DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  I stopped eating and walked around behind her chair, leaned down and kissed her on the mouth.

  "My, what kind of thoughts have you been having this morning?" she said.

  "You're the best, Boots," I said.

  She looked up at me, and her eyes were kind and soft, and I touched her hair and cheek with my fingers.

  Then she looked out the window toward the front road.

  "Who's that?" she said.

  A silver Cadillac with television and CB antennas and windows that were tinted almost black turned off the dirt road by the bayou and parked next to my pickup truck under the pecan trees. The driver cut the engine and stepped out into the yard, dressed in a suit that was silver-charcoal, a blue shirt with French cuffs, a striped red-and-blue necktie, and wraparound black sunglasses. He pulled off his sunglasses gingerly with his right hand, which had only a carved, half-moon area where the two bottom fingers should have been, widened his eyes to let them adjust to the light, and walked over the layer of leaves and pecan husks toward the gallery. His black shoes were shined so brightly they could have been patent leather.

  "Is that---2' Bootsie began.

  "Yeah, it's Lyle Sonnier. He shouldn't have come out here."

  "Maybe he tried at the office and they told him you were home."

  "It doesn't matter. He should have arranged to meet me at the office."

  "I didn't know you felt that way about him."

  "He takes advantage of poor and uneducated people, Boots. He used the Ethiopian famine to raise money for that television sideshow of his. Look at the car he drives."

  "Shhhh, he's on the gallery," she whispered.

  "I'll talk to him outside. There's no need to invite him in.

  Okay, Boots?"

  She shrugged and said, "Whatever you say. I think you're being a little too hard."

  Lyle grinned through the screen when he saw me walking toward the door. He had the same dark Cajun complexion as the other Sonniers, but Lyle had always been the thin one, narrow at the shoulders and hips, a born track runner or poolroom lizard and ultimately one of the most fearless grunts I knew in Vietnam. Except Vietnam and pajama-clad little men who hid in tunnels and spider holes were twenty-five years back down the road.

  "What's happenin', Loot? he said.

  "How are you, Lyle?" I said, and shook hands with him out on the gallery. His mutilated hand felt light and thin and unnatural in mine. "I have to feed the rabbits and my daughter's horse before I go back to work. Do you mind walking with me while we talk?"

  "Sure. Bootsie isn't home?" He looked toward the screen.

  On the right side of his face was a shower of shrapnel scars like a chain of flesh-toned plastic teardrops.

  "She'll be out directly. What's up, Lyle?" I walked toward the rabbit hutches under the trees so he would have to follow me.

  He didn't speak for a while. Instead he combed his waxed brown hair in the shade and looked out toward my dock and the cypress swamp on the far side of the bayou.

  Then he put his comb in his shirt pocket.

  "You don't approve of me, do you?" he said.

  I opened the chicken-wire door to one of the hutches and began filling the rabbits' bowl with alfalfa pellets.

  "Maybe I don't approve of what you do, Lyle," I said.

  "I don't apologize for it."

  "I didn't ask you to."

  "I can heal, son."

  I looked at my watch, opened up the next hutch, and didn't answer him.

  "I don't brag on it," he said. "It's a gift. I didn't earn it. But the power comes through my shoulder, through my arm, right through this deformity of a hand, right into their bodies. I can feel the power swell up in my arm just like I was holding a bucket of water by the bail, then it's gone, from me into them, and my arm's so light it's like my sleeve is empty. You can believe it or not, son. But it's God's truth. I tell you another thing. You got a sick woman up in that house."

  I set down the alfalfa bag, latched the hutch door, and turned to look directly into his face.

  "I'm going to ask two things of you, Lyle. Don't call me son' again, and don't pretend you know anything about my family's problems."

  He scratched the back of his deformed hand and looked up toward the house. Then he sucked quietly on the back of his teeth and said, "It wasn't meant as an offense. That's not my purpose. No, sir."

  "What can I help you with today?"

  "You've got it turned around. You went out to Weldon's, but he wouldn't tell you diddly-squat, would he?"

  "What about Weldon's?"

  "Somebody shot at him. Bama called me right after she called y'all. Look, Dave, Weldon's not going to cooperate with you. He can't. He's afraid."

  "Of what?"

  "The same thing most people are afraid of when they're afraid-facing up to the truth about something."

  "Weldon doesn't impress me as a fearful man."

  "You didn't know our old man."

  "What are you talking about, Lyle?"

  "The man with the burned-off face that Bama saw through her window. I've seen him, too. He was sitting in the third row at last Sunday's telecast. I almost pulled the mike out of the jack when my eyes got focused on him and I saw the face behind all that scar tissue. It was like holding up a photographic negative to a light until you see the image inside the shadows, you know what I mean? By the end of the sermon sweat was sliding off my face as big as marbles. It was like that old son of a buck reached up with a hot finger and poked it right through my belly button."

  He tried to grin, but it wasn't convincing.

  "You're not making any sense, partner," I said.

  "I'm talking about my old man, Verise Sonnier. He was gone when I went down into the audience, but it was him. God didn't make two of his kind."

  "Your father was killed in Port Arthur when you were a kid."

  "That's what they said. That's what we hoped." He grinned again, then shook the humor out of his face.

  "Buried alive under a pile of white-hot boilerplates when that chemical factory blew. Somebody shoveled up a pillow sack full of ashes and bone chips and said that was him. But my sister Drew got a letter from a man in the San Antonio city jail who said he was our old man and he wanted a hundred dollars to go to Mexico." He paused and stared at me a moment to emphasize his point, as though he were looking into a television camera. "She sent it to him."

  "I'm afraid this has the ring of theater to it, Lyle."

  "Yeah?"

  "Why would your father want to hurt Weldon?"

  He looked away into the trees, his face shadowed, and brushed idly at the chain of scar tissue that seemed to flow out of the corner of his eye.

  "He has reason to want to hurt all of us. After we thought he was dead, we did something to somebody who was close to him." He looked back into my face. "We hurt this person bad."

  "What did you do?"

  "I've made my peace on it. Somebody else will have to tell you that."

  "Then I don't know what I can do for you."

  "I can tell you what Weldon did to him. Or at least what the old man thinks Weldon did to him." He waited, and when I didn't respond he continued. "When we were kids the old man had this obsession. He was going to be an independent wildcatter, a kind of legend like Glenn McCarthy over in, Houston. He started off as a jug hustler with an offshore seismographic outfit, roughnecked all over Texas and Oklahoma, then started contracting board roads in the marsh for the Texaco Company. After a while he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya basin and buying up a bunch of rusted junk to put his first rig together. A geologist from Lafayette told him the best place to punch a hole was right there on our farm.

  "Except the old man had a problem with that. He was a traiture, you know, and always claimed he could cure warts, stop bleeding in cut hogs, blow the fire out of a bum, cause a woman to have a boy or a girl, all that kind of 'white witch' stuff. But he also told us there were Indians buried in an old Spanish well in the middle of ou
r sugarcane field, and if he drilled a hole on our property their spirits would be turned loose on us.

  "He was afraid of spirits in the ground, all right, but I think of a different kind. My uncle got drunk once and told me the old man hired this black man for thirty cents an hour to plow his field. The black man ran the plow across a rock and busted it, then just lay down under a tree and took a nap. The old man found the busted plow and the mule still in harness in the row, and he walked over to the tree and kicked this fellow awake and started hollering at him. That black fellow made a big mistake. He sassed my old man.

  The old man went into a rage, chased him across the field, and broke open his skull with a hoe. My uncle said he buried him somewhere around that Spanish well."

  "What does this have to do with Weldon?"

  "Are you sure you're listening to me? As greedy and driven to be a success as he was, the old man was afraid to drill on his own property. But not Weldon, podna. That's where he built his first rig, and he cored right down through the center of that Spanish well, I think just to make a point. A floorman on that rig told me the drill bit brought up pieces of bone when they first punched into the ground."

  "I'll keep all this in mind. Thanks for coming out, Lyle."

  "You don't look upon it as the big breakthrough in your case?"

  "When people go about trying to kill other people with forethought and deliberation, it's usually over money. Not always, but most times."

  "Well, a man hears when it's time for him to hear."

  "Is that right?"

  "I was never a good listener. At least not till somebody up on high got my attention. I don't fault you, Dave."

  "Do you know what passive-aggressive behavior is?"

  "I never went to college, like you and Weldon. It sounds real deep."

  "It's not a profound concept. A person who has a lot of hostility learns how to mask it in humility and sometimes even in religiosity. It's very effective."

  "No kidding? You learn all that in college? It's too bad I missed out." He grinned with the side of his mouth, his teeth barely showing, like a possum.

  "Let me ask you something fair and square, with no bullshit, Lyle," I said.

  "Go ahead."

  "Do you hold your last day against me?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "In Vietnam. I sent you into that tunnel. I wish we'd blown it and passed it on by."

  "You didn't send me down there. I liked it down there. It was my own underground horror show. I made those zips think the scourge of God had crawled down into the bowels of the earth. It wasn't a good way to be, son." He flinched good-naturedly and raised his hands, palms outward, in front of him. "Sorry, it's just a manner of speaking."

  I looked at my watch.

  "I guess that's my cue to go," he said. "Thanks for your time. Say good-bye to Bootsie for me, and don't think too unkindly of me."

  "I don't."

  "That's good."

  Without saying anything further, he turned and walked through the dead leaves toward his Cadillac. Then he stopped, rubbed the back of his neck hard, as though a mosquito had burrowed deep into his skin, then turned around and stared blankly at me, his jaw slack with a sudden and ugly knowledge.

  "It's a disease that lives in the blood. It's called hipus. I'm sorry, Dave. God's truth, I am," he said.

  My mouth fell open, and I felt as though a cold wind had blown through my soul.

  The next morning was Saturday, and the sun came up as pink as a rose over the willow trees and dead cypress in the marsh and the clouds of mist that rolled out of the bays.

  Batist and I opened up the bait shop at first light, and the air was so cool and soft, so perfect with blue shadows and the smell of night-blooming jasmine, that I forgot about Lyle's visit and his attempt to appear omniscient about my wife's illness. I had concluded that Lyle was little different from any other televangelist huckster and that somebody close to Bootsie had told him about her problem. But regardless I wasn't going to clutter my weekend with any more thoughts about the Sonnier family.

  Some people were born to take a fall, I thought, and Weldon was probably one of them. I also had a feeling that Lyle was one of those theological self-creations whose own neurosis would eventually eat him like an overturned basket of hungry snakes.

  After we had rented most of our boats, Batist and I seined the dead shiners out of the aluminum bait tanks, poured crushed ice over the beer and soda pop in the coolers, and started the fire in the barbecue pit I had made by splitting an' oil drum with an acetylene torch, hinging it, and welding metal legs on the bottom. By eight o'clock the sun was bright and hot in the sky, burning the mist out of the cypress trees, and on the wind you could smell the faint odor of a dead animal back in the marsh.

  "You got somet'ing on your mind, Dave?" Batist asked.

  He had a head like a cannonball; a pair of surplus navy dungarees hung on his narrow hips, and his wash-torn undershirt looked like strips of white rag on his massive coal-black chest and back.

  "No, not really."

  He nodded, put a dry cigar in his mouth, and looked out the window at a tangle of dead trees and hyacinths floating past us in the bayou's current.

  "It ain't bad to have somet'ing on your mind, no," he said. "It's bad when you don't tell nobody."

  "What do you say we season the chickens?"

  "She gonna be all right. You gonna see. That's what they got all them doctors for."

  "I appreciate it, Batist."

  I saw Alafair walk down through the pecan trees from the house with Tripod on his chain. She was in third grade now, a little bit fat across the stomach, so that her old gold-and purple LSU T-shirt, with a smiling Mike the Tiger on it, exposed her navel and the top of her elastic-waisted jeans. She had shiny black hair cut in bangs, skin that stayed tan year-round, wide-set Indian teeth, and a smile that was so broad it made her dark eyes squint almost completely shut. Now adays, when I would pick her up, she felt heavy and compact in my arms, full of energy and play and expectation.

  But three years ago, when I pulled her from a crashed and submerged plane out on the salt, one piloted by a Lafayette priest who was transporting illegal refugees from El Salvador, her lungs had been filled with water, her eyes dilated with terror as we rose in a rush of bubbles toward the Gulf's surface, her little bones as thin and frail as a bird's.

  Tripod thumped out on the dock, rattling his chain across the board planks behind him.

  "Dave, you left the bag of rabbit food on top of the hutch. Tripod threw it all over the yard," Alafair said. Her face was beaming.

  "You think that's funny, little guy?" I said.

  "Yeah," she said, and grinned again.

  "Batist says you brought Tripod down to the bait shop yesterday and he got into the hard-boiled eggs."

  Her face became vague and quizzical.

  "Tripod did that?" she said.

  "Do you know anyone else who would wash a hardboiled egg in the bait tank?"

  She looked across the bayou speculatively, as though the answer to a profound mystery lay among the branches of the cypress trees. Tripod zigzagged back and forth on his chin, sniffing the smell of fish in the dock.

  I rubbed the top of Alafair's head. Her hair was already warm from the sunlight.

  "How about a hied pie, little guy?" I said, and winked at her. "But you and Tripod show some discretion with Batist."

  "Show what?"

  "Keep that coon away from Batist."

  I brought a tray of seasoned and oiled chickens out of the shop and began laying them on the barbecue grill. The hickory wood I used for fuel had burned into hot, white coal, and the oil from the chickens dripped into the ash and steamed away in the wind. I could feel Alafair's eyes on the side of my face.

  "Dave?"

  "What is it, Alf'?"

  "Bootsie told me not to tell you something."

  "Maybe you'd better not tell me, then." I turned my head to smile at her, but her dark eyes were
veiled and troubled.

  "Bootsie dropped a fork on the floor," she said. "When she picked it up her face got all white and she sat down real hard in a chair."

  "Was that this morning?"

  "Yesterday, when I came home from school. She started to cry, then she saw me looking at her. She made me say I wouldn't tell."

  "It's not bad to tell those kinds of things, Alf"