Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "I wouldn't mark it off, mon. This greaseball in Igor's was complaining to me about how the Giacano family is falling apart, how they've lost their self-respect and they're running low-rent action like porno joints and dope in the projects. I say, 'Yeah, it's a shame. The world's really going to hell,' and he says, 'You telling me, Purcel? It's so bad we got a serious problem with somebody, we got to outsource.'

  "I say, 'Outsource?'

  "He goes, 'Yeah, niggers from the Desire, Vietnamese lice-heads, crackers who spit Red Man in Styrofoam cups at the dinner table.'

  "It's the Dixie Mafia, Dave. There's a nest of them over on the Mississippi coast."

  I drew the paddle through the water and let the boat glide into a cove that was freckled with sunlight. I cast a popping bug with yellow feathers and red eyes on the edge of the hyacinths. A solitary blue heron lifted on extended wings out of the grass and flew through an opening in the trees, dimpling the water with its feet.

  "But you didn't bring me out here to talk about wise guy bullshit, did you?" Clete said.

  I watched a cottonmouth extend its body out of the water, curling around a low branch on a flooded willow, then pull itself completely into the leaves.

  "I don't know how to say it," I said.

  "I'll clear it up for both of us. I like her. Maybe we got something going. That rubs you the wrong way?"

  "A guy gets involved, he doesn't see things straight sometimes," I said.

  "'Involved,' like in the sack? You're asking me if I'm in the sack with Megan?"

  "You're my friend. You carried me down a fire escape when that kid opened up on us with a.22. Something stinks about the Flynn family."

  Clete's face was turned into the shadows. The back of his neck was the color of Mercurochrome.

  "On my best day I kick in some poor bastard's door for Nig Rosewater. Last week a greaseball tried to hire me to collect the vig for a couple of his shylocks. Megan's talking about getting me on as head of security with a movie company. You think that's bad?"

  I looked at the water and the trapped air bubbles that chained to the surface out of the silt. I heard Clete's weight turn on the vinyl cushion under him.

  "Say it, Dave. Any broad outside of a T amp;A joint must have an angle if she'd get involved with your podjo. I'm not sensitive. But lay off Megan."

  I disconnected the sections of my fly rod and set them in the bottom of the boat. When I lifted the outboard and yanked the starter rope, the dry propeller whined like a chain saw through the darkening swamp. I didn't speak again until we were at the dock. The air was hot, as though it had been baked on a sheet of tin, the current yellow and dead in the bayou, the lavender sky thick with birds.

  Up on the dock, Clete peeled off his shirt and stuck his head under a water faucet. The skin across his shoulders was dry and scaling.

  "Come on up for dinner," I said.

  "I think I'm going back to New Orleans tonight."

  He took his billfold out of his back pocket and removed a five-dollar bill and pushed it into a crack in the railing. "I owe for the beer and gas," he said, and walked with his spinning rod and big tackle box to his car, his love handles aching with fresh sunburn.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, UNDER a fan moon, two men wearing hats drove a pickup truck down a levee in Vermilion Parish. On either side of them marshlands and saw grass seemed to flow like a wide green river into the Gulf. The two men stopped their truck on the levee and crossed a plank walkway that oozed sand and water under their combined weight. They passed a pirogue that was tied to the walkway, then stepped on ground that was like sponge under their western boots. Ahead, inside the fish camp, someone walked across the glare of a Coleman lantern and made a shadow on the window. Mout' Broussard's dog raised its head under the shack, then padded out into the open air on its leash, its nose lifted into the wind.

  NINE

  MOUT' STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of the shack and looked at the two white men. Both were tall and wore hats that shadowed their faces. The dog, a yellow-and-black mongrel with scars on its ears, growled and showed its teeth.

  "Shut up, Rafe!" Mout' said.

  "Where's Willie Broussard at?" one of the men said. The flesh in his throat was distended and rose-colored, and gray whiskers grew on his chin.

  "He gone up the levee to the sto'. Coming right back. Wit' some friends to play bouree. What you gentlemens want?" Mout' said.

  "Your truck's right yonder. What'd he drive in?" the second man said. He wore a clear plastic raincoat and his right arm held something behind his thigh.

  "A friend carried him up there."

  "We stopped there for a soda. It was locked up. Where's your outboard, old man?" the man with whiskers said.

  "Ain't got no outboa'd."

  "There's the gas can yonder. There's the cut in the cattails where it was tied. Your boy running a trot line?"

  "What y'all want to bother him for? He ain't done you nothing."

  "You don't mind if we come inside, do you?" the man in the raincoat said. When he stepped forward, the dog lunged at his ankle. He kicked his boot sideways and caught the dog in the mouth, then pulled the screen and latch out of the doorjamb.

  "You stand over in the corner and stay out of the way," the man with whiskers said.

  The man in the raincoat lifted the Coleman lantern by the bail and walked into the back yard with it. He came back in and shook his head.

  The man with whiskers bit off a corner on a tobacco plug and worked it into his jaw. He picked up an empty coffee can out of a trash sack and spit in it.

  "I told you we should have come in the a.m. You wake them up and do business," the man in the raincoat said.

  "Turn off the lantern and move the truck."

  "I say mark it off. I don't like guessing who's coming through a door."

  The man with whiskers looked at him meaningfully.

  "It's your rodeo," the man in the raincoat said, and went back out the front door.

  The wind blew through the screens into the room. Outside, the moonlight glittered like silver on the water in the saw grass.

  "Lie down on the floor where I can watch you. Here, take this pillow," the man with whiskers said.

  "Don't hurt my boy, suh."

  "Don't talk no more. Don't look at my face either."

  "What's I gonna do? You here to kill my boy."

  "You don't know that. Maybe we just want to talk to him… Don't look at my face."

  "I ain't lying on no flo'. I ain't gonna sit by while y'all kill my boy. What y'all t'ink I am?"

  "An old man, just like I'm getting to be. You can have something to eat or put your head down on the table and take a nap. But don't mix in it. You understand that? You mix in it, we gonna forget you're an old nigra don't nobody pay any mind to."

  The man in the raincoat came back through the door, a sawed-off over-and-under shotgun in his right hand.

  "I'm burning up. The wind feels like it come off a desert," he said, and took off his coat and wiped his face with a handkerchief. "What was the old man talking about?"

  "He thinks the stock market might take a slide."

  "Ask him if there's any stray pussy in the neighborhood."

  The man with whiskers on his chin leaned over and spit tobacco juice into the coffee can. He wiped his lips with his thumb.

  "Bring his dog in here," he said.

  "What for?"

  "Because a dog skulking and whimpering around the door might indicate somebody kicked it."

  "I hadn't thought about that. They always say you're a thinking man, Harpo."

  The man with the whiskers spit in the can again and looked hard at him.

  The man who had worn the raincoat dragged the dog skittering through the door on its leash, then tried to haul it into the air. But the dog's back feet found purchase on the floor and its teeth tore into the man's hand.

  "Oh, shit!" he yelled out, and pushed both his hands between his thighs.

  "Get that damn dog under control, old ma
n, or I'm gonna shoot both of you," the man with whiskers said.

  "Yes, suh. He ain't gonna be no trouble. I promise," Mout' said.

  "You all right?" the man with whiskers asked his friend.

  His friend didn't answer. He opened an ice chest and found a bottle of wine and poured it on the wound. His hand was strung with blood, his fingers shaking as though numb with cold. He tied his handkerchief around the wound, pulling it tight with his teeth, and sat down in a wood chair facing the door, the shotgun across his knees.

  "This better come out right," he said.

  MOUT' SAT IN THE corner, on the floor, his dog between his thighs. He could hear mullet splash out in the saw grass, the drone of a distant boat engine, dry thunder booming over the Gulf. He wanted it to rain, but he didn't know why. Maybe if it rained, no, stormed, with lightning all over the sky, Cool Breeze would take shelter and not try to come back that night. Or if it was thundering real bad, the two white men wouldn't hear Cool Breeze's outboard, hear him lifting the crab traps out of the aluminum bottom, hefting up the bucket loaded with catfish he'd unhooked from the trot line.

  "I got to go to the bat'room," he said.

  But neither of the white men acknowledged him.

  "I got to make water," he said.

  The man with whiskers stood up from his chair and straightened his back.

  "Come on, old man," he said, and let Mout' walk ahead of him out the back door.

  "Maybe you a good man, suh. Maybe you just ain't giving yourself credit for being a good man," Mout' said.

  "Go ahead and piss."

  "I ain't never give no trouble to white people. Anybody round New Iberia tell you that. Same wit' my boy. He worked hard at the bowling alley. He had him a li'l sto'. He tried to stay out of trouble but wouldn't nobody let him."

  Then Mout' felt his caution, his lifetime of deference and obsequiousness and pretense slipping away from him. "He had him a wife, her name was Ida, the sweetest black girl in Franklin, but a white man said she was gonna cook for him, just like that, or her husband was gonna go to the penitentiary. Then he took her out in the shed and made her get down on her knees and do what he want. She t'rowed up and begged him not to make her do it again, and every t'ree or fo' nights he walked her out in the shed and she tole herself it's gonna be over soon, he gonna get tired of me and then me and Cool Breeze gonna be left alone, and when he got finished wit' her and made her hate herself and hate my boy, too, another white man come along and give her presents and took her to his bed and tole her t'ings to tell Cool Breeze so he'd know he wasn't nothing but a nigger and a nigger's wife is a white man's jelly roll whenever he want it."

  "Shake it off and zip up your pants," the man with whiskers said.

  "You cain't get my boy fair. He'll cut yo' ass."

  "You better shut up, old man."

  "White trash wit' a gun and a big truck. Seen y'all all my life. Got to shove niggers round or you don't know who you are."

  The man with whiskers pushed Mout' toward the shack, surprised at the power and breadth of muscle in Mout's back.

  "I might have underestimated you. Don't take that as good news," he said.

  MOUT' WOKE JUST BEFORE first light. The dog lay in his lap, its coat stiff with mud. The two white men sat in chairs facing the front door, their shoulders slightly rounded, their chins dropping to their chests. The man with the shotgun opened his eyes suddenly, as though waking from a dream.

  "Wake up," he said.

  "What is it?"

  "Nothing. That's the point. I don't want to drive out of here in sunlight."

  The man with whiskers rubbed the sleep out of his face.

  "Bring the truck up," he said.

  The man with the shotgun looked in Mout's direction, as if asking a question.

  "I'll think about it," the man with whiskers said.

  "It's mighty loose, Harpo."

  "Every time I say something, you got a remark to make."

  The man with the shotgun rewrapped the bloody handkerchief on his hand. He rose from the chair and threw the shotgun to his friend. "You can use my raincoat if you decide to do business," he said, and went out into the dawn.

  Mout' waited in the silence.

  "What do you think we ought to do about you?" the man with whiskers asked.

  "Don't matter what happen here. One day the devil gonna come for y'all, take you where you belong."

  "You got diarrhea of the mouth."

  "My boy better than both y'all. He outsmarted you. He know y'all here. He out there now. Cool Breeze gonna come after you, Mr. White Trash."

  "Stand up, you old fart."

  Mout' pushed himself to his feet, his back against the plank wall. He could feel his thighs quivering, his bladder betraying him. Outside, the sun had risen into a line of storm clouds that looked like the brow of an angry man.

  The man with whiskers held the shotgun against his hip and fired one barrel into Mout's dog, blowing it like a bag of broken sticks and torn skin into the corner.

  "Get a cat. They're a lot smarter animals," he said, and went out the door and crossed the board walkway to the levee where his friend sat on the fender of their pickup truck, smoking a cigarette.

  TEN

  "COOL BREEZE RUN OUT OF gas. That's why he didn't come back to the camp," Mout' said.

  It was Wednesday afternoon, and Helen and I sat with Mout' in his small living room, listening to his story.

  "What'd the Vermilion Parish deputies say?" Helen asked.

  "Man wrote on his clipboa'd. Said it was too bad about my dog. Said I could get another one at the shelter. I ax him, 'What about them two men?' He said it didn't make no sense they come into my camp to kill a dog. I said, 'Yeah, it don't make no sense 'cause you wasn't listening to the rest of it.'"

  "Where's Cool Breeze, Mout'?"

  "Gone."

  "Where?"

  "To borrow money."

  "Come on, Mout'," I said.

  "To buy a gun. Cool Breeze full of hate, Mr. Dave. Cool Breeze don't show it, but he don't forgive. What bother me is the one he don't forgive most is himself."

  BACK AT MY OFFICE, I called Special Agent Adrien Glazier at the FBI office in New Orleans.

  "Two white men, one with the first name of Harpo, tried to clip Willie Broussard at a fish camp in Vermilion Parish," I said.

  "When was this?"

  "Last night."

  "Is there a federal crime involved here?"

  "Not that I know of. Maybe crossing a state line to commit a felony."

  "You have evidence of that?"

  "No."

  "Then why are you calling, Mr. Robicheaux?"

  "His life's in jeopardy."

  "We're not unaware of the risk he's incurred as a federal witness. But I'm busy right now. I'll have to call you back," she said.

  "You're busy?"

  The line went dead.

  A UNIFORMED DEPUTY PICKED up Cool Breeze in front of a pawnshop on the south side of New Iberia and brought him into my office.

  "Why the cuffs?" I said.

  "Ask him what he called me when I told him to get in the cruiser," the deputy replied.

  "Take them off, please."

  "By all means. Glad to be of service. You want anything else?" the deputy said, and turned a tiny key in the lock on the cuffs.

  "Thanks for bringing him in."

  "Oh, yeah, anytime. I always had aspirations to be a bus driver," he said, and went out the door, his eyes flat.

  "Who you think is on your side, Breeze?" I said.

  "Me."

  "I see. Your daddy says you're going to get even. How you going to do that? You know who these guys are, where they live?"

  He was sitting in the chair in front of my desk now, looking out the window, his eyes downturned at the corners.

  "Did you hear me?" I said.

  "You know how come one of them had a raincoat on?" he said.

  "He didn't want the splatter on his clothes."

 
; "You know why they left my daddy alive?"

  I didn't reply. His gaze was still focused out the window. His hands looked like black starfish on his thighs.

  "Long as Mout's alive, I'll probably be staying at his house," he said. "Mout' don't mean no more to them than a piece of nutria meat tied in a crab trap."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "Them two men who killed the white boys out in the Basin? They ain't did that in St. Mary Parish without permission. Not to no white boys, they didn't. And it sure didn't have nothing to do with any black girl they raped in New Iberia."

  "What are you saying?"

  "Them boys was killed 'cause of something they done right there in St. Mary."

  "So you think the same guys are trying to do you, and you're going to find them by causing some trouble over in St. Mary Parish? Sounds like a bad plan, Breeze."

  His eyes fastened on mine for the first time, his anger unmasked. "I ain't said that. I was telling you how it work round here. Blind hog can find an ear of corn if you t'row it on the ground. But you tell white folks grief comes down from the man wit' the money, they ain't gonna hear that. You done wit' me now, suh?"

  LATE THAT SAME AFTERNOON, an elderly priest named Father James Mulcahy called me from St. Peter's Church in town. He used to have a parish made up of poor and black people in the Irish Channel, and had even known Clete Purcel when Clete was a boy, but he had been transferred by the Orleans diocese to New Iberia, where he did little more than say Mass and occasionally hear confessions.

  "There's a lady here. I thought she came for reconciliation. But I'm not even sure she's Catholic," he said.

  "I don't understand, Father."

  "She seems confused, I think in need of counseling. I've done all I can for her."

  "You want me to talk to her?"

  "I suspect so. She won't leave."

  "Who is she?"

  "Her name is Lila Terrebonne. She says she lives in Jeanerette."

  Helen Soileau got in a cruiser with me and we drove to St. Peter's. The late sun shone through the stained glass and suffused the interior of the church with a peculiar gold-and-blue light. Lila Terrebonne sat in a pew by the confessional boxes, immobile, her hands in her lap, her eyes as unseeing as a blind person's. An enormous replication of Christ on the cross hung on the adjacent wall.