A Stained White Radiance (33 page)

Alafair caught Tripod up in her arms at the end of the dock, then turned to face down Batist, whose black, thick neck was pulsing with nests of veins.

“I gonna flatten that coon like a bicycle patch, me,” he said. “I gonna wipe up that bait shop wit' him.”

“You leave him alone!” Alafair shouted back.

“I cain't be runnin' a sto', no, with that nasty coon wreckin' my shelves. You set him down on that dock and I gonna golf him right over them trees.”

“He ain't did anything! Clean up your own mess! Clean up your own nasty cigars!”

In the meantime, Tripod was trying to climb over her shoulder and down her back to get as much geography between him and Batist as possible.

Oh Lord,
I thought, and walked down to the dock.

“It's too late, Dave,” Batist said. “That coon headed for coon heaven.”

“Let's calm down a minute,” I said. “How'd Tripod get into the bait shop again, Alf?”

“Batist left the screen open,” she said.

“I left the screen open?” he said incredulously.

“You were fishing out back, too, or he wouldn't have gotten up on the shelf,” she said. Her face was flushed and heated, her eyes as bright as brown glass.

“Look his face, look his mouth,” Batist said. “He eat all the sugar in the can and two boxes them Milky Ways.”

Tripod, whose fur was almost black except for his silver-ringed tail and silver mask, didn't make a good witness for the defense. His muzzle and whiskers were slick with chocolate and coated with grains of sugar. I picked up the end of his chain. The clip that we used to fasten him to the clothesline was broken.

“I'm afraid we've got Tripod on a breaking-and-entering rap, Alf,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“It looks like he's going to have to go into lockdown,” I said.

“What?”

“That means let's put him in the rabbit hutch until tomorrow when I can fix his chain. In the meantime, Batist, let's close down the shop and think about going to the drive-in movie.”

“It ain't my sto', it ain't my Milky Way. I just work here all day so I can clean up after some fat no-good coon, me.”

Alafair was about to fire off another shot when I turned her gently by the shoulder and walked her back through the pecan trees in front of the house.

“He was mean, Dave,” she said. “He was gonna hurt Tripod.”

“No, he's not mean, little guy,” I said. “To Batist, running the bait shop is an important job. He just doesn't want anything to go wrong while he's in charge.”

“You didn't see what he looked like.” Her eyes were moist in the deep shade of the trees.

“Alafair, Batist grew up poor and uneducated and never learned to read and write. But today he runs a business for a white man. He wants to do everything right, but he has to make an ‘X' when he signs for a delivery and he can't count the receipts at the end of the day. So he concentrates on things that he can do well, like barbecuing the chickens, repairing the boat engines, and keeping all the inventory squared away. Then Tripod gets loose and makes a big mess of the shelves. So in Batist's mind he's let us down.”

I saw her eyes blinking with thought.

“It's kind of like the teachers at school giving you a job to do, then someone else comes along and messes it up and makes you look bad. Does that make sense?”

She shifted Tripod in her arms, so that he lay on his back with his three paws in the air, his stomach swollen with food.

“I guess so. We going to the show?”

“You bet.”

“Batist is going, too?”

“I don't know, you think he should go?”

She thought about it.

“Yeah, he should go with us,” she said, as though she had just reached a profound metaphysical conclusion.

“You're the best, little guy.”

“You are, too, big guy.”

We popped Tripod into the hutch, then I swung Alafair up on my back and we walked beneath the sparking of fireflies onto the gallery and into the lighted house, where Bootsie was deep-frying
sac-a-lait
and listening to a Cajun song that was playing on the radio propped in the kitchen window. The western sky looked like a blood-streaked ink wash, and I could hear the cicadas in a distant woods, all the way across the waving field of green sugarcane at the back of my property.

T
HE
NEXT MORNING
Alafair helped Batist and me open the bait shop. She earned her weekly allowance of five dollars by seining the dead shiners out of the bait tanks, seasoning the chickens that we barbecued on a split oil drum for our midday customers, draining the coolers, and pouring fresh ice over the beer and soda pop. But her favorite Saturday-morning job was sitting on a tall stool behind the cash register, her Astros baseball cap low on her head, ringing up worm and shiner sales with a loud bang on the keys.

It was a wonderful morning to fish. The air was still cool and windless, the early pink light muted in the cypress trees, the moon still visible in one soft blue corner of the sky. After we had rented most of our boats, I started the barbecue fire in the oil drum, then fixed coffee and hot milk and bowls of Grape-Nuts for the three of us, and we ate breakfast on one of the telephone-spool tables under an umbrella out on the dock. I had managed to push the Sonnier case completely out of
my mind when the phone rang inside the shop and Alafair got up and answered it.

I could see only the side of her face through the screen window as she held the receiver to her ear, but I had no doubt that she was listening to something that she had never expected to come through our telephone. Her eyes were blinking rapidly and her tan cheeks were filled with white discolorations, and I saw her look at me with her mouth parted as though a childish bad dream had become real in the middle of her day.

I went quickly inside the shop and behind the counter and took the receiver from her hand.

“Dave, he called you real bad names,” Alafair said. She was breathing hard through her mouth.

“Who is this?” I said into the receiver.

“You know who it is. Don't act stupid,” a high, metallic voice, like that of a midget, said. “You cut a deal with Joey Meatballs, didn't you?”

“You're not shy about frightening a little girl. How about giving me your name?”

“You don't know my name?”

I picked up a pencil and scribbled across the top of a lined notepad: “Boots, call office, tell them to trace call in shop.” Then I put the pad in Alafair's hands and pushed her toward the door.

“What's the matter, you got nothing wise to say?” the voice asked.

“What do you want, Fluck?”

“I want to know what you're giving Joey Gee so that he puts a whack out on me.”

“There's no deal with Joey.”

“You lying sonofabitch. He's out of the bag one day and everybody in New Orleans hears there's a five-grand open contract on me. You telling me you don't have anything to do with it?”

“That's right.”

“What is it, you guys want to wipe your books clean with my ass? Or is it a personal beef because I almost cooled you out in Sonnier's house?”

“You're going down because you killed a police officer and Eddy Raintree.”

“I'm shaking.”

“To tell you the truth, Fluck, I'm busy right now and you're a boring man to talk to.”

“The only reason somebody from the AB didn't take you out is you're not worth the trouble. But I'm going to give you a deal, one that'll make you big shit in your little town. I get immunity on that dead cop in the Sonnier house, I don't know anything about Eddy Raintree's problems next to a train track, and I give you everything you want on Joey Meatballs. I'm talking about guys he's whacked, the marshmallow Jack Gates shoved into the plane propeller, the crack they're selling to the niggers in the projects, gun deals with spicks, you name it, I'll give it to you. . . . Are you listening to me, man?”

“I hear you just fine.”

“Then you set it up. I want protective custody, too. Maybe in another state.”

“I think you're overestimating your importance, Fluck. You're not the kind of witness that prosecutors get excited about.”

“Look, I can take you to two graves down by Terrebonne Bay. Two guys that Joey made kneel down on the edge of a trench and suck on a barrel of a .22 mag before he dumped a big one down their throats.”

“It's not a sellers' market these days.”

“What's with you, man? You want to see Joey Gee go down or not?”

“Where are you?”

“Are you kidding?”

“What I mean is, you're probably not too far from a police station of some kind. Turn yourself in. It's the only deal you're going to get from me or probably anybody else. You executed a police officer. You get caught by the wrong guys and you'll never make the jail, Fluck.”

“You're getting off on this, aren't you?”

Through the screen window I saw Bootsie wave at me from the gallery of the house.

“Nope, I'm tired of talking to you,” I said.

“I'm messing up your morning, huh?”

“No, you just made a big mistake today.”

“What mistake, what are you talking—”

“You phoned me at my house. You frightened my little girl. You did it because inside you're a small, scared man, Fluck. That's why you wanted Garrett to see it coming. For just a second you felt you were as big a man as he was.”

“You're talking yourself into something real bad.”

“Call the DEA. They cut deals with snitches all the time.”

I could hear him breathing into the receiver.

“Where you from, outer space? You're fucking with the AB. We're everywhere, man. There ain't anybody we can't clip. Even if I go down, even if I'm in a max unit somewhere, I can have your whole family taken out.”

“For five grand your AB buddies will have you in a soap dish.”

I could almost hear a wet, gastric click in his throat. Then he hesitated a moment, as though he were squeezing his anger back into a small box down in his chest.

“I want you to remember everything you said to me,” he said. “Keep running the words over and over in your head. I'm gonna think up something for you, something special, something that you didn't think could ever happen in your life. I was in Parchman, man. You don't know how much pain a wise-ass fuck like you can go through before he dies.”

Then the line went dead. I looked at my watch. I didn't know if there had been enough time for the dispatcher at the office to get a successful trace on the call or not. I dipped a wad of paper towels into the floating ice in the beer cooler and rubbed my face with it, then wiped my skin dry and flung the towels into the trash basket, as though I could somehow rinse and clean the voice of Jewel Fluck out of my day.

I waited ten more minutes, then called the dispatcher.

“They traced it to a pay phone on Decatur in New Orleans,” he said. “We called First District
headquarters, but the guy was gone when they got there. Sorry, Dave. Who was it?”

“The guy who killed Garrett.”

“Fluck? Oh man, if we'd just been a little bit faster—”

“Don't worry about it.”

I walked up through the shade of the pecan trees to the gallery. Bootsie was sitting in the swing with Alafair beside her. Alafair looked up at me from under the brim of her ball cap, her face filled with a pinched light.

“It was just a drunk man, little guy,” I said. “He thought I was somebody else.”

“His voice, it was—” she began. “It made me feel bad inside.” She swallowed and looked out into the deep shadows of the trees.

“That's the way drunk people sound sometimes. We just don't pay any attention to them,” I said. “Anyway, Bootsie had the call traced to New Orleans, and the cops went to pick this guy up. Hey, let's don't waste any more time worrying about this character. I need you to help me get ready for our lunch customers.”

I felt Bootsie's eyes searching my face.

I went inside the house, took my .45 out of the dresser, slipped it down into my khakis, and pulled my shirt over it. At the dock I put Alafair in charge of turning the sausage links and split chickens on the barbecue grill. Her shoulders barely came above the top of the pit, and when the grease and
sauce piquant
dripped onto the coals her head and cap were haloed in smoke.

I put the .45 on a top shelf behind a stand-up display of Mepps spinners. I wouldn't need it, I told myself, not here, anyway. Fluck had too many problems of his own to worry about me. His kind took revenge only when they had nothing at risk, when it came to them as a luxury they could savor. I was sure of that, I told myself.

T
HE
SHERIFF LEARNED
OF
Fluck's phone call early Monday from the dispatcher. As soon as I walked into my office, he tapped on the doorjamb and followed me in.

“Jewel Fluck called you at your house?” he said.

“That's right.” I opened the blinds and sat down behind my desk.

“Why do I have to hear that from the dispatcher?”

“I didn't see any point in disturbing you on the weekend.”

“What'd he say?”

“Most of it was douche water. His clock's running out.”

“Come on, Dave, why'd he call you?”

“He wanted to give up Joey Gouza for immunity on Garrett and Eddy Raintree. I told him the store's closed.”

“You did what?”

“I indicated that cop killers don't get any slack, sheriff.”

He sat down in the chair across from me and
brushed one hand across the top of the other. He puffed out his cheeks.

“Maybe that's not yours to decide, Dave. There're a half-dozen agencies that want Joey Gouza salted away. The DEA, U.S. Customs, the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—”