DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  "That doesn't mean I'm going to get drunk over it."

  "I had seven years sobriety, me. Then I started studying on them fingers I left on that drill pipe. I'd get up with it in the morning, just like you wake up with an ugly, mean woman. I'd drag it around with me all day. I'd look at them pink stumps till they'd start throbbing. Then I went fishing one afternoon, went into a colored man's bait store to buy some shiners, told that man I was gonna catch me a hunnerd sac-a-lait before' the sun get behind them willow tree. Then I told him I changed my mind, just give me a quart of whiskey and don't bother about no shiners. I got drunk five years. Then I spent one in the penitentiary. Get mad about what you can't change and maybe you'll get to do just what Tee Neg done."

  He looks at me reflectively and rubs his palms in a circular motion on his thighs. I twirl my coffee cup on my finger, then one of the cleanup volunteers reaches down and takes it from me.

  "That doesn't mean you always have to like what you see around you," I say.

  "It don't mean you got to be miserable about it, neither."

  "I'm not miserable, Tee Neg. Give it a break, will you?"

  "It ain't never gonna be the same, Dave. That world we grown up in, it's gone. Palti avec le vent, podna."

  I look down from the window at the brick-paved street in the morning's blue light, the colonnades over the sidewalks, a black man pushing a wooden cart laden with strawberries from under the overhang of a dark green oak tree. The scene looks like a postcard mailed from the nineteenth century.

  I went out to Weldon's home on Bayou Teche at 9 A.M. the morning after he was attacked in his boathouse. When he opened the door he was dressed in Levi's, a pair of old tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. A folded baseball glove protruded from his back pocket.

  "You're headed for a game or something?" I asked.

  A red welt ran around his throat, like half of a necklace.

  "I've got an apple basket nailed up on the barn wall," he said. "I like to see if my fork ball's still got a hop on it."

  "You've been throwing a few?"

  "About two hours' worth. It beats smoking cigarettes or fooling around with early-morning booze."

  "How close was it?" I said.

  "He came across my throat and I remember I couldn't breathe, that I was trying to get my fingernails under the wire. Then the blood shut off to my brain, and I went down on the deck like I was poleaxed. It all happened real quick. It makes you think about how quick it can happen."

  "Walk me down to your boathouse."

  "I don't know who it was, Dave. I didn't see him, he didn't say anything, I just remember that wire popping tight across my windpipe." He blew out his breath. "Man, that's a hard feeling to shake. When I was overseas and I thought about buying it, I always figured I'd see it coming somehow, that I'd control it or negotiate with it some way, maybe convince it that I had another season to run. That's a crazy way to think, isn't it?"

  "Let's see if we find anything down at your boathouse."

  We strolled across the lawn toward the bayou. When we were abreast of the old barn on the back of his property, he stooped down and picked up a scuffed baseball with split seams.

  "Watch this, buddy," he said.

  He wet two of his fingers, took a windup, and whipped the ball like a BB into the apple basket.

  "Not bad," I said.

  "I should probably get out of the oil business and start my own baseball franchise. You remember the old New Iberia Pelicans? Boy, I miss minor-league ball." He picked up another baseball from the ground.

  "The report says some kids scared the assailant off."

  He threw the ball underhanded against the barn door, stuck his hands in his back pockets, and continued walking with me toward the boathouse.

  "Yeah, some USL kids ran out of gas on the bayou and paddled in to my dock. Otherwise I would have caught the bus. But they couldn't describe the guy. They said they just saw some fellow take off through the bushes."

  We walked out onto his dock and into the boathouse.

  Oars and life preservers were hung from hooks on the rafters, and the whole interior rippled with the sunlight that reflected off the water at the bottom of the walls.

  "Are you sure he didn't say anything?" I said.

  "Nothing."

  "Did you see a ring or a watch?"

  "I just saw that wire loop flick down past my nose. But I know it was one of Joey Gouza's people."

  "Why?"

  "Because I've got some stuff Joey wants. Joey's been behind all this from the beginning. The guy with the wire was probably Jewel Fluck or Jack Gates. Or any number of mechanics Joey can hire out of Miami or Houston."

  "So you are hooked up with them?"

  "Sure, I am. But I've had it. I don't care if I take a fall or not. I can't keep endangering or fucking up other people anymore. Give me a minute and we'll go to the movies."

  "What?"

  "You'll see," he said, moving a pirogue that was upended on sawhorses. Then he knelt on one knee and lifted up a plank in the floor of the boathouse. A videocassette tightly wrapped in a clear plastic bag was stapled to the bottom of the plank. He sliced the cassette out of the bag with his pocketknife. "Come on up to the house and I'll give you a private screening from Greaseball Productions."

  "What's this about, Weldon?"

  "Everything you want is on this tape. I'm going to give it to YOU."

  "Maybe you should think about calling your lawyer."

  "There's time for that later. Come on."

  I followed him up to his house and into his living room.

  He turned on his television set and VCR; he plugged in the cassette and paused with the remote control in his palm.

  "This is what it amounts to, Dave," he said. "I hit two dusters in a row, I was broke, and I was about to lose my business. I borrowed everything I could at the bank, but it wasn't enough to stay afloat. So I started talking with a couple of shylocks in New Orleans. Before I knew it I was dealing with Jack Gates and he made me an offer to do a big arms drop in Colombia."

  "Colombia?"

  "That's where it's happening. Bush is sending a lot of arms down there to fight the druglords, but the Colombian government has a way of whacking out some of the peasants with it at the same time. So there are antigovernment people down there who pay big money for weapons, and I figured I could make a couple of runs, twenty thou a drop, and not worry about the political complexities involved. Why not? I dropped everything in Laos from pigs to napalm homemade from gasoline and soap detergent.

  "Then Jack Gates offered me the big score, eighty thou for one run. The plan was for me to fly an old C-47 into Honduras, pick up a load of arms, land at this jungle strip in Colombia, where these guys process large amounts of coke, load about eight million dollars worth of flake on board, then do the arms drop up in the mountains and head for the sea.

  "But I told Gates I wanted the payoff when I loaded the coke. He said I'd get paid on this end, and I told him it was no deal, then, because I didn't exactly trust the kind of people he represented. So he made a couple of phone calls and finally said all right, since eighty thou is used Kleenex to these guys. Also, Gates and Joey Gouza thought we'd be in business together for a long time. Except I took them over the hurdles. Sit down. You'll enjoy this."

  He pressed the remote button, and for fifteen minutes the screen showed a series of scenes and images that could have been snipped from color footage filmed in Southeast Asia two decades earlier: wind whipping the canvas cargo straps and webbing in the empty bay of a plane; the shadow of the C-47 racing across yellow pasture-land, hummocks, earthen dikes, and brown reservoirs, the dark green of coffee plantations, a village of shacks built from discarded lumber and sheets of tin that looked as bright and hot as shards of broken mirror in the sun; then the approach over the crest of a purple mountain and the descent into a long valley that contained a landing strip bulldozed out of the jungle so recently that the broken roots in the soil were still white and pink wi
th life.

  The next images looked like they had been taken at an oblique angle from the pilot's compartment: sweat-streaked Indians in cutoff GI fatigues dragging crates of grenades, ammunition, and Belgian automatic rifles into the bay, a man who looked like an American watching in the background, a straw hat shadowing his face; then suddenly an abrupt shift in the location and cast of characters. The second cargo was loaded at twilight, and the bags were pillowsize, wrapped in black vinyl, the ends tucked, folded, and taped, carried on board as lovingly as Christmas packages.

  "The next thing you should see is a lot of parachutes popping open in the dark and those crates floating down toward a circle of burning truck flares in the middle of some mountains," Weldon said. "That's where I made a change in the script. Watch this."

  The screen showed a moonlit seacoast, the waves sliding up on the beach in a long line of foam, humps of coral reef protruding from the surf like the rose-colored backs of whales. Then the kickers began shoving the cargo out of the C-47.

  "I call this part 'Weldon pickles the load and says get fucked to the greaseballs,' " Weldon said.

  The wind ripped apart the bags of cocaine and covered the black surface of the water with a floating white paste.

  The crates of arms tumbled out into the darkness like a flying junkyard. Some of the crates sent geysers of foam out of the groundswell; others burst apart on the exposed reef, bejeweling the coral with belts of.50 caliber shells.

  The screen went white.

  "That's it?" I said.

  "Yeah. What do you think of it?"

  "This is what Gouza's been after?"

  "Yeah, I told both of them I had their whole operation on tape. I told them to get out of my life. I figured they owed me the eighty thou for the earlier runs, anyway. I took thirty-seven holes in the fuselage on one of them. What do you think of it?"

  "Not much."

  "What?"

  "What else have you got besides this tape?" I asked.

  "This is the whole show."

  "Have you got something connecting Gouza to arms and dope trafficking?"

  "I've just got this tape."

  "Will you make a sworn statement that you were flying for Joey Gouza?"

  "I can't."

  "Why not?"

  "I made all the arrangements with Jack Gates. Gouza stayed out of it."

  I looked out the ceiling-high window at the live oaks in Weldon's side yard.

  "What's Bobby Earl's part in this?" I said.

  "He's got no part."

  "Don't tell me that, Weldon."

  "Bobby doesn't have anything to do with it."

  "Now's not the time to cover for this guy, podna."

  "Bobby's mind is on the U.S. Senate and his putz. Use your head, Dave. Why would he want to get mixed up with dope and guns?"

  "Money."

  "He gets all he wants from right-wing simpletons and north Louisiana rednecks. Besides, that's not what he's after. You liberals have never figured him out. Bobby doesn't care about black people one way or another. He's never known any. How could he be upset by them? It's educated and intelligent white people he doesn't like. In his mind you're all just like his parents. I don't think a day went by in his life that they didn't let him know he was a piece of shit. He's got two loves in this world, porking the ladies and provoking the press and people like yourself."

  "That might all be true, but he's hooked up with Joey Gouza and that means he's in this bullshit right up to his kneecaps."

  "You're wrong."

  "I'm weary of you holding out on me, Weldon."

  "I'm not. I've told you everything. What else do you want out of me? A guy tried to take my head off with a piano wire. I can't think about it without shuddering all over. It really got to me, man. I can even smell the guy."

  "What do you mean?"

  He stopped, and his eyes looked into space.

  "I didn't think about it before," he said. "The guy had a smell. It was like embalming fluid or something."

  "Say it again."

  "Embalming fluid. Or chemicals. Hell, I don't know. It was there just a second, then my light switch clicked off."

  "It wasn't one of Gouza's people, Weldon."

  His brow furrowed, and he fingered the red line around his neck.

  "I think your brother, Lyle, was right all along," I said. "I think your father has made a spectacular reappearance in your life. Take this tape to the DEA or the U.S. Customs office, if you want. It doesn't fall under my jurisdiction."

  "You're not interested in it?"

  "We already have a murder warrant out on Jack Gates. You haven't shown or told me anything that will help put any of the other players in jail."

  "You mean I've been holding this evidence and taking all this heat for nothing? And all you can tell me is that my poor demented brother has been right all along, that my own father wants to put my head on a pike?"

  "I'm afraid that's about it."

  "No, that's not it, Dave," he said. "I think this time I finally read you. You're not interested in Joey Gouza or Jack Gates or any of these Aryan Brotherhood clowns. You want to staple my brother-in-law's butt to the furniture. In fact, if you had your way, you'd blow up his shit big time, wouldn't you? Just like a Gatling gun locking down on Charlie in the middle of a rice field."

  We stared at each other in the silence like a pair of bookends.

  I drove to the Salvation Army transient shelter in Lafayette to try and find Vic Benson. A portly, red-cheeked, kindly man with big sideburns who ran the shelter said that Benson had had a fistfight with another man two days ago and had been asked to leave. He had responded by packing his duffel bag quietly and walking out the door without a word; then he had stopped, snapped his fingers as though he had forgotten something, and returned to the dormitory long enough to stuff his bed sheets in the toilet bowl.

  "Where do you think he went?" I asked.

  "Anywhere there's Southern Pacific tracks," the Salvation Army officer said.

  "Can I talk to the other men?"

  "I doubt if they know anything. You can try, though.

  They were a little afraid of Vic. He wasn't like the rest.

  Most of our men are harmless. Vic always made you feel he was working on a dark thought, like he was grinding sand between his back teeth. One time he was watching television..." He stopped, smiled, and shook the memory out of his face.

  "Go on," I said.

  "He and some of the other men were watching this minister, then Vic said, 'I'd pour lye down that one's throat if his brother didn't deserve it worse."

  "Which minister?"

  "That fellow in Baton Rouge, what's-his-name."

  "Lyle Sonnier?"

  "Yeah, that's the one. I tried to make a joke out of it, and I said, "Vic, what could you possibly have against that man up there?' He said, 'The same thing the rooster's got against the baby chick that thinks the brooder house is his.' Talking with Vic could be a little bit like walking through cobwebs. Or accidentally raking your hand across a yellow-jacket nest."

  We talked to a half-dozen men in the dormitory, and they all had the same vacant response and benign, vacuous expressions that they wore and used as habitually as the identities and personal histories that they had created for themselves in hundreds of drunk tanks and trackside jungle camps. They reminded me of figures in a van Gogh or Munch painting. Palm fronds and the sunlit leaves of banana trees rustled against the screen windows, but in contrast the men inside looked wind-dried, the color of cardboard, weightless in their emaciation, their hollow chests devoid of heartbeat, the skin of their arms wrapped as tight as fish scales around their bones. Their squared-away bunks, which cast no shadows because of the sun's position, looked in their exactitude like a line of coffins.

  Why the morbidness over a bunch of drunks? Because they brought back the ever-present knowledge in my life that I was one drink away from their fate-despair, murder of the soul, insanity, or death-and that realization was like some
one working my heart muscle with an angry thumb.

  The Salvation Army officer and I walked out of the dormitory into the sunlight, into the clean sweep of wind through oak and myrtle trees and a twirling water sprinkler on the grass.

  "How would you describe that odor they have?" I asked.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "That smell. They all have it. How would you describe it?"

  "Oh. It's those short-dogs they drink. It's one step above paint-thinner."