DR01 - The Neon Rain

by James Lee Burke

  Then Bobby Joe's arms let go of my neck, as though he had tired of me, and I collapsed in a gasping, embryonic heap on the floor. I lay with one eye pressed against the wet tile.

  "Get out there and see what it is!" the man in the raincoat said.

  Bobby Joe stood erect, stepped over me, and was gone.

  "Had a mind-change about Fitzpatrick?" the man in the raincoat said.

  I couldn't answer. In fact, at that point I didn't even remember the name. Then I heard Bobby Joe in the doorway.

  "His bitch got her feet loose from the bedstead and kicked a lamp through the window. The whole goddamn backyard is full of people from a party," he said.

  "Travel time," the man in the raincoat said. He stood up and combed his hair as he walked past me. "You're a big winner tonight, Lieutenant. But let the experience work for you. Don't try to play in the major leagues. It's a shitty life, believe me. Big risks, lots of crazy people running around, few side benefits like the piece you've got in the next room. You've got cojones, but the next time around, Bobby Joe and Erik will cut them off."

  Then they went out the front door into the dark like three macabre harlequins who on impulse visited the quiet world of ordinary people with baseball bats.

  Three patrol cars from the Second District, an ambulance, and a fire truck answered the neighbor's emergency call. Revolving red and blue lights reflected off the trees and houses; the lawn and house were filled with patrolmen, paramedics, firemen in yellow slickers, neighbors drinking beer and sangria, people writing on clipboards and talking into static-filled radios, and all of it signified absolutely nothing. Any candid policeman will tell you that we seldom catch people as a result of investigation or detective work; in other words, if we don't grab them during the commission of the crime, there's a good chance we won't catch them at all. When we do nail them, it's often through informers or because they trip over their own shoestrings and turn the key on themselves (drunk driving, expired license plates, a barroom beef). We're not smart; they're just dumb.

  That's why the feds were made to look so bad back in the late sixties and early seventies when they couldn't nail a bunch of middle-class college kids who ended up on the "Ten Most Wanted" list. Instead of dealing with predictable psychopaths like Alvin Karpis and Charles Arthur Floyd, the FBI had to second-guess Brandeis and Wisconsin English majors who dynamited research labs and boosted banks and Brinks' trucks and then faded back into the quiet life of the suburbs. For a time, the amateurs ruined crime for everybody.

  The last one to leave was the scene investigator whom I'd requested. He dusted the doors, the bedroom, the bath, looked at me with a shrug, and walked out the door without speaking, which was his way of telling me what he thought of the fruitless work I had just created for him.

  "Did he find something?" Annie said. She sat at the dining room table with a tumbler of whiskey between her fingers. Her face was wan, her voice and blue eyes listless.

  "Everything was probably smeared. Fingerprints never do us much good anyway, not unless we have a body or someone in custody. Even if an examiner has a whole handprint set in blood, he still has to compare it with tens of thousands of file prints, and it's as much fun as threading a needle with your eyes closed. That's why he looked so happy when he left here. Look, I'm sorry I brought all this stuff into your house. I got careless tonight. I should have made those guys when they stepped out of their car."

  "It wasn't your fault." Her voice was flat, distant.

  "I think you should have gone in the ambulance. A concussion can fool you sometimes."

  "It doesn't have anything to do with a concussion."

  I looked at her colorless, depleted face.

  "Listen, let me go to my boat and change clothes, then I'll take you to an Italian restaurant on the lake where they serve lasagna that'll break your heart," I said.

  "I don't think I can go anywhere now."

  "All right, I'll go up to that Chinese place on St. Charles and bring us something back. I'll be gone only a few minutes."

  She stared quietly into space for a moment.

  "Do you mind not going for a while?" she asked.

  "All right, but I tell you what—no booze. Instead, I'm going to fix some hot milk for you, and an omelette."

  I took the tumbler of whiskey from her fingertips. Then her eyes looked desperately into mine, her mouth trembled, and the tears ran down her cheeks.

  "He put his hands all over me," she said. "He put them everywhere. While the other one watched."

  She started to cry hard now, her chin on her chest, her shoulders shaking.

  "Listen, Annie, you're a brave person," I said. "You don't know it, but you saved my life. How many people could do what you did? Most people just roll over when violence comes into their lives. A guy like that can't harm a person like you."

  She had her arms folded tightly across her stomach, and she kept her face turned down toward the table.

  "You come in the living room and sit on the couch with me," I said. I put my arm around her shoulders and walked her to the divan. I sat down next to her and picked up her hands in mine. "What happens outside of us doesn't count. That's something we don't have control over. It's what we do with it, the way that we react to it, that's important. You don't get mad at yourself or feel ashamed because you catch a virus, do you? Listen, I'll be straight-up with you. You've got a lot more guts than I have. I've been in a situation where something very bad happened to me, but I didn't have your courage."

  She swallowed, widened her eyes, and touched at her wet cheeks with the back of her wrist. Her face jerked slightly each time she breathed, but she was listening to me now.

  "I was in Vietnam in the early days of the war," I said, "a hotshot lieutenant with a degree in English who really thought he could handle the action. Why not? It had never been very rough while I was there. The Vietcong used to pop at us with some old Japanese and French junk that had been heated up and bent around trees. Half the time it blew up in their faces. Then one day we were going through a rubber plantation and we ran into a new cast of characters—North Vietnamese regulars armed with AK-47s. They sucked us into a mined area, then blew us apart. If a guy tried to turn around and crawl out, he'd either set off a Claymore right under his face or get chopped up in their crossfire. We lost ten guys in fifteen minutes, then the captain surrendered. They marched us through the rubber trees down to a coulee where ARVN artillery had killed a bunch of civilians from a VC village. There were dead children and women and old people in the water and all along the banks of the coulee. I figured they were going to line us up and blow us into the water with the rest of them. Instead, they stripped off our web gear and tied our hands around trees with piano wire they tore out of a smashed-up piano in the plantation house. Then they ate our rations and smoked our cigarettes and took turns urinating on us. We sat on the ground like kicked dogs while they did it to us. I blamed the captain for surrendering. I even felt pleasure when they urinated on him. But something else happened that really put some boards in my head later on.

  "A gunship spotted us, and about ten minutes later a bunch of rangers and pathfinders came through that same mined area to bail us out. We were the bait in the rat trap. I could hear the AKs and the Claymores going off, hear our guys screaming, even see blood and parts of people explode on the tree trunks, and I was glad that I was out of it, drenched in piss and safe from all that terror out there where those guys were dying, trying to save us.

  "I used to pretend to myself that I didn't have the thoughts that I did, that what went through my head didn't have anything to do with the outcome anyway, or other times I just wanted to kill every VC or North Vietnamese I could, but the real truth of that whole scene, before a couple of Hueys turned the place into a firestorm, was that I was glad somebody else was getting shredded into dog-food instead of me.

  "That's what I mean about rolling over. You're not that kind of girl. You've got a special kind of courage, and it can't be compro
mised by some peckerwood dimwit who's going to end up as Vienna sausage if I have anything to do with it."

  "Your feelings were just human. You couldn't help it," she said.

  "That's right, but you were a better soldier tonight than I was in Vietnam, except you don't want to give yourself any credit." Then I brushed back her blond curls from her forehead. "You're a prettier soldier, too."

  Her eyes looked back at me without blinking.

  "Pretty and brave. That's a tough combo," I said.

  The blueness of her eyes, the childlike quality in them, made something sink inside me.

  "Do you think you'd like to eat now?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "My daddy was a wonderful cook. He taught me and my half-brother all his recipes."

  "I think he taught you some other things, too. I think you're a very good man."

  Her eyes smiled at me. I squeezed her hand, which was still cold and formless, then went into the kitchen and heated a pan of milk and cooked an omelette with green onions and white cheese. We ate at the coffee table, and I saw the color come back into her face.

  I made her talk about her family, her home, her music, and her work, everything that defined who she was before Bobby Joe had touched her with his probing hands. She told me she had grown up on a wheat and milo farm north of Wichita, Kansas, that her mother was a Mennonite peace worker and her father a descendant of John Brown's people. She described Kansas as a rolling green country traced with slow-moving rivers, dotted with clumps of oak and poplar and cottonwood, a wide, horizonless place under a hot blue sky that would fill with the drone of cicadas on a summer evening. But it was also a country peopled with religious fanatics, prohibitionists, and right-wing simpletons, and on the other side of the equation were the anti-nukers and dozens of vigilant peace groups. It sounded like an open-air mental asylum. Or at least it was to her, because she had gone to Tulane to study music and had not left New Orleans since.

  But sleep was stealing into her face now.

  "I think it's time for a kiddo I know to go to bed," I said.

  "I'm not tired. Not really."

  "Oh yes?" I put my arm around her, placed her head on my shoulder, and touched her eyes closed with my fingertips. I could feel her breathing evenly on my chest.

  "I'm not a kiddo. I'm twenty-seven," she said sleepily.

  I slipped my other arm under her legs and carried her into her bedroom and laid her down on the bed. I took off her shoes and pulled the sheet over her. She looked up at me from the pillow and put her hand on the back of my neck. ,

  "Don't go," she said.

  "I'll be on the couch in the living room. Tomorrow morning we'll have breakfast at the French Market. If you hear a noise later, it's just me. I walk around a lot at night," I said, and turned off the light.

  It was true, I usually didn't sleep well. Sometimes it was latent memories of the war, but most often I was sleepless simply because I was alone. Even the monastic saints never wrote in praise of nocturnal solitude. I watched three late-hour movies on television, until I saw the light turn gray in the trees outside. When I finally fell asleep, it was with the confidence that the full radiance of day was only a short time away, and that my night's aching celibacy, my battered set of ethics, all my alcoholic dragons would soon resolve themselves in a predictable and manageable way.

  The man I sometimes thought of as my father's misplaced seed called me just before noon and told me to come to lunch at his restaurant on Dauphine. Actually, my half-brother, Jimmie, who people said looked like my twin, was a gentleman in his way. He had our father's sense of humor and fairness; he treated his equals as well as his inferiors with respect, and he paid his gambling debts on time; and he had an honorable attitude toward women, one that was almost Victorian, possibly because his mother was supposedly a prostitute from Abbeville, although neither of us remembered her. But he was also locked into off-track betting and trafficking in poker and slot machines, which brought him into a casual but dangerous association with Didoni Giacano.

  I often got mad at him because of that association and his cavalier attitude toward it, as well as some of the other things he had continued to do for a lifetime to prove somehow that he was both different from me and at the same time that he was not simply my half-brother and his father's illegitimate son. But I could never stay mad at him long, no more than I could when we were children and he was always devising schemes that invariably went wrong and got us both in trouble.

  Even though he was fifteen months younger than I, we did everything together. We washed bottles in the hot-sauce factory on the bayou, plucked chickens for a nickel apiece at the slaughterhouse, set pins at the bowling alley when few white kids would work in those 110-degree pits that were filled with cursing, sweating Negroes, exploding pins, and careening bowling balls that could snap your shinbone in half. But he got us both fired at the hot-sauce factory, since the owner couldn't tell us apart, when he tried to wash bottles en masse by filling a dozen gunny-sacks with them and weighting them down in the bayou's current. We got canned at the slaughterhouse after he decided to streamline the operation and take six dozen chickens out of the cages at one time and herd them into the yard where we were to butcher and then scald them in big cauldrons of water; instead, they panicked and many of them flew into the big window fan and were chopped to pieces in the metal blades.

  One hot night at the bowling alley, a group of tough kids who lived down by Railroad Avenue came in and started rolling the second ball before the pin boy could reset the rack. These were kids who went nigger-knocking on Saturday nights with slingshots and marbles and ball bearings. The Negroes in the pits couldn't do much when they were abused by drunks or bad high-school kids, but Jimmie imposed no restraints upon himself and always practiced immediate retaliation. He was picking up four pins at a time in the pit next to me, his T-shirt streaked with dirt, sweat running out of his hair, when a ball sailed past his kneecap and thudded into the leather backstop. A minute later it happened again. He set the rack down to block the alley, went over to one of the other pits, and came back with a spit can filled with chewed Red Man. He poured it into the thumb hole of the bowling ball, packed a wad of bubblegum on top of it, then rolled the ball back down the chute.

  A moment later we heard a loud curse, and we looked out from under the racks and saw a big, burr-headed boy staring at his hand with a horrified expression on his face.

  "Hey, podna, smear some of it on your nose, too. It'd be an improvement," Jimmie yelled.

  Three of them caught us in the parking lot after the alley closed and knocked us down on the gravel for five minutes before the owner came out, chased them off, and told us we were both fired. Jimmie ran after their truck, throwing rocks at the cab.

  "We'll get a paper route," he said, his face hot and dusty and streaked with dried perspiration. "Who wants to be a pinsetter all his life? There's a lot of money in paper routes these days."

  Both of us would change a lot when we went to college in Lafayette, and in many ways we would begin to leave our father's Cajun world behind us. Eventually I would go into the army and be sent to Vietnam, and Jimmie would join the national guard, borrow money on the small house and seven-acre farm our father left us, and open a café on Decatur Street in New Orleans. Later he would buy into the first of several restaurants, wear expensive jewelry and Botany 500 suits and learn the manners of the people who lived in the Garden District and belonged to the Southern Yacht Club, primarily because he thought they knew something about money and power that he didn't, and there would be any number of attractive women who floated in and out of his life. But whenever I saw him on Canal or in his restaurant with a group of jocular businessmen, his eyes crinkling good-naturedly at their banal humor, an earlier image would glint briefly in my memory like a small mirror, and I would see again the kid in overalls panicking a swirl of chickens into a window fan or flinging a rock at a pickup truck receding in the darkness.

  Didi Gee and my broth
er were eating in a red leather booth in the back of the restaurant when I walked in. Didi's waistline and stomach had the contours of three inner tubes stacked on top of each other. His hands were as big as skillets, his neck as thick as a fire hydrant, his curly black head as round and hard as a cannonball. As a young man he'd been a collector for a group of shylocks across the river in Algiers, hence the story about his holding people's hands down in an aquarium filled with piranha. I also knew for a fact that a cop in Gretna shot a plug out of his shoulder the size of an apple core, refused to call for an ambulance, and left him to bleed to death on the sidewalk. Only he lived and got the cop fired from the force, then fired from every job he tried to hold thereafter, until finally he had to go to work for Didi Gee as a numbers runner, a sort of pathetic human exhibit that Didi kept around like a voodoo doll with pins stuck in it.

  Jimmie grinned at me with his white teeth, shook hands, and motioned for the waiter to serve me a steak-and-lobster plate from the warmer on the back counter. Didi Gee's mouth was so full of food that he had to put down his knife and fork and continue chewing for almost a half-minute, then drink a glass of red wine, before he could speak.

  "How you doing, Lieutenant?" he said flatly. He always spoke as though his nose were clotted with cartilage.

  "Pretty good," I said. "How's life, Didi?"

  "Not so hot, to tell you the truth. I got cancer of the colon. They're going to cut out some of my entrail tract and sew up my hole. I got to walk around with a bag of shit hanging on my side."

  "I'm sorry to hear about that," I said.

  "My doctor says I either get it done or they nail me down in a piano crate. Be glad you're young." He put a meatball wrapped with spaghetti and half a slice of bread in his mouth.

  "We heard some rumors about you," Jimmie said, smiling. He wore a charcoal suit and gray tie, and his gold watch and rings gleamed in the restaurant's soft light. Ever since he was a kid he had used his grin to hide guilt, to address complexity, or to deny a basic goodness in himself.