DR08 - Burning Angel

by James Lee Burke

”Tell Dave what's on your mind, get his thoughts on it,“ Clete said to the back of Patsy's head.

  ”You guys hire operatives. Maybe we can work something out,“ Patsy said.

  ”Like work for us, you mean?“ I asked.

  ”Nobody catches any flies on you. I can see that,“ he answered, and tilted more BB's into the tiny holes of his game.

  Clete widened his eyes and puffed air in his cheeks to suppress the humor in his face.

  ”We're not hiring right now, Patsy. Thanks, anyway,“ I said. ”Who tried to peel your box?“ he said. Clete and I looked at each other.

  ”You didn't know your place got creeped?“ He laughed, then pointed with his thumb to the safe. ”You can punch 'em, peel 'em, or burn 'em.

  The guy tried to do this one was a fish. He should have gone through the dial.“ Clete got up from his desk and rubbed his fingers along the prised edge of the safe, then went to the front and back doors. ”How'd the guy get in?“ he said to me, his face blank. ”It's called a lock pick, Purcel,“ Patsy said. ”There're no scratches,“ Clete said to me.

  ”Maybe the safe was already damaged when you got it from Nig,“ I said.

  But Clete was already shaking his head. Patsy lit a cigarette, held it upward in the cone of his fingers, blew smoke around it as though he were creating an artwork in the air. ”There's a hit on me. I got a proposition,“ he said. ”Tell me who Charlie is,“ I said. ”Charlie?

  What the fuck you talking about?“

  ”Would you watch your language, please,“ I said. ”Language? That's what's you guys got on your mind, I use bad language?“ he said. ”You're a beaut, Patsy,“ I said. ”Yeah? Well, fuck you. The hit's coming from Johnny Carp. You stomped the shit out of him, Robicheaux; Purccl bounced money off his face. That gives all of us a mutual interest, you get my drift?“

  ”Thanks for coming by,“ I said. He stood up, ground his cigarette out in an ashtray, stabbing it into the ceramic as though he were working an angry thought out of his mind. ”Marsallus ever wash up on the shore?“

  he said. ”No, why?“ I said. ”No reason. I wish I'd been there for it. It was time somebody broke that mutt's legs.“

  ”Get out,“ I said. When he walked past the secretary, he drew his finger, like a line of ice water, across the back of her neck. When I closed the bait shop that night and walked up the dock toward the house, I saw Luke Fontenot waiting for me in the shadows of the oaks that overhung the road. He wore a pair of pink slacks, a braided cloth belt, a black shirt with the collar turned up on the neck. He flipped a toothpick out onto the road. ”What's up, partner?“ I said. ”Come out to the plantation wit' me.“

  ”Nope.“

  ”Ruthie Jean and me want to bring all this to an end.“

  ”What are you saying?“

  ”Moleen Bertrand gonna fix it so it come out right for everybody.“

  ”I'm afraid I'm not one of his fans, Luke.“

  ”Talk to my Aim Bertie. If it come from you, she gonna listen.“ I could hear the strain, like twisted wire, in his throat. ”To what? No, don't tell me. Somebody's going to give y'all a lot of money. Sounds great. Except Bertie's one of those rare people who's not for sale and just wants her little house and garden and the strip Moleen's grandfather gave y'all's family.“

  ”You ain't got to the part that counts most.“ He rubbed a mosquito bite on his neck, looked hotly into my face. ”Moleen and Ruthie Jean?“ I said. ”That's what it always been about, Mr. Dave. But if it don't go right, if Aim Bertie gonna act old and stubborn .. . There's some bad white people gonna be out there. I'm between Ruthie Jean and that old woman. What I'm gonna do?“ I followed him in my truck out to the Bertrand plantation. The sky was freckled with birds, the air heavy with smoke from a trash fire, full of dust blowing out of the fields. The grove of gum trees at the end of the road thrashed in black-green silhouette against the dying 24 6

  sun. While he told me a story of reconciliation and promise I sat with Luke on the tiny gallery of the house from which he and Ruthie Jean had been evicted, and I wondered if our most redeeming quality, our willingness to forgive, was not also the instrument most often used to lay bare and destroy the heart. Moleen had found Luke first, then Ruthie Jean, the latter in a motel in a peculiar area of north Lafayette where Creoles and blacks and white people seemed to traverse one another's worlds without ever identifying with any one of them. He spent the first night with her in the motel, a low-rent 19405 cluster of stucco boxes that had once been called the Truman Courts. While he made love to her, she lay with her head propped up on pillows, her hands lightly touching his shoulders, her gaze pointed at the wall, neither encouraging nor dissuading his passion, which seemed as insatiable as it was unrequited. Then in the middle of the night he sat naked on the side of the bed, his skin so white it almost glowed, his forearms on his thighs, his confession of betrayal and hypocrisy so spontaneous and devoid of ulterior motive that she knew she would have to forgive whatever injury he had done her or otherwise his sin would become her own. She rose to her knees, pressed him back on the pillow, then mounted him and kissed his face and throat, made love to him almost as though he were a child. When the light broke against the window curtains in the morning and she heard the sound of diesel trucks outside, car doors slamming, people talking loudly because they didn't care if others slept or not, all the hot, busy noise of another day in the wrong part of town, she could feel the nocturnal intimacy of their time together slipping away from her, and she knew he would shower soon, drink coffee with her, be fond, even affectionate, while the attention in his eyes wandered, then begin to refocus on the world that awaited him with all the guarantees of his race and position as soon as he left the motel. But instead he drove them to Galveston, where they ate lunch at a hotel restaurant on the beach, rented a boat and fished for speckled trout in the deep drop-off beyond the third sandbar, walked barefoot along the edge of the surf by the old World War I fort at sunset, and on a whim flew to Monterrey to watch a bullfight the next afternoon. By the time they returned to Lafayette, Ruthie Jean believed her life had turned a corner she had not thought possible.

  ”He's leaving his wife?“ I said. ”He give his word. He cain't stay with Miss Julia no more,“ Luke said. I didn't say anything for a long time. ”You're a smart man, Luke. Where's he going to take his law practice?“

  ”He sell the property, they ain't gonna have to worry.“

  ”I see.“ I had an indescribably sad feeling inside that I could not translate into words. Then I saw Ruthie Jean come out of Bertie's house and walk on her cane toward us. She looked beautiful. Her hair was brushed in thick swirls that curved on her high cheekbones, and the low-cut white knit dress she wore showed every undulation in her body.

  When she recognized me in the gloom, she went through the back door of the house. ”Are y'all staying here now?“ I asked Luke. ”Yes, suh.“

  ”But it was Julia Bertrand who evicted y'all, wasn't it?“ He studied the grove of gum trees at the end of the road. ”So it must be with her knowledge y'all are back here. Does that make sense to you?“ I said.

  ”Talk to Aim Bertie, Mr. Dave.“

  ”I have too much respect for her. No offense meant. I'll see you, Luke.“

  ”Moleen Bertrand gonna keep his word.“ When I started my truck he was standing alone in his yard, a jail-wise hustler, pulled from the maw of our legal killing apparatus, who grieved over his elderly aunt and put his trust in white people, whom a behaviorist would expect him to fear and loathe. I wondered why historians had to look to the Roman arena for the seeming inexhaustible reservoirs of faith that can exist in the human soul.

  The next evening, after I had closed the bait shop and dock, I put on my running shoes and gym shorts and worked out with my weights in the backyard. I did three sets of curls, dead lifts, and military presses, then jogged through the tunnel of trees by the bayou's edge. The sky was the color of gunmetal, the sun a crack of fire on the western horizon. I came out of the trees, the
wind in my face, and headed for the drawbridge.

  For some reason I wasn't even surprised when he came out of the shadows and fell in next to me, his tennis shoes powdering the dust in sync with mine, the granite head hunched down on his oily shoulders as though the neck had been surgically removed, his evenly measured breath warm with the smell of beer and tobacco.

  ”I saw you working out on the speed bag at Red Lerille's Gym,“ he said.

  ”The trick's to do it without gloves.“ He held out his square, blunt hands, his words bouncing up and down in his throat. ”I used to wrap mine with gauze soaked in lye water. Puts a sheath of callus on the outside like dry fish scale. The problem today is, some faggot cuts his hand on the bag, then you skin your hand on the same bag and you got AIDS, that's what these cocksuckers are doing to the country.“

  ”What's your problem, Pogue?“

  ”You gonna dime me?“

  ”I'm not a cop anymore, remember?“

  ”So the bar's open,“ he said, and pointed toward a brown Nissan parked by the side of the road.

  ”I'm tied up.“

  ”I got the cooler on the backseat. Take a break, chief. Nobody's after your cherry,“ he said.

  Up ahead I could see the drawbridge and the bridge tender inside his little lighted house. Emile Pogue tugged his cooler out onto the road, stuck his corded forearm down into the water and melting ice, and pulled out two bottles of Coors.

  ”No, thanks,“ I said. He twisted off the cap on one bottle and drank it half-empty. His torso looked as taut and knurled as the skin on a pumpkin, crisscrossed with stitched scars, webbed with sinew like huge cat's whiskers above the rib cage. He worked his arms through a sleeveless, olive green shirt. ”You don't like me?“ he said.

  ”No.“

  He pinched his nostrils, flexed his lips back on his gums, looked up and down the road. ”Here's the deal,“ he said. ”You put a stop to what's happening, I'll rat-fuck any grease ball you want, then I'm gone.“

  ”Stop what?“

  ”That demented guy, the one looks like a dildo you scrambled, Patsy Dapolito, he thinks Johnny Carp's got a hit on him. It ain't coming from Johnny, though.“ His breath was like a slap, his body aura-ed with a fog of dried sweat and testosterone. He tapped me on the chest with his finger. ”Look at me when I'm talking to you. Sonny killed my brother. So I had a personal and legitimate hard-on for the guy.“

  ”I hear you.“

  ”But that ain't why Sonny's back.“ I stared at him, open-mouthed. His eyes had the dead quality of ball bearings. He breathed loudly through his nose.

  ”Back?“ I said.

  ”Get you some Q-Tips, open up the wax. Don't tell me what I seen.

  Look, chief, till you been down in the bush with the Indians, done a few mushrooms with these fuckers, I'm talking about on a stone altar where their ancestors used to tear out people's hearts, don't knock what somebody else tells you he sees.“

  ”You lost me.“

  ”I saw him at a camp I use out in the Atchafalaya. I looked out in the trees, inside all this hanging moss, there was a swarm of moths or butterflies, except they were on fire, then they formed a big cluster in the shape of a guy, and the guy walked right through the trunk of a tree into the water. It was Sonny Marsallus, he was burning like hundreds of little tongues of flame under the water. I ain't the only one seen it, either.“

  His hand was squeezed like a huge paw around his beer bottle, his mouth an expressionless slit.

  ”I think we're talking about an overload of acid or steroids, Emile,“ I said.

  ”You get word to Sonny,“ he said. ”That Mennonite's words .. . they were a curse. I'm saying maybe I'm damned. I need time to get out of it.“

  His breath was rife with funk, his eyes jittering, riveted on mine.

  ”What Mennonite?“ I said.

  Sometimes you pull aside the veil and look into the Pit. What follows is my best reconstruction of his words.

  Chapter 26

  I HAD THIRTY guys strung out on the trail in the dark. It sounded like a traveling junkyard. I stopped them at the river, told the translator, Look, we got a problem here, two more klicks we're in Pinkville South, know what I'm saying, we go in, make our statement, then boogie on back across the river, the beer is five hours colder and we let the dudes from Amnesty International count up the score. In and out, that's the rhythm, none of our people get hurt, even the volunteers we took out of the last ville don't need to walk through any toe-poppers. I'm talking to guys here who think the manual of arms is a Nicaraguan baseball player. Look, ace, you got to understand, I didn't target the ville, it targeted itself. They were giving food to the people who were killing us. We warned them, we warned the American priest running the orphanage. Nobody listened. I didn't have no grief with the Mennonite broad. I saw her in the city once, I tipped my hat to her. I admired her. She was a homely little Dutch wisp of a thing working in a shithole most people wouldn't take time to spit on. The trouble came from a couple of liaison guys, officers who spent some time at a special school for greasers at Benning, listen, chief, I was an adviser, got me,

  I didn't get paid for interfering, you see these guys walk a dude into a tin shed that's got a metal bed frame in it, they close the door behind them, you'll hear the sounds way out in the jungle and pretend it's just monkeys shrieking. Ellos! they'd yell when we came into the ville, and then try to hide. That was our name. As far as these poor bastards knew, I could have been Pancho Villa or Stonewall Jackson.

  Look, it got out of control. We were supposed to set up a perimeter, search for weapons, take one guy out in particular, this labor organizer, one object lesson, that's all, they used to call it a Christmas tree, a few ornaments hanging off the branches in the morning, you with me, but the guy runs inside the church and the priest starts yelling at our people out on the steps, and pop pop pop, what was I supposed to do, man? Suddenly I got a feeding frenzy on my hands. You got to look at the overview to see my problem. It's in a cup of mountains, with nobody to see what's going on. That can be a big temptation. In the center of the ville is this stucco church with three little bell towers on it. The priest looks like a pool of black paint poured down the steps. The streets run off in all directions, like spokes on a wheel, and the guys did the priest are scared and start popping anybody in sight. Before I know it, they're down all the spokes, deep in the ville, the circus tent's on fire and I'm one fucking guy. Geese and chickens are exploding out of the yards, pigs squealing, women screaming, people getting pulled into the street by their hair. She comes around a corner, like she's walking against a wind and it takes everything in her to keep walking toward the sounds that make most people cover their ears and hide. I ain't ever going to forget the look in her face, she had these ice blue eyes and hair like white corn silk and blood on her blouse, like it was thrown from an ink pen, but she saw it all, man, just like that whole street and the dead people in it zoomed right through her eyes onto a piece of film. The problem got made right there. I pushed her hard. She had bones like a bird, you could hold her up against a candle and count them with your finger, I bet, and her face was a little pale triangle and I knew why she was a religious woman and I shoved her again. ”This is an accident. It's ending now. You haul your butt out of here, Dutchie,“

  I said.

  I squeezed her arm, twisted her in the other direction, scraped her against the wall and saw the pain jump in her face. But they're hard to handle when they're light; they don't have any weight you can use against them. She pulled out of my hands, slipped past me, even cut me with her nails so she could keep looking at the things she wasn't supposed to see, that were going to mess all of us up. Her lips moved but I couldn't understand the words, the air between the buildings was sliced with muzzle flashes, like red scratches against the dark, and you could see empty shell casings shuttering across the lamplight in the windows. Then I heard the blades on the Huey before I felt the downdraft wash over us, and I watched it set down in a field at
the end of this stone street and the two officers from the special school at Benning waiting for me, their cigars glowing inside the door, and I didn't have any doubt how it was going to go.

  They said it in Spanish, then in English. Then in Spanish and English together. ”It is sad, truly. But this one from Holland is communista.

  She is also very se rio with friends in the left-wing press. Entiende, Senor Pogue?“

  It wasn't a new kind of gig. You throw a dozen bodies out at high altitudes. Sometimes they come right through a roof. Maybe it saves lives down the line. But she was alive when they brought her onboard.

  Look, chief, I wasn't controlling any of it. My choices were I finish the mission, clean up these guys' shit and not think about what's down below, because the sun was over the ridges now and you could see the tile roof of the church and the body of the labor organizer hanging against the wall and Indians running around like an ants' nest that's been stepped on, or stay behind and wait for some seriously pissed-off rebels to come back into the ville and see what we'd done.

  Two guys tried to lift her up and throw her out, but she fought with them. So they started hitting her, both of them, then kicking her with their boots. I couldn't take it, man. It was like somebody opened a furnace door next to my head. This stuff had to end. She knew it, too, she saw it in my eyes even before I picked her up by her shoulders, almost like I was saving her, her hands resting on my cheeks, all the while staring into my eyes, even while I was carrying her to the door, even when she was framed against the sky, like she was inside a painting, her hair whipping in the wind, her face jerking back toward the valley floor and what was waiting for her, no stopping any of it now, chief, and I could see white lines in her scalp and taste the dryness and fear on her breath, but her lips were moving again while I squeezed her arms tighter and moved her farther out into a place where nobody had to make decisions anymore, her eyes like holes full of blue sky, and this time I didn't need to hear the words, I could read them on her mouth, they hung there in front of me even while the wind tore her out of my hands and she became just a speck racing toward the earth: You must change your way.