"Elton doesn't have a phone, does he?"
"He doesn't have any plumbing. I don't know why he'd have a phone."
I looked at my watch.
"Maybe I have time to stop by his place just a minute. It's not far, is it?" I said.
"Straight down the road to the levee. You can't miss it. Just follow your nose. Hah!"
"By the way, how's Elton's eye?"
"It looks like worms ate it. Are you doing some kind of missionary work or something?"
The violet air was thick with insects as I drove down the yellow road toward the levee and the marsh. The road crossed the Southern Pacific tracks, then followed alongside a green levee that was covered with buttercups. On the other side of the levee were a canal, a chain of willow islands and sandbars, and a bay full of dead cypress. Three hundred yards from the track crossing was a fishing shack, a small box of a place with a collapsed gallery, an outhouse, an overflowing garbage barrel in back. Both a pirogue and a boat with an outboard engine were tied to wood stobs driven into the mudflat. A chopped-down Harley was parked on the far side of the gallery, its chrome glinting with the sun's last red light. The sky was black with birds.
I parked the truck down the levee, took my World War II Japanese field glasses from my locked toolbox, which the kids from the Iberville project hadn't gotten into, and waited. It was going to be a hot night. The air was perfectly still, heated from the long afternoon, stale with the smell of dead water beetles and alligator gars that fishermen had thrown up on the bank. I studied the shack through the field glasses. The garbage barrel boiled with flies, an. orange cat was eating a fishhead in a bowl on the shack step, a man walked past a window.
Then he was gone before I could focus on his face.
Finally it was dark, and the man inside the shack lit an oil lamp, opened a tin can at a table, and ate from it with a fork, hunched over with his back toward me. Then he urinated off the back steps with a bottle of beer in one hand, and I saw his big granite head in the light from the door, and the muscles that swelled in his shoulders like lumps of garden hose.
When he was back inside I got out of the truck with my.45 in my hand, crossed the levee, and moved through the darkness toward the shack. The willows were motionless, etched against a yellow moon, and I saw a moccasin as thick as my wrist uncoil off a log, drop into the water, and swim in a silvery V toward a dead neutria who had been hit by a boat propeller. The man moved in silhouette across the window, and I slid back the receiver on the.45, eased a hollow-point into the chamber, and walked quickly up the mud-bank to the back steps. I heard train cars jolt together, then a locomotive backing along the tracks on the far side of the levee.
Now, I thought, and I cleared the three steps in, one jump, burst into the shack, into a reek of stale sweat that was as close and gray as a damp cotton glove. His head looked up from the comic book that was spread on his knees. I aimed the.45 straight into the face of Eddy Raintree.
"Hands behind your neck, down on the floor! Do it, do it, do it!" I shouted.
The skin around his right eye was puckered with white sores. I shoved him off the chair amid a litter of newspapers, beer cans, and fast-food containers. His weight bowed the floor planks. I put the.45 behind his ear.
"All the way down on your face, Eddy," I said, and began to pull the handcuffs from the back of my belt.
That should have been the end of it. But I got careless.
Maybe my alcoholic dreams and sleeplessness of the previous night were to blame, or the eye-watering body odor that filled the room, or the sudden slamming of freight cars out in the darkness. But in the time it took the handcuffs to drop from my fingers, my vision to slip off the back of his head, he spun around like an animal turning in a box, grabbed the.45 with both hands, and locked his teeth on the knuckle of my right thumb.
His eyes were close-set like a pig's in the lamplight, his jaws knotted with cartilage, trembling with exertion. Blood spurted across the back of my hand; I could feel his teeth biting into the bone. I clubbed desperately at the back of his thick neck. His coarse, oily skin felt like rubber under my knuckles.
I was almost ready to drop the gun when he rammed his shoulder into my chest and dove headlong through the front window curtain.
My right hand quivered uncontrollably. I picked up the.45 with my left and went out the front door after him. He was running along the levee next to a stopped freight that must have been a mile long. The locomotive was haloed with white light and wisps of vapor, and in front of it gandy walkers were repairing track in the red glare of burning flares.
Eddy Raintree must have received his dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps before a DI could teach him to stay off the crests of hills and embankments and never run in a straight line when someone is making a study of you through iron sights.
It felt strange to fire the.45 with my left hand. It leaped upward in my grasp as though it had a life of its own. Both rounds whanged and sparked off the sides of a gondola, and Eddy Raintree kept running, his head hunched into his shoulders. I knelt in the weeds, sighted low to allow for the recoil, let out my breath slowly, and squeezed off another round. His right leg went out from under him as though it had been struck with a baseball bat, and he toppled down the far side of the levee to the railroad bed.
When I slid down the embankment and got to him he had his palm pressed tightly against his thigh and was trying to pull himself erect on a metal rung at the end of a boxcar.
His hand was shining and wet, and his face had already gone white with shock. A sweet, fetid odor came from the car, and then I saw that it was actually built of slats and contained cages.
"Sit down, Eddy," I said.
He breathed hard through his mouth. His eyes were bright and mean, the whites flecked with blood.
"It's over, partner. Don't have any wrong thoughts about that. Now sit down and give me your wrist," I said.
He tried not to grimace as he eased himself down on the gravel. I cuffed one wrist, looped the chain through the iron rung on the car, and cuffed the other wrist. Then I patted him down.
"What the fuck's this train carrying?" he said.
I split open his pants leg with my Puma knife. The entry hole in the skin was black and no bigger than the ball of my index finger. But it took my wadded handkerchief to cover the exit wound. I slipped my belt around his thigh and tightened it with a stick.
"What the fuck is in that car?" he said. His long hair hung from his head like string on a pumpkin.
"I'm going to give you the lay of the land, Eddy. You're leaking pretty bad. I'm going to run up ahead and ask those train guys to radio for an ambulance. But if we can't get one out here right away, I think we should dump you into my truck and head into Baton Rouge."
The side of his face twitched.
"What's the game?" he said.
"No game. You've got a big hole in you. You're going to need some blood."
"That's it? I'm suppose to get scared now? I had a nigger gunbull sweat me with a cattle prod till he ran out of batteries. Go fuck yourself."
"Read it like you want. I'm going to the head of the train, then I'll be back and we'll load you in my truck."
He twisted his head around at a sound inside the railroad car.
"There's fucking lions or tigers in there, man," he said.
"It's part of a circus. They're in cages. They can't hurt YOU."
"What if they back up the fucking train while you're taking a walk?"
"You dealt the play, Eddy. Live with it. Keep that belt tight and don't move your leg around."
"Hey, man, come here. Cuff me to that light over there."
"It's too far to move you."
"What the fuck's with you? You enjoy people's pain or something?"
"I'll be back, Eddy."
"All right, man, I'll trade. Jewel smoked the cop in the basement. But I didn't have any part in it. We were just there to creep the joint. You saw me, I didn't have a piece."
"T
hat's not much of a trade."
He waited a moment, then he said, "There's a whack out On Sonnier and the broad, both."
"Which broad?"
"His sister." He wet his lips. "I can't swear it, but I think the whack's out on you, too. You're a hair in the wrong guy's nose."
"Which guy?"
"That's all you get, motherfucker. I cut a deal, it's in custody, with a lawyer and the prosecutor there."
"I think you're a gasbag, Eddy, but I don't want to see you die of fright." I uncuffed one wrist, then locked both of his arms behind him. "Lie quietly. I'm going to ask a couple of those gandy walkers to help me put you in the truck."
"Hey, man, those animals smell my blood. Hey, man, come back here!"
He lay on his side in the gravel and weeds, his face sallow and slick with sweat in the humid air. His manacled arms were ropy with muscle, as though he were being hung from a great height, as though his tattoos were about to pop from his skin. A breeze blew across the levee, and I could smell the moist odor of animal dung and almost taste Eddy Raintree's fear of his own kind.
I walked three hundred yards to the head of the train, showed my badge to the engineer, and told him to radio to Baton Rouge for an ambulance. Then I asked two black gandy walkers to help me with Eddy Raintree. They wore din-streaked undershirts, and their black skin was beaded with sweat in the red light of the track flares. They looked at their crew foreman, who was white.
"Go ahead, boys," he said.
They walked behind me, back toward where Eddy Raintree lay on his side in the weeds and gravel. I heard the deep-throated sound of a tiger or lion in the wind. I turned to say something light to the black men, when one of them pointed into the distance.
"You got somebody coming yonder on a motorcycle," he said.
I saw the headlight and the starlit silhouette of the bike and a small rider bounce down the side of the levee and come hard along the line of train cars. I could already see Eddy Raintree trying to rise to one knee, as he realized that he might still have another frolic in the funhouse.
It was very quick after that.
I pulled the.45 from my belt and broke into a run. The motorcycle passed Eddy Raintree, skidded in the gravel, and circled back in the direction it had come from, the headlight beam bouncing off the sides of the train. At first I thought the small rider was trying to swing Eddy up behind him, the way a rodeo pickup man scoops up a thrown cowboy. Then I saw a rigid object about two feet long in his hand, saw him extend it out beside him, and in my naivety I thought it might be bolt cutters, that Raintree would lift up his manacled wrists, and the small rider would snap him free and I would be left breathless and exhausted while they disappeared over the levee into the darkness.
But I was close enough now to see that it was a shotgun, with the barrel sawed off right in front of the pump. Eddy Raintree had made it to one knee and was frozen in the headlight's radiance, like an armless man trying to genuflect in church, when the shotgun roared upward three inches from his chin.
Then the small rider opened up his bike, one boot skipping along the rocks for balance, and wove the bike up the levee in a shower of dirt and divots of grass and buttercups.
My chest was heaving, my arm shaking, when I let off two rounds at his toylike silhouette just before he hit it full-bore, his head bent low, and disappeared in a long roll of diminishing thunder between the levee and the willow islands.
Eddy Raintree's buttocks were collapsed on his heels. His head was turned away from me, as though he were trying to hide his facial expression or a secret that he wished to take with him to another place. The animals in the circus car crashed wildly about in their wire cages. I touched Eddy Raintree lightly on the shoulder, and it rotated downward with gravity on the severed tendons in his neck.
One of the gandy walkers vomited.
"Oh Lord God, look what they done to that po' man," the other said. "His face hanging off the wrong side of his head."
CHAPTER 9
It was after midnight before I finished with the paramedics, local sheriff's deputies, an angry detective who accused me of operating in his jurisdiction without first contacting his office, and the parish medical examiner, who, like many of his kind, had aspirations to be a comedian.
"You could can that guy's B.O. as a chemical weapon and bring the Iranians to their knees," he said. "I'd consider rabies shots."
When I got into my truck I knew I should drive straight back to New Iberia. That would have been the reasonable thing to do. But my late-night hours had never been characterized by reason, neither as a practicing or as a recovering drunk.
Less than an hour later I was on Highland Drive, west of the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, and I turned out of the long corridor of oaks into a brick-paved driveway lined with a brick fence and rosebushes. It led to an enormous white house with antebellum pretensions that might have been built five minutes ago on a Hollywood movie set. The trim on the front door was pink, the brass-work as bright and portentous as gold.
When he opened the front door in his pajamas, the breeze made the chandelier over his head ring with sound and light.
"Bootsie needs your help," I said. "No, that's not really true. I need it for her. I'm out there on the rim, Lyle."
CHAPTER 10
The next morning was Saturday, and I should have been Toff for the day, but the dispatcher called at 9 A.M.
"What do you want to do with these four guys Levy and Guillory brought in?" he asked.
What four guys?"
"The bums Levy and Guillory brought in from the shelters. Levy said you were looking for guys who'd been in an ugly-man contest. You've got some beauts here, Dave."
I had completely forgotten.
"Where are they now?" I said.
"In the drunk tank."
"How long have they been there?"
"Since yesterday."
"Get them out of there. I'll be right down."
Fifteen minutes later I was at the office. I walked down a corridor to a holding cell, where the four men patiently waited for me on a single wood bench. In the center of the cell floor was a urine-streaked drain hole. The men all had the emaciated characteristics of people whose lives existed on a straight line between the blood bank and the wine store. Like most professional tramps, they had a strange chemical odor about them, as though their glands had long ago stopped functioning properly and now secreted only a synthetic substitute for natural body fluids. I opened up the barred door.
One man's head was misshapen, broken on one side like a dented walnut; the second's face was eaten with a skin disease that looked like skin cancer; the third had a bad harelip and virtually no cartilage in his nose; but it was the face of the fourth man on the bench that made me wince inside.
"Have you guys eaten?" I said.
They nodded that they had, except the man on the end.
His eyes never blinked and never left my face.
"I'm sorry about what happened," I said. "I didn't mean for you to be locked up. I had just wanted to talk to you, but I went out of town and my orders got a little confused."
They made no reply. They shuffled their shoes on the concrete floor and looked at the backs of their hands. Then the man with the skin disease said, "It ain't bad. They got TV."
"Anyway, I apologize to you guys," I said. "A deputy will drive you back to wherever you want to go. He'll also give you a voucher for a meal at a cafe in town. Here's my business card. If you ever want to pick up a dollar or two sanding down some boats, call that number."
They rose as one to go out the open cell door.
"Say, podna, would you stay a minute with me?" I said to the last man on the bench.
He sat back down indifferently and began rolling a cigarette. I took a chair from the corridor and sat opposite him.
His whole head looked like it had been put in a furnace.
The ears were burnt into stubs; the hairless red scar tissue looked like it had been applied in layers to the bone
with a putty knife; part of the lips had been surgically removed so that the teeth and gums were exposed in a permanent sneer.
He rolled the tobacco into a tight cylinder, wet down the glued seam, and crimped the edges. He lifted his eyes up to mine. They looked as lidless, as reptilian and liquid as a chamelcon's. He popped a match aflame on his thumbnail.
It was as thick and purple as tortoise shell.
"You like my face?" he asked.
"What's your name?"
"Vic."
"Vic what?"
"Vic Who-gives-a-shit? One name's good as another, I figure."
"How about giving me your last name?"
"Benson."
"How'd you get hurt, podna?"
He put his cigarette in the hole where his lips were pared away at the corner of his mouth. He blew smoke out toward the bars. "In a tank," he said.
"You were in the service?"
"That's right."
"Where'd you serve?"
"Korea."
"Your tank got nailed?"
"You got it."
"Where in Korea?"
"Second day, at Heartbreak Ridge. What's all this stuff about?"
"There're some people who say they've seen a man with your description looking through their windows."
"Yeah? Must be my twin brother." He laughed, and saliva welled up on his gum.
"There's a preacher in Baton Rouge who thinks a man who looks like you might be his father."
"I had a son once. But I didn't raise no preacher."
"You ever hear of a woman called Mattie?"
He took his cigarette carefully off his lip and tipped the ashes between his knees.
"Did you hear me, podna?" I said.
His eyes regarded me quietly.
"You guys got nothing else to do except this kind of stuff?." he asked.
"Did you know a woman named Mattie?"
"No, I didn't."
He picked at a scab inside his wasted forearm.
"How often do you go to the blood bank?" I asked.
A Stained White Radiance dr-5 Page 16
