DR05 - Stained White Radiance

by James Lee Burke

  I tried to free the staples from the bark, then I simply tore the poster down the middle, handed it to him, and walked up to the house.

  Bootsie was in town and Alafair had not gotten home from her picnic yet. I undressed in the bedroom, turned on the window fan, lay down on top of the sheets with the pillow over my head, and tried to sleep. I could hear the rain hitting the trees in large, flat drops now and tinking on the blades of the fan.

  But I couldn't sleep, and I kept trying to sort through my thoughts in the same way that you pick at a scab you know you should leave alone.

  No matter how educated a Southerner is, or how liberal or intellectual he might consider himself to be, I don't believe you will meet many of my generation who do not still revere, although perhaps in a secret way, all the old southern myths that we've supposedly put aside as members of the New South. You cannot grow up in a place where the tractor's plow can crack minis balls and grapeshot loose from the soil, even rake across a cannon wheel, and remain impervious to the past.

  As a child I had access to few books, but I knew all the stories about General Banks's invasion of Southwestern Louisiana, the burning of the parish courthouse, the stabling of horses in the Episcopalian church on Main Street, the union gunboats that came up the Teche and shelled the plantation on Nelson's Canal west of town, and Louisiana's boys in butternut brown who lived on dried peas and gave up ground a bloody foot at a time.

  Who cared if their cause was just or not? The stories made your blood sing; the grooved minis ball that you picked out of the freshly plowed row and rolled in your palm made you part of a moment that happened over a century ago. You looked away at the stand of trees by the bayou, and rather than the tractor engine idling beside you, you heard the ragged popping of small-arms fire and saw black plumes of smoke exploding out of the brush into the sunlight. And you realized that they died right here in this field, that they bled into this same dirt where the cane would grow eight feet tall by autumn and turn as scarlet as dried blood.

  But why did large numbers of people buy into a man like Bobby Earl? Were they that easily deceived? Would any group of reasonable people entrust the conduct of their government to an ex-American Nazi or Ku Klux Klansman? I had no answer.

  I wondered if any of them ever asked themselves what Robert Lee or Thomas Jackson might have to say about a man like this.

  I finally fell asleep. Then I heard the brakes on the church bus and a moment later the screen door slam. Other sounds followed: a lunch kit clattering on the drainboard, the icebox door opening, the back screen slamming. Tripod racing up and down on the chain that was attached to the clothesline, the screen slamming again, tennis shoes in the hallway outside the bedroom door, then a pause full of portent.

  Alafair hit the bed running and bounced up and down on her knees, lost her balance, and fell across my back. I raised my head up from under the pillow.

  "Hi, big guy. What you doing home early?" she said.

  "Taking a nap."

  "Oh." She started bouncing again, then looked at my face. "Maybe you should go back to sleep?"

  "Why would I want to do that, Alf?"

  "Are you mad about something?"

  I put on my trousers, then sat back down on the side of the bed and tried to rub the sleep out of my face.

  "Hop up on my back," I said. "Let's check out what Batist is doing. It's not a day for lying around in bed."

  She put her arms around my neck and clamped her legs around my ribcage, and we walked down through the wet leaves to the dock. It was raining lightly out of a gray sky now, the lily pads were bright green and beaded with water, and the bayou was covered with rain rings.

  Batist had slid the canvas awning out on wires over the dock, and several fishermen sat under it, drinking beer and eating boudin out of wax paper. He had also allowed someone to put Bobby Earl posters in the bait-shop windows and on the service counter.

  I let Alafair climb down off my back. Batist was taking some boudin out of the microwave. He wore canvas boat shoes without socks, a pair of ragged, white cutoffs whose top button had popped off, and a wash-faded denim shirt tied under his chest, which reminded me of black boilerplate. His shirt pocket was bursting with cigars.

  "Batist, who put these posters here?"

  "Some white man who come ax if he could leave them."

  "Next time send the man up to the house."

  "You was sleepin', you." He put a dry cigar in his mouth and began slicing the boudin on a paper plate and inserting matchsticks into each slice. "Why you worried about them signs, Dave? People leave them here all the time."

  "Because they're for Bobby Earl, and Bobby Earl's a shit!" Alafair said.

  I looked down at her, stunned.

  "Put the cork in that language, Alf," I said.

  "I heard Bootsie say it," she answered. "He's a shit. He hates black people."

  Two men at the beer cooler were grinning at me.

  "Dave, that's right. Them is for that fella Earl?" Batist said.

  "Yeah, but you didn't know, Batist," I said. "Here, I'll throw them in the trash."

  "I ain't never seen him on TV, me, so I didn't pay his picture no mind."

  "It's all right, podna."

  The men at the cooler were still grinning in our direction.

  "Do you gentlemen need something?" I said.

  "Not a thing," one of them said.

  "Good," I said.

  I took Alafair by the hand, and we walked back up the slope to the gallery. The wind was cool blowing out of the marsh and smelled of wet leaves and moldy pecan husks and the purple four-o'clocks that were just opening in the shadows. Alafair's hand felt hot and small in mine.

  "You mad, Dave?" she said.

  "No, I'm real proud of you, little guy. You're what real soldiers are made of."

  Her eyes squinted almost completely shut with her smile.

  That evening Alafair went to a baseball game with the neighbors' children, and Bootsie and I were left alone with each other. It had stopped raining, and the windows were open and you could hear the crickets and the cicadas from horizon to horizon. Our conversation, when it occurred, was spiritless and morose. At nine o'clock the phone rang in the kitchen.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Hey, Streak, I thought I'd pass on some information in case you're wondering about life down here in the Big Sleazy."

  "Just a minute, Clete," I said.

  I took the telephone on its extension wire out on the back steps and sat down.

  "Go ahead," I said.

  "I found the perfect moment to drop the dime on our man. His dork just went into the electric socket big time."

  In the background I could hear people talking loudly and dishes clattering.

  "Where are you?"

  "I'm scarfing down a few on the half shell and chugging down a few brews at the Acme, noble mon. There's also a French lady at my table who's fascinated with my accent. I told her it's Irish-coonass. She also says I'm a sensitive and entertaining conversationalist. She's talking about painting me in the nude.... Hey, trust me, Dave, everything'scopa cetic. I'll never go down in a manual on police procedure, but when it's time to mash on their scrots, you do it with hobnailed boots. Hang loose, partner, and come on down this weekend and let's catch some green trout."

  I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle and went back inside the house. Bootsie had just put away some dishes in the cabinet and was watching me.

  "That was Clete, wasn't it?" she said. She wore a sundress printed with purple and green flowers. She had just brushed her hair, and it was full of small lights.

  "Yep."

  "What have you two done, Dave?"

  I sat down at the breakfast table and looked at the tops of my hands. I thought about telling her all of it.

  "Back at the First District, we used to call it 'salting the mine shaft."

  "What?"

  "The wiseguys have expensive lawyers. Sometimes cops fix it so two and two add up to fiv
e."

  "What did you do?"

  I cleared my throat and thought about continuing, then I made my mind go empty.

  "Let's talk about something else, Boots."

  I gazed out the back screen at the fireflies lighting in the trees. I could feel her eyes looking at me. Then she walked out of the kitchen and began sorting canned goods in the hallway pantry. I thought about driving into town and reading the newspaper at the bar in Tee Neg's poolroom. In my mind I already saw myself under the wood-bladed fan and smelled the talcum, the green sawdust on the floor, the flat beer, and the residue of ice and whiskey poured into the tin sinks.

  But Tee Neg's was not a good place for me to be when I was tired and the bottles behind the bar became as seductive and inviting as a woman's smile.

  I heard Bootsie stop stacking the canned goods and shut the pantry door. She walked up behind my chair and paused for a moment, then rested her hand lightly on the back of the chair.

  "It was for me and Alafair, wasn't it?" she said.

  "What?"

  "Whatever you did last night in New Orleans, it wasn't for yourself. It was for me and Alafair, wasn't it?"

  I put my arm behind her thigh and drew her hand down on my chest. She pressed her cheek against my hair and hugged me against her breasts.

  "Dave, we have such a wonderful family," she said. "Let's try to trust each other a little more."

  I started to say something, but whatever it was, it was better forgotten. I could hear her heart beating against my ear. The sun-freckled tops of her breasts were hot, and her skin smelled like milk and flowers.

  By nine o'clock the next morning I had heard nothing of particular interest out of New Orleans. But then again the local news often featured stories of such national importance as the following: the drawbridge over the Teche had opened with three cars on it; the school-board meeting had come to an end last night with a fistfight between two high school principals; several professional wrestlers had to be escorted by city police from the National Guard armory after they were spat upon and showered with garbage by the fans; the drawbridge tender had thrown a press photographer's camera into the Teche because he didn't believe anyone had the right to photograph his bridge.

  So I kept diddling with my paperwork, looking at my watch, and wondering if perhaps Clete hadn't simply spent too much time at the draft beer spout in the Acme before he had decided to telephone me.

  Then, just as I was about to drive home for lunch, I got a call from Lyle Sonnier.

  "Sorry to be so late getting back to you, Loot, but it was hard getting everybody together. Anyway, it's on for tomorrow night," he said.

  "What's on?"

  "Dinner. Actually, a crab boil. We're gonna cook up a mess of 'ern in the backyard."

  "Lyle, that's nice of you but-"

  "Look, Dave, Drew and Weldon feel the same way I do. You treated our family decent while we sort of stuck thumbtacks in your head."

  "No, you didn't."

  "I know better, Loot. Anyway, can y'all make it or not?"

  "Friday night we always take Batist and Alafair to the drive-in movie in Lafayette."

  "Bring them along."

  "I don't know if your father is anxious to see me again."

  "Come on, Dave, he operates on about three brain cells, poor old guy. Have a little compassion."

  "That's the second time this week somebody has said that to me about the wrong person."

  "What?"

  "Never mind. I'll ask Boots and Batist and get back to you. Thanks for the invitation, Lyle."

  I drove home, and Bootsie and I fixed a pitcher of iced tea and poor-boy sandwiches of shrimp and fried oysters and took them out on the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree.

  "You sure you don't mind going?" I said.

  "No. Why should I mind?"

  "Their father may be there. He's terribly disfigured, Boots."

  She smiled. The wind in the mimosa tree made drifting, lacy patterns of shadow on her skin.

  "What you mean is, Drew will be there," she said.

  "Well, she will be."

  "I think I can survive the knowledge of your college romances, Dave." Her brown eyes crinkled at the corners.

  I was late getting back to the department. When I walked through my office door the sheriff was sitting in my chair, one of his half-topped boots propped on the corner of my desk. A videotape cassette rested on his belt buckle. He looked at his watch, then his eyes glanced at my damp hair and shirt.

  "You look like you just got out of the shower," he said.

  "I did."

  "You go home to take a shower in the middle of the day?"

  "I had to change a tire."

  "I'll be," he said, clicking his nails on the plastic cassette case.

  "What's up, sheriff?."

  "An FBI agent dropped this tape by about an hour ago. It was shot last night in front of a home that's under surveillance out by Lake Pontchartrain. The home is owned by one of the Giacanos, the head greaseballs in New Orleans."

  "Yeah?"

  "They had a big party there last night. The Vitalis crowd from three states was milling around on the lawn, including Joey the Neck and a couple of his whores. Did you know that he makes his whores carry validated health certificates because he's terrified of catching AIDS from them? That's what this FBI agent said."

  "I didn't know that."

  "Anyway, this FBI agent knew we had a vested interest in Joey's career, and that's why he dropped off this tape."

  The sheriff removed his foot from my desk and swiveled the chair around to face me. "So I watched the tape. It's quite a show. You don't want to get up and go for popcorn on this one. And while I was watching it, I kept remembering something you said to me the other day."

  He sucked on his bottom lip and stared into my face, his rimless glasses low on his nose.

  "Okay, I'll bite, sheriff. What did I say to you?"

  "You mentioned something about letting events unfold. So when I finished watching the tape, I got to thinking. Is Dave omniscient? Does he have insight into the future that none of the rest of us have? Or does he know about things that I don't?"

  "I'm not good at being a straight man, sheriff. You want to cut to it?"

  "Let's take a walk down to my office and stick this in the VCR. These guys do quite a job. It's even got sound. I sure wish we had their equipment."

  As we went down the hallway I kept looking into the faces of other people. But there was nothing unusual in their expressions that I could see.

  "I think there should be some screen credits on this," he said, clicking on his television set and fitting the cassette into the VCR. "Maybe something like 'Directed by Cletus Purcel and Unnamed Friend."

  "What about Purcel?"

  He sucked in his cheeks, and his eyes looked into the corners of mine.

  "You don't know?"

  "I'm truly lost."

  "Gouza pulled up to the house and parked. A couple of minutes later Purcel cruised by. It looked like he'd been following Gouza."

  "How do they know it was Purcel?"

  "A fed made him. Also they ran his tag. Then about twenty minutes later NOPD gets this anonymous phone call that Joey Gouza has got a body in the trunk of his car and his car can be found at this address out on the lake. That's where our film starts, Dave. Sit down and watch, then tell me what you think."

  The sheriff closed the blinds, sat on the corner of his desk, and activated the VCR with a remote control in his palm. In the first black-and-white frames the screen showed an enormous Tudor house with lines of Cadillacs, Lincolns, Mercedes, and Porsches parked in the circular driveway and at the curbs. The oak trees in the side yard were strung with Japanese lanterns, and through the piked fence and myrtle bushes you could see perhaps 'a hundred people milling around the food and drink tables.

  Then a solitary city patrol car cruised down the street, its emergency lights off, slowed, and stopped. The driver got out with a clipboard and f
lashlight and walked up and down the line of cars at the curb, shining his light on the tags. He paused by a white Cadillac limo with black-tinted windows just as a dog unit pulled into the camera lens from the opposite end of the block.

  The action was very quick after that. A uniformed cop, with a German shepherd straining at its leash, approached the back of the limo. Then the dog took one sniff and went crazy, leaping against its leash, clacking its nails on the bumper and trunk.