DR08 - Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

  “I ax him if he want a boat. He says, ”Give me a beer and a sandwich.“

  An hour later he's sitting at the table under the umbrella, smoking a cigarette, he ain't eat the sandwich, he ain't drunk the beer. I ax him if there's any ting wrong with the food. He says, ”It's fine. Bring me another beer.“ I say, ”You ain't drunk that one.“ He says, ”It's got a bug in it. You got the afternoon paper here?“ I say, ”No, I ain't got the paper.“ He says, ”How about some magazines?“

  ”

  “I'll be down in a minute,” I said. “I ought to brought him a paper bag.”

  “What d' you mean?”

  “To put over his head. He looks like somebody took a sharp spoon and stuck it real deep all over his face.”

  “Stay in the bait shop, Batist. You understand me? Don't go near this man.” I hung up, without waiting for him to reply, called the department for a cruiser, took my .45 out of the dresser drawer, stuck it through the back of my belt, and hung my shirt over it. As I walked down the slope through the broken light under the pecan and oak trees, I could see a strange drama being played out among the spool tables on the dock. Fishermen who had just come in were drinking beer and eating smoked sausage and boudin under the umbrellas, their faces focused among themselves and on their conversations about big-mouth bass and goggle-eye perch, but in their midst, by himself, smoking a cigarette with the concentrated intensity of an angry man hitting on a reefer, was Patsy Dapolito, his mouth hooked downward at the corners, his face like a clay sculpture someone had mutilated with a string knife. I remembered a scene an old-time gun bull had once pointed out to me on the yard, inside the Block, at Angola Penitentiary. Inmates stripped to the waist, their apelike torsos wrapped with tattoos, were clanking iron, throwing the shot put and ripping into heavy bags with blows that could eviscerate an elephant. In the center of the lawn was a tiny, balding, middle-aged man in steel-rimmed spectacles, squatting on his haunches, chewing gum furiously, his jaws freezing momentarily, the eyes lighting, then the jaws moving again with a renewed snapping energy. When a football bounced close to the squatting man, a huge black inmate asked permission before he approached to pick it up. The squatting man said nothing and the football remained where it was. “Forget about them big 'uns,” the gun bull told me. “That little fart yonder killed another convict while he had waist and leg chains on. I won't tell you how he done it, since you ain't eat lunch yet.” I looked down at Patsy Dapolito's ruined face. His pale eyes, which were round like an outraged doll's, clicked upward into mine. “You made a mistake coming here,” I said. “Sit down. You want a beer?” he said. He picked up a bottle cap from the tabletop and threw it against the screen of the bait shop. “Hey, you! Colored guy! Bring us a couple more beers out here!” I stared at him with my mouth open. Batist's head appeared at the screen, then went away. “You've pulled some wiring loose, partner,” I said. “What, I don't got a right to drink a beer in a public place?”

  “I want you out of here.”

  “Let's take a ride in a boat. I ain't never seen a swamp. You got swamp tours?” he said. “Adios, Patsy.”

  “Hey, I don't like that. I'm talking here.” I had already turned to walk away. His hand clenched on my forearm, bit into the tendons, pulled me off balance into the table.

  “Show some courtesy, act decent for a change,” he said. “You need some help, Dave?” a heavyset man with tobacco in his jaw said at the next table. “It's all right,” I said. People were staring now. My .45 protruded from under my shirt. I sat down on a chair, my arms on top of the spool table. “Listen to me, Patsy. A sheriff's cruiser is on its way. Right now, you got no beef with the locals. As far as I see it, you and I are slick, too. Walk away from this.” His teeth were charcoal colored and thin on the ends, almost as though they had been filed. His short, light brown hair looked like a wig on a mannequin.

  His eyes held on mine. “I got business to do,” he said. “Not with me.”

  “With you.” The fishermen at the other tables began to drift off toward their cars and pickup trucks and boat trailers. “I want part of the action,” he said. “What action?”

  “The deal at the plantation. I don't care what it is, I want in on it. You're on a pad for Johnny Carp. That means you're getting pieced off on this deal.”

  “A pad for-”

  “Or you'd be dead. I know Johnny. He don't let nobody skate unless it's for money.”

  “You're a confused man, Patsy.” He pinched his nose, blew air through the nostrils, looked about at the sky, the overhang of the trees, a cloud of dust drifting from a passing pickup through a cane brake. “Look, there's guys ain't even from the city in on this deal, military guys think they're big shit because they cooled out a few gooks and tomato pickers. I did a grown man with a shank when I was eleven years old. You say I'm lying, check my jacket.”

  “It's Johnny you want to bring down, isn't it?” I said. He kept huffing puffs of air through his nostrils, then he pulled a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose in it. i85

  “Johnny don't show it, but he's a drunk,” Dapolito said. “A drunk don't look after anybody but himself. Otherwise you'd be fish bait, motherfucker. I walked out to meet the cruiser sent by the dispatcher.

  The deputy was a big red bone named Cecil Aguillard whose face contained a muddy light people chose not to dwell upon. ”You t'ink he's carrying?“ Cecil said. ”Not unless he has an ankle holster.“

  ”What he's done?“

  ”Nothing so far,“ I said. He walked down the dock ahead of me, his gunbelt, holster, and baton creaking on his hips like saddle leather. The umbrella over Patsy's head tilted and swelled in the wind. Cecil pushed it at an angle so he could look down into his face. ”Time to go,“ Cecil said. Patsy was hunkered down over the tabletop, scowling into a state fish and game magazine. He made me think of a recalcitrant child in a school desk who was not going to let a nun's authority overwhelm him. ”Dave don't want you here,“ Cecil said. ”I ain't done nothing.“ His shoulders were hunched, his hands clenched into fists on the edges of the magazine, his eyes flicking about the dock. Cecil looked at me and nodded his head toward the bait shop. I followed him. ”Clear everybody out of here, Dave, I'll take care of it,“ he said. ”It won't work on this guy.“

  ”It'll work.“

  ”No, he'll be back. Thanks for coming out, Cecil. I'll call you later if I have to.“

  ”It ain't smart, Dave. You turn your back on his kind, he'll have your liver flopping on the flo'.“ I watched Cecil drive down the road in the deepening shadows, then I helped Batist seine the dead shiners out of our bait tanks and hose down the boats we had rented that day. Patsy Dapolito still sat at his table, smoking cigarettes, popping the pages in his magazine, wiping bugs and mosquitoes from in front of his face.

  The sun had dipped behind my house, and the tops of the cypress in the swamp had turned a grayish pink in the afterglow.

  ”We're closing up, Patsy,“ I said.

  ”Then close it up,“ he said.

  ”We've got a joke out here. This fellow woke up on his houseboat and heard two mosquitoes talking about him. One said, “Let's take him outside and eat him.” The other one said, “We'd better not. The big ones will carry him off for themselves.”

  “

  ”I don't get it,“ he said.

  ”Have a good one,“ I said, and walked up the slope to the house.

  Two hours later it was dark. I used the switch inside the house to turn on the string of lights over the dock. Patsy Dapolito still sat at his table, the Cinzano umbrella furled above his head. His hard, white body seem to glow with electrified humidity.

  Later, Bootsie and Alafair pulled into the drive, the car loaded with bags of groceries they had bought in Lafayette.

  ”Dave, there's a man sitting on the dock,“ Bootsie said.

  ”It's Patsy Dap,“ I said.

  ”The man you-“ she began.

  ”That's the one.“

  ”I can't b
elieve it. He's on our dock?“

  ”He's not going to do anything,“ I said.

  ”He's not going to have a chance to. Not if I have anything to do with it,“ she said.

  ”I think Johnny Giacano's cut him loose. That's why he's here, not because of me. He couldn't think his way out of a wet paper bag, much less rejection by the only form of authority he's ever respected.“

  But she wasn't buying it.

  ”I'll get rid of him,“ I said.

  ”How?“

  ”Sometimes you've got to make their souls wince.“

  ”Dave?“

  I carried a sack of groceries inside, then wrapped both my .45 and nine-millimeter Beretta inside a towel, took a tube of first-aid cream from the medicine cabinet, and walked down to the dock. Patsy's elbows were splayed on the table, his face pale and luminous with heat and perspiration. The tide was out and the current was dead in the bayou.

  Patsy worked a thumbnail between his teeth and stared at me.

  ”Put some of this stuff on those mosquito bites,“ I said.

  He surprised me. He filled both palms with white cream and rubbed it into his forearms and on his face and neck, his round chin pointed up in the air.

  I unfolded the towel on the table. His eyes dropped to the pistols, then looked up at me.

  ”What, you got cold pieces for sale?“ he said.

  I released the magazine from the butt of each automatic so he could see the top round, inserted it again, chambered the round, set the safety, and placed both weapons butt to butt in the center of the table. Then I sat down across from him, my eyes stinging with salt. Up the slope, I could see Bootsie under the light on the gallery.

  ”If you want to square what I did to you, now's the time,“ I said.

  ”Otherwise, I'm going to mop up the dock with you.“

  He smiled and screwed a fresh cigarette in his mouth, crumpled up the empty pack. ”I always heard you were a drunk. That ain't your problem. You're fucking stupid, man,“ he said.

  ”Oh?“

  ”I want to make somebody dead, I don't even have to get out of bed.

  Don't try to shine me off, worm man. Tell Johnny and those military as swipes they piece me off or I leave hair on the walls.“

  He walked on the balls of his feet toward his automobile, lifting his arm to smell himself again.

  Sometimes they don't wince.

  Chapter 2O

  INSIDE THE dream I know I'm experiencing what a psychologist once told me is a world destruction fantasy. But my knowledge that it is only a dream does no good; I cannot extricate myself from it. As a child I saw the sun turn black against a cobalt sky and sink forever beyond the earth's rim. Years later the images would change and I'd revisit my brief time as a new colonial, see Victor Charles, in black pajamas, sliding on his stomach through a rice paddy, a French bolt-action rifle strapped across his back; two GI's eating C-rations in the shade of banyan trees after machine-gunning a farmer's water buffalo just for meanness' sake; three of our wounded after they'd been skinned and hung in trees like sides of meat by NVA. In my dream tonight i can see the Louisiana coastline from a great height, as alluvial and new as it must have been after Jehovah hung the archer's bow in the sky and drew the waters back over the earth's edges, the rivers and bayous and wetlands shimmering like foil under the moon. But it's a view that will not hold at the center, because now I realize the cold light of the moon is actually the fire from chemical plants and oil refineries along the Mississippi, the shook foil of a dead Jesuit poet nothing more than industrial mercury systemically injected into the earth's veins. The roadways and ditches are blown with litter, the canals a depository for rubber tires, beer cans, vinyl sacks of raw garbage thrown from pickup trucks. A fish's gills are orange with fungus.

  I wake from the dream and sit alone in the kitchen. I can hear thunder out of the Gulf and Tripod pulling his chain along the clothesline.

  Through the window my neighbor's freshly cut lawn smells like corn silk and milk. I sit on the back steps until the trees turn gray with the false dawn, then I go back inside and fall asleep just as the first raindrops ping against the blades of the window fan.

  At noon Bootsie and I were eating lunch in the kitchen when Ruthie Jean Fontenot called.

  ”Moleen's at Dot's in St. Martinville. You know where that's at, I'm talking about in the black section?“ she said.

  ”I'm not his keeper, Ruthie Jean.“

  ”You can get him out.“

  ”Get him out yourself.“

  ”Some secrets suppose to stay secret. You know the rules about certain things that go on between white and black people.“

  ”Wrong man to call,“ I said.

  ”The man owns the place is a friend of Luke's. He said Moleen's got a li'l pistol stuck down inside his coat. The man doesn't want to call the police unless he has to.“

  ”Forget Moleen and take care of yourself, Ruthie Jean. He's not worth-“

  She hung up. I sat down at the table and started eating again. Bootsie watched my face.

  ”Moleen's a grown man,“ I said. ”He's also a hypocritical sonofabitch.“

  ”He got her out of jail,“ Bootsie said.

  ”He paid somebody else to do it. Which is Moleen's style. Three cushion shots.“

  ”Too harsh, Streak,“ she said.

  I drank out of my iced tea, sucked on a sprig of mint, finally squeezed my temples between my fingers.

  ”See you before five,“ I said.

  ”Watch your ass, kiddo,“ she said.

  I took the old road into St. Martinville, along Bayou Teche and through cane fields and pastureland where egrets stood like spectators on the backs of grazing cows. Dot's was a ramshackle bar toward the end of the main artery that traversed the black district and eventually bled into the square where Evangeline was buried with her lover behind the old French church. Ironically, the bar's geographical location, set like a way station between two worlds, was similar to the peculiar mix of blood and genes in the clientele-octoroons and quadroons, red bones and people who were coal black but whose children sometimes had straw-colored curly hair.

  Moleen sat in the gloom, at the far end of the bar, on a patched, fingernail-polish-red vinyl stool, his seersucker coat tight across his hunched shoulders, one oxblood loafer twisted indifferently inside an aluminum rung on the stool. I could smell his unwashed odor three feet away.

  ”She's worried about you,“ I said, and sat down next to him.

  He drank from a glass of bourbon and melted ice, pushed two one-dollar bills out of his change toward the bartender.

  ”You want a drink?“ he said.

  I didn't answer. I peeled back the edge of his coat with one finger.

  He glared at me.

  ”A .2,5 caliber derringer. That's dumb, Moleen,“ I said. ”One of those is like bird shit hitting a brick.“

  He pointed at his empty glass for the bartender. A deformed mulatto man with a shoe-shine box came through the front door in a burst of hot sunlight, let the door slam hard behind him, vibrating the glass and Venetian blinds. His face was moronic, his mouth a wet drool, his arms like gnarled oak roots that were half the length they should have been.

  I looked away from him.

  ”You want your shoes shined?“ Moleen said, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

  ”I think a remark like that is unworthy of you,“ I said.

  ”I wasn't being humorous. His great-grandfather and mine were the same gentleman. If you think he's an eyeful, you should meet his mother.

  Hang around. She comes in about seven.“

  ”I can't stop you from fucking up your life, Moleen, but as a law officer, I want you to hand over your piece.“

  ”Take it. I've never fired a shot in anger, anyway.“

  I slipped it from inside his belt, cracked open the breech below the lip of the bar.

  ”It's empty,“ I said,

  ”Oh, yeah,“ he said absently, and took two steel-jac
keted rounds from his coat pocket and dropped them in my palm. ”They're going to take your friend Marsallus out.“

  ”Who?“

  He tilted the glass to his mouth. His eyes were red along the rims, his face unshaved and shiny with a damp sweat.

  ”What's the worst thing you saw in Vietnam, Dave?“ he asked.

  ”It's yesterday's box score.“

  ”You ever leave your own people behind, sell them out, scratch their names off a list at a peace conference, lie to their families?“

  ”Quit sticking thumbtacks in your head. Go public with it.“

  ”It is public, for God's sakes. Nobody cares.“

  ”Why do these guys want to kill Sonny?“

  ”He's a one-man firing squad. He gets them in his sights and they tend to dissolve in a red mist.“

  ”A good woman cares for you, Moleen. A guy could have worse problems,“

  I said.

  ”Which woman?“

  ”See you around, partner. Don't let them get behind you.“ I started to get up.

  ”You're always the wise guy Dave. Try this. Ruthie Jean got her Aunt Bertie to file suit against the plantation. They retained a little sawed-off ACLU lawyer from New Orleans who can tie us up in court for years.“

  ”Sounds like a smart move.“

  ”Glad you think so. I know some gentlemen who probably won't agree with you. After they take Marsallus off the board, you may get to meet a few of them.“