A Stained White Radiance (28 page)

“No, not really. Joey Gouza's probably having his day in the Garden of Gethsemane, but I guess that's the breaks.”

“Do you feel bad about him for some reason?”

“I don't know what I feel. I suppose he deserves anything that happens to him.”

“Then what is it?”

“I think he's in jail for the wrong reasons. I
think Drew Sonnier is lying. I also think nobody cares whether Drew is lying or not.”

“That doesn't make sense, Dave. If he didn't do it to her, who did?”

Out on the field the kids had torn loose a base pad from its fastening in the sand, where it served as the home base for one side. Alafair had the volleyball under one arm and was trying to replace the wooden peg in the sand without anyone else taking the ball from her.

“I don't know who did it,” I said. “Maybe Gouza ordered it done as a warning to Weldon, then Drew lied to put him at the scene. But a guy like Gouza doesn't go out on a job himself.”

“It's the city's case. It's not your responsibility.”

“I twisted him. I made Bobby Earl think Gouza was going to drop the dime on him, then I told Gouza about it. The guy's experiencing some real psychological pain. He thinks a hit's out on him.”

“Is there?”

“Maybe. And if there is, I might be responsible.”

“Dave, a man like that is a human garbage truck. Whatever happens to him is the result of choices he made years ago. . . . Are you listening?”

“Sure,” I said. But I was watching Alafair. She couldn't hold the wooden peg with one hand and tamp it down in the sand without releasing the volleyball with the other, so she balanced the peg against her folded knee, then knocked it down with the heel of her free hand.

“What is it?” Bootsie said.

“Nothing,” I said. “You're right about Joey
Gouza. It would be impossible to be more than a footnote in that guy's life.”

“Do you want another piece of chicken?”

“No, I'd better get back to the office.”

“Let the city people handle it,
cher.
”

“Yeah, why not?” I said. “That's the best idea.”

She squinted one eye at me, and I averted my gaze.

T
EN
MINUTES AFTER
I was back at the office, my phone rang.

“Dave?” His voice was cautious, almost deferential, as though he were afraid I'd hang up.

“Yeah, what is it, Weldon?”

He waited a moment to reply. In the background I could hear “La Jolie Blonde” on a jukebox and the rattle of pool balls.

“You want to have a bowl of gumbo down at Tee Neg's?” he asked.

“I've already eaten, thanks.”

“You shoot pool?”

“Once in a while. What's up?”

“Come down and shoot some nine-ball with me.”

“I'm a little busy right now.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“About what?”

“For taking a punch at you. I'm sorry I did it. I wanted to tell you that.”

“Okay.”

“That's all . . . ‘okay'?”

“I pushed you into a hard corner, Weldon.”

“You're not still heated up about it?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Because I wouldn't want you mad at me.”

“I'm not mad at you.”

“So come down and shoot some nine-ball.”

“No more games, podna. What's on your mind?”

“I've got to get out of this situation. I need some help. I don't know anybody else to ask.”

After I hung up I drove over to Tee Neg's pool hall on Main Street. The interior had changed little since the 1940s. A long mahogany bar with a brass rail and cuspidors ran the length of the room, and on it were gallon jars of cracklings (which are called
graton
in southern Louisiana), hard-boiled eggs, and pickled hogs' feet. Wood-bladed fans hung from the ceiling; green sawdust was scattered on the floor; and the pool tables were lighted by tin-shaded lamps. In the back, under the blackboards that gave ball scores from all around the country, old men played dominoes and
bourée
at the felt tables, and a black man in a porter's apron shined shoes on a scrolled-iron elevated stand. The air was thick and close with the smell of gumbo, boiled crawfish, draft beer, whiskey, dirty-rice dressing, chewing tobacco, cigarette smoke, and talcum from the pool tables. During football season illegal betting cards littered the mahogany bar and the floor, and on Saturday night, after all the scores were in, Tee Neg (which means “Little Negro” in Cajun French) put oilcloth over the pool tables and served free robin gumbo and dirty rice.

I saw Weldon shooting pool by himself at a
table in back. He wore a pair of work boots, clean khakis, and a denim shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his tan biceps. He rifled the nine ball into the side pocket.

“You shouldn't ever hit a side-pocket shot hard,” I said.

“Scared money never wins,” he said, sat at a table with his cue balanced against his thigh, knocked back a jigger of neat whiskey, and chased it with draft beer. He wiped at the corner of his mouth with his wrist. “You want a beer or a cold drink or something?”

“No thanks. What can I do to help you, Weldon?”

He scratched at his brow.

“I want to give it up, but I don't want to do any time,” he said.

“Not many people do.”

“What I mean is, I
can't
do time. I've got a problem with tight places. Like if I get in one, I hear popsicle sticks snapping inside my head.”

He motioned his empty jigger at the bar.

“Maybe your fears are getting ahead of you,” I said.

“You don't understand. I had some trouble over there.”

“Where?”

“In Laos.” He waited until the barman had brought him another shot and a fresh draft chaser. He tipped the whiskey into the beer and watched it balloon in a brown cloud off the bottom of the glass. “We operated a kind of flying taxi service
for some of the local warlords. We were also transporting some of their home-grown organic. Eventually it got processed into heroin in Hong Kong. For all I know, GIs in Saigon ended up shooting it in their arms. Not too good, huh?”

“Go on.”

“I got sick of it. On one trip I told this colonel, this half-Chinese character named Liu, that I wasn't going to load his dope. I pushed him off the plane and took off down the runway. Big mistake. They shot the shit out of us, killed my copilot and two of my kickers. I got out of the wreck with another guy, and we ran through jungle for two hours. Then the other guy, this Vietnamese kid, said he was going to head for a village on the border. I told him I thought NVA were there, but he took off anyway. I never found out what happened to him, but Liu's lice heads caught me an hour later. They marched me on a rope for three days to a camp in the mountains, and I spent the next eighty-three days in a bamboo cage just big enough to crawl around in.

“I lived in my own stink, I ate rice with worms in it, and I wedged my head through the bamboo to lick rainwater out of the mud. At night the lice heads would get drunk on hot beer and break the bottles against my cage. Then one morning I smelled this funny odor. It was blowing in the smoke from the campfire. It smelled like burned hair or cowhide, then, when the wind flattened out the smoke, I saw a half-dozen human heads on pikes around the fire. I don't want to tell you what their faces looked like.

“Liu's buttholes probably wanted to ransom me, but at the same time they were afraid of our guys because they'd shot up the plane and killed three of my crew. So I figured eventually they'd get tired of busting bottles on my cage and pissing on me through the bars, and my head was going to be curing in the smoke with those others.

“I used to wake with fear in the morning that was unbelievable. I'd pray at night that I would die in my sleep. Then one day some other guys came into the camp, guys who knew I was money on the hoof and who wanted to make some toady points with the CIA. They bought me for a case of Budweiser and six cartons of cigarettes.”

He drank from his boilermaker, his eyes glazed faintly with shame.

“It's a funny experience to have,” he said. “It makes you wonder about your worth.”

“Cut it loose, Weldon.”

“What?”

“We already paid our dues. Why run the same old tape over and over again?”

“I volunteered for Air America. I can't blame that on somebody else.”

“You didn't volunteer to be a heroin mule.”

He pulled the cellophane off a cigar and rubbed it between his fingers until it was a small ball.

“If you were going to cut a deal with the feds, who would you go to?”

“It depends on what you did.”

“We're talking about guns and dope.”

“You mean you got into it again?”

“Yes and no.”

I looked at him quietly. He made a series of wet rings on the table with his jigger.

“The guns and the dope didn't get delivered, but I burned some guys for one hundred and eighty grand,” he said.

His eyes flicked away from mine.

“This is straight? You actually ripped off some traffickers for that kind of money?” I said.

“Yeah, I guess it was sort of a first for them.”

“One of the guys you burned is right there in the city jail, isn't he?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“There's no maybe about it. My advice is you should talk to the DEA or to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I know a pretty good agent in Lafayette.”

“That's about all you can suggest, huh? No magic answers.”

“You won't confide in me. I'm at a loss to help you.”

“If I did confide in you, I'd probably be under arrest.”

He smiled wanly and started to drink from his glass, then set it back down.

“I'll give what you said some thought, Dave.”

“No, I doubt that, Weldon. You'll go your own way until you beat your head into jelly.”

“I wish I always knew what was going on inside other people. It'd be a great asset in the oil business.”

B
EFORE
I
DROVE
back to the office I walked across the drawbridge over the Teche and watched the current running through the pilings and the backs of the garfish breaking the water in the sunlight. The air was hot, the sky bright with haze, the humidity so intense that my eyes burned with salt and my skin felt like insects were crawling on it. Even under the trees by the old brick firehouse in the park, the air felt close and moist, like steam rising off a stove.

Weldon had his problems, but I had mine, too. This case went far beyond Iberia Parish, and it appeared to involve people and power and politics of a kind that our small law-enforcement agencies were hardly adequate to deal with. Once again, I felt like the outside world was having its way with us, that it had found something vulnerable or weak or perhaps even desirous in us that allowed the venal and the meretricious to leave us with less of ourselves, less of a way of life that had been as sweet in the mouth as peeled sugarcane, as poignant and heartbreaking in its passing as the words to “La Jolie Blonde” on Tee Neg's jukebox:

Jolie blonde, gardez donc c'est t'as fait.

Ta m'as quit-té pour t'en aller,

Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.

Jolie blonde, pretty girl,

Flower of my heart

I'll love you forever,

My jolie blonde.

Still, Joey Gouza was in the city of New Iberia's custody, and if the prosecutor's office had its way he would be hoeing sweet potatoes on Angola Farm the rest of his life.

But something that had bothered me at noon while I had watched Alafair playing in the park was troubling me again, this time because of an idle glance across the bayou at a young man fishing under a cypress tree. I was watching him because he reminded me of so many working-class Cajun boys I had grown up with. He stood while he fished, bare-chested, lean, olive-skinned, his body knotted with muscle, his Marine Corps utilities low on his stomach, smoking a cigarette in the center of his mouth without taking it out. His bobber went under, and he jerked his pole up and pulled a catfish through the lily pads. Then I noticed that his left hand was gone at the wrist and he had to unhook the catfish and string it with one hand. But he was quite good at it. He laid the fish across a rock, pressed the sole of his boot down on its stomach, slipped the hook loose from the corner of its mouth, and worked a shaved willow fork through the gills until the hard white point emerged bloody and coated with membrane from the mouth. Then with his good hand he flopped the fish into the shallows and sank the willow fork deep into the mud.

T
HE
SHERIFF
WAS
sitting sideways in his swivel chair, reading a diet book, punching at his stomach with three fingers, when I walked into his office.
He looked up at me, then put the book in his drawer and began fiddling with some papers on his blotter. Like many Cajun men, his chin was round and dimpled and his cheeks ruddy and flecked with small veins.

“I was thinking about going on a diet myself,” I said.

“Somebody left that in here. I don't know who it belongs to.”

“Oh.”

“What's up?”

I told him I was going out to Drew Sonnier's again and my suspicions about what had happened at the gazebo.

“All right, Dave, but make sure you get her permission to look around on the property. If she won't give it to you, let's get a warrant. We don't want any tainted evidence.”

He saw me raise my eyebrows.

“What?” he said.

“You're talking about evidence we might use against her?”

“It's not up to us. If she's filed false charges against Joey Gouza, the prosecutor might want to stick it to her. You still want to go out there?”