DR08 - Burning Angel (12 page)

I couldn't blame him for his anger. The case drawers in our building were filled with enough grief, mayhem, perversity, and institutional failure to match the quality of life in the worst Third World nations on earth. Like case histories at a welfare agency, a police file, once opened, never seemed to close. Instead, it grew gene rationally the same family names appearing again and again, the charges and investigations marking the passage of one individual from birth to adolescence to adulthood to death, crime scene photo upon mug shot, yellowing page upon yellowing page, like layers of sedimentary accretion formed by sewage as it flows through a pipe.

Children aborted with coat hangers, born addicted to crack, scalded under hot faucets; teenage mothers with pipe cleaner legs living between detox, the welfare agency, and hooking on the street; high school kids who can let off a .44 Magnum point-blank into their classmates at a dance and seriously maintain they acted in self-defense because they heard firecrackers popping in the parking lot; armed robbers who upgrade their agenda to kicking ballpoint pens into the eardrums of their victims before they execute them in the back of a fast-food restaurant; and the strangest and most baffling phenomenon of all, the recidivist pedophiles who are repeatedly paroled until they not only sodomize but murder a small child.

At one time local AA meetings were made up largely of aging drunks like myself. Now kids who should be in middle school are brought to the meetings in vans from halfway houses. They're usually white, wear burr haircuts, floppy tennis shoes, and oversize baseball caps sideways on their heads and look like refugees from an Our Gang comedy, except, when it's their turn to talk, they speak in coon ass blue-collar accents about jone sing for crack and getting UA-ed by probation officers. You have the feeling their odyssey is just beginning.

Our best efforts with any of it seem to do no good. In dark moments I sometimes believed we should simply export the whole criminal population to uninhabited areas of the earth and start over again.

But any honest cop will tell you that no form of vice exists without societal sanction of some kind. Also, the big players would still be with us-the mob and the gambling interests who feed on economic recession and greed in politicians and local businessmen, the oil industry, which fouls the oyster beds and trenches saltwater channels into a freshwater marsh, the chemical and waste management companies that treat Louisiana as an enormous outdoor toilet and transform lakes and even the aquifer into toxic soup.

They all came here by consent, using the word jobs as though it were part of a votive vocabulary. But the deception wasn't even necessary.

There was always somebody for sale, waiting to take it on his knees, right down the throat and into the viscera, as long as the money was right.

The speeding ticket Clete had found in Sweet Pea's car had been written on the dirt road that led from the highway back to the juke joint operated by Luke and Ruthie Jean Fontenot. Before I left the office, I pulled the ten-year package we had on Luke. He had been extricated from the death house while a convict barber was in the act of lathering and shaving his head, the state's final preparation for the moment when Luke would sit in an oak chair while men he didn't know screwed a metal cap down on his sweating pate and strapped his arms and shinbones so tightly into the wood that his own rigid configuration would seem part of the chair itself. The call had come from the governor's office after Moleen Bertrand had hand-delivered depositions from two witnesses who swore the victim, a white sharecropper, had brought a pistol out from under the bouree table. According to the witnesses, a wet-brain in the crowd had stolen the gun before the sheriff's deputies arrived.

Luke received not only a stay but eventually a new trial, and finally a hung jury and a prosecutorial decision to cut him loose. His debt to Moleen was a large one. The morning was warm and humid and the breeze blew a fine dust out of the shell parking lot and powdered the leaves of the oak and hackberry trees that were clustered next to the juke joint. I drove through the empty lot and parked in the shady lee of the building. A trash fire was smoldering in a rusted oil barrel by one of the trailers. On the ground next to it, like a flattened snake with a broken back, was a long strip of crusted gauze. A black woman in purple shorts and an olive green V-neck sweater looked out the back screen and disappeared again. I kicked over the trash barrel, rolled it across the shells, and used a stick to pry apart a smoldering stack of newspaper and food-streaked paper plates, scorched boudin casings and pork rinds, until, at the bottom of the pile, I saw the glowing and blackened remains of bandages that dissolved into thread when I touched them with the stick. I went through the screen door and sat at the empty bar. Motes of dust spun in the glare of light through the windows.

The woman had big arms and breasts, a figure like a duck, a thick and glistening black neck hung with imitation gold chains. She walked toward me in a pair of flip-flops, holding a cigarette with two fingers, palm upward, by the side of her face, her hoop earrings swinging on her lobes.

“You gonna tell me you the tax man, I bet,” she said.

“Nope.”

“You ain't the beer man.”

“I'm not that either.”

“Sorry, sugar, if you come down to check the jellyroll. It's too early in the morning.”

“I came down to see you,” I said, and smiled.

“I knowed it soon as you come in.”

“Is Luke here?”

“You see him?”

“How about Ruthie Jean?”

“They come in at night. What you gonna have?” she said, and folded her arms on the bar so that her breasts swelled like cantaloupes out of her sweater. A gold tooth glinted in the corner of her mouth. “If you big enough, you can have anything you want. You big, ain't

your

”How about a Dr. Pepper?“ I watched her uncap a bottle and fill a glass with ice, her thought patterns, her true attitudes toward whites, the plan or absence of a plan that governed her day, her feelings for a lover or a child, the totality of her life, all of it a mystery, hidden behind a coy cynicism that was as implacable as ceramic.

”Y'all don't have a gun-shot white man in one of those trailers, do you?“ I said, and drank out of my glass.

”Don't know nothing about guns.“

”I don't blame you. Who bled all over those bandages?“

Her mouth was painted with purple lipstick. She pursed her lips into a. large, thick button and hummed to herself. ”Here's a red quarter.

Can you put it in the jukebox for me?“ she said. ”It got fingernail polish on it so the jukebox man don't keep it when he picks up the coins.“

I opened my badge holder on the bar.

”Do you mind if I look in your trailers?“ I said.

”I thought I had me a new boyfriend. But you just being on the job, ain't you?“

”I think there might be an injured man back there. So that gives me the right to go in those trailers. You want to help me?“

She pressed her fingertip on a potato chip crumb on the bar, looked at it, and flicked it away.

”I give away my heart and a man wipe his feet on it every time,“ she said.

I went back outside. The windows in both trailers were open, the curtains blowing in the breeze, but the doors were padlocked. When I reentered the bar the woman was talking on the pay phone in back. She finished her conversation, her back to me, and hung up.

”Had to find me a new man,“ she said.

”Can I have the key?“

”Sure. Why you ain't ax? You know how to put it in? Cain't every man always get it in by his self

I unlocked and went inside the first trailer. It stunk of insecticide and moist garbage; roaches as fat as my thumb raced across the cracked linoleum. In the center of the floor was a double cot with a rubber air mattress on it and a tangled sheet spotted with gray stains. The small tin sink was full of empty beer cans, the drain stoppered with cigarette butts.

The second trailer was a different matter. The floor was mopped, the tiny bathroom and shower stall clean, the two trash cans empty. In the icebox was a gallon bottle of orange juice, a box of jelly doughnuts, a package of ground chuck steak. The sheets and pillowcases had been stripped from the mattress on the bed. I grabbed the mattress by one end and rolled it upside down on the springs. In the center of the rayon cover was a brown stain the size of a pie plate that looked like the source had pooled and soaked deep into the fabric.

I opened my Swiss Army knife and grooved a line of crusted flakes onto the blade and wiped them inside a Ziploc bag. I locked the i o o trailer and started to get in my truck, then changed my mind and went back inside the bar. The woman was mopping out the women's rest room, her stomach swinging under her sweater.

“He was a tall white man with a face full of wrinkles,” I said. “He probably doesn't like black people much, but he had at least one nine-millimeter round in him and wasn't going to argue when Sweet Pea drove him out here. How am I doing so far?”

“It ain't my bid ness baby.”

“What's your name?”

“Glo. You treat me right, I light up. I light up your whole life.”

“I don't think you mean harm to anyone, Glo. But that man, the one with the wrinkles in his face, like old wallpaper full of cracks, he's a special kind of guy, he thinks up things to do to people, anybody, you, me, maybe even some Catholic nuns, I was told he threw two of them from a helicopter at a high altitude. Was the man in the trailer that kind of guy?”

She propped the head of the mop in a bucket of dirty water and worked her Lucky Strikes out of her shorts. Her right eye looked bulbous and watery as she held the Zippo's flame to the cigarette. She exhaled, pressed the back of her wrist to her eye socket, then cleared her throat and spat something brown into the wastebasket.

She tilted her chin up at me, her face unmasked, suddenly real, for the first time. “That's the troot, what you saying about this guy?”

“As far as I know.”

“I'm locking up now, sugar, gotta take my little boy to the doctor today. There's a lot of grip going around.”

“Here my business card, Glo.”

But she walked away from me, her arms stiff at her sides, her hands extended at right angles, as though she were floating on currents of air, her mouth gathered into a silent pucker like a purple rose.

I drove across the cattle guard under the arched and wisteria-covered iron trellis at the entrance to the Bertrand plantation, down the dirt road to Ruthie Jean Fontenot's small white frame house, where I parked in the yard. The sun had gone behind a cloud, blanketing i o i the fields with shadow, and the breeze felt moist and warm blowing across the tops of the cane.

Ruthie Jean opened her door on a night chain.

“What you want?” she said.

“Question and answer time.”

“I'm not dressed.”

“I'm not going away.”

“Aren't you suppose to have a warrant or something?”

“No.”

She made a face, closed the door hard, then walked into the back of the house. I waited ten minutes among the gum trees where the dirt had been bladed and packed smooth by the earthmover. I picked up the twisted tongue of an old shoe. It felt as dry and light as a desiccated leaf. I heard Ruthie Jean slip the night chain on the door.

Her small living room was cramped with rattan furniture that had come in a set. The andirons in the fireplace were stacked with stone logs, a blaze of scarlet cellophane pasted behind them to give the effect of flames. Ruthie Jean stood on her cane in a white dress with a lacy neckline, black pumps, and a red glass necklace. Her skin looked yellow and cool in the soft light.

“You look nice,” I said, and instantly felt my cheeks burn at the license in my remark.

“What you want down here this time?”

Before I could answer, a phone rang in back. She walked back to the kitchen to answer it. On a shelf above the couch were a clutter of gilt-framed family photographs. In one of them Ruthie Jean was receiving a rolled certificate or diploma of some kind from a black man in a suit and tie. They were both smiling. She had no cane and was wearing a nurse's uniform. At the end of the shelf was a dust-free triangular empty space where another photograph must have been recently removed.

“Are you a nurse?” I asked when she came back in the room.

“I was a nurse's aide.” Her eyes went flat.

“How long ago was that?”

“What you care?”

“Can I sit down, please?”

“Suit yourself.”

“You have a phone,” I said.

She looked at me with an incredulous expression.

“Your Aunt Bertie told me she didn't have a phone and I'd have to leave messages for her at the convenience store. But you live just next door. Why wouldn't she tell me to call you instead?”

“She and Luke don't get along.” Her cheek twitched when she sat down on the couch. Behind her head was the shelf with the row of framed photographs on it.

“Because he's too close to Moleen Bertrand?” I said.

“Ax them.”

“I want the white man named Jack,” I said.

She looked at her nails, then at her watch.

“This guy's an assassin, Ruthie Jean. When he's not leaking blood in one of your trailers, he carries a cut-down twelve-gauge under his armpit.”

She rolled her eyes, a whimsical pout on her mouth, and looked out the window at a bird on a tree branch, her eyelids fluttering. I felt my face pinch with a strange kind of anger that I didn't quite recognize.

“I don't understand you,” I said. “You're attractive and intelligent, you graduated from a vo-tech program, you probably worked in hospitals.

What are you doing with a bunch of lowlifes and white trash in a hot pillow joint?”

Her face blanched.

“Don't look injured. Sweet Pea Chaisson is supplying the girls at your club,” I said. “Why are you letting these people use you?”

“What I'm suppose to do now, ax you to hep us, same man who say he doesn't need a warrant just 'cause he's down in the quarters?”

“I'm not the enemy, Ruthie Jean. You've got bad people in your life and they're going to mess you up in a serious way. I guarantee it.”