A Stained White Radiance (25 page)

I drove down the dirt road past the rusted windmill and crumbled brick supports where the
house had stood before Weldon had hired a gang of drunken blacks to tear it apart with crowbars and sledgehammers. I parked my truck by a sludge pond and an open-sided shed stacked with pipe and sacks of drilling mud, and walked up the iron steps of a rig that roared with the noise of the drilling engine.

The roughnecks on the floor were slimy with mud, bent into their work at the wellhead with the concentration of men who know the result of a moment's inattention on a rig, when the tongs or a whirling chain can pinch off your fingers or snap your bones like sticks.

A tool pusher put a hard hat on my head.

“Where's Weldon?” I shouted at him.

“What?”

“Where's Weldon Sonnier?” I shouted again over the engine's roar.

He pointed up into the rig.

High up on the tower I saw Weldon in coveralls and hard hat, working with the derrick man on the monkey board. The derrick man was clipped to the tower with a safety belt. I couldn't see one on Weldon. His face was small and round against his yellow hat as he looked down at me.

A moment later he put one foot out on the hoist, grabbed the cable with one hand, and rode it down to the rig floor. There was a single smear of bright grease, like war paint, on one of his cheekbones.

“Coffee time,” he yelled at the floormen.

Somebody killed the drilling engine, and I opened and closed my mouth to clear my ears.
Weldon pulled off his bradded gloves, unzipped his coveralls, and stepped out of them. He was wearing slacks and a polo shirt, and his armpits and the center of his chest were dark with sweat.

“Let's go over here in the shade,” he said. “It must be ninety-five today.”

We walked to the far end of the platform and leaned against the railing under a canvas awning. The air was sour with natural gas.

“I thought you'd pretty well punched out this field,” I said.

“Anyplace there was an ocean, there's oil. You just got to go deep enough to find it.”

I looked out at the wells pumping up and down in the distance and the long spans of silver pipe that sweated coldly from the natural gas running inside.

“With the low price of crude, a lot of outfits are shut down now,” I said.

“That's them, not me. What are you out here for, Dave?”

“To deliver a message.”

“Oh?”

“Actually I'm just passing on an observation. Have you been up to see Drew today?”

“Yeah, a little while ago.”

“You know you're going to end up testifying at Gouza's trial, then?”

“So?”

“I get the feeling you think somebody's going to wave a wand over your situation and you won't ever have to explain your dealings with Gouza. He's
not copping a plea. He's facing life in Angola. His defense attorneys are going to use a chain saw when they get you and Drew on the stand.”

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

“Give some thought to what Drew's doing.”

He wiped at the grease on his face with a clean mechanic's cloth.

“Tell Gouza he doesn't want to make bond,” he said. “Believe me, he doesn't want to see me unless he's got some cops around him.”

“Then you buy it?”

“You think she did it to herself? You've got the right guy in jail. Just make sure he stays there.”

“Here's the problem I have, Weldon. Joey Gouza is what they call a made guy. That's unusual in his case. He wasn't born to it, he didn't have any patrons or political allies greasing the wheels for him. He worked his way up from a reformatory punk. That means that in his world he's a lot smarter than a lot of the people around him. Come on, you know him, Weldon, do you think he'd set himself up for a fall like this?”

He folded the pink mechanic's cloth in a neat square and balanced it on the rail. Then he moved it and balanced it again.

“Stonewall time is over,” I said. “Your sister just put the tape on fast forward.”

“So you've come out here to tell me she's a liar?”

“No, I've come out here to tell you she's a victim. I'm using the word in a broad sense, too. There's a certain kind of victimization that starts in
childhood. Then the person grows older and never learns any other role. Except maybe one other. The word for that one is enabler.”

“You better get to it, Dave.” He turned toward me and rested his hand on the metal rail.

“Lyle understands it and he never finished high school.”

“I'm going to ask you to choose each of your words carefully, Dave.”

I took a deep breath. The air was pungent with gas, acrid with the smell of oil sludge and dead weeds in the sunlight.

“Look, Weldon, if I know about your family history, about some of the complexities in it, do you believe that Gouza's attorneys won't have access to the same information, that they won't use it to tear your sister apart?”

“Say it or shut the fuck up and get out of here.”

“She's not just your sister. In her mind she's your wife, your lover, your mother. She'll do anything for you. It's a way of life for her. You know it, too, you rotten sonofabitch.”

His feet were already set when he swung. He caught me on the chin, and my head snapped back and my hard hat rolled across the rig floor.

I straightened up, held the rail with one hand, and looked into his face. It was stretched tight on the bone, and the suntanned skin at the corners of his eyes was filled with white lines.

The roughnecks on the floor stared at us in disbelief.

I pushed at the side of my chin with my thumb.

“They'll melt you into lard in the courtroom, Weldon,” I said. “Gouza won't even have to take the stand. Instead, you and Drew will be on trial, and those defense attorneys will make you sound like a pornographer's wet dream.”

I saw his hand move, his eyes click again as though he'd been slapped.

“Don't even think about it,” I said. “The first one was free. You come at me again, and I'll make sure you do time for assaulting a police officer.” I picked up the hard hat from the rig floor and shoved it into his hands, jammed it into his chest. “Thanks for the tour of the rig. My recommendation is you hire a good lawyer and get some advice about the wisdom of suborning perjury. Or apply for a pilot's job in a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States. See you around, Weldon.”

I walked down the iron steps to my truck. I could hear the canvas awning flapping in the hot wind, a chain clinking brightly against a piece of pipe, in the embarrassed silence of the roughnecks on the rig floor.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I drove across the I-10 bridge over the Mississippi to Baton Rouge. The river was high and muddy, almost a mile across, and the oil barges far below looked as tiny as toys. Huge oil refineries and aluminum plants sprawled along the east bank of the river, but what always struck my eye first when I rolled over the apex of the bridge into Baton Rouge was the spire of the
capitol building lifting itself out of the flat maze of trees and green parks in the old downtown area. All the state's political actors since Reconstruction had passed through there: populists in suspenders and clip-on bow ties, demagogues, alcoholic buffoons, virulent racists, a hillbilly singer who would be elected governor twice, another governor who broke out of a mental asylum in order to kill his wife, a recent governor who pardoned a convict in Angola, who repaid the favor by murdering the governor's brother, and the most famous and enigmatic player of them all, the Kingfish, who might have given FDR a run for his money had he not died, along with his supposed assassin, in a spray of eighty-one machine-gun bullets in a hallway of the old capitol building.

I parked my truck and sat in the gallery during the morning session of the legislature. I watched the regard with which Bobby Earl was treated by many of his peers, the warm handshakes, the pats on the arm and shoulder, the expression of gentlemanly goodwill by men who should have known better. It reminded me of the deference sometimes shown to a small-town poolroom bully or redneck police chief. The people around him well know his hatred of Jews, intellectuals, news people, Asians, blacks; no one doubts his potential with the leaded baton or the hobnailed boot across the neck. But they make friends with the ape in their midst, no matter how violently the tuning fork vibrates inside them; consequently they absorb his dark powers, and secretly gloat at the fear he inspires in others.

They recessed for lunch, and I followed Bobby Earl and a group of his friends one block to the entrance of an expensive restaurant with an awning that extended out over the sidewalk. The windows were filled with ferns and hanging copper pots. After Earl and his group had entered the restaurant, I put on my seersucker coat, tightened my necktie, and walked inside, too. Most of the tables were filled, the air loud with conversation and scented with the smell of gumbo from the kitchen, bourbon and tropical drinks from the bar.

“I don't think we have a seating for one, sir. Would you like to wait in the bar?” the maître d' said.

“I'm with Mr. Earl's party. Ah, there he is right over there,” I said.

“Very well. Please follow me, sir,” he said.

I walked with the maître d' to Bobby Earl's table. The maître d' set a menu down for me at an empty place setting and walked away. Earl turned away from his conversation with another man, then his mouth opened silently as he looked up and realized who was sitting down at his table.

“Hello, Mr. Earl. I apologize for bothering you again, but I'm just in town briefly and I didn't want to disturb you at the legislature,” I said. “How are you gentlemen? I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office. I just need to ask Mr. Earl a question or two. Y'all go right ahead with your lunch.”

They went on talking to each other, as though
my presence was perfectly natural, but I could see their eyes, the positions of their bodies, already disassociating themselves from the situation.

Bobby Earl wore a brown pinstripe suit and a yellow silk tie, and his thick hair looked blow-dried and recently cut.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“Do you know that Joey Gouza's in custody?”

“No.”

I set my notebook on the tablecloth and peeled back several pages. It contained nothing but notes from old investigations and a grocery list I had made out at the office yesterday.

“I interviewed him in his cell yesterday and your name came up,” I said.

“What?”

“Gouza is charged with ordering two men to nail Drew Sonnier's hand to a gazebo. When I questioned him your name came up in the conversation. That fact bothered me, Mr. Earl. Is it your statement that you don't know Joey Gouza?”

“I'm not making a statement. What are you trying to do here?”

A man at the end of the table coughed quietly into his fist and went to the restroom.

“You and Joey Gouza seem to have the same friends. Your lines keep crossing in this case, Mr. Earl. Originally I questioned you about Eddy Raintree. Now someone has blown Eddy's face off with a shotgun. You knew that, didn't you?”

“No, I don't know anything about this. You listen—”

His voice level rose, and the man next to him excused himself to talk with friends at the bar.

“You're harassing me,” Earl began again. “I can't prove it, but I suspect you have a political motivation for what you've been doing. It won't work. It just makes my cause stronger. If you doubt me, call the
Morning Advocate
and check the polls.”

“Let me tell you what Gouza said and you can come to your own conclusions. We were talking about
you,
then he begins to tell me that if he goes down for what is called the ‘bitch,' which is a life sentence given to habitual criminals, he's going to take others down with him. What does that seem to suggest to you, Mr. Earl?”

“It suggests you're going to have a lawsuit against you for slander.” His monocular right eye, with the enlarged pupil like a spot of India ink, was fixed on my face. The skin along the bottom rim was trembling with anger.

I folded my notebook and put it in my shirt pocket. I picked up a package of crackers from the breadbasket, then dropped it in the basket again.

“You're an intelligent man, and I'll tell you the truth, Mr. Earl,” I said. “I think Joey might be in on a bum rap. But unfortunately for him, nobody cares if a guy like Joey is innocent or not. People just want him put away in a cage for a long time, and they don't care how it's done. The prosecutor will probably get a new political career out of it, his lawyers will get rich on his appeals while he's chopping sugarcane at Angola, his wife and
mistresses will clean out his bank accounts and sell everything he owns, and his hired stooges will go to work for his competitors and forget they ever heard of him. In the meantime, there are probably some sadistic gunbulls who will ejaculate at the thought of busting Joey's hump on their work gangs.

“Now, if you were Joey Meatballs and facing a prospect like that, wouldn't you be willing to cut a deal, any deal, including maybe putting your mother in harness on a dogsled team?”

The other men at the table had gone quiet now and had given up the pretense of conviviality. They looked at their watches, touched nervously at their mouths with their napkins, stared at a remote part of the restaurant. The cost of their lunch with Bobby Earl was not one they had anticipated.

I rose from the table.

“You like primitive law and vigilante solutions to complex problems, Mr. Earl,” I said. “Maybe you've stumbled into one of your own creations this time. But I wouldn't end up as Joey Gouza's fall partner. He doesn't care about political causes. He had his own brother-in-law fed into an airplane propeller. What do you think his lawyers might have planned for you?”