But what sat behind the desk in the governor’s office with the body language of a badass Swamp Alligator and the eyes of a stone-cold killer just wasn’t her.
And certainly not the even more stone-cold male voice.
“You’ve come a long way from the Alligator Swamp, haven’t you, Martin Luther Martin, now haven’t you?” it said insinuatingly. “You don’t go back there much at all these days, now do you?”
Luke shuddered at the voice and squirmed at the truth, which was that he hadn’t been back to the hood since he made sergeant.
“I guess I’ve been kinda busy.…” he admitted a tad shamefully. “Has it changed?”
“No, it hasn’t changed, boy. Have you?”
“For the better. And … and for the greater good.”
“Oh, you think they’re saying that about you down there? What about their greater good, or at least lesser agony?”
“The People’s Police don’t go down there unless they make us have to. They haven’t been, so we aren’t. We may not be popular in the Alligator Swamp like we are in New Orleans Proper, but I don’t think we’re unpopular either.”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Right.”
“As long as they stay down there, right? Don’t want the likes of your old homies up in Jackson Square or in front of City Hall, now do we?”
“I’ve been told that it’s … it’s … politically counterproductive.…”
“Well, as you may notice, boy, I’m sitting here in the governor’s chair, and I say it’s counterproductive to not let the lower reaches of the citizenry of the city have their voices heard. They’ll be on your side, now won’t they? And I, Mama Legba, governor of the great state of Louisiana, order you to go down into the Alligator Swamp and invite the outsiders in.”
Luke was torn in time. The boy from the swamp knew that this was the right thing to do, and the memory of that boy relished the thought of doing it, but the professional officer of the People’s Police that he now was did not think it was exactly a brilliant idea.
“I … I … I don’t think the governor has the right to order me around like that,” Luke stammered.
“Maybe, maybe not,” said the thing inside Mama Legba, “but Baron Samedi has the power. And isn’t it the sad truth of your world and mine, boy, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
And it was inside him.
Whether Luke had ever believed voodoo was anything more than another cult scam was no longer relevant now, for the next thing he knew, or was allowed to know, he was somewhere in the Alligator Swamp, not Baton Rouge, and he was sitting by himself in a four-seat police department airboat, with the deafening roar of the airplane propeller behind him and the big engine thrumming his bones, and the airboat was banking around a curve in a bayou at about fifty miles an hour, then swerving up onto the mud, and gliding toward a little village just like the one he had grown up in.
And maybe it was the one he had grown up in, because this had to be a dream, a dream of the watching of a police airboat chasing gangbangers that had set the boy he had been back in the day on the path to the man he had become.
It had to be a dream, didn’t it?
Because he was expertly driving an airboat, something he had never in his life done before.
Or was he?
His hands were on the tiller and throttle, but he wasn’t moving them, he wasn’t driving the airboat. He was riding the airboat, but Baron Samedi was riding him.
And talking to him silently inside his own head.
You’re my horse for the duration, boy, so you might as well lean back and enjoy it. It’s not as if being a heroic cop roaring through the Alligator Swamp on an airboat wasn’t your childhood dream.
What the hell’s happening to me? Luke wondered.
Luke found that he didn’t have control of a single muscle in his body including the ones that worked his mouth and his tongue. But nevertheless he still was talking to this thing called itself Baron Samedi.
Silently.
Inside his own head.
Whatever you want to believe, Martin Luther Martin. You can believe you’re really being ridden by Baron Samedi. You can believe you’re still that very boy dreaming you’ve grown up just as you wanted to. You can believe you really are Lieutenant Martin dreaming this is happening.
A bone-chilling silent laugh with something fraternal behind it.
Or you don’t have to believe anything at all. Sometimes I think I could be something else dreaming it’s Baron Samedi. Sometimes I don’t. Who cares? What matters is we’re going to take a ride around the Swamp together, and we are both going to enjoy it.
And then the airboat slid into the village, thatched or aluminum sheeting huts and houses up on stilts above muddy pathways, little knots of the curious following the airboat until it had gathered maybe a few dozen fisherfolk and farmers around it and a few obvious Swamp Alligators in gangbanger colors.
We can do this two ways, boy, and the choice is yours, Baron Samedi told him. Either way, I’m in the saddle, and I’ll drive this thing, you’re just along for the ride. But I can do the talking or you can as long as you say what I want said. And I think you already know what I want said. And whether or not you believe in Baron Samedi, Baron Samedi believes in you. Believes you want it said too. Believes you can say it to these people better than I can. Because you’re one of them and I’m not. Over to you, boy. You can just be my horse, or we can be one of those centaurs together.
And Luke found that he could not deny that the nonexistent son of a bitch, whatever he was, was right, and knew it. And he knew what he was supposed to do. And knew damn well that he wanted to do it.
“I’m Lieutenant Luke Martin of the People’s Police, maybe y’all heard of me, I been in the news a lot, and I know it gets through to down here ’cause I was born in the Swamp, blooded in the Swamp, so cop or not, I grew up as one of you.”
Snorts and head shakes and cynical sour looks all around.
“The fuckin’ honcho of the fuckin’ Alligator Swamp police!” one of the gangbangers snarled.
What you doing, boy? demanded Baron Samedi.
What we want to do, Luke told him. Wait and see.
“That’s right, mofo, I started as a cop down in the Swamp an’ I made the Alligator Police the top gang in our turf, and me the honcho of honchos, and made y’all like it or else, an’ a lot of you did, so you better listen up, ’cause here I am again, only I ain’t just what I was, now I’m Lieutenant Luke Martin of the People’s Police!!”
“Our enemies!” another of the gangbangers shouted out. “Zookeepers of the Alligator Swamp!”
“That’s right! That’s what the cops in New Orleans were. Zookeepers of the Alligator Swamp! Hired guns! Hired to keep the Alligators down in the Swamp an’ out of the New Orleans Proper and the Quarter where the fuckin’ powers that be say low-life mofos like you don’t belong.”
They’re not liking this.
They’re not supposed to. Not yet.
The gangbangers were looking at each other in silent and sullen confusion. What the fuck was this cop saying?
“Well, we’re not that anymore! We’re the People’s Police! And you’re the people too! And we wanna be your police too.”
That line went over like a wet fart. As it was supposed to.
“Yeah, y’all heard that sorta bullshit a million times, and the New Orleans Police never delivered anything to ya but a kick in the ass and time inna joint, so why should you believe it now?”
Hostile silence, what else?
Now that’s a good question, boy, you sure you got the answer? Maybe it’s time for Baron Samedi to take over?
You got the power, but I got the answer, Luke told him. These are my homies, not yours.
Give it a try then, boy, but it better be good.
“Well, you shouldn’t believe such bullshit, was I still you, I sure wouldn’t! But your People’s Police aren’t asking
you to believe anything. Your People’s Police are just promising not to hassle you anywhere in New Orleans, not to keep you out of anywhere, not to bust you for anything but robbery, murder, rape, or violence, no victim, no crime, maybe you heard about it, you don’t have to believe it, you come up out of the mud and into the party in Jackson Square and the Quarter an’ around City Hall an’ see for yourself that it’s true.”
“Or it’s a trick to get a lotta people busted!”
“Now why would the People’s Police wanna do that when we’re askin’ for your help?”
Blank silence.
“Cuts both ways, you want us to really be your People’s Police too, you gotta be our people too. Power to the people gotta mean power from the people ’cause there ain’t any other place for it to come from, now is there? For sure not from the redneck bastards in Baton Rouge fixin’ to send in the peckerwood National Guard to bust cops like me and mine an’ rule the whole fuckin’ city for the benefit of the mofos that own their asses, the mofos who be stealin’ what they can on the high ground, the mofos who wanna keep those dirty dumb-ass low-life alligators in the swamp down here in the mud an’ shit where scumbags like them believe savage reptiles like you belong!”
Couldn’t do it better myself, so why should I bother? Baron Samedi told Luke. Baron Samedi hasn’t had a horse with a mouth like this since they shot down the Kingfish.
“Okay, we all know was the New Orleans Police keepin’ alligators like us out of places like Jackson Square an’ the Quarter an’ all, but that was then an’ this is now! And now I’m telling y’all that the People’s Police aren’t just going to let you there, we want you there! We’re asking you to go there! We’re fuckin’ begging you to show those bastards in Baton Rouge that you too support your People’s Police! We’re asking you to help scare the shit out of them! They give you the name, means they afraid of your game! Let ’em know that they try to take our city away from all of us, that they try to take the People’s Police away from the People, they seriously piss off people who couldn’t care less about nonviolent resistance, they just might have a real fuckin’ revolution on their hands!”
It’s all yours, boy! Baron Samedi told Luke. I’ll be your horse and take you where we both want to go, and you do the talking and say what we both want to say.
“Power to the People! Power to all of the People! Power from you to us! Power from us to you! Power from all of the People to the People’s Police!”
It was a wild ride through the Alligator Swamp, depressing sights and stenches that had once seemed normal, but that Luke had not subjected himself for a long and somehow shameful time, delivering more or less the same speech from the airboat dozens of times, like a ward-heeling politician trolling for votes.
Like a politician trolling for votes?
Might that not be what he was in the process of becoming?
Might that not be just what Baron Samedi wanted to turn him into? Baron Samedi? MaryLou Boudreau? Mama Legba? Weren’t they all somehow the governor of Louisiana? And wasn’t it the governor of Louisiana who had summoned him to Baton Rouge to do her, his, and their bidding?
And wasn’t votes what it was really what it was all about?
The decent denizens of the Alligator Swamp were too trodden down in the mud to bother voting for some dry-ground mush-mouth, and the gangbangers lived too completely by the jungle law of the Swamp to trust even the laid-back law of the People’s Police, let alone even think about voting. And therefore with zero political clout in bottom-line political arithmetic.
Until now.
Now he and Governor Mama Legba was inviting them into the political game.
Whether the loa inside his head was really letting him say what he pleased as the day wore on or just using his sense of the local lingo to phrase his own rap didn’t matter, because Luke believed what he was saying.
Power to the People?
How could he believe that these were not people too when he had grown up as one of them? What would that make him?
Maybe this Baron Samedi was using him as a mouthpiece for whatever his own purposes were. So what? The Alligators of the Swamp were maybe no longer his brothers but he seemed to be getting through to them, persuading them to ally themselves with their previous worst enemy, to actually try supporting their People’s Police.
Maybe the Christians would call the thing in his head driving the airboat an evil demon. Maybe Baron Samedi was an evil demon. But when the loa drove the airboat to a landing dock and left Luke Martin to his own devices, it didn’t leave him feeling raped by some devil like a punk in the joint but like the horse of a rider who had ridden him to where he too wanted to go.
If that was a deal with the Christians’ devil, wasn’t it a fair deal?
If that wasn’t voodoo magic what magic was it?
Or so Luke believed when the sun that went down on the Alligator Swamp came up on thousands of its people already having joined the demonstrators in front of City Hall and the permanent Mardi Gras in Jackson Square. What passed for the solid citizens of the swamp; fisher folk and mud farmers, nutria hunters and alligator hunters, their sons and their daughters, hookers without their pimps, but no obvious gangbangers in their colors in evidence at all.
This, however, did not prevent Luke from being called in on the carpet by Superintendent Mulligan, though things being what they now were, the carpet was in Big Joe Roody’s office, not his.
“What in hell did you think you were doing, Martin?” Mulligan shouted at him by way of red-faced greeting.
“Winning thousands of new allies for the People’s Police,” Luke shot back, whether he really believed it or not. “Putting some extra fear in the bastards in Baton Rouge.”
“Jesus Christ, Martin—”
“How do you figure that, Luke?” Big Joe interrupted.
A good question, and Luke hadn’t really thought up a good answer beforehand, so he had better bullshit himself one now. “Why do you want to keep the Alligators in the Swamp, Mr. Mulligan?” he ventured, not sure at all where he was going.
“What kind of stupid question is that, Martin?”
“Because you’re afraid of them, right? Because you’re afraid they’ll scare the tourists out of the Quarter and go apeshit in the Zone, right?”
Mulligan began to open his mouth, but Big Joe Roody shut it just by silently holding up his hand. No doubt who was really running the People’s Police these days, no doubt at all. It was Big Joe he had to play to, not Mulligan.
“So…?” said Roody.
“So the Republicans in the legislature got the votes to pass the resolution to send in the Guard, but not maybe enough to overturn the governor’s veto, right?”
“Right,” said Big Joe Roody, regarding Luke now with more interest than anger. “So, Luke…?”
“So it’s a close thing, right?”
“Right.”
“So if we show that the Swamp Alligators aren’t the enemies of the police anymore, and that the People’s Police aren’t their enemies anymore and can let them into the whole city and keep them under control…”
“As long as we want to?” said Big Joe. “Which we just might not want to do if the legislature sent in the Guard…? We might just stand aside and see how well the peckerwoods do at handling a city full of thousands of these supposedly savage alligators…?”
Luke didn’t didn’t have to say anything to that. Big Joe Roody had done his thinking for him. Even Mulligan’s attitude changed.
“You think we can really get away with that?” he asked Roody. “You think we can keep it under control?”
“You tell me, Dick, you’re the police superintendent. No victim, no crime frees up a lot of cops to keep the peace, not trying to bottle up the Alligator Swamp frees up a lot more to do their real job. And if they can’t…”
“What does that say about my leadership?”
Roody shrugged and smiled fatuously. “You said it, Dick, I didn’t.”
Both
of them turned their attention on Luke for a long silent moment. And it was Mulligan who finally spoke.
“You grew up there, Lieutenant Martin.…”
He didn’t have to say more. And Luke, somewhat to his own surprise, found himself speaking from the heart. “It’s the gangbangers who are the problem, that’s who everyone thinks of as the Swamp Alligators, and even they do more dope-dealing and whore-running than smash and grab. The other Alligator Swamp folks got a bad rap, more of ’em than not grow their own vegetables, catch their own fish, hunt the fuckin’ nutria for meat, trade the stuff back and forth, run little stores, got too hard a time stayin’ alive to go be apeshit troublemakers. And they mostly won’t vote.”
“Until now.…” said Big Joe Roody. “And somehow I don’t think any of them are gonna vote Republican. Could change the state demographics…”
“That’s the real deal, Mr. Mulligan,” Luke said. “You gonna say the New Orleans police can’t tell the difference and handle that…?”
Luke may have been making it all up on the spot to save his own ass, but by the time he was through he really did believe it.
And when the Alligators among the demonstrators and tourists did little more of interest to the People’s Police watching over them than enthusiastically waving any picket sign passed to them and joining the crowds hurling crap at the pictures of the state legislators, when the few actual gangbangers among them had to be busted for nothing worse than a few fistfights and muggings, and the bill to send in the Guard got stalled in committee, the local media crowned Luke their golden political boy genius.
And when Mayor Bradford and Mayor-to-be Montrose calculated how many new votes the Democratic machine was going to harvest out of the Alligator Swamp the next time around, Luke was promoted to captain forthwith, and Big Joe Roody swore to him that he hadn’t had anything to do with it because he hadn’t had to.
The People's Police Page 18
