A Stained White Radiance (41 page)

“Where you think you're going, buddy?” he said. His breath was rife with the smell of cigars.

“Iberia Parish sheriff's office. There's a man in the crowd with—” I began.

“Yeah? Who's that with you? The African paratroopers?” he said.

“He's FBI, you peckerwood shithead,” I said. “Now, you get the fuck out of my way.”

Mistake, mistake, I thought, even as the words came out of my mouth. Don't humiliate north Louisiana stump-jumpers in front of either their women or the boss man.

“Iberia Parish don't mean horse piss on a rock here,” the second man said. “You better haul your ass 'fore you get it hauled for you.”

Then more of Earl's bodyguards and aides pressed toward me, as though I were the source of all their problems, the spoiler of a grand moment in which they had been allowed to participate.

I stepped back from them and held my palms outward. Then I pointed one finger at them.

“I'll make it brief,” I said. “Get your man out of sight before he gets dusted. Second, I'm going to be back later and bust every one of you for interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty.”

I moved out of the crowd and behind the concrete shell to the far side. Lines had formed in front of the portable bathrooms, and large numbers of people were now drifting out of the picnic areas
and the pavilion toward the speaker's platform. The wind had suddenly died, and the air had grown close and hot, with a dusty, metallic smell to it, and the field lights were white and haloed with humidity against the darkening sky. I kicked over a trash barrel, rolled it snug against the concrete shell, stood on it, and tried to see Vic Benson's baseball cap among the hundreds of heads in the crowd.

It seemed impossible.

Then I heard a woman scream and I saw people separating themselves from some terrible or frightening presence in their midst, tripping on each other's ankles, falling backward to the ground. Not twenty feet from me, Vic Benson was racing through the crowd, the way a barracuda would slice through a school of bluefish, a small silver pistol in his upraised hand.

Bama saw him before Bobby Earl, whose back was turned as he signed autographs for children. Her face went white, and her mouth opened in a round red O.

I knocked a woman down, felt somebody bounce hard off my shoulder, crashed across a folding wheelchair, and dove headlong into the small of Vic Benson's back.

He hit the ground under me, and I heard the breath go out of his lungs in a gasp, and once again I smelled that odor that was like turpentine or embalming fluid, wind-dried sweat, nicotine, smoke rubbed into the skin and clothes. His baseball cap toppled off his head, his dark glasses were askew
on his face, and his eyes stared into mine the way a lizard's might if it were trapped on top of a hot rock in the middle of a burning field.

His lips moved, and I knew he wanted to curse or wound me in some fresh way, but his breath rasped in his throat like a man whose lungs were perforated with holes. I slipped my hand along his arm and removed the unfired pistol from his fingers.

I thought it was over. It should have been.

But Batist, when he had seen what was about to happen, had plunged through the crowd from the other side, his arms outspread, and had flung both Bama and Bobby Earl to the ground and had landed with his huge weight on top of both of them. People were screaming and shoving one another; photographers and TV cameramen were trying to get Bobby Earl's prone body, with Batist's on top of it, into their cameras' lenses; and three uniformed cops were fighting desperately to get through the rim of the crowd and into the center before a riot spread throughout the park.

Then I realized that most of the people pressed into the center of the grassy area had not seen Vic Benson or understood what he had tried to do. Instead, some of them obviously believed that Batist had attacked Bobby Earl.

As Batist tried to raise himself on his arms, a man on the edge of the crowd swung a doubled-over dog chain at his head, then two of Earl's bodyguards grabbed him by the belt and began tugging him backward.

“Put that fucking nigger in a cage,” someone yelled.

Then the crowd surged forward, toppling over one another, trampling others who had already fallen to the ground. Between their legs I saw the desperation in Batist's face as he tried to shield his eyes from a solitary fist that was flailing at his head. A string of saliva and blood drooled from his lower lip.

I tore into their midst. I drove my fist as hard as I could into the back of a man's thick neck; I ripped my elbow into someone's rib cage and felt it go like a nest of popsicle sticks; I lifted an uppercut into another man's stomach and saw him cave to his knees in front of me, his face gray and his mouth hanging open as if he had been eviscerated.

Then they rolled over both Batist and me.

There are moments in your life when you think the last frames in your film strip have just snapped loose from the reel. When one of those moments occurs, you hear your own blood thundering in your ears, or a sound like waves bursting over a coral reef, or hundreds of feet pounding dully on the earth.

Or perhaps the last frame in the strip simply freezes and you hear nothing at all.

Then as though sound and sight, trees and sky and air had all been given back to me, I saw the sunburned police sergeant with the hard, green eyes, knocking people backward with his baton, gripping it horizontally with both hands, swinging it violently from side to side, pushing the crowd back into a wider and wider circle.

Then other cops were in the circle, and you could feel the energies go out of the crowd the way air leaves a punctured balloon. When I got to my feet, I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and wiped my face on it. It was smeared with spittle and blood.

“I'm taking your piece and cuffing you and your friend together till I can get y'all out of here. Don't argue about it,” the sergeant said.

“No argument, podna,” I said.

He snapped one cuff of a set on my wrist and the other on Batist's. Batist's white shirt hung in strips off his massive shoulders.

Bobby Earl was standing among his bodyguards, his double-breasted tropical suit smudged with grass stains. He held a folded handkerchief to the corner of his mouth and combed back his wavy hair with his fingers. I felt the sergeant's hand tighten under my arm.

“Just a minute,” I said to him. “Hey, Bobby, a black man just saved your worthless pink ass. You and your constituency might think that over. There's another thought I want to leave you with, too, and I don't want you to take it the wrong way. But if you ever try to hurt my friend Cletus Purcel again, they'll have to scrub you out of your garbage grinder with a toothbrush.”

Batist and I walked to a squad car, surrounded by cops, our wrists chained together, our clothes in rags, just as lightning flickered across the sky and raindrops as heavy as marbles began to strike the leaves of the pin oaks above our heads.

Through the back window of another squad car, his arms manacled behind him, Vic Benson's destroyed face stared out at the cops, the milling crowd, the trees, the park, the slanting rain, the blackened sky, perhaps the earth itself, as though the invisible forces that had driven him all his life had gathered at this place, in this moment, to finally and irrevocably have their way with him.

W
E
TOOK OUR
VACATION
in Key West in late summer, when the weather is hot and bright, prices are cheap, the streets are empty of tourists, and the Gulf is lime green and streaked with whitecaps as far as the eye can see, and dark patches of water, like clouds of India ink, drift across the coral reefs.

But it was more than simply a respite from police work. I had taken indefinite leave from the sheriff's department. I let other people's problems, the seriousness, all the fury and mire and complexity, pull out of my grasp, in the same way that you finally tire of grief or guilt or a bonegrinding ongoing contention with the world. One morning, perhaps just before sunrise, you turn your eyes in a different direction and notice a blue heron rising from the reeds along the bayou's edge, a gator's walnut-ridged eyes moving silently through a milky skim of algae and floating twigs, a glowing radiance on the earth's rim that suddenly breaks through the black trunks of the cypress trees with such a white brilliance that you want to shield your eyes.

Joey Gouza is back with the big stripes in
Angola pen, but not for the murder of Garrett or Jewel Fluck, or even the assault-and-battery beef. Joey's final legal chapter was written in the New Orleans city prison. He set fire to his mattress, plugged up the commode with his clothes, flooded the whole cell block, and urinated through the bars on a gunbull. He tried to tell anyone who would listen that both the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia had put a hit on him. No one was interested, or perhaps, more accurately, no one cared.

Finally he was moved into an isolation cell with a solid iron door, because he was convinced that an AB member, with the consent of the Mafioso who had taken a Taser dart in the neck that had been intended for Joey, was going to turn him into a flaming object lesson by hurling a Molotov cocktail through his bars.

Two days later a new guard walked him down to the shower stalls and the small concrete room that contained barbells and a broken universal gym, where Joey was supposed to shower and exercise by himself. Then the guard let eight other men out of their cells. Joey Gouza broke off a five-inch shank, made from a jagged sliver of window glass, in another inmate's shoulder.

The investigator's report stated that the other inmate had celled with Jewel Fluck in Parchman, that his upper torso was tattooed with swastikas and iron crosses, and that at the time of the attack he had been carrying a razor blade mounted on a toothbrush handle.

But who cared?

Joey Gouza went down for attempted murder.

I'd like to be able to tell you that Bobby Earl's political career ended, that somehow the events in the park revealed him publicly as a fraud or a physical coward, or that his followers turned against him. But it didn't happen. It couldn't.

I had been determined to prove that Bobby Earl was fronting points for Joey Gouza, or that he was connected with arms and dope trafficking in the tropics. I was guilty of that age-old presumption that the origins of social evil can be traced to villainous individuals, that we just need to identify them, lock them in cages, or even march them to the executioner's wall, and this time, yes, this time, we'll catch a fresh breeze in our sails and set ourselves on a true course.

But Bobby Earl is out there by consent. He has his thumb on a dark pulse, and like all confidence men, he knows that his audience wishes to be conned. He learned long ago to listen, and he knows that if he listens carefully they'll tell him what they need to hear. It's a contract of mutual deceit by which they open up their flak vests and take it right through the breastbone.

If it were not he, it would be someone like him—misanthropic, beguiling, educated, someone who, as an ex-president's wife once said, allows the rest of us to feel comfortable with our prejudices.

I think the end for Bobby Earl will come in the same fashion as it does for all his kind. Unlike the members of The Pool and that great army of vil
lainous buffoons trying to sneak through life on side streets, Bobby Earl's ilk want power so badly that at some point in their lives they make a conscious choice to embrace evil. It's not a gradual seduction. They do it without reservation, and that's when they leave the rest of us. You know it when it happens, too. No amount of cosmetic surgery can mask the psychological deformity in their eyes.

Then unbeknown to themselves they set about erecting their own scaffolds; their most loyal adherents become their executioners, just as Mussolini's people hanged him upside down in a filling station and Robespierre's followers trundled him over their heads to the guillotine.

Then the audience moves on and seeks a new magician.

But people like Bobby Earl don't read history books.

A
S
I
WATCHED
Alafair dive off our rented boat, just the other side of Seven-Mile Reef, her tan body glazed with sunlight and saltwater, I thought of children everywhere, and I thought of the pain that can be inflicted on them like a stone bruise in the soul, like a convoluted, blood-red rose pushed deep into the tissue by a brutal thumb.

She floated above the reef, watching the schools of clown fish and mackerel, blowing saltwater out her snorkel, the small waves lapping across her back and thighs. Thirty feet below, the sand was like ground diamonds; you could see each black spike in the nests of sea urchins, and the fire coral
was so bright it looked as if it would scorch your hand with the intensity of a hot stove.

Then I saw a long, tubular shadow ripple across the crown of the reef and flatten out on the ocean floor. It must have been eight feet long. A floating island of kelp obscured my angle of vision, then the shadow changed directions and I saw the glistening brown back of a hammerhead shark. When he turned and flipped his tail fin I could see one round, flat, glassy eye, his gash of a mouth, the jagged row of razor teeth, the obscene pale whiteness of his stomach.

I yelled at Alafair, but her ears were half underwater and she didn't hear me. I kicked off my canvas shoes, stepped up on the gunwale, hit the water in a long, flat dive, and reached her in three strokes. By now she had seen the shark, and her face was terrified when I grabbed her around the waist and began swimming back to the boat. Then a peculiar thing happened. She knew that we were fighting against each other, that our legs were thrashing impotently in a shimmering cone of wet light above the shark's murderous gaze, and I saw a quiet, almost naïve expression of resolution replace the fear in her face. She worked the mask and snorkel off her head, hooked them on her arm, and began to swim with me toward the boat ladder, her body horizontal, her head twisting from side to side so she could breathe above the chop.