DR10 - Sunset Limited (15 page)

Megan had stopped eating. Her cheeks were freckled with
discoloration, as though an invisible pool of frigid air had burned her
face.

"What is this, Dave?" Clete said.

"Maybe nothing," I said.

"Just lunch conversation?" he said.

"The Terrebonnes have had their thumbs in lots of pies," I
said.

"Will you excuse me, please?" Megan said.

She walked between the tables to the rest room, her purse
under her arm, her funny straw hat crimped across the back of her red
hair.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" Clete said.

THAT EVENING I DROVE to Red Lerille's
Health & Racquet
Club in Lafayette and worked out with free weights and on the
Hammer-Strength machines, then ran two miles on the second-story track
that overlooked the basketball courts.

I hung my towel around my neck and did leg stretches on the
handrail. Down below, some men were playing a pickup basketball game,
thudding into one another clumsily, slapping one another's shoulders
when they made a shot. But an Indonesian or Malaysian man at the end of
the court, where the speed and heavy bags were hung, was involved in a
much more intense and solitary activity. He wore sweats and tight red
leather gloves, the kind with a metal dowel across the palm, and he
ripped his fists into the heavy bag and sent it spinning on the chain,
then speared it with his feet, hard enough to almost knock down a kid
who was walking by.

He grinned at the boy by way of apology, then moved over to
the speed bag and began whacking it against the rebound board, without
rhythm or timing, slashing it for the effect alone.

"You were at Cisco's house. You're Mr. Robicheaux," a woman's
voice said behind me.

It was Billy Holtzner's daughter. But her soapy blue eyes were
focused now, actually pleasant, like a person who has stepped out of
one identity into another.

"You remember me?" she asked.

"Sure."

"We didn't introduce ourselves the other day. I'm Geraldine
Holtzner. The boxer down there is Anthony. He's an accountant for the
studio. I'm sorry for our rudeness."

"You weren't rude."

"I know you don't like my father. Not many people do. We're
not problem visitors here. If you have one, it's Cisco Flynn," she said.

"Cisco?"

"He owes my father a lot of money. Cisco thinks he can avoid
his responsibilities by bringing a person like Swede Boxleiter around."

She gripped the handrail and extended one leg at a time behind
her. Her wild, brownish-red hair shimmered with perspiration.

"You let that guy down there shoot you up?" I asked.

"I'm all right today. Sometimes I just have a bad day. You're
a funny guy for a cop. You ever have a screen test?"

"Why not get rid of the problem altogether?"

But she wasn't listening now. "This area is full of violent
people. It's the South. It lives in the woodwork down here. This black
man who's coming after the Terrebonnes, why don't you do something
about him?" she said.

"Which black man? Are you talking about Cool Breeze Broussard?"

"Which? Yeah, that's a good question. You know the story about
the murdered slave woman, the children who were poisoned? If I had
stuff like that in my family, I'd jump off a cliff. No wonder Lila
Terrebonne's a drunk."

"It was nice seeing you," I said.

"Gee, why don't you just say fuck you and turn your back on
people?"

Her skin was the color of milk that has browned in a pan, her
blue eyes dancing in her face. She wiped her hair and throat with a
towel and threw it at me.

"That kick-boxing stuff Anthony's doing? He learned it from
me," she said.

Then she raised her face up into mine, her lips slightly
parted, speckled with saliva, her eyes filled with anticipation and
need.

ON THE WAY BACK home I stopped in the
New Iberia city library
and looked up a late-nineteenth-century reminiscence written about our
area by a New England lady named Abigail Dowling, a nurse who came here
during a yellow fever epidemic and was radicalized not by slavery
itself and the misery it visited upon the black race but by what she
called its dehumanizing effects on the white.

One of the families about which she wrote in detail was the
Terrebonnes of St. Mary Parish.

Before the Civil War, Elijah Terrebonne had been a business
partner in the slave trade with Nathan Bedford Forrest and later had
ridden at Forrest's side during the battle of Brice's Crossing, where a
minié shattered his arm and took him out of the war. But
Elijah had
also been below the bluffs at Fort Pillow when black troops who begged
on their knees were executed at point-blank range in retaliation for a
sixty-mile scorched-earth sweep by Federal troops into northern
Mississippi.

"He was of diminutive stature, with a hard, compact body. He
sat his horse with the rigidity of a clothes pin," Abigail Dowling
wrote in her journal. "His countenance was handsome, certainly, of a
rosy hue, and it exuded a martial light when he talked of the War. In
consideration of his physical stature I tried to overlook his imperious
manner. In spite of his propensity for miscegenation, he loved his wife
and their twin girls and was unduly possessive about them, perhaps in
part because of his own romantic misdeeds.

"Unfortunately for the poor black souls on his plantation, the
lamps of charity and pity did not burn brightly in his heart. I have
been told General Forrest tried to stop the slaughter of negro soldiers
below the bluffs. I believe Elijah Terrebonne had no such redemptive
memory for himself. I believe the fits of anger that made him draw
human blood with a horse whip had their origins in the faces of dead
black men who journeyed nightly to Elijah's bedside, vainly begging
mercy from one who had murdered his soul."

The miscegenation mentioned by Abigail Dowling involved a
buxom slave woman named Lavonia, whose husband, Big Walter, had been
killed by a falling tree. Periodically Elijah Terrebonne rode to the
edge of the fields and called her away from her work, in view of the
other slaves and the white overseer, and walked her ahead of his horse
into the woods, where he copulated with her in an unused sweet potato
cellar. Later, he heard that the overseer had been talking freely in
the saloon, joking with a drink in his hand at the fireplace, stoking
the buried resentment and latent contempt of other landless whites
about the lust of his employer. Elijah laid open his face with a quirt
and adjusted his situation by moving Lavonia up to the main house as a
cook and a wet nurse for his children.

But when he returned from Brice's Crossing, with pieces of
bone still working their way out of the surgeon's incision in his arm,
the Teche country was occupied, his house and barns looted, the
orchards and fields reduced to soot blowing in the wind. The only meat
on the plantation consisted of seven smoked hams Lavonia had buried in
the woods before the Federal flotilla had come up the Teche.

The Terrebonnes made coffee out of acorns and ate the same
meager rations as the blacks. Some of the freed males on the plantation
went to work on shares; others followed the Yankee soldiers marching
north into the Red River campaign. When the food ran out, Lavonia was
among a group of women and elderly folk who were assembled in front of
their cabins by Elijah Terrebonne and then told they would have to
leave.

She went to Elijah's wife.

Abigail Dowling wrote in the journal, "It was a wretched
sight, this stout field woman without a husband, with no concept of
historical events or geography, about to be cast out in a ruined land
filled with night riders and drunken soldiers. Her simple entreaty
could not have described her plight more adequately: 'I'se got fo'
children, Missy. What's we gonna go? What's I gonna feed them with?'"

Mrs. Terrebonne granted her a one-month reprieve, either to
find a husband or to receive help from the Freedmen's Bureau.

The journal continued: "But Lavonia was a sad and ignorant
creature who thought guile could overcome the hardness of heart in her
former masters. She put cyanide in the family's food, believing they
would become ill and dependent upon her for their daily care.

"Both of the Terrebonne girls died. Elijah would have never
known the cause of their deaths, except for the careless words of
Lavonia's youngest child, who came to him, the worst choice among men,
to seek solace. The child blurted out, 'My mama been crying, Mas'er.
She got poison in a bottle under her bed. She say the devil give it to
her and made her hurt somebody with it. I think she gonna take it
herself.'

"By firelight Elijah dug up the coffins of his children from
the wet clay and unwound the wrappings from their bodies. Their skin
was covered with pustules the color and shape of pearls. He pressed his
hand on their chests and breathed the air trapped in their lungs and
swore it smelled of almonds.

"His rage and madness could be heard all the way across the
fields to the quarters. Lavonia tried to hide with her children in the
swamp, but to no avail. Her own people found her, and in fear of
Elijah's wrath, they hanged her with a man's belt from a persimmon
tree."

WHAT DID IT ALL mean? Why did
Geraldine Holtzner allude to the
story at Red's Gym in Lafayette? I didn't know. But in the morning
Megan Flynn telephoned me at the dock. Clete Purcel had been booked on
a DWI and a black man had started a fire on the movie set in the
Terrebonnes' front yard.

She wanted to talk.

"Talk? Clete's in the bag and you want to talk?" I said.

"I've done something terribly wrong. I'm just down the road.
Will it bother you if I come by?"

"Yes, it will."

"Dave?"

"What?"

Then her voice broke.

MEGAN SAT AT A BACK table in the bait
shop with a cup of
coffee and waited for me while I rang up the bill on two fishermen who
had just finished eating at the counter. Her hat rested by her elbow
and her hair blew in the wind from the fan, but there was a twisted
light in her eyes, as though she could not concentrate on anything
outside her skin.

I sat down across from her.

"Y'all had a fight?" I asked.

"It was over the black man who started the fire," she said.

"That doesn't make any sense," I said.

"It's Cool Breeze Broussard. It has to be. He was going to set
fire to the main house but something scared him off. So he poured
gasoline under a trailer on the set."

"Why should you and Clete fight over that?"

"I helped get Cool Breeze out of jail. I knew about all his
trouble in St. Mary Parish and his wife's suicide and his problems with
the Terrebonne family. I wanted the story. I pushed everything else out
of my mind… Maybe I planted some ideas in him about revenge."

"You still haven't told me why y'all fought."

"Clete said people who set fires deserve to be human candles
themselves. He started talking about some marines he saw trapped inside
a burning tank."

"Breeze has always had his own mind about things. He's not
easily influenced, Megan."

"Swede will kill him. He'll kill anybody he thinks is trying
to hurt Cisco."

"That's it, huh? You think you're responsible for getting a
black man into it with a psychopath?"

"Yes. And he's not a psychopath. You've got this guy all
wrong."

"How about getting Clete into the middle of it? You think that
might be a problem, too?"

"I feel very attached—"

"Cut it out, Megan."

"I have a deep—"

"He was available and you made him your point man. Except he
doesn't have any idea of what's going on."

Her eyes drifted onto mine, then they began to film. I heard
Batist come inside the shop, then go back out.

"Why'd you want to put him on that movie set?" I said.

"My brother. He's mixed up with bad people in the Orient. I
think the Terrebonnes are in it, too."

"What do you know about the Terrebonnes?"

"My father hated them."

A customer came in and picked a package of Red Man off the
wire rack and left the money on the register. Megan straightened her
back and touched at one eye with her finger.

"I called the St. Mary Sheriffs Department. Clete will be
arraigned at ten," I said.

"You don't hold me in very high regard, do you?"

"You just made a mistake. Now you've owned up to it. I think
you're a good person, Meg."

"What do I do about Clete?"

"My father used to say never treat a brave man as less."

"I wish Cisco and I had never come back here."

But you always do, I thought.
Because of a body
arched into wood planks, its blood pooling in the dust, its crusted
wounds picked by chickens
.

"What did you say?" she asked.

"Nothing. I didn't say anything."

"I'm going. I'll be at Cisco's house for a spell."

She put a half dollar on the counter for the coffee and walked
out the screen door. Then, just before she reached her automobile, she
turned and looked back at me. She held her straw hat in her fingers, by
her thigh, and with her other hand she brushed her hair back on her
head, her face lifted into the sunlight.

Batist flung a bucket full of water across one of the spool
tables.

"When they make cow eyes at you, it ain't 'cause they want to
go to church, no," he said.

"What?"

"Her daddy got killed when she was li'l. She always coming
round to talk to a man older than herself. Like they ain't no other man
in New Iberia. You got to go to collitch to figure it out?" he said.

TWO HOURS LATER HELEN and I drove over
to Mout' Broussard's
house on the west side of town. A black four-door sedan with tinted
windows and a phone antenna was parked in the dirt driveway, the back
door open. Inside, we could see a man in a dark suit, wearing aviator
glasses, unlocking the handcuffs on Cool Breeze Broussard.