Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  "What we got to do to get this here order you talking about?" he asked.

  WHEN I GOT HOME a peculiar event was taking place. Alafair and three of her friends were in the front yard, watching a man with a flattop haircut stand erect on an oak limb, then topple into space, grab a second limb and hang from it by his knees.

  I parked my pickup and walked across the yard while Boxleiter's eyes, upside down, followed me. He bent his torso upward, flipped his legs in the air, and did a half-somersault so that he hit the ground on the balls of his feet.

  "Alafair, would you guys head on up to the house and tell Bootsie I'll be there in a minute?" I said.

  "She's on the gallery. Tell her yourself," Alafair said.

  "Alf…" I said.

  She rolled her eyes as though the moment was more than her patience could endure, then she and her friends walked through the shade toward the house.

  "Swede, it's better you bring business to my office," I said.

  "I couldn't sleep last night. I always sleep, I mean dead, like stone. But not last night. There's some heavy shit coming down, man. It's a feeling I get. I'm never wrong."

  "Like what?"

  "This ain't no ordinary grift." He fanned his hand at the air, as though sweeping away cobweb. "I never had trouble handling the action. You draw lines, you explain the rules, guys don't listen, they keep coming at you, you unzip their package. But that ain't gonna work on this one." He blotted the perspiration off his face with the back of his forearm.

  "Sorry. You're not making much sense, Swede."

  "I don't got illusions about how guys like me end up. But Cisco and Megan ain't like me. I was sleeping in the Dismas House in St. Louis after I finished my first bit. They came and got me. They see somebody jammed up, people getting pushed around, they make those people's problem their problem. They get that from their old man. That's why these local cocksuckers nailed him to a wall."

  "You're going have to watch your language around my home, partner," I said.

  His hand shot out and knotted my shirt in a ball.

  "You're like every cop I ever knew. You don't listen. I can't stop what's going on."

  I grabbed his wrist and thrust it away from me. He opened and closed his hands impotently.

  "I hate guys like you," he said.

  "Oh?"

  "You go to church with your family, but you got no idea what life is like for two-thirds of the human race."

  "I'm going inside now, Swede. Don't come around here anymore."

  "What'd I do, use bad language again?"

  "You cut up Anthony Pollock. I can't prove it, and it didn't happen in our jurisdiction, but you're an iceman."

  "If I did it in a uniform, you'd be introducing me at the Kiwanis Club. I hear you adopted your kid and treated her real good. That's a righteous deed, man. But the rest of your routine is comedy. A guy with your brains ought to be above it."

  He walked down the slope to the dirt road and his parked car. When he was out of the shade he stopped and turned around. His granny glasses were like ground diamonds in the sunlight.

  "How many people did it take to crucify Megan and Cisco's old man and cover it up for almost forty years? I'm an iceman? Watch out one of your neighbors don't tack you up with a nail gun," he yelled up the slope while two fishermen unhitching a boat trailer stared at him openmouthed.

  I RAKED AND BURNED leaves that afternoon and tried not to think about Swede Boxleiter. But in his impaired way he had put his thumb on a truth about human behavior that eludes people who are considered normal. I remembered a story of years ago about a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in a small Mississippi town not far from the Pearl River. One afternoon he whistled at a white woman on the street. Nothing was said to him, but that night two Klansmen kidnapped him from the home of his relatives, shot and killed him, and wrapped his body in a net of bricks and wire and sank it in the river.

  Everyone in town knew who had done it. Two local lawyers, respectable men not associated with the Klan, volunteered to defend the killers. The jury took twenty minutes to set them free. The foreman said the verdict took that long because the jury had stopped deliberations to send out for soda pop.

  It's a story out of another era, one marked by shame and collective fear, but its point is not about racial injustice but instead the fate of those who bear Cain's mark.

  A year after the boy's death a reporter from a national magazine visited the town by the Pearl River to learn the fate of the killers. At first they had been avoided, passed by on the street, treated at grocery or hardware counters as though they had no first or last names, then their businesses failed-one owned a filling station, the other a fertilizer yard-and their debts were called. Both men left town, and when asked their whereabouts old neighbors would only shake their heads as though the killers were part of a vague and decaying memory.

  The town that had been complicit in the murder ostracized those who had committed it. But no one had been ostracized in St. Mary Parish. Why? What was the difference in the accounts of the black teenager's murder and Jack Flynn's, both of which seemed collective in nature?

  Answer: The killers in Mississippi were white trash and economically dispensable.

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON I FOUND Archer Terrebonne on his side patio, disassembling a spinning reel on a glass table top. He wore slippers and white slacks and a purple shirt that was embroidered with his initials on the pocket. Overhead, two palm trees with trunks that were as gray and smooth as elephant hide creaked against a hard-blue sky. Terrebonne glanced up at me, then resumed his concentration, but not in an unpleasant way.

  "Sorry to bother you on Sunday, but I suspect you're quite busy during the week," I said.

  "It's no bother. Pull up a chair. I wanted to thank you for the help you gave my daughter."

  You didn't do wide end runs around Archer Terrebonne.

  "It's wonderful to see her fresh and bright in the morning, unharried by all the difficulties she's had, all the nights in hospitals and calls from policemen," he said.

  "I have a problem, Mr. Terrebonne. A man named Harpo Scruggs is running all over our turf and we can't get a net over him."

  "Scruggs? Oh yes, quite a character. I thought he was dead."

  "His uncle was a guy named Harpo Delahoussey. He did security work at y'all's cannery, the one that burned."

  "Yes, I remember."

  "We think Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a black man named Willie Broussard and almost drowned Jack Flynn's daughter."

  He set down the tiny screwdriver and the exposed brass mechanisms of the spinning reel. The tips of his delicate fingers were bright with machine oil. The wind blew his white-gold hair on his forehead.

  "But you use the father's name, not the daughter's. What inference should I gather from that, sir? My family has a certain degree of wealth and hence we should feel guilt over Jack Flynn's death?"

  "Why do you think he was killed?"

  "That's your province, Mr. Robicheaux, not mine. But I don't think Jack Flynn was a proletarian idealist. I think he was a resentful, envious troublemaker who couldn't get over the fact his family lost their money through their own mismanagement. Castle Irish don't do well when their diet is changed to boiled cabbage."

  "He fought Franco's fascists in Spain. That's a peculiar way to show envy."

  "What's your purpose here?"

  "Your daughter is haunted by something in the past she can't tell anybody about. It's connected to the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I wonder if it's Jack Flynn's death that bothers her."

  He curled the tips of his fingers against his palm, as though trying to rub the machinist's oil off them, looking at them idly.

  "She killed her cousin when she was fifteen. Or at least that's what she's convinced herself," he said. He saw my expression change, my lips start to form a word. "We had a cabin in Durango at the foot of a mountain. They found the key to my gun case and started shooting across a snowfield. The avalanche buri
ed her cousin in an arroyo. When they dug her out the next day, her body was frozen upright in the shape of a cross."

  "I didn't know that, sir."

  "You do now. I'm going in to eat directly. Would you care to join us?"

  When I walked to my truck I felt like a man who had made an obscene remark in the midst of a polite gathering. I sat behind the steering wheel and stared at the front of the Terrebonne home. It was encased in shadow now, the curtains drawn on all the windows. What historical secrets, what private unhappiness did it hold? I wondered if I would ever know. The late sun hung like a shattered red flame in the pine trees.

  TWENTY

  I REMEMBER A CHRISTMAS DAWN five years after I came home from Vietnam. I greeted it in an all-night bar built of slat wood, the floor raised off the dirt with cinder blocks. I walked down the wood steps into a deserted parking area, my face numb with alcohol, and stood in the silence and looked at a solitary live oak hung with Spanish moss, the cattle acreage that was gray with winter, the hollow dome of sky that possessed no color at all, and suddenly I felt the vastness of the world and all the promise it could hold for those who were still its children and had not severed their ties with the rest of the human family.

  Monday morning I visited Megan at her brother's house and saw a look in her eyes that I suspected had been in mine on that Christmas morning years ago.

  Had her attackers held her underwater a few seconds more, her body would have conceded what her will would not: Her lungs and mouth and nose would have tried to draw oxygen out of water and her chest and throat would have filled with cement. In that moment she knew the heartbreaking twilight-infused beauty that the earth can offer, that we waste as easily as we tear pages from a calendar, but neither would she ever forget or forgive the fact that her reprieve came from the same hands that did Indian burns on her skin and twisted her face down into the silt.

  She was living in the guest cottage at the back of Cisco's house, and the French doors were open and the four-o'clocks planted as borders around the trees were dull red in the shade.

  "What's that?" she said.

  I lay a paper sack and the hard-edged metal objects inside it on her breakfast table.

  "A nine-millimeter Beretta. I've made arrangements for somebody to give you instruction at the firing range," I said.

  She slipped the pistol and the unattached magazine out of the sack and pulled back the slide and looked at the empty chamber. She flipped the butterfly safety back and forth.

  "You have peculiar attitudes for a policeman," she said.

  "When they deal the play, you take it to them with fire tongs," I said.

  She put the pistol back in the sack and stepped out on the brick patio and looked at the bayou with her hands in the back pockets of her baggy khaki pants.

  "I'll be all right after a while. I've been through worse," she said.

  I stepped outside with her. "No, you haven't," I said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "It only gets so bad. You go to the edge, then you join a special club. A psychologist once told me only about three percent of the human family belongs to it."

  "I think I'll pass on the honor."

  "Why'd you come back?"

  "I see my father in my sleep."

  "You want the gun?"

  "Yes."

  I nodded and turned to go.

  "Wait." She took her eyeglass case out of her shirt pocket and stepped close to me. There was a dark scrape at the corner of her eye, like dirty rouge rubbed into the grain. "Just stand there. You don't have to do anything," she said, and put her arms around me and her head on my chest and pressed her stomach flat against me. She wore doeskin moccasins and I could feel the instep of her foot on my ankle.

  The top of her head moved under my chin and against my throat and the wetness of her eyes was like an unpracticed kiss streaked on my skin.

  RODNEY LOUDERMILK HAD LIVED two weeks on the eighth floor of the old hotel that was not two blocks from the Alamo. The elevator was slow and throbbed in the shaft, the halls smelled bad, the fire escapes leaked rust down the brick sides of the building. But there was a bar and grill downstairs and the view from his window was magnificent. The sky was blue and salmon-colored in the evening, the San Antonio River lighted by sidewalk restaurants and gondolas that passed under the bridges, and he could see the pinkish stone front of the old mission where he often passed himself off as a tour guide and led college girls through the porticoed walkways that were hung with grapevines.

  He was blind in one eye from a childhood accident with a BB gun. He wore sideburns and snap-button cowboy shirts with his Montgomery Ward suits. He had been down only once, in Sugarland, on a nickel-and-dime burglary beef that had gone sour because his fall partner, a black man, had dropped a crowbar off the roof through the top of a greenhouse.

  But Rodney had learned his lesson: Stay off of roofs and don't try to turn watermelon pickers into successful house creeps.

  The three-bit on Sugarland Farm hadn't been a wash either. He had picked up a new gig, one that had some dignity to it, that paid better, that didn't require dealing with fences who took him off at fifteen cents on the dollar. One week off the farm and he did his first hit. It was much easier than he thought. The target was a rancher outside Victoria, a loudmouth fat shit who drove a Cadillac with longhorns for a hood ornament and who kept blubbering, "I'll give you money, boy. You name the price. Look, my wife's gonna be back from the store. Don't hurt her, okay…" then had started to tremble and messed himself like a child.

  "That goes to show you, money don't put no lead in your pencil," Rodney was fond of telling his friends.

  He also said the fat man was so dumb he never guessed his wife had put up the money for the hit. But Rodney let him keep his illusions. Why not? Business was business. You didn't personalize it, even though the guy was a born mark.

  Their grief was their own, he said. They owed money, they stole it, they cheated on their wives. People sought justice in different ways. The state did it with a gurney and a needle, behind a viewing glass, while people watched like they were at an X-rated movie. Man, that was sick.

  Rodney showered in the small tin stall and put on a fresh long-sleeve shirt, one that covered the tattooed chain of blue stars around his left wrist, then looked at his four suits in the closet and chose one that rippled with light like a sheet of buffed tin. He slipped on a new pair of black cowboy boots and fitted a white cowboy hat on his head, pulling the brim at an angle over his blind eye.

  All you had to do was stand at the entrance to the Alamo and people came up and asked you questions. Clothes didn't make the person. Clothes were the person, he told people. You ever see a gun bull mounted on horseback without a hat and shades? You ever see a construction boss on a job without a clipboard and hard hat and a pocketful of ballpoints? You ever see a hooker that ain't made up to look like your own personal pinball machine?

  Rodney conducted tours, gave directions around the city, walked tourists to their hotels so they wouldn't be mugged by what he called "local undesirables we're fixing to get rid of."

  A buddy, a guy he'd celled with at Sugarland, asked him what he got out of it.

  "Nothing. That's the point, boy. They got nothing I want."

  Which wasn't true. But how did you explain to a pipehead that walking normals around, making them apprehensive one moment, relieving their fears another, watching them hang on his words about the cremation of the Texan dead on the banks of the river (an account he had memorized from a brochure) gave him a rush like a freight train loaded with Colombian pink roaring through the center of his head?

  Or popping a cap on a slobbering fat man who thought he could bribe Rodney Loudermilk.

  It was dusk when Rodney came back from showing two elderly nuns where Davy Crockett had been either bayoneted to death or captured against the barracks wall and later tortured. They both had seemed a little pale at the details he used to describe the event. In fact, they had the ingratitude t
o tell him they didn't need an escort back to their hotel, like he had BO or something. Oh, well. He had more important things on his mind. Like this deal over in Louisiana. He'd told his buddy, the pipehead, he didn't get into a new career so he could go back to strong-arm and B amp;E bullshit. That whole scene on the bayou had made him depressed in ways he couldn't explain, like somebody had stolen something from him.

  She hadn't been afraid. When they're afraid, it proves they got it coming. When they're not afraid, it's like they're spitting in your face. Yeah, that was it. You can't pop them unless they're afraid, or they take part of you with them. Now he was renting space in his head to a hide (that's what he called women) he shouldn't even be thinking about. He had given her power, and he wanted to go back and correct the images that had left him confused and irritable and not the person he was when he gave guided tours in his western clothes.

  He looked at the slip of paper he had made a note on when this crazy deal started. It read: Meet H.S. in New Iberia. Educate a commonist? A commonist? Republicans live in rich houses, not commonists. Any dumb shit knows that. Why had he gotten into this? He crumpled up the note in his palm and bounced it off the rim of the wastebasket and called the grill for a steak and baked potato, heavy on the cream and melted butter, and a green salad and a bottle of champale.

  It was dusk and a purple haze hung on the rooftops when a man stepped out of a hallway window onto a fire escape, then eased one foot out on a ledge and worked his way across the brick side of the building, oblivious to the stares of two winos down in the alley eight floors below. When the ledge ended, he paused for only a moment, then with the agility of a cat, he hopped across empty space onto another ledge and entered another window.

  Rodney Loudermilk had just forked a piece of steak into his mouth when the visitor seized him from behind and dragged him out of his chair, locking arms and wrists under Rodney's rib cage, lifting him into the air and simultaneously carrying him to the window, whose curtains swelled with the evening breeze. Rodney probably tried to scream and strike out with the fork that was in his hand, but a piece of meat was lodged like a stone in his throat and the arms of his visitor seemed to be cracking his ribs like sticks.