive I saw Clete's lavender Cadillac convertible parked across from Zerelda Calucci's cottage. In a dry, brittle place inside my head I could hear a persistent humming sound, like an electrical short buzzing in the rain, the same sound I'd heard when I came home from Iberia General, wired to the eyes on painkillers. Helen parked the cruiser and looked at me. My walking cane and two sawed-down Remington pump twelve-gauge shotguns were propped on the seat between us. "You got something eating you?" she asked. "This is a dumb move. You don't 'front Joe Zeroski." "Maybe you should tell the skipper." "I already did. Waste of time," I said. "Try to enjoy it. Come on, Streak, time to rock 'n' roll, lock and load," she said, opening her door. I got out on the driveway with my cane in one hand and a shotgun propped over my shoulder with the other. The sheriff, three plainclothes, and at least ten uniformed sheriffs deputies and a dozen city policemen were walking toward me. The wind had started to gust and leaves from the oaks spun in circles on the drive. "You got a second, Skipper?" I said. "What is it?" he asked, his eyes fixed on the cottages at the end of the row. A bullhorn hung from his right hand. "Let me talk with Joe." "No." "That's it?" "Get with the program, Dave." My gaze went through the crowd of police officers and focused on a man with ash-blond hair in jeans and a sports coat and a golf shirt and a white straw hat coned up on the sides who was getting out of a cruiser, his face filled with expectation, like a kid entering an amusement park. "What's that guy doing here?" I asked. "Which guy?" the sheriff said. "Marvin Oates. He's got a sheet. What's he doing here?" "He's a criminal justice student. We're letting them ride with us. Dave, I think maybe you should go sit down, take it easy a while, maybe go up to the barbershop and get a haircut. We'll pick you up on the way out," the sheriff said. His words hung in the silence like the sound of a slap. He and everyone around him walked past me toward the end of the motor court as though I werenot there. I could hear dead leaves blowing in a vortex around me. Helen looked over her shoulder, then walked back toward me. Her shirtsleeves were rolled in cuffs, her arms pumped. She squeezed my wrist. "He just found out his wife has cancer. He's not himself, bwana," she said. "This is a mistake." "Forget I said anything." She followed the others, her shotgun held in two hands, canted at an upward angle, her jeans tight on her rump, her handcuffs drawn through the back of her belt. A moment later the sheriff was on the bullhorn, his voice echoing off the trees and cottages. But I couldn't hear his words. My ears were ringing now, my scalp cold in the wind. Joe Zeroski came out of his cottage, barechested, wearing sweatpants and a pair of snow-white tennis shoes, a piece of fried chicken in his hand, his face like that of a man who might have been working in front of a blast furnace. "What is this?" he said. "Tell all your people to get out here," the sheriff said. "I don't got to tell them. They go where I go. I asked you what this is. We got the Mickey Mouse show here?" Joe said. "You kidnapped a bunch of black men. They won't file charges on you, but I know what you did. Here's the search warrant if you care to look at it, Mr. Zeroski," the sheriff said. "Wipe your ass with it," Joe replied. Uniformed deputies and city police were now pullingJoe's people out of their cottages, lining them up, pushing them into search positions against trees and cars. "Turn around and place your hands on that tree, please," the sheriff said to Joe. Nests of veins rippled through Joe's chest and shoulders; rose petals of color bloomed in his throat. He threw his chicken bone into the bushes. "Somebody beat my daughter so bad her face didn't look human. But you're out here, knocking around blue-collar guys ain't done you nothing. You know why that is? Because I bother you. You can't do nothing about the degenerates you got in this town, so you lean on people you think are easy. Hey, you're as old as I am. I look easy to you?" Joe said. Joe saw two uniformed deputies shove a man with a leviathan stomach and melancholy face and jowls like a St. Bernard's over a car fender. "Hey, that's Frankie Dogs they're rousting," Joe said. "You know who Frankie Dogs is? Even in a shithole like this they got to know who that is. Hey, you get your fucking hands off me." But two deputies already had Joe against the tree and were feeling inside his thighs. Just then a city cop escorted Clete Purcel and Zerelda Calucci out of Zerelda's cottage. It was all moving fast now. "What do you want to do with him?" the city cop asked, indicating Clete. "He goes down with the rest," the sheriff replied. Clete and Zerelda propped their arms against the side of Clete's Cadillac, waiting to be searched. Clete looked at me over his shoulder, then raised his eyebrows andlooked away and watched a tugboat passing on the bayou, his sandy hair blowing in the wind. Cletus, Cletus, I thought. Joe Zeroski began to fight with the deputies who were shaking him down. A half-dozen cops swarmed him, including the city cop who had been about to search Clete and Zerelda. Marvin Oates was standing right behind Zerelda now, his face transfixed, a strange, almost ethereal light in his eyes. He stepped closer to her, as though drawing near a presence from another world, leaves crackling under the soles of his shoes. He leaned down toward her shoulders, perhaps trying to breathe in the heat from her body or the perfume in her hair. Then his hands slid down the muscles in her back, under her arms and on her sides. I saw her body jerk, as though she were being sexually violated, but Oates whispered something in her ear and his hand went to her blue jeans pocket and came away with a small bag, which he pushed up into his coat sleeve. I headed toward him with my cane, the shotgun still propped on my shoulder. "What do you think you're doing?" I asked. His face drained. "Trying to hep out," he replied. "You're not a police officer. You don't have the right to put your hand on anybody here. You understand that?" I said. "You're right, sir. I dint have
no bidness coming here. I'm just a simple student at the university. You ain't gonna have no trouble with the likes of me," he said. He hurried through the trees toward the bayou, pushing through bamboo and underbrush, his sports coat tearing on a thorn bush. "Come back here," I said. But he was gone. I limped down to the bank and amid a tangle of morning glory vines saw a Ziploc bag that was fat with a greenish-brown substance inside. I poked at the bag with my cane, then picked it up and shook out the marijuana inside it and put the bag in my pocket. When I got back up to the driveway, Joe Zeroski and all of his men were hooked up on a long wrist chain, and so were Clete and Zerelda. "How about some slack on Purcel, Skipper?" I said. "Let him sit in his own mess for a change," the sheriff replied. "Earlier today you made a remark about the women who were raped on the LaSalles' plantation. You said maybe they should have gotten jobs somewhere else. I believe that's the filthiest fucking thing I've ever heard you say, sir," I said. I pumped open the breech on my shotgun and threw the shotgun in the backseat of the sheriff's cruiser. Then I hooked my walking cane on the limb of a persimmon tree, like a misplaced Christmas ornament, and limped unassisted toward the front of the motor court. "Where you going, Dave?" Helen asked. "To get a haircut," I said, and gave her the thumbs-up sign.

  Late that night, after Joe Zeroski and all of his men were released from jail, a car pulled into the motor court and stopped in front of Zerelda Calucci's cottage. A youngman in a white straw hat and pale blue cowboy shirt with flowers stitched on it got out of the car and walked to the cottage door, bending down briefly, then got back in the car and drove away. The next morning, when Zerelda Calucci opened her door, she found a dozen red roses, wrapped in green tissue paper, lying across a gold-embossed copy of the Bible.

  CHAPTER 12

  Friday night I experienced what recovering alcoholics refer to as drunk dreams, nocturnal excursions into the past that represent either a desire to get back on the dirty boogie or a fear of it. In my dream I visited a saloon on Magazine Street in New Orleans, where I stood at a mirrored bar with two inches of Beam in a glass and a long-necked Jax on the side. I drank as I did before I entered Alcoholics Anonymous, knocking back doubles with the careless disregard of a man eating a razor blade, confident that this time I would not wake trembling in the morning, filled with rage and self-hatred and an insatiable desire for more drink. Then I was in another saloon, this one located in an old colonial hotel in Saigon, one with wood-bladed ceiling fans and ventilated shutters on the windows and marble columns and potted palms set between tables that were covered with white linen. I wore a freshly presseduniform and sat in a tall chair at a teakwood bar next to a friend, an Englishman who owned an export-import company there and who had been an intelligence agent in Hanoi when the Viet Minh, later named the Viet Cong, were America's allies. He wore a white suit and a Panama hat and a trimmed white mustache, and was always kind and deferential toward those who thought they could succeed as colonials where he could not. Aside from his flushed complexion, the enormous quantities of scotch he drank seemed to have little influence on him. He tapped my glass with his, his blue eyes sorrowful, and said, "You're such a nice young officer. A shame you and your chaps have to die here. Oh, well, give the little buggers hell." Then it was night and I was looking out on a sea of windswept elephant grass lit by the phosphorous halos of pistol flares. Inside the grass toy men in conical straw hats and black pajamas, armed with captured American ordnance and French and Japanese junk, tripped a wire strung with C-rat cans. The Zippo-tracks cut loose, with a mewing sound like a kitten's, arcing liquid flame over the grass, filling the sky with voices and a smell that no amount of whiskey ever rinses from the soul. I sat up on the edge of the bed and pushed the sleep out of my eyes. The window curtains were blowing in the wind, and the clouds above the swamp were as black as soot, heat lightning ballooning inside them, and I could smell a trash fire in a coulee and hear the hysterical shrieking sound of a nutria calling to its mate. I went into the bathroom and opened a bottle of aspirin and poured eight into my hand, then ate them off my palm, biting down on the acidic taste of each, cupping water into my mouth, taking the rush just as if I had eaten a handful of white speed. I lay back down on top of the sheets, a pillow over my face, but did not sleep again until dawn.

  It was Saturday morning and I drove to Morgan City and searched the city newspaper's morgue for an account of a homicide involving the man some called Legion Guidry. It wasn't hard to find. On a weekday night in December of 1966 a freelance writer named William O'Reilly, age thirty-nine, of New York City, had acted belligerent in a bar down by the shrimp docks. When asked to leave, he had pulled a pistol on the bartender. The bartender, one Legion Guidry, had tried to disarm him. William O'Reilly was shot twice, then had staggered into the parking lot, where he died. The story did not run until two days after the death of the victim and appeared on the second page of the newspaper. The story stated that William O'Reilly had been unemployed for several years and had been dismissed from both a newspaper and a university teaching job for alcohol-related problems. I turned off the microfilm scanner and looked out the window at the palm trees and rooftops of Morgan City. I could see the bridges over the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya River and the shrimp boats and bust-head saloons down by the waterfront and the dead cypresses in the chain of bays that formed a deep-water channel into the Gulf of Mexico. But to the denizens of America's criminal subculture, Morgan City was more than a piece of Jamaica sawed loose from the Caribbean. It had always been the place to go to if you were on the run andneeded a new identity, access to dope, whores, foreign ports, and money that was not on the record. What better place to murder a worrisome alcoholic writer from New York and get away with it, I thought.

  That afternoon Clete Purcel came into the bait shop and rented a boat. I had not seen him since he had been released from jail. "You want to talk about anything?" I asked. "About getting put in the bag with psychopaths like Frankie Dogs? Not really," he said. "I was going to ask you if you'd had any contact with Legion Guidry." His face became vague, then he yawned and looked at his watch. "Wow, the fish are waiting," he said. He loaded his tackle box and cooler and spinning rod and himself into a narrow aluminum outboard and roared down the bayou, splitting the water in a yellow trough behind him. He returned just before dark, sunburned, his face dilated from drinking beer all afternoon, an eleven-pound large-mouth bass iced down in the cooler, the treble hooks of the Rapala still buried deep in its throat. I heard him scaling and scraping out his fish under a faucet on the dock, then he entered the bait shop and washed his hands and face with soap at a sink in back and helped himself to a sandwich off the shelf and a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter, his eyes clear now. He counted the money out of his wallet for the sandwich and coffee, then lost his concentration and knitted his fingers in front of him. "I need to put my schlong in a lockbox," he said. "You're talking about your involvement with Zerelda?" "I can't believe I was in a cell with Frankie Dogs. He was a bodyguard for one of the guys who probably killed John Kennedy. It's like standing next to a disease." "Go back to New Orleans for a while." "That's where all these guys live." "So pull the plug with Zerelda." "Yeah," he said vaguely, looking into space, puffing out the air in one cheek, then the other. "I think she's still got the hots for Perry LaSalle, anyway. I guess he poked her a few times, then decided to zip up his equipment. Zerelda says he did the same thing with Barbara Shanahan." I busied myself at the cash register, then carried out a bucket of water that had drained from the pop cooler and threw it across one of the bait tables. When I came back inside, Clete was looking at me, his face flat. "You don't want to hear about other people's sex lives?" he said. "Not particularly." "Well, you'd better hear this, because this guy LaSalle has thumbtacks in his head and makes a full-time career of finding reasons to jam boards up everybody's ass except his own. "Barbara and Zerelda used to know each other when Barbara and LaSalle were at Tulane together. Barbara wouldn't have anything to do with LaSalle, because LaS
alle's family let Barbara's grandfather do time that should have been theirs. Then one night outside a law-school party on St. Charles, LaSalle saw these gang-bangers tearing up two Vietnamese kids. LaSalle wadedinto about six of them, so they stomped him into marmalade instead of the Vietnamese. "Barbara took LaSalle home and cleaned up his cuts and fed him soup and, guess what, they end up doing the horizontal bop. "Guess what again? LaSalle comes around a few more times for some more boom-boom, then turns her off like she doesn't exist." "This means he has thumbtacks in his head?" I asked. "A guy who dumps a woman like Barbara Shanahan? Either he's got shit for brains or he's a closet bone-smoker." "You called her a woman instead of a broad," I said. Clete raised his eyebrows. "Yeah, I guess I did," he said. The phone rang. When I got finished with the call, Clete was gone. I caught him at his car, out by the boat ramp. "The other day the sheriff told me somebody slashed Legion Guidry's truck tires. You were seen in the neighborhood," I said. "That's a heartbreaking story," he said. "Stay out of it, Cletus." "The show is just getting started, big mon," he replied, and drove away.