A Stained White Radiance (30 page)

“Yeah, I owe you one.”

“You really believe that somebody is going to do you in the shower?”

“Put it this way. One guy in this place got poisoned. Me. Your people say it was an accident. Maybe so. But I don't want any more accidents. Does that seem reasonable?”

I leaned forward with my forearms on my thighs. “I've got a problem,” I said.

“
You've
got a problem?”

“Yeah, a serious one, Joey.”

“What are you talking—”

“You're a made guy. A made guy worries about respect, about what people think of him.”

“So.”

“When you get out of here, you'll probably have a nice dinner somewhere, maybe drink a glass of wine, maybe do a few lines with one of your whores. Then after a while all kinds of thoughts will start to turn over in your head. Are you with me?”

“No.”

“You'll think about how you were humiliated, how a woman set you up for a fall, how Elmer Fudd and company turned you into a sideshow. Then you'll remember how you got scared and asked for your own hot plate and canned food and told the screw you wanted to stay in lockup. You'll wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night, then you'll wonder if the people around you are figuring you for a guy who's about to lose it, maybe a guy who's ripe for replacement. That's when you'll decide it's time for an object lesson. So
that's what's been on my mind, partner. Sooner or later we'll have a visit from one of your people, a button man from Miami or maybe some AB sex deviate you turn loose on women.”

He leaned over the bunk and spat into the wastebasket, then took a sip from a brown bottle of chalky medicine and screwed the cap back on.

“Think anything you want,” he said. “I got nothing on my mind except getting treatment for my ulcers before they have to cut out half my stomach. Any beef I got against this shithole I let my lawyers handle with a civil suit. You can thank Fudd and the broad if y'all have to pass a sales tax to pay off the damages.”

“What I'm really trying to do is apologize to you, Joey.”

He raised his elongated head up on his elbow. The skin at the corner of his mouth wrinkled with a smile.

“You're gonna apologize? You're good, man. You ought to get yourself some kind of nightclub act. I can probably book you into a couple of places.”

“Because I was going to pull a cheap ruse on you. I was going to treat you like a punk instead of a made guy. So I'm apologizing.”

“You talk like you got clap in your brain or something. What's with you? You never make sense. Can't you talk to people like you got sense?”

I reached behind me and pulled the .45 from under my coat. I rested it on my thigh.

“You ain't supposed to have that in here, man,” he said.

“You're right. That's what I've been trying to tell you. I want to apologize for what I had in mind.”

He was rigid in the bunk. I stared intently at the floor, then cocked the hammer with my thumb and raised the barrel and fitted it into the hollow of his cheek. His eyes closed, then opened again, and his Adam's apple worked up and down with a dry click in his throat.

I squeezed the trigger, and the hammer snapped on the empty chamber. He gasped, and his face jerked like he'd been slapped.

“I was going to pull a cheap trick like that to scare you,” I said. “But you're a made guy, Joey, and you deserve more respect than I've shown you. And even if I rattled you a little bit, you'd be back, wouldn't you?” I winked at him. “You'd really rip some ass, right or wrong?”

A sweat had broken on his ashen face.

“You're a head case, man,” he said. “You stop this shit. You get the fuck out of my life.”

I pulled the clip from my belt and let it rest against my thigh. The hollow-points were loaded tightly against the spring. I rubbed my thumb casually over the top round in the clip. The fingers of both my hands made tiny, delicate prints in the thin sheen of oil on the steel surfaces of the pistol and the clip. I could hear him breathing loudly through his nose and smell the odor of fear that rose from his armpits.

“You weren't in the service, were you?” I said.

“Who gives a shit?”

“Did you ever kill anybody close up?”

He didn't answer. His eyes went from my hands to my face and back to my hands again. I inserted the clip in the magazine, pulled back the receiver, and slid a hollow-point round into the chamber.

“I'm going to give you your chance,” I said.

“What?”

“To do me. Right in this cell. I lied to the guard and told him I'd already checked my weapon. So everybody will believe you when you tell them I tried to kill you, that you got the weapon away from me and did me instead.”

“I ain't playing this game.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I want the screw.”

“It's just you and me, Joey. Here,” I said, and I laid the .45 on the striped mattress next to his arm.

His hands were shaking. A drop of sweat fell from the point of his chin.

“I ain't touching it,” he said.

“It's the only chance you'll get at me. If you send anybody back to Iberia Parish to square a beef, I'll be coming through your door two hours after it happens. It'll be under a black flag, too, Joey. No warrant, no rules, just you and me and maybe Clete Purcel as a Lucky Strike extra. Are you going to pick it up?”

He pressed one hand against his naked stomach and grimaced with a spasm that made his eyes close.

“You quit doing this to me. You fucking lay off,” he said hoarsely.

I reached out and took the .45 back and eased the hammer back down. I tried to hide the deep breath that I drew into my lungs.

He leaned his head over the bunk and vomited into the wastebasket. The hair on his bare shoulders was damp with sweat. I wet some paper towels in the washbasin and handed them to him.

“Any vendetta you have against the Sonniers ends here, Joey,” I said. “Are we understood on this?”

He sat up on the bunk and took the crumpled towels away from his mouth.

“I'll give you what you want,” he said.

“I'm not quite following you.”

“I'll give you the guy you want. You get the guy.”

“Which guy?”

“I'll deliver him up. Packaged. You get the guy.”

“ ‘Packaged'? What do you mean ‘packaged'?”

“Don't act like a stupid fuck. You know what I mean.”

“You're coming to some wrong conclusions. You don't make terms, you don't do our job.”

“You got a dead cop. You want it squared. So the beef gets squared. Now, you stop pulling my insides out.”

He hung his head over the wastebasket, one hand trembling on his temple. His long neck looked like a bent swan's.

“You can't walk out of here with that kind of misunderstanding, Joey. Do you hear me? This isn't
a barter situation. Are you listening to me? Look at me.”

But he continued to stare between his legs, his eyes glazed and dull, focused inward on his own pain.

T
HAT EVENING, ELEVEN
hours after Joey Gouza was kicked loose from custody, someone tried to garrote Weldon Sonnier in his boathouse with a strand of piano wire.

T
HE
AA
MEETING ROOM
upstairs in the Episcopalian church is foul with cigarette smoke. On the walls are framed photographs of our founders, whom we still affectionately call Dr. Bob and Bill W., as though their anonymity need be protected even in death. Also on the wall are the twelve steps of AA recovery and the simple two axioms that we attempt to live by:
ONE DAY AT A TIME
and
EASY DOES IT.
The meeting is over now, and volunteers are washing coffee cups, emptying ashtrays, and wiping down the tables. I sit by a big floor fan that is blowing the smoke out the windows into the early-morning air. My AA sponsor, Tee Neg, who looks like a mulatto, sits across from me. Before he bought the bar and poolroom that he now owns on East Main, he was a pipeliner and oil-field roughneck, and three fingers on his right hand were snipped off by a drilling chain. He's uneducated, can barely read and write, but he's tough-minded and intelligent and unfailing in his loyalty to me.

“You mad at somet'ing again, Dave. That ain't good,” he says.

“I'm not mad.”

“We get drunk
at
somebody. Or maybe
at
somet'ing. That's the way it works. It's them resentments mess us up. Don't be telling me different, no.”

“I know that, Tee Neg.”

“It ain't worrying about Bootsie this time. It's somet'ing else, ain't it?”

“Maybe.”

“You want to know what I t'ink's on your mind, podna?”

“I have a feeling you're going to tell me, anyway.”

“You're studying on this case all the time. You t'ink that's it, but it ain't. You bothered by the way t'ings are, the way we got trouble with the colored people all the time, you bothered 'cause it ain't like it used to be. You want sout' Lou'sana to be like it was when you and me and yo' daddy went all day and went everywhere and never spoke one word of English. You walk away when you hear white people talking bad about them Negro, like that bad feeling ain't in their hearts. But you keep pretend it's like it used to be, Dave, that these bad t'ings ain't in white people's hearts, then you gonna be walking away the rest of yo' life.”

“That doesn't mean I'm going to get drunk over it.”

“I had seven years sobriety, me. Then I started studying on them fingers I left on that drill pipe. I'd get up with it in the morning, just like you wake up with an ugly, mean woman. I'd drag it around with
me all day. I'd look at them pink stumps till they'd start throbbing. Then I went fishing one afternoon, went into a colored man's bait store to buy some shiners, told that man I was gonna catch me a hunnerd
sac-a-lait
befo' the sun get behind them willow tree. Then I told him I changed my mind, just give me a quart of whiskey and don't bother about no shiners. I got drunk five years. Then I spent one in the penitentiary. Get mad about what you can't change and maybe you'll get to do just what Tee Neg done.”

He looks at me reflectively and rubs his palms in a circular motion on his thighs. I twirl my coffee cup on my finger, then one of the cleanup volunteers reaches down and takes it from me.

“That doesn't mean you always have to like what you see around you,” I say.

“It don't mean you got to be miserable about it, neither.”

“I'm not miserable, Tee Neg. Give it a break, will you?”

“It ain't never gonna be the same, Dave. That world we grown up in, it's gone.
Pa'ti avec le vent,
podna.”

I look down from the window at the brick-paved street in the morning's blue light, the colonnades over the sidewalks, a black man pushing a wooden cart laden with strawberries from under the overhang of a dark green oak tree. The scene looks like a postcard mailed from the nineteenth century.

I
WENT OUT
to Weldon's home on Bayou Teche at 9
A.M.
the morning after he was attacked in his boathouse. When he opened the door he was dressed in Levi's, a pair of old tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. A folded baseball glove protruded from his back pocket.

“You're headed for a game or something?” I asked.

A red welt ran around his throat, like half of a necklace.

“I've got an apple basket nailed up on the barn wall,” he said. “I like to see if my fork ball's still got a hop on it.”

“You've been throwing a few?”

“About two hours' worth. It beats smoking cigarettes or fooling around with early-morning booze.”

“How close was it?” I said.

“He came across my throat and I remember I couldn't breathe, that I was trying to get my fingernails under the wire. Then the blood shut off to my brain, and I went down on the deck like I was poleaxed. It all happened real quick. It makes you think about how quick it can happen.”

“Walk me down to your boathouse.”

“I don't know who it was, Dave. I didn't see him, he didn't say anything, I just remember that wire popping tight across my windpipe.” He blew out his breath. “Man, that's a hard feeling to shake. When I was overseas and I thought about buying it, I always figured I'd see it coming somehow, that I'd control it or negotiate with it some
way, maybe convince it that I had another season to run. That's a crazy way to think, isn't it?”

“Let's see if we find anything down at your boathouse.”

We strolled across the lawn toward the bayou. When we were abreast of the old barn on the back of his property, he stooped down and picked up a scuffed baseball with split seams.

“Watch this, buddy,” he said.

He wet two of his fingers, took a windup, and whipped the ball like a BB into the apple basket.

“Not bad,” I said.

“I should probably get out of the oil business and start my own baseball franchise. You remember the old New Iberia Pelicans? Boy, I miss minor-league ball.” He picked up another baseball from the ground.

“The report says some kids scared the assailant off.”

He threw the ball underhanded against the barn door, stuck his hands in his back pockets, and continued walking with me toward the boathouse.

“Yeah, some USL kids ran out of gas on the bayou and paddled in to my dock. Otherwise I would have caught the bus. But they couldn't describe the guy. They said they just saw some fellow take off through the bushes.”

We walked out onto his dock and into the boathouse. Oars and life preservers were hung from hooks on the rafters, and the whole interior rippled with the sunlight that reflected off the water at the bottom of the walls.