Purple Cane Road (12 page)

“Louis.”

“Where’s the guy live you sold the guns to?” Clete asked.

“Probably downtown somewhere.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“‘Cause he drove toward downtown. The same direction the streetcar go to.”

“Pretty smart deduction, Louis. How much did he give you for the guns?” Clete said.

“A hunnerd dollars.”

“For six guns?” Clete said.

“He said he didn’t have no more money. He showed us his wallet. It didn’t have no more money in it.”

“One of those guns was used to kill somebody, Louis,” I said.

He looked into space, as though my words and the reality they suggested had nothing to do with his life. He must have weighed eighty pounds. He looked like an upended ant, with small ears, hooked teeth, and eyes that were too large for his face. His knees and elbows were scabbed, his T-shirt glued to his chest with dried food.

“What’d you do with the money, partner?” I asked.

“Didn’t get no chance to do nothing. Big kids took it. We was going to the show. Y’all got any spare change?”

His eyes blinked in the silence while he waited for an answer.

WHAT HAD WE ACCOMPLISHED? There was no way to tell. We had put the word on the street that Johnny Remeta was willing to give up people in the New Orleans underworld. Maybe either he or the people who had given him the contract on Zipper Clum and Little Face Dautrieve would be forced into the sunlight. But that night I was too tired to care.

When I was nineteen I worked on an offshore seismograph rig, called a doodlebug outfit in the oil field. It was the summer of 1957, the year that Hurricane Audrey pushed a tidal wave out of the Gulf of Mexico on top of Cameron, Louisiana, crushing the town flat, killing hundreds of people.

For weeks afterward bodies were found in the forks of gum trees out in the swamp or inside islands of uprooted cypress that floated out of the wetlands into the Gulf. Sometimes the long, rubber-coated recording cables we strung from the bow and stern of a portable drill barge got hung on a sunken tree in the middle of a bay or river and a crew member on the jugboat would have to go down after them.

The water was warm with the sun’s heat, dark brown with mud and dead hyacinths. The kid who went over the gunnel and pulled himself hand over hand down to the fouled place on the cable did so without light. The sun, even though it was absolutely white in the sky, could not penetrate the layers of silt in the water, and the diver found himself swimming blindly among the water-sculpted and pointed ends of tree branches that gouged at his face like fingers. If he was lucky, the cable came loose with one hard tug in the right direction.

On a late July afternoon I swam down fifteen feet until I touched the smooth, mud-encased trunk of an enormous cypress. I felt my way along the bark until I bumped into the root system, then unwrapped the cable and slid it toward me off the sides of a taproot.

A gray cloud of mud mushroomed around me, as though I had disturbed an envelope of cold air trapped inside the maw of the tree’s root system. Suddenly the body of a woman rose out of the silt against mine, her hair sliding across my face, her dress floating above her underwear, the tips of her ringed fingers glancing off my mouth.

No one on the jugboat saw her and some of the crew did not believe the story I told them. But the woman who had been gripped and held fast by the cypress tree, set free only to be lost again, lived with me in my dreams for many years. Her memory had the power to close my windpipe and steal the air from my lungs.

Tonight she was back, although in a different form.

It was nighttime in the dream, the air thick and acrid and sweet at the same time with smoke from a distant stubble fire. I saw my mother, Mae Robicheaux, on a dirt road that led past a neon-lit dance hall. The road was bordered on each side by fields that were bursting with fat stalks of purple cane, their leaves rustling with wind. She was running down the dirt road in the pink uniform she wore to work at the beer garden, her hands outstretched, her mouth wide with a desperate plea. Two cops ran behind her, their hands holding their revolvers in their holsters to prevent them from falling out on the ground.

I was unable to move, watching impotently as a torrent of water surged out of the bay at the end of the dirt road and roared toward her between the walls of sugarcane. She tripped and fell and the root systems from the fields wrapped her body like white worms and held her fast while the water coursed around her thighs, her hips and breasts and neck.

I could see her eyes and mouth clearly now and read my name on her lips, then the current closed over her head and I sat up in bed, my face popping with sweat, my lungs burning as though acid had been poured in them.

I sat in the kitchen, in the dark, my heart twisting in my chest. I went into the bedroom and came back again, with my .45 in my hand, my palm damp on the grips. In my mind I saw the two cops who had chased my mother down the road, saw the sky blue of their uniforms, the glint of the moon on their shields and revolver butts and waxed gun belts, saw everything about them except their faces. I wanted to fire my weapon until the barrel was translucent with heat.

When Bootsie lay her hand on my back, I twitched as though touched with a hot iron, then placed the .45 on the table and buried my face in her stomach.

10

O
N SATURDAY I WOKE early, before sunrise, to help Batist, the elderly black man who worked for me, open the bait shop and fire the barbecue pit on which we prepared chickens and links for our midday customers. I unhooked Tripod, Alafair’s pet three-legged coon, from his chain and set him on top of the rabbit hutch with a bowl of water and a bowl of fish scraps. But he hopped down on the ground and walked ahead of me through the pecan and oak trees and across the dirt road to the dock, his tail and rear end swaying.

He and Batist had been at war for years, Tripod flinging boudin all over the counter, destroying boxes of fried pies and candy bars, Batist chasing him down the dock with a broom, threatening to cook him in a pot. But finally they had declared a truce, either out of their growing age or their recognition of their mutual intractability. Now, whenever Alafair or I turned Tripod loose, he usually headed for the dock and worked the screen open and slept on top of the icebox behind the counter. Last week I saw Batist roaring down the bayou in an outboard, with Tripod sitting on the bow, his face pointed into the breeze like a hood ornament.

When I went inside the shop Batist was drinking a cup of coffee, looking out the screen window at the swamp.

“You ever seen a red moon like that this time of year?” he said.

“The wind’s up. There’s a lot of dust in the air,” I said.

He was a big man, the muscles in his upper arms like croquet balls; his bell-bottomed dungarees and white T-shirt looked sewn to his skin.

“Old people say back in slave days they poured hog blood in the ground under a moon like this,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Make the corn and cane bigger. Same reason people kill a gator and plant it in the field,” he replied. “I seen Clete Purcel with Passion Labiche.”

“Really?”

“Them girls are trouble, Dave. Their folks was pimps.”

“A good apple can come off a bad tree,” I said.

“Tell that to the man got his parts chopped up all over the flo’.”

“I think he had it coming,” I replied.

Tripod had crawled up on the counter and was sniffing ajar of pickles. Batist hefted him up in the crook of his arm. Tripod’s tail was ringed with silver bands and it flipped back and forth between his upended legs.

“We was ten of us when I was growing up. My mama made a big pan of biscuits for breakfast every morning but we didn’t have nothing to put on them. So she kept a jar of fig preserves on the table. We rubbed the biscuit on the side of the jar, then ate it. We all laughed when we done that. Everybody’s road got glass on it, Dave. Don’t mean you got the right to kill nobody,” he said.

“What does that have to do with Clete seeing Passion, Batist?”

“I knowed them girls since they was little. You seen one, you seen the other. They wasn’t never more than a broom handle apart.”

“It’s too early in the morning to argue with you, partner,” I said.

“I ain’t arguing. The troot’s the troot. I ain’t got to prove nothing, me.”

He walked outside into the soft blue light and set Tripod on the handrail and began hosing down the spool tables on the dock, the moon dull red behind his head.

LATER THAT MORNING I filled an envelope full of black-and-white photos taken at the Vachel Carmouche murder scene and drove out to Carmouche’s boarded-up house on the bayou. The property itself seemed physically stricken by the deed that had been committed there. The yard was waist-high in weeds, the gallery stacked with old tires and hay bales that had gone gray with rot. Nests of yellow jackets and dirtdobbers buzzed under the eaves and a broken windmill clanged uselessly in a dry, hot wind.

I walked around back, re-creating in my mind’s eye the path that Letty must have taken from the back porch to the rear of her house, where she stripped off her shoes and robe and washed the blood from her hair and body with a garden hose. The lock was already broken on the back door of Carmouche’s house, and I pushed the door open, scraping it back on the buckled linoleum.

The air was stifling, like the inside of a privy in summer, rife with the smell of bat guano and pools of settled water under the floor, superheated by the tin roof and the closed windows. A green plant, as dark as spinach, had blossomed from the drain in the sink.

But the signs of Carmouche’s agony from his crawl were still visible on the linoleum, like smeared reddish black paint that had dried and taken on the crisp, razored design of broken leaves. But there were other stains in the kitchen, too—a tentacle of connected dots on the wall by the stove and two similar streakings on the ceiling. I touched my fingers on the dots by the stove and felt what I was sure were the crusted, physical remains of Louisiana’s most famous electrician.

I looked through the crime scene photos again. Blood had been slung all over the floor, the walls, the curtains on the cabinets, the icebox, and even the screen of the television set, which had been tuned to an old Laurel and Hardy comedy when the photo was taken. But how would blood from a mattock, a heavy, two-handed tool used to bust up stumps and root systems, create whipped patterns like those on the ceiling and the wall?

I walked across the yard to the back of the Labiche house. The faucet where Letty had washed herself dripped water into the dust; the oil drum she had tried to destroy her robe and shoes in now smoldered with burning leaves; the house she had grown up in was ringed with roses and gardenias, and red squirrels leaped from the branches of the live oaks and clattered across the roof.

The home was weathered, the woodwork termite-eaten and the white paint cracked by the sun and dulled by smoke from stubble fires, but it was still a fine place in which to live, a piece of history from antebellum times, if only Letty were here to enjoy it, if only she had not traded off her life in order to kill a worthless man like Vachel Carmouche.

“You prowling round my house for a reason?” someone said behind me.

“What’s the haps, Passion?” I said.

She wore sandals and baggy jeans and stood with her big-boned hands on her hips.

“Clete says you think he’s a cradle robber, that I’m too young a chick for a man his age.”

“He tells that to women all the time. It makes them feel sorry for him,” I replied.

“What were you doing over at Carmouche’s place?” she asked.

“An elderly black friend of mine was mentioning how you and Letty were inseparable. How if somebody saw one of you, he automatically saw the other.”

“So?”

“What were you doing the night Carmouche got it?”

“Read the trial report. I’m not interested in covering that same old territory again. Tell me something. You got a problem with your friend seeing me ‘cause I’m Creole?”

“You’ll have to find another pincushion, Passion. See you around,” I said, and walked across the yard under the shade trees toward my truck.

“Yeah, you, too, big stuff,” she said.

When I drove back up the road, she was carrying a loaded trash can in each hand to the roadside, her chest and heavy arms swollen with her physical power. I waved, but my truck seemed to slide past her gaze without her ever seeing it.

THAT AFTERNOON GOVERNOR Belmont Pugh held a news conference, supposedly to talk about casinos, slot machines at the state’s racetracks, and the percentage of the gambling revenue that should go into a pay raise for schoolteachers.

But Belmont did not look comfortable. His tie was askew, the point of one collar bent upward, his eyes scorched, his face the color and texture of a boiled ham. He kept gulping water, as though he were dehydrated or forcing down the regurgitated taste of last night’s whiskey.

Then one reporter stood up and asked Belmont the question he feared: “What are you going to do about Letty Labiche, Governor?”

Belmont rubbed his mouth with the flat of his hand, and the microphone picked up the sound of his calluses scraping across whiskers.

“Excuse me, I got a sore throat today and cain’t talk right. I’m granting an indefinite stay of execution. Long as she’s got her appeals up there in the courts. That’s what the law requires,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘indefinite,’ Governor?”

“I got corn fritters in my mouth? It means what I said.”

“Are you saying even after her Supreme Court appeal, you’re going to continue the stay, or do you plan to see her execu-ted? It’s not a complicated question, sir,” another reporter, a man in a bow tie, said, smiling to make the insult acceptable.

Then, for just a moment, Belmont rose to a level of candor and integrity I hadn’t thought him capable of.

“Y’all need to understand something. That’s a human life we’re talking about. Not just a story in your papers or on your TV show. Y’all can take my remarks any damn way you want, but by God I’m gonna do what my conscience tells me. If that don’t sit right with somebody, they can chase a possum up a gum stump.”