Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "She seems to think you're a pretty influential guy," she replied.

  Bootsie was bent over the sink, scrubbing the burnt grease off a stove tray, her strong arms swollen with her work; her polo shirt had pulled up over her jeans, exposing the soft taper of her hips. She had the most beautiful hair I had ever seen in a woman. It was the color of honey, with caramel swirls in it, and its thickness and the way she wore it up on her head seemed to make the skin of her face even more pink and lovely.

  "Is there anything else I can arrange? An audience with the Pope?" I said.

  She turned from the drainboard and dried her hands on a towel.

  "That woman's after something else. I just don't know what it is," she said.

  "The Flynns are complicated people."

  "They have a way of finding war zones to play in. Don't let her take you over the hurdles, Streak."

  I hit her on the rump with the palm of my hand. She wadded up the dish towel and threw it past my head.

  We ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the back yard. Beyond the duck pond at the back of our property my neighbor's sugarcane was tall and green and marbled with the shadows of clouds. The bamboo and periwinkles that grew along our coulee rippled in the wind, and I could smell rain and electricity in the south.

  "What's in that brown envelope you brought home?" Bootsie asked.

  "Pictures of a mainline sociopath in the Colorado pen."

  "Why bring them home?"

  "I've seen the guy. I'm sure of it. But I can't remember where."

  "Around here?"

  "No. Somewhere else. The top of his head looks like a yellow cake but he has no jaws. An obnoxious FBI agent told me he's pals with Cisco Flynn."

  "A head like a yellow cake? A mainline con? Friends with Cisco Flynn?"

  "Yeah."

  "Wonderful."

  That night I dreamed of the man named Swede Boxleiter. He was crouched on his haunches in the darkened exercise yard of a prison, smoking a cigarette, his granny glasses glinting in the humid glow of lights on the guard towers. The predawn hours were cool and filled with the smells of sage, water coursing over boulders in a canyon riverbed, pine needles layered on the forest floor. A wet, red dust hung in the air, and the moon seemed to rise through it, above the mountain's rim, like ivory skeined with dyed thread.

  But the man named Swede Boxleiter was not one to concern himself with the details of the alpine environment he found himself in. The measure of his life and himself was the reflection he saw in the eyes of others, the fear that twitched in their faces, the unbearable tension he could create in a cell or at a dining table simply by not speaking.

  He didn't need a punk or prune-o or the narcissistic pleasure of clanking iron in the yard or even masturbation for release from the energies that, unsatiated, could cause him to wake in the middle of the night and sit in a square of moonlight as though he were on an airless plateau that echoed with the cries of animals. Sometimes he smiled to himself and fantasized about telling the prison psychologist what he really felt inside, the pleasure that climbed through the tendons in his arm when he clasped a shank that had been ground from a piece of angle iron on an emery wheel in the shop, the intimacy of that last moment when he looked into the eyes of the hit. The dam that seemed to break in his loins was like water splitting the bottom of a paper bag.

  But prison shrinks were not people you confided in, at least if you were put together like Swede Boxleiter and ever wanted to make the street again.

  In my dream he rose from his crouched position, reached up and touched the moon, as though to despoil it, but instead wiped away the red skein from one corner with his fingertip and exposed a brilliant white cup of light.

  I sat up in bed, the window fan spinning its shadows on my skin, and remembered where I had seen him.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I went to the city library on East Main Street and dug out the old Life magazine in which Megan's photos of a black rapist's death inside a storm drain had launched her career. Opposite the full-page shot of the black man reaching out futilely for the sunlight was the group photo of five uniformed cops staring down at his body. In the foreground was Swede Boxleiter, holding a Red Delicious apple with a white divot bitten out of it, his smile a thin worm of private pleasure stitched across his face.

  BUT I WASN'T GOING to take on the Flynns' problems, I told myself, or worry about a genetic misfit in the Colorado pen.

  I was still telling myself that late that night when Mout' Broussard, New Iberia's legendary shoeshine man and Cool Breeze's father, called the bait shop and told me his son had just escaped from the parish prison.

  THREE

  CAJUNS OFTEN HAVE TROUBLE WITH the th sound in English, and as a result they drop the h or pronounce the t as a d. Hence, the town's collectively owned shoeshine man, Mouth Broussard, was always referred to as Mout'. For decades he operated his shoeshine stand under the colonnade in front of the old Frederic Hotel, a wonderful two-story stucco building with Italian marble columns inside, a ballroom, a saloon with a railed mahogany bar, potted palms and slot and racehorse machines in the lobby, and an elevator that looked like a polished brass birdcage.

  Mout' was built like a haystack and never worked without a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth. He wore an oversized gray smock, the pockets stuffed with brushes and buffing rags ribbed with black and oxblood stains. The drawers under the two elevated chairs on the stand were loaded with bottles of liquid polish, cans of wax and saddle soap, toothbrushes and steel dental picks he used to clean the welts and stitches around the edges of the shoe. He could pop his buffing rags with a speed and rhythm that never failed to command a silent respect from everyone who watched.

  Mout' caught all the traffic walking from the Southern Pacific passenger station to the hotel, shined all the shoes that were set out in the corridors at night, and guaranteed you could see your face in the buffed point of your shoe or boot or your money would be returned. He shined the shoes of the entire cast of the 1929 film production of Evangeline; he shined the shoes of Harry James's orchestra and of U.S. Senator Huey Long just before Long was assassinated.

  "Where is Cool Breeze now, Mout'?" I said into the phone.

  "You t'ink I'm gonna tell you that?"

  "Then why'd you call?"

  "Cool Breeze say they gonna kill him."

  "Who is?"

  "That white man run the jail. He sent a nigger try to joog him in the ear with a wire."

  "I'll be over in the morning."

  "The morning? Why, t'ank you, suh."

  "Breeze went down his own road a long time ago, Mout'."

  He didn't reply. I could feel the late-summer heat and the closeness of the air under the electric light.

  "Mout'?" I said.

  "You right. But it don't make none of it easier. No suh, it surely don't."

  At sunrise the next morning I drove down East Main, under the canopy of live oaks that spanned the street, past City Hall and the library and the stone grotto and statue of Christ's mother, which had once been the site of George Washington Cable's home, and the sidewalks cracked by tree roots and the blue-green lawns rilled with hydrangeas and hibiscus and philodendron and the thick stand of bamboo that framed the yard of the 1831 plantation manor called The Shadows, and finally into the business district. Then I was on the west side of town, on back streets with open ditches, railroad tracks that dissected yards and pavement, and narrow paintless houses, in rows like bad teeth, that had been cribs when nineteenth-century trainmen used to drink bucket beer from the saloon with the prostitutes and leave their red lanterns on the gallery steps when they went inside.

  Mout' was behind his house, flinging birdseed at the pigeons that showered down from the telephone wires into his yard. He walked bent sideways at the waist, his eyes blue with cataracts, one cheek marbled pink and white by a strange skin disease that afflicts people of color; but his sloped shoulders were as wide as a bull's and his upper arms like chunks of
sewer pipe.

  "It was a bad time for Breeze to run, Mout'. The prosecutor's office might have cut him loose," I said.

  He mopped his face with a blue filling-station rag and slid the bag of birdseed off his shoulder and sat down heavily in an old barber's chair with an umbrella mounted on it. He picked up a fruit jar filled with coffee and hot milk from the ground and drank from it. His wide mouth seemed to cup around the bottom of the opening like a catfish's.

  "He gone to church wit' me and his mother when he was a li'l boy," he said. "He played ball in the park, he carried the newspaper, he set pins in the bowling alley next to white boys and didn't have no trouble. It was New Orleans done it. He lived with his mother in the projects. Decided he wasn't gonna be no shoeshine man, have white folks tipping their cigar ashes down on his head, that's what he tole me."

  Mout' scratched the top of his head and made a sound like air leaving a tire.

  "You did the best you could. Maybe it'll turn around for him someday," I said.

  "They gonna shoot him now, ain't they?" he said.

  "No. Nobody wants that, Mout'."

  "That jailer, Alex Guidry? He use to come down here when he was in collitch. Black girls was three dollars over on Hopkins. Then he'd come around the shoeshine stand when they was black men around, pick out some fella and keep looking in his face, not letting go, no, peeling the skin right off the bone, till the man dropped his head and kept his eyes on the sidewalk. That's the way it was back then. Now y'all done hired the same fella to run the jail."

  Then he described his son's last day in the parish prison.

  THE TURNKEY WHO HAD been a brig chaser in the Marine Corps walked down the corridor of the Isolation unit and opened up the cast-iron door to Cool Breeze's cell. He bounced a baton off a leather lanyard that was looped around his wrist.

  "Mr. Alex says you going back into Main Pop. That is, if you want," he said.

  "I ain't got no objection."

  "It must be your birthday."

  "How's that?" Cool Breeze said.

  "You'll figure it out."

  "I'll figure it out, huh?"

  "You wonder why you people are in here? When you think an echo is a sign of smarts?"

  The turnkey walked him through a series of barred doors that slid back and forth on hydraulically operated steel arms, ordered him to strip and shower, then handed him an orange jumpsuit and locked him in a holding cell.

  "They gonna put Mr. Alex on suspension. But he's doing you right before he goes out. So that's why I say it must be your birthday," the turnkey said. He bounced the baton on its lanyard and winked. "When he's gone, I'm gonna be jailer. You might study on the implications."

  At four that afternoon Alex Guidry stopped in front of Cool Breeze's cell. He wore a seersucker suit and red tie and shined black cowboy boots. His Stetson hung from his fingers against his pant leg.

  "You want to work scrub-down detail and do sweep-up in the shop?" he asked.

  "I can do that."

  "You gonna make trouble?"

  "Ain't my style, suh."

  "You can tell any damn lie you want when you get out of here. But if I'm being unfair to you, you tell me to my face right now," he said.

  "People see what they need to."

  Alex Guidry turned his palm up and looked at it and picked at a callus with his thumb. He started to speak, then shook his head in disgust and walked down the corridor, the leather soles of his boots clicking on the floor.

  Cool Breeze spent the next day scrubbing stone walls and sidewalks with a wire brush and Ajax, and at five o'clock reported to the maintenance shop to begin sweep-up. He used a long broom to push steel filings, sawdust, and wood chips into tidy piles that he shoveled onto a dustpan and dumped into a trash bin. Behind him a mulatto whose golden skin was spotted with freckles the size of dimes was cutting a design out of a piece of plywood on a jigsaw, the teeth ripping a sound out of the wood like an electrified scream.

  Cool Breeze paid no attention to him, until he heard the plywood disengage from the saw. He turned his head out of curiosity just as the mulatto balled his fist and tried to jam a piece of coat-hanger wire, sharpened to a point like an ice pick and driven vertically through the wood handle off a lawn-mower starter rope, through the center of Cool Breeze's ear and into his brain.

  The wire point laid open Cool Breeze's cheek from the jawbone to the corner of his mouth.

  He locked his attacker's forearm in both bis hands, spun with him in circles, then walked the two of them toward the saw that hummed with an oily light.

  "Don't make me do it, nigger," he said.

  But his attacker would not give up his weapon, and Cool Breeze drove first the coat hanger, then the balled fist and the wood plug gripped inside the palm into the saw blade, so that bone and metal and fingernails and wood splinters all showered into his face at once.

  He hid inside the barrel of a cement mixer, where by all odds he should have died. He felt the truck slow at the gate, heard the guards talking outside while they walked the length of the truck with mirrors they held under the frame.

  "We got one out on the ground. You ain't got him in your barrel, have you?" a guard said.

  "We sure as hell can find out," the truck driver said.

  Gears and cogs clanged into place, then the truck vibrated and shook and giant steel blades began turning inside the barrel's blackness, lifting curtains of wet cement into the air like cake dough.

  "Get out of here, will you? For some reason that thing puts me in mind of my wife in the bathroom," the guard said.

  Two hours later, on a parish road project south of town, Cool Breeze climbed from inside the cement mixer and lumbered into a cane field like a man wearing a lead suit, his lacerated cheek bleeding like a flag, the cane leaves edged with the sun's last red light.

  "I DON'T BELIEVE IT, Mout'," I said.

  "Man ain't tried to joog him?"

  "That the jailer set it up. He's already going on suspension. He'd be the first person everyone suspected."

  "'Cause he done it."

  "Where's Breeze?"

  Mout' slipped his sack of birdseed over his shoulder and begin flinging handfuls into the air again. The pigeons swirled about his waxed bald head like snow-flakes.

  MY PARTNER WAS DETECTIVE Helen Soileau. She wore slacks and men's shirts to work, seldom smiled or put on makeup, and faced you with one foot cocked at an angle behind the other, in the same way a martial artist strikes a defensive posture. Her face was lumpy, her eyes unrelenting when they fixed on you, and her blond hair seemed molded to her head like a plastic wig. She leaned on my office windowsill with both arms and watched a trusty gardener edging the sidewalk. She wore a nine-millimeter automatic in a hand-tooled black holster and a pair of handcuffs stuck through the back of her gunbelt.

  "I met Miss Pisspot of 1962 at the jail this morning," she said.

  "Who?"

  "That FBI agent, what's her name, Glazier. She thinks we set up Cool Breeze Broussard to get clipped in our own jail."

  "What's your take on it?"

  "The mulatto's a pipehead. He says he thought Breeze was somebody else, a guy who wanted to kill him because he banged the guy's little sister."

  "You buy it?" I asked.

  "A guy who wears earrings through his nipples? Yeah, it's possible. Do me a favor, will you?" she said.

  "What's up?"

  Her eyes tried to look casual. "Lila Terrebonne is sloshed at the country club. The skipper wants me to drive her back to Jeanerette."

  "No, thanks."

  "I could never relate to Lila. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's because she threw up in my lap once. I'm talking about your AA buddy here."

  "She didn't call me for help, Helen. If she had, it'd be different."

  "If she starts her shit with me, she's going into the drunk tank. I don't care if her grandfather was a U.S. senator or not."

  She went out to the parking lot. I sat behind my desk for a moment, then pi
nged a paper clip in the wastebasket and flagged down her cruiser before she got to the street.

  LILA HAD A POINTED face and milky green eyes and yellow hair that was bleached the color of white gold by the sun. She was lighthearted about her profligate life, undaunted by hangovers or trysts with married men, laughing in a husky voice in nightclubs about the compulsions that every two or three years placed her in a hospital or treatment center. She would dry out and by order of the court attend AA meetings for a few weeks, working a crossword puzzle in the newspaper while others talked of the razor wire wrapped around their souls, or staring out the window with a benign expression that showed no trace of desire, remorse, impatience, or resignation, just temporary abeyance, like a person waiting for the hands on an invisible clock to reach an appointed time.

  From her adolescent years to the present, I did not remember a time in her life when she was not the subject of rumor or scandal. She was sent off by her parents to the Sorbonne, where she failed her examinations and returned to attend USL with blue-collar kids who could not even afford to go to LSU in Baton Rouge. The night of her senior prom, members of the football team glued her photograph on the rubber machine in Provost's Bar.

  When Helen and I entered the clubhouse she was by herself at a back table, her head wreathed in smoke from her ashtray, her unfilled glass at the ends of her fingertips. The other tables were filled with golfers and bridge players, their eyes careful never to light on Lila and the pitiful attempt at dignity she tried to impose on her situation. The white barman and the young black waiter who circulated among the tables had long since refused to look in her direction or hear her order for another drink. When someone opened the front door, the glare of sunlight struck her face like a slap.

  "You want to take a ride, Lila?" I said.

  "Oh, Dave, how are you? They didn't call you again, did they?"

  "We were in the neighborhood. I'm going to get a membership here one day."

  "The same day you join the Republican Party. You're such a riot. Would you help me up? I think I twisted my ankle," she said.