DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

by James Lee Burke

  Later, at the office, Wally walked down the corridor from the dispatcher's cage and opened my door and leaned inside. "That soldier, the nutjob, the one who claimed he knew you in Vietnam?" he said. "What about him?" I asked. "He's hanging around New Iberia High. They've got summer-school classes in session now. One of the teachers called and says they want him out of there." "What'd he do?" "She said he's got all his junk piled up on the sidewalk and he tries to make conversation with the kids when they walk by." "I think he's harmless," I said. "Could be," Wally replied. His hair was a coppery-reddish color, his sideburns neatly defined. His eyes were bright with an unspoken statement. "What is it?" I asked. “Youcheck your mail this morning?" "No." "If you had, you might have seen a note I put in there late yesterday. We got a complaint he was bothering a couple of hookers over on Railroad. On the same corner where Linda Zeroski used to work." "Thanks, Wally," I said. "Any time. Wish I could be a detective. You guys got all the smarts and stay on top of everything while us grunts clean the toilets. You think I could sharpen up my smarts if I went to night school?" he said. I checked out a cruiser and drove to the high school. I saw the ex-soldier sitting in a shady spot on his rolled-up tent, his back propped against a fence, watching the traffic roar by. His face was clean-shaved, his hair washed and cut, and he wore a pair of new jeans and an oversize T-shirt emblazoned front and back with an American flag. I pulled the cruiser to the curb. "How about coffee and a doughnut, Doc?" I said. He squinted up at a palm tree, then watched a helicopter thropping across the sky. "I don't mind," he said. We packed his duffel bag, his rolled-up tent, and a plastic clothes basket filled with cook gear, magazines, and canned goods into the backseat of the cruiser, then drove to the center of town and crossed the train tracks to a doughnut shop. "Wait here. I'll get it to go," I said. "You don't want to go inside?" he asked, his face vaguely hurt. "It's a nice day. Let's eat it in the park," I replied. I went inside the store and bought pastry and two paper cups of hot coffee, then drove across the drawbridge into City Park and stopped by one of the tin-roofed picnic shelters next to Bayou Teche. He sat at the plank table, his coffee and a doughnut on a napkin in front of him, gazing through the live oaks at the children swimming in the public pool. "You ever been in trouble?" I asked. "I been in jail." "What for?" I asked. "For whatever they wanted to make up." "You're looking copacetic, Doc." "I went to the Catholic men's shelter in Lafayette. They give me new clothes and a haircut. They're nice people." "What were you doing over on Railroad Avenue yesterday?" His face colored. He bit a large piece out of his doughnut and drank from his coffee and fixed his attention on the gardens in the backyard of the Shadows, across the bayou. "You don't have a girlfriend on Railroad, do you?" I said, and smiled at him. "The woman didn't have no cigarettes. So I went in the store and bought some for her." "Yeah?" I said. "She took the cigarettes, then I asked her why she didn't change her life." I kept my eyes averted, my expression flat. "I see. What happened then?" I said. "She and the other broad laughed at me. They laughed for a long time, real loud." "The report says you threw a rock at them." "I kicked a rock. It hit their pimp's car. Take me back where you found me. Or put me in that shit bucket you call a jail. You want a lesson, Loot? Everybody does time. It just depends on where you do it. I do my fucking time wherever I am." He pointed a stiffened index finger into the side of his head. "I got stuff in here worse than anything you motherfuckers could ever do to me." "I believe you," I said. In seconds his face had gone from pity to rage. Then, just as quickly, he seemed to disconnect from his own rhetoric and fix his attention on a butterfly that had just come to rest on a camellia leaf, its pink and gray wings gathered together, its purchase on the leaf tenuous and unsteady. When the breeze came up, the butterfly fell to the ground, among red ants that had nested below the camellia bush. The ex-soldier, who in my encounters with him had given me three different Italian names, got down on all fours and lifted the butterfly up on a twig and walked it down to the bayou, protecting it from the wind with his cupped hand. He stooped and set it inside a hollow cypress on a mound of moss. I cleaned up our trash and wedged three fingers inside his paper cup and placed it inside the cardboard box containing the rest of our doughnuts. After I dropped him off on Main, I drove out to the crime lab by the airport and asked one of our forensic chemists to lift the latentson the cup and run them through AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. "We got any kind of priority?" he said. "Tell them it's part of a homicide investigation," I replied.

  That afternoon Clete Purcel picked up Barbara Shanahan after work, and the two of them drove to a western store, located on the south end of town among strip malls and huge discount outlets whose parking lots were blown with trash. Clete sat in his convertible and listened to the radio while Barbara went inside and bought a western shirt and a silver belt buckle as a birthday gift for her uncle. While the clerk processed her credit card, she felt a sense of uneasiness that she could not explain, a tiny twitch in her back, a puff of fouled air on her neck, although the front door of the store was closed and no one stood behind her. Then she smelled cigarette smoke, even though the store was supposedly a smoke-free environment. She turned and looked down an aisle lined with racks of cowboy boots and hand-tooled leather purses and saw a tall, sinewy man, with vertical furrows in his face, wearing a snap-button, long-sleeved maroon shirt, a Panama hat at a jaunty angle, starched khaki trousers, and a chrome belt buckle with a rearing brass horse on it. The man was smoking a nonfiltered cigarette with two fingers that were yellow with nicotine. His eyes moved over her face, her breasts and stomach, her hips and thighs. Inside the shadow of his hat brim, a smile wrinkled at the corner of his mouth. For some reason her credit card did not clear. The clerk started to excuse himself. "Where are you going?" she asked. "The line's down. I don't know what's wrong. I have to use a separate line," he replied. "I can pay cash," she said. "That's all right, ma'am. I'll be right back," he said, and walked away. She looked straight ahead, examining a row of antique firearms on the wall. Then she smelled an odor behind her, like sweat and unrinsed soap detergent ironed into someone's clothes. No, that wasn't it. It was far worse, raw and dead smelling, like a rat buried inside a wall. She turned and stared into Legion Guidry's face, only inches from her own. He took a puff off his cigarette and averted his face and blew his smoke at an upward angle. "Is there something I can help you with?" she said. "I seen you. Both you and him," he said. He nodded toward the parking lot, where Clete sat in his car, reading a magazine. "You saw me? What are you talking about?" she said. "What you t'ink? T'rew your window. You must be hard up, you. To let some shithog like that one out yonder put his dick in you." She tried to step back from his words, from the smell that seemed auraed on his body. She felt the edge of the glass counter knock into her back. He laughed under his breath and spit a grain of tobacco off his tongue and started to walk away. Her hand went into her purse. "Wait," she said. He dropped his cigarette to the wood floor and twisted his shoe on it, then turned. "What you want, bitch?" he said. Her hand closed around her car and house and office keys. They were mounted on a ring, and the ring was mounted on a stainless-steel handle. She pulled the keys out of her purse and swung them, like a sock filled with scrap iron, across his face. "You ever look through my window again, you pathetic fuck, I'll blow your goddamn liver out," she said. A narrow welt, needle-pointed with blood, appeared just below his eye. He touched it with the balls of his fingers, then rubbed them against his thumb. He reached out and clenched her hand in his, squeezing, cupping the bones behind the knuckles into a circle of pain, blowing his breath into her face, touching her hair with it, tracing her eyes and mouth with it, causing her to push her free hand against his chest like a child. "I know where that shithog live. Y'all gonna be seeing a lot more of me. You gonna like it, you," he said. Then he walked toward the rear of the store, past customers who stepped back from him, stunned and open-mouthed. He pushed through the back door, and the interior of the store was filled with a hot light like the
sun leaping off a heliograph. Then Legion Guidry was gone. Clete opened the front door and walked into the air-conditioning, his face puzzled. "Anything wrong? What's that smell?" he said.

  That evening, just at sunset, I ran four miles on the dirt road that wound past my house. The moss was blowing in the trees along the road, and I could smell water sprinklers twirling on my neighbors' lawns and the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou. The sugarcane and cattle acreage and distant clumps of pecan trees behind the houses had already fallen into shadow, but the summer light still filled the sky, as though somehow it had a life of its own and was not affected by the setting of the sun. Then a huge flock of birds rose out of the swamp and freckled the perfection of the sky directly overhead, and for some reason I thought of a painting by Van Gogh, a cornfield suddenly invaded by black crows. A gas-guzzler passed me, with two figures in the front seat, then stopped at a bend in the road, the muffler rattling against the frame. The driver cut the engine and got out and stood with one arm propped across the top of the door, waiting. He wore a pink shirt unbuttoned on his chest and black trousers, stitched with silver thread, that hung down below his navel. His throat and chest ran with sweat. I slowed and wiped my face with a bandanna, then tied it around my forehead. "Just taking a drive?" I said. "I'll go into that treatment program you was talking about," Tee Bobby said. "What changed your mind?" "I cain't take it no more." I leaned down slightly, below the top of the car door. "How you doin', Rosebud?" I asked. His sister smiled lazily, in a private and self-indulgent way, then her eyes closed and opened vacantly and looked at nothing. "Your trial is in a couple of weeks," I said to Tee Bobby. "If I'm in a treatment program, I can get it postponed. See, a guy got to be able to hep with his own defense." "Talk to Mr. Perry. You can't scam the court." "Ain't no scam. I'm sick. Perry LaSalle ain't worriedabout me. He worried about his family, his pink ass, hisConfederate flags and portraits he got all over thewalls." "Know what's bothered me from the jump on this deal, Tee Bobby? It's the fact you've got everything else in the world on your mind except the death of that girl. Yourself, your habit, your music, your troubles with Jimmy Sty and Perry LaSalle, a kind of general discontent with the entire universe. But that poor girl's murder never seems to enter your thought processes." "Don't say that," he said, "Amanda Boudreau. That was her name. Amanda Boudreau. It's never going to go away. Amanda Boudreau. You knew her. She was your friend. You saw her die. Don't tell me you didn't, Tee Bobby. Say her name and look me in the eye and tell me you're not responsible in any way for her death. Say her name, Tee Bobby. Amanda Boudreau." Rosebud twisted against her seat strap and began to keen and slap the seat and the dashboard, her face round with fear, the corners of her mouth flecked with slobber. "See what you done? I hate you, you white motherfucker. I hate Perry LaSalle and I hate every drop of white blood I got in my veins. I hate yall in ways yall cain't even think about," Tee Bobby said, and smashed his fists into the window glass of the back door, again and again, the glass flying into the interior, his knuckles flaying against the broken edges. I stared at him stupidly, only now realizing some of the complexities that drove Tee Bobby's soul. "Perry should plead you out, but he's not. He's feeding you to the lions, isn't he? Perry's connected in some way to Amanda's death," I said. But Tee Bobby had gotten behind the wheel of his car again and started the engine, the backs of his hands slick with blood. He floored his car down the road while his sister screamed insanely out the window.

  CHAPTER 25

  The next morning was Friday. I awoke early, rested, my mind free of dreams and nocturnal worries, the trees outside filled with birdsong. Wednesday night I had broken into the home of Legion Guidry and had probably experienced the most bizarre behavior I had ever witnessed in a human being, namely, the revelation of what I believed to be an enormous evil presence living inside a man who looked little different than the rest of us. But nonetheless, because I had been able to tell him I would pursue no personal vendetta against him, I felt freed of Legion Guidry and the violation he had committed against my person. The white worm was gone. I didn't feel the need to drink and use. Bootsie's body was warm with sleep under the sheet, the breeze from the window fan ruffling her hair on the pillow. I kissed the back of her neck and began makingbreakfast, then noticed an unopened envelope from Reed College under the toaster, the same envelope I had seen two days earlier on the couch. It was addressed to Alafair, and the fact that she had not opened it told me what the contents were. Ever since she and I had gone on a backpacking trip up the Columbia River Gorge, she had longed to return to the Oregon coast and to major in English and creative writing at Reed. She had applied for a scholarship, then had realized that even with a grant we would still have to pay several thousand more in fees than we would if she chose to commute to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I sliced open the envelope and read the letter of congratulations awarding her most of her tuition for her first year. I went into the living room and wrote out a two-thousand-dollar check to be applied against her registration and dormitory fees for her first semester, placed a stamp on the return envelope, and walked out to the road and stuck it in the mailbox, then flipped up the red flag for the postman. When I came back inside, Alafair was seated at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She had put on makeup and a powder-blue dress and earrings. Through the back screen door I could see Tripod eating out of a bowl on the steps, his ringed tail damp with dew. "Where you headed?" I asked. "Over to UL. I'm going to enroll, get things started," she replied. "Hear anything from Reed?" . "Not exactly. I've decided against it, anyway. I can learn as much here as I can out there." "You look pretty, Alafair. When I grow up, I'm going to marry you," I said. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," she said. "You're going to Reed." "No, it was a bad idea. I wasn't using my head." "It's a done deal, kid. Your scholarship came through. I sent them a check for your fees." Her eyes were a dark brown, her hair like black water on her cheeks. She was quiet a long time. "You did that?" she asked. "Sure. What did you think I'd do, Alf?" "I love you, Dave." The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record.

  Iwent to the office, then signed out at ten o'clock and drove south toward Poinciana Island, crossing the freshwater bay that separated the island from the rest of the parish. At the far end of the bridge the security guard came out of the little wooden booth he used as an office and flagged me down. He wore a gray uniform and a holstered revolver, an American flag sewn to his shirtsleeve. His face was young and sincere under his cap. He held a clipboard in one hand and bent down toward my window. "You're here to see somebody, sir?" he said. "My name's Dave Robicheaux. I'm a police officer. Otherwise I probably wouldn't be driving a sheriffs cruiser," I replied, and took off my sunglasses and grinned at him. "You're Mr. Robicheaux?" He glanced down at his cupboard. He cleared his throat and looked away nervously. "Mr. Robicheaux, I ain't supposed to let you on the island." "Why not?" "Mr. Perry just says there's some folks ain't supposed to come on the island." "You did your job. But now you need to get on the phone and call Mr. Perry and tell him I just drove across your bridge on official business. Our conversation on this is over, okay?" "Yes, sir." "Thank you," I said, and drove onto the island, out of the sun's white glare into the damp coolness of trees and shade-blooming four-o'clocks and the thick stands of water-beaded elephant ears that grew along the water's edge. I followed the winding road to the log-and-brick house where Ladice Hulin lived, directly across from the scorched stucco shell of Julian LaSalle's home. She came to the door on her cane, wearing a print dress, her thick gray hair pinned up on her head with a costume-jewelry comb, her gold chain and religious medal bright on her throat. "I knowed you was coming," she said through the screen. "How?" " 'Cause I cain't hide the troot no more," she said, and stepped out on the gallery. "I'd ax you in, but Rosebud's sleeping. She come in last night, moaning and crying and hiding in the closet. She's got terrible t'ings locked up in her head. Some of this is on me, Mr. Dave." She sat down in her wicker chair and gazed across the road at the peacock
s that wandered lumpily through the shade trees arching over the ruins of Julian LaSalle's home. "How is it on you, Miss Ladice?" I asked. "Lies I tole," she replied. "People always thought your daughter was fathered by Mr. Julian. But I think the father was actually Legion Guidry. He raped you, didn't he? I suspect on a repeated basis." "People didn't call it rape back then. The overseer just took any black woman he wanted. Go to the sheriff, go to the city police, they'd listen while you talked, not saying nothing, maybe writing on a piece of paper, then when you was gone they'd call up the man who had raped you and tell him everything you'd said." "When did Tee Bobby learn his grandfather is Legion Guidry?" I asked. I saw her knuckles tighten on the handle of her cane. She studied the scene across the road, the peacocks picking in Julian LaSalle's yard, a scattering of poppies, like drops of blood, around a rusted metal roadside cross put there by a friend of Mrs. LaSalle's. "I always tole Tee Bobby his granddaddy was Mr. Julian," she replied. "I t'ought it was better he didn't know the blood of a man like Legion was in his veins. But this spring Tee Bobby wanted money to go out to California and make a record. He went to see Perry LaSalle." "To blackmail him?" "No, he t'ought he deserved the money. He t'ought Perry LaSalle was gonna be proud Tee Bobby was gonna make a record. He t'ought they was in the same family." She shook her head. "It was me who put that lie in his life, that made him the po' li'l innocent boy he is." "Perry told him Legion is his grandfather?" "When Tee Bobby come back to the house, he t'rew t'ings against the wall. He put Rosebud in his car and said he was gonna meet Jimmy Dean Styles and fix it so he could take Rosebud out to California, away from Lou'sana and the t'ings white people done to our family." "I see. That was the day Amanda Boudreau died?" "That was the day. Oh, Lord, this all started 'cause I t'ought I could seduce Mr. Julian and go to college. Tee Bobby and that white girl got to pay for my sin," she said. "You didn't choose the world you were born into. Why don't you give yourself a break?" I said. She started to get up, then her arm shook on her cane and she fell back heavily into her chair, dust ballooning out from her dress, her face riven with disbelief at what age and time and circumstance and the unrequited longings of her heart had done to her life.