His stomach looked like a watermelon under his longsleeved blue shirt. The accent was north Louisiana hill country, the voice absolutely certain when he spoke, and the face absolutely joyless.
He was not a man whom you either liked or disliked. He had been jailing most of his life, and I suspected that at the center of his existence was a loneliness and perversion so great that if he ever became privy to it he would blow his brains all over the ceiling of the little frame house where he lived with others like himself in the free people's compound.
He handed the reins of his horse to a black inmate and walked with a cane up a path through the willows toward me. The bottom of the cane was seated inside a twelve-inch steel tube. A briar pipe protruded from inside the holster belt of his chrome-plated nine-millimeter automatic. He shook hands with the limpness of a man who was not used to social situations, filled his pipe, and pushed the tobacco down with his thumb while his eyes watched the men filling and hefting sandbags below us. I had known him for fifteen years, and I did not once remember his addressing me by name.
"Eddy Raintree," he said, acknowledging my question.
"Yeah, he was one of mine. What about him?"
"I think he helped kill a deputy sheriff. I'd like to run him to ground, but I'm not sure where to start."
He lit his pipe and watched the smoke drift off into the wind.
"His kind used to run their money through their pecker on beer and women. Now they do it with dope. I caught him and another one once cooking down some blues to shoot in an eyedropper. They was using the edge of a dollar bill for an insulator. No more sense than God give a turnip."
"Was he in any racial beefs?"
"When you got nigger and white boys in the same cage, there ain't any of them wouldn't cut each other's throats."
"Do you know if he was in the AB?"
"The what?"
"The Aryan Brotherhood."
"We ain't got that in here."
"That's funny. It's the fashion everywhere else." I tried to smile.
But he was not given to humor about his job.
"Let me sit down. My hip's hurting," he said. He raised his cane in the air and shouted, "Walnut!" A mulatto convict, his denims streaked with mud and sweat, dropped his shovel, picked up a folding chair, ran it up the incline, and popped it open for the captain.
"Tell Mr. Robicheaux what you're in for," the captain said.
"Suh?"
"You heard me."
The convict's eyes focused on a tree farther down the levee.
"Murder, two counts," he said, quietly.
"Whose murder?" the captain asked.
"My kids. They say I shot bof' my kids. That's what they say."
"Get on back to work."
"Yes, suh."
The captain waited until the convict was back down the mud-flat, then said, pointing with the steel tip of his cane, "See that big one yonder, the one flinging them bags up on the levee, he raped an eighty-five-year-old woman, then snapped her neck. You tell these white boys they're gonna have to cell with niggers like them two out yonder or they'll lose their good-time, what do you think's gonna happen?"
"I'm not following you."
He drew in on his pipe, his eyes hazy with a private knowledge. It was overcast, and his lips looked sick and purple against his liver-spotted skin.
"We had two white boys shanked in the Block this year," he said. "One a trusty, one a big stripe. We think the same nigger got both of them, but we can't prove it. If you was a white person living up there, what would you do?"
"So maybe there's something like the AB in Angola?"
"Call it what you want. They got their ways. The goddamn Supreme Court's caused all this." He paused, then continued. "They carve swastikas, crosses, lightning bolts on each other, pour ink in the sores. The black boys don't tend to mess with them, then. Wait a minute, I'll show you something. Shorty! Get it up here!"
"Yow boss!" A coal-black convict, with a neck like a fire hydrant, his face running with sweat, heaved a sandbag against the levee and lumbered up the incline toward us.
"What'd Boss Gilbeau put you in isolation for?" the captain asked.
"Fightin', boss."
"Who was you fighting with, Shorty?"
"One of them boys back in Ash." He grinned, his eyes avoiding both of us.
"Was he white or colored, Shorty?"
"He was white, boss."
"Show Mr. Robicheaux how you burned yourself when you got out of isolation."
"Suh?"
"Pull up your shirt, boy, and don't act ignorant."
The convict named Shorty unbuttoned his sweat-spotted denim shirt and pulled the tail up over his back. There were four gray, thin, crusted lesions across his spine, like his skin had been branded by heated wires or coat hangers.
"How'd you burn yourself, Shorty?" the captain said.
"Backed into the radiator, boss."
"What was the radiator doing on in April?"
"I don't know, suh. I wished it ain't been on. It sure did hurt. Yes, suh."
"Get on back down there. Tell them others to clean it up for lunch."
"Yes, suh."
The captain knocked his pipe out on his boot heel and stuck it back in his holster belt. He gazed out on the wide yellow-brown sweep of the river and the heavy green line of trees on the far side. He didn't speak.
"That's the way it is here, huh?" I said.
"Besides dope, Raintree's problem is his prick. He's got rut for brains. It don't matter if it's male or female, if it's warm and moving he'll try to top it. The other thing you might look for is fortune-tellers. He had astrology maps all over his cell walls. He give a queer in Magnolia a carton of cigarettes a week to read his palm. By the way, it ain't the AB you ought to have on your mind. Them with the swastikas I was telling you about, they get mail from some church out in Idaho calestian Identity. Hayden Lake, Idaho."
He raised himself up on his cane to indicate that our interview was over. I could almost hear his bones crack.
"I thank you for your time, captain," I said.
Then as an afterthought he said, "If you bust that boy, tell him he just as lief hang himself as come back here for killing a policeman."
His pupils were like black cinders in his washed-out blue eyes.
I arrived back at my office just in time to shuffle some papers around on my desk and sign out at five o'clock. I was tired from the round-trip drive up to Angola; my shoulder still hurt where Eddy Raintree had caught me with the crowbar, and I wanted to go home, eat supper, take a run along the dirt road by the bayou, and maybe go to a movie in Lafayette with Alafair and Bootsie.
But parked next to my pickup truck was a waxed fireengine-red Cadillac, with the immaculate white canvas top folded back loosely on the body. A man in ice-cream slacks lay almost supine across the leather seats, one purple suede boot propped up on the window jamb, a sequined sunburst guitar hung across his stomach.
"Allons i Lafayette, pour voir les Itites franCaises, " he sang, then sat up, pulled off his sunglasses with his mutilated hand, and grinned at me. "What's happening, lieutenant?"
"Hello, Lyle."
"Take a ride with me."
"How many of these do you own?"
"They actually belong to the church."
"I bet."
"Take a ride with me."
"I'm on my way home."
"You can blow a few minutes. It's important."
"Do you have anything against talking to me during office hours?"
"Somebody broke into Drew's house last night."
"I didn't hear anything about it. Did she report it to the city police?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Maybe I'll explain that. Take a ride with me." He lifted his guitar over into the back seat. I opened the door and sat back in the deep flesh-colored leather seat next to him. We clanked across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove out of town on East Main. He picked up a paper cup from the floor and drank
out of it. A familiar odor struck my nostrils in the warm air.
"Did you give yourself a dispensation today?" I said.
"I preach against drunkenness, not drinking. There's a big difference."
"Where are we going, Lyle?"
"Not far. Right there," he said, and pointed across a sugarcane field to a collapsed barn, a rusted and motionless windmill, and some brick pilings that had once supported a house. The field behind the barn was unplowed, and in it were a half-dozen oil wells.
We pulled off the parish road into a weed-grown dirt lane that led back to the barn. Lyle cut the engine, removed a pint bottle of bourbon from under the seat, and unscrewed the cap with one thumb. His hair, which he wore on-camera in a waved conk that reminded me of a washboard, was windblown and loose and hanging in his eyes.
"I own a third of it, a third of them wells out there, too," he said. "But I'm not fond of coming out here. I surely ain't."
"Why are we here, then?"
"You got to go back where the dragons live if you want to get rid of them."
"I tried to make myself clear before, Lyle. I sympathize with the problems your family had in the past, but my concern now is with a murdered police officer."
"Drew came home last night from her Amnesty International meeting and she noticed the light on the back porch was out. She went on into the house, and there was a guy in the kitchen, in the dark, looking at her. He had something in his hand, a screwdriver or a knife. She ran back out the front of the house to the neighbor's and tried to get hold of Weldon, then she called me up in Baton Rouge."
"Why didn't she call the cops, Lyle?"
"She thinks she's protecting Weldon from something."
"What?"
"I'm not sure. Neither one of them is real convinced about my religious conversion. They tend to think maybe my brain cells soaked up a little too much purple acid when I came back from Vietnam. So they don't always confide everything in me. But it doesn't matter. I know who that fellow was."
"Your father?"
"I don't have a doubt."
"Everybody else seems to, including me."
He took a sip from his pint bottle and looked away at the red sun over the bayou. The wind was warm, and I could smell the reek of natural gas from the wells.
"What does Drew say? What did this man look like?" I asked.
"She didn't see his face."
"I'll talk to her tomorrow. Now I'd better get back home."
"All right, I'm going to tell you all of it. Then you can do any damn thing you want with it, Loot. But by God, first, you're going to listen."
The scars dripping down the side of his face looked like smooth pieces of red glass in the late sunlight.
CHAPTER 5
And this is the way Lyle told it to me, or as I have reconstructed it.
His mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on a burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink uniform, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard, shucking off their feathers in a caldron of scalding water. The father, Verise, came home later than he should have, parked his pickup by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi's, His shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with sweat and black hair.
The mother sat on a wood chair, with her knees apart in front of the steaming caldron, her forearms covered with wet chicken feathers. Headless chickens flopped all over the grass.
"I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint. Like you some kind of big ladies' man," she said.
"I ain't been with nobody," he said, "except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh."
"You said you'd leave her alone."
"You children go inside."
"That gonna make your conscience right 'cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise."
"I ain't seen her."
"You sonofabitch, I smell her on you," the mother said, and swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across his chest and Levi's.
"You ain't gonna act like that in front of my children, you," he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. "I said y'all get inside. This is between me and her."
Weldon and Lyle were used to their parents' quarrels, and they turned sullenly toward the house; but Drew stood mute and tearful under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.
"Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We're gonna play with the Monopoly game," Lyle said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.
Then Lyle saw his father's large, square hand go up in the air, saw it come down hard against the side of the mother's face, heard the sound of her weeping, as he tried to step into Drew's line of vision and hold her and her cat against his body, hold the three of them tightly together outside the unrelieved sound of his mother's weeping.
Three hours later her car went through the railing on the bridge over the Atchafalaya River. Lyle dreamed that night that an enormous brown bubble arose from the submerged wreck, and when it burst on the surface her drowned breath stuck against his face as wet and rank as gas released from a grave.
The woman called Mattie wore shorts and sleeveless blouses with sweat rings under the arms, and in the daytime she always seemed to have curlers in her hair. When she walked from room to room, she carried an ashtray with her, into which she constantly flicked her lipstick-stained Chesterfields. She had a hard, muscular body, and she didn't close the bathroom door when she bathed; once Lyle saw her kneeling in the tub, scrubbing her big shoulders and chest with a large, flat brush. The area above her head was crisscrossed with improvised clotheslines, from which dripped her wet underthings. Her eyes fastened on his, and he thought she was about to reprimand him for staring at her; but instead her hard-boned, shiny face continued to look back at him with a vacuous indifference that made him feel obscene.
If Verise was out of town on a Friday or Saturday night, she fixed the children's supper, put on her blue suit, and sat by herself in the living room, listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride, while she drank apricot brandy from a coffee cup. She always dropped cigarette ashes on her suit and had to spot-clean the cloth with drycleaning fluid before she drove off for the evening in her old Ford coupe. They didn't know where she went on those Friday or Saturday nights, but a boy down the road told them that Mattie used to work in Broussard's Bar on Railroad Avenue, an infamous area in New Iberia where the women sat on the galleries of the cribs, dipping their beer out of buckets and yelling at the railroad and oil-field workers in the street.
Then one morning when Verise was in Morgan City a man in a new silver Chevrolet sedan came out to see her. It was hot, and he parked his car partly on the grass to keep it in the shade. He wore sideburns, striped brown zoot slacks, two-tone shoes, suspenders, a pink shirt without a coat, and a fedora that shadowed his narrow face. While he talked to her he put one shoe on the car bumper and wiped the dust off it with a rag. Then their voices grew louder and he said, "You like the life. Admit it, you. He ain't given you no wedding ring, has he? You don't buy the cow, no, when you can milk through the fence."
"I am currently involved with a gentleman. I do not know what you are talking about. I am not interested in anything you are talking about," she said.
He threw the rag back inside the car and opened the car door.
"It's always trick, trade, or travel, darling'," he said. "Same rules here as down on Railroad. He done made you a nigger woman for them children, Mattie."
"Are you calling me a nigra?" she said quietly.
"No, I'm calling you crazy, just like everybody say you are. No, I take that back, me. I ain't calling you nothing. I ain't got to, 'cause you gonna be back. You in the life, Mattie. You be phoning me to come out here, bring you to the crib, rub your back,
put some of that warm stuff in your arm again. Ain't nobody else do that for you, huh?"
When she came back into the house she made the children take all the dishes out of the cabinets, even though they were clean, and wash them over again.
It was the following Friday that the principal at the Catholic elementary school called about a large welt on Lyle's neck. Mattie was already dressed to go out. She didn't bother to turn down the radio when she answered the phone, and in order to compete with Red Foley's voice she had to almost shout into the receiver.
"Mr. Sonnier is not here," she said. "Mr. Sonnier is away on business in Port Arthur… No, ma'am, I'm not the housekeeper. I'm a friend of the family who is caring for these children… There's nothing wrong with that boy that I can see…. Are you calling to tell me that there's some thing wrong, that I'm doing something wrong? What is it that I'm doing wrong? I would like to know that. What is your name?"
Lyle stood transfixed with terror in the hall as she bent angrily into the mouthpiece and her knuckles ridged on the receiver. A storm was blowing in from the Gulf, the air smelled of ozone, and the southern horizon was black with thunderclouds that crawled with white electricity. Lyle heard the wind ripping through the trees in the yard and pecans rattling down on the gallery roof like grapeshot.
When Mattie hung up the phone the skin of her face was tight against the bone and one liquid eye was narrowed at him like someone aiming down a rifle barrel.
All That winter Verise started working regular hours, what he called "an indoor job," at a chemical plant in Port Arthur, and the children saw him only on weekends. Mattie cooked only the evening meal and made the children responsible for the care of the house and the other two meals. Weldon started to get into trouble at school. His eighth-grade teacher, a laywoman, called and said he had thumb-tacked a girl's dress to the desk during class, causing her to almost tear it off her body when the bell rang, and he would either pay for the dress or be suspended. Mattie hung up the phone on her, and two days later the girl's father, a sheriff's deputy, came out to the house and made Mattie give him four dollars on the gallery.
She came back inside, slamming the door, her face burning, grabbed Weldon by the neck of his T-shirt, and walked him into the backyard, where she made him stand for two hours on an upended apple crate until he wet his pants.
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