DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  "Let me tell you what Gouza said and you can come to your own conclusions. We were talking about you, then he begins to tell me that if he goes down for what is called the 'bitch,' which is a life sentence given to habitual criminals, he's going to take others down with him. What does that seem to suggest to you, Mr. Earl?"

  "It suggests you're going to have a lawsuit against you for slander." His monocular right eye, with the enlarged pupil like a spot of India ink, was fixed on my face. The skin along the bottom rim was trembling with anger.

  I folded my notebook and put it in my shirt pocket. I picked up a package of crackers from the breadbasket, then dropped it in the basket again.

  "You're an intelligent man, and I'll tell you the truth, Mr. Earl," I said. "I think Joey might be in on a bum rap. But unfortunately for him, nobody cares if a guy like Joey is innocent or not. People just want him put away in a cage for a long time, and they don't care how it's done. The prosecutor will probably get a new political career out of it, his lawyers will get rich on his appeals while he's chopping sugarcane at Angola, his wife and mistresses will clean out his bank accounts and sell everything he owns, and his hired stooges will go to work for his competitors and forget they ever heard of him. In the meantime, there are probably some sadistic gunbulls who will ejaculate at the thought of busting Joey's hump on their work gangs.

  "Now, if you were Joey Meatballs and facing a prospect like that, wouldn't you be willing to cut a deal, any deal, including maybe putting your mother in harness on a dogsled team?"

  The other men at the table had gone quiet now and had given up the pretense of conviviality. They looked at their watches, touched nervously at their mouths with their napkins, stared at a remote part of the restaurant. The cost of their lunch with Bobby Earl was not one they had anticipated.

  I rose from the table.

  "You like primitive law and vigilante solutions to complex problems, Mr. Earl," I said. "Maybe you've stumbled into one of your own creations this time. But I wouldn't end up as Joey Gouza's fall partner. He doesn't care about political causes. He had his own brother-in-law fed into an airplane propeller. What do you think his lawyers might have planned for you?"

  The tables around Bobby Earl's had now become quiet, too. He turned to speak to the men seated next to him, but their eyes were fixed on the flower arrangement in the center of the table. But I learned then that Bobby Earl was not easily undone in a public situation. He rose from the table, put his napkin neatly by his plate, and walked toward the men's room, pausing to let a black drink waiter pass. His gaze was level, his face handsome, almost pleasant-looking, his thick brown hair tousled by the cool currents from the air-conditioner.

  I realized then that Bobby Earl might burn inside with banked fires, and that perhaps I had indeed inserted some broken glass in his head that would saw through brain tissue later; but in front of an audience he was a tragedian actor, a protean figure who could create an emanation of himself out of willpower alone and become as benign, photogenic, and seemingly anointed by history as Jefferson Davis in defeat.

  I had a feeling this one would go into extra innings.

  CHAPTER 12

  That evening Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to a shrimp Tboil in the park on Bayou Teche. The air smelled of flowers and new-cut grass, the clouds were marbled with pink, the oak trees around the wood pavilion were dark green and thick with birds. School was out for the summer, and Alafair and some other kids played kickball on the baseball diamond with the sense of dusty, knee-grimed joy that's the special province of children during summer. In fact, Alafair's aggressiveness at play made me wonder if she didn't have a bent for adversarial roles. Her cheeks were dirt-streaked and flushed with excitement; she charged without blinking at the kicker and took the volleyball full in the face, and then ran after it again, sometimes knocking another child to the ground.

  The last four days with Bootsie had been wonderful. The new balance of medicine seemed to be working. Her eyes smiled at me in the morning, her posture was erect and selfassured, and she helped me and Batist at the dock and in the bait shop with cheerful eagerness. Only an hour ago I had looked up from my work and caught her in a moment when she was unconscious of my glance, just as though I had clicked the camera lens and frozen her in the pose of the healthy and unworried woman that I prayed she would become again for both of us. She had just emptied the bait tanks, her denim shirt stuck wetly to her uplifted breasts, and she was staring abstractedly out the screen window at the bayou, eating a carrot stick, her hair touched by the breeze, one hand set jauntily on her hip, the muscles in her back and neck as strong and firm as a Cajun fishergirl's.

  At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn't in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn't bothered to be grateful for the things I had.

  She peeled the shell off a shrimp, dipped the shrimp in a horseradish sauce and put it in her mouth. She reached out and touched my chin lightly with two fingers, as though she were examining for a skin blemish.

  "Is that where Weldon hit you?" she asked.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Oh my, such innocence." I cleared my throat.

  "I was in the supermarket this morning," she said. "A woman whose husband is a floorman on Weldon's rig couldn't stop herself from asking about your welfare."

  Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

  "Weldon's not always a rational man," I said.

  "Why didn't you arrest him?"

  "He's a tormented man, Boots. He carries a burden nobody should have to carry."

  She stopped chewing. Her eyes looked into mine.

  "Lyle told me some things about their childhood, about Weldon's relationship with Drew," I said.

  A crease went across her brow, and she set her half-eaten shrimp back on the paper plate. The children out on the baseball diamond were tumbling in the dust, their happy cries echoing off the backstop.

  "They're messed up in the head real bad," I said. "Weldon's a pain in the butt, all right, but I suspect he wakes up each morning with the Furies after him."

  "He and Drew?" she said, the meaning clear and sad in her eyes now.

  "Probably Lyle, too. I said something pretty rough to Weldon about it. So he had a free one coming."

  "That's an awful story."

  "They'll probably never tell all of it, either."

  She was quiet for a few moments. Her eyes were flat and turned inward; her hair looked like it was touched with smoke in the broken light through the tree.

  "When this is over, maybe we can invite them to dinner," she said.

  "That'd be fine."

  "You wouldn't mind?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Why didn't anyone-" she began. Then she stopped, coughed in the back of her throat, and said, "I never guessed. Poor Drew."

  I squeezed her hand; but it felt dry and pliant inside mine.

  Her mouth had the down-turned expression of someone who might have opened a bedroom door at the wrong moment.

  Then she stood up and began clearing the table, her face concentrating on her work.

  "I'm going to invite her to go shopping with me in Lafayette," she said. "You think she'd like that?"

  "You bet," I said.

  You'll always be a standup lady, Boots, I thought.

  Out on the baseball diamond a shout went up from the children as someone fired the volleyball into the backstop.

  It was dusk when we returned home, and the air was heavy and cool, motionless, loud with the croaking of frogs out in the cypress. I parked under the pecan trees in the front yard, and Bootsie and Alafair walked up to the house while I rolled up the truck's windows. The sky had turned blueblack, the color of scorched iron, and I could feel the barometer dr
opping again, and smell sulfur and distant rain.

  As I started up the incline toward the gallery, a beat-up flatbed truck bounced through the chuckholes in the dirt road and turned in to my drive. On the back was a huge chrome-plated cross, with the top end propped on the cab's roof and the shaft fastened to the bed with a boomer chain.

  Lyle Sonnier cut the ignition and stepped down, grinning, from the running board. He wore a pair of striped overalls without a shirt, and his thin chest and shoulders were red with sunburn.

  "I thought I'd take your time just for a minute," he said.

  "What do you think of it?"

  "It looks like it's made of car bumpers."

  "It is. Me and this ole boy in Lafayette welded a shell all around the wood beams. What do you think?"

  Batist had left on the string of electric bulbs over the dock, and the cross rippled and glowed with a silver and blue light.

  "It looks like an artwork. It's beautiful," I said.

  "Thanks, Loot. It's the only thing the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock left me before they sent him off to Parchman Farm. One time we were outside New Albany, Mississippi, where some Klan uglies had burned a cross in a field, and Jimmy Bob was eating a hamburger in the truck across the road, looking out at that black cross, when he says, 'No sense letting good building material go to waste.' Then he walks across the road and gives this colored farmer who was out there plowing a dollar for it."

  " 'What in the world are we gonna do with that?' I say."

  "He says, 'Son, the most exciting place in a shithole like this is the Dairy Queen on Saturday night. When you run a hallelujah tent show, you gotta give them lights in the sky.' "

  "He went into a supermarket, bought eight rolls of aluminum foil, and wrapped the cross in it, then we drove out to a junkyard and he got a guy to string it with electric bulbs.

  That night we put it up on a hill, way up the slope from the tent, and hooked it up to the generator, and you could see that cross glowing in the mist for five miles."

  I nodded absently and looked up toward my lighted gallery.

  "Well... I didn't mean to take up a lot of your evening," he said. "I just wanted to tell you I didn't feel good about the other night in Baton Rouge. You came to me for help and I couldn't offer you very much."

  "Maybe you did, Lyle."

  He looked at me curiously, then lifted one of his overall straps off his sunburn with his thumb.

  "I'm going to put the cross up on my new bible college," he said. "I was going to call it the Lyle Sonnier Bible Institute. Now I'm just going to call it the South Louisiana Bible College. How's that sound?"

  "It sounds pretty good."

  "I told you I ain't as bad as you think."

  "I think maybe you're not bad at all, Lyle."

  His eyes looked into the corners of mine, then he brushed at the dirt and leaves in the drive with his shoe.

  "I appreciate it, Loot," he said.

  "You want to come in?" I asked.

  "No, thanks anyway. I just came into town to see Drew at the hospital and pick up my cross in Lafayette. Weldon told me about him taking a swing on you. I'm sorry that happened. I know you've been as good and fair as you can to both him and Drew. But you really stuck a garden rake in his head."

  "Weldon has to stop jerking everybody around. Maybe it's time he takes his own fall."

  Lyle etched lines in the leaves and dust with the point of his shoe. He rested his mutilated hand, which in the deepening shadows looked almost like part of an amphibian, on the truck's door handle.

  "Weldon told me last night what he's been involved in. It's a mess, it surely is," he said. "I think he wants to tell you about it. He's pretty well worn-out with it."

  "Do you want to tell me what it is?"

  "It's his grief. You'll have to get it from him. No offense meant." He got up in the cab of his truck and clicked the door shut with his underarm. He smiled. "I better get out of here before I get in some kind of legal trouble. You know why I keep that burnt cross, why I'm gonna put it up on top of my Bible college? It don't let me forget where I've been and what I'm fixing to be. It's like that ole boy says in the song, 'I might be an old chunk of coal but I'm gonna be a diamond someday.' Give Weldon a chance. Maybe inside that cinder-block head of his he wants you to like him."

  "What I think is unimportant, Lyle. Your brother's problem is going to be with the court. Anyway, there's something I should tell you before you go. We brought in an old-timer from the Sally in Lafayette, a fellow who'd been in a fire. He might be the same man you saw in your audience."

  "He told you his name was Vic Benson?"

  "You know him?"

  "Sure. I drove to Lafayette and talked to him the other day. We run a shelter in Baton Rouge and a couple of new guys told me about him."

  "He's not your father, then?"

  He smiled again and started his truck.

  "It's him, all right. He denied it, said he had only one son and not some diddly-squat TV preacher he wouldn't waste his jizzurn on." He shook his head good-naturedly. "That old has-... that old son of a buck still knows how to rub a little pain into you. But he's a wet-brain now, been in and out of jails and insane asylums all over Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, at least that's what the other wet-brains say. They say maybe he's got cancer in the lungs, too. So what are you gonna do except feel sorry for a guy like that? I gotta deedee, Loot. Hang loose."

  He drove down the dirt road through the dark tunnel of oak trees, the chrome-plated cross vibrating against his cab, just as the first raindrops dimpled the bayou.

  I was tired, but I had to drive to Lafayette that night and pick up a new aluminum shiner tank and water pump for the bait shop. On my way back out of town I saw one of Weldon Sonnier's company trucks pull out of the traffic and park under the trees in front of the Catholic home for handicapped children.

  Weldon, in a pair of knife-creased brown slacks and a form-fitting T-shirt like a 1950s hood would wear, walked up the sidewalk to the front entrance with a stuffed shopping bag hanging from each hand.

  I stopped at the traffic light, clicked my fingernails on the horn button, turned the radio on and off at least three times, resolved under my breath that I would continue on home and not intrude any more than necessary on Weldon's pride, hardheadedness, and carefully nursed store of private misery.

  The light turned green, and I went around the block and parked across the street from Weldon's truck. The moon was up, and the sky in the north, where it hadn't yet started to rain, looked like a lighted ink wash. I headed up the walk toward the entrance.

  Why?

  Because he needs to know that you don't get the heat off your back by punching out a police officer on an oil rig floor, I told myself.

  But that wasn't it. The truth was I wanted to believe in Weldon, in the same way that sometimes you encourage someone you care about to lie to you. Or perhaps I wanted somehow to dispel the fear that one day I would have to make him Joey Gouza's fall partner.

  But what would I find in a Catholic children's home that would be of any value in eventually cutting Weldon loose from the investigation or prosecuting the executioners of a deputy sheriff or taking down a racist politician?

  Answer: Nothing.

  I walked through the front door into a softly lit and immaculately clean oak-floored hallway, with statues of St. Anthony, St. Theresa, and Jesus resting on pedestals against the walls, and looked through a set of open French doors into a large recreation room.

  It was filled with the children whom nobody wanted.

  They were retarded, spastic, mongoloid, born with deformed limbs, locked in metal braces, wired to electronic devices on wheelchairs. Scattered about on the floor was a tangle of torn wrapping paper., colored ribbon and bows, and boxes that had contained all kinds of toys. He must have made several trips back and forth to the truck.

  Neither the nuns nor the children looked in my direction.

  Weldon had taken off his shoes and was walkin
g on his hands in the middle of the room. His face was almost purple with blood, his muscles quivering with tension, while coins and keys from his pockets bounced all over the rug and the children screamed in delight.

  When he finally flipped himself over on his back, his mouth grinning crazily, his eyes bright with exertion, the children and nuns clapped as though they had just witnessed the world's greatest aerialist at work.

  He sat up and rubbed his knees, still grinning. Then he saw me.

  I waved at him with two fingers. His eyes lingered on mine a moment, bemused, faintly embarrassed perhaps, then he turned back to the children and said, "Hey, you guys, the ice cream man made a big delivery this evening. Sister Agnes says it's time to fang it down."