DR10 - Sunset Limited (22 page)

"I hope you're here for the brunch, Purcel," he said.

"Not your gig, Benny. Get off the clock," Clete said.

"Come on, make an appointment. Don't do this. Hey, you deaf?"
Then Benny Grogan reached out and hooked his fingers on the back of
Clete's shirt collar as Clete brushed past him.

Clete flung the chipped beef into Benny Grogan's face. It was
scalding hot and it matted his skin like a
papier-mâché mask with slits
for the eyes. Benny's mouth was wide with shock and pain and an
unintelligible sound that rose out of his chest like fingernails
grating on a blackboard. Then Clete whipped the bottom of the skillet
with both hands across the side of Benny's head, and backswung it into
the face of the man who was trying to rise from his chair on the other
side of Ricky Scarlotti, the cast-iron cusp ringing against bone,
bursting the nose, knocking him backward on the floor.

Ricky Scarlotti was on his feet now, his mouth twisted, his
finger raised at Clete. But he never got the chance to speak.

"I brought you some of your own, Ricky," Clete said.

He jammed a pair of vise grips into Ricky Scarlotti's scrotum
and locked down the handles. Ricky Scarlotti's hands grabbed impotently
at Clete's wrists while his head reared toward the ceiling.

Clete began backing toward the front door, pulling Ricky
Scarlotti with him.

"Work with me on this. You can do it, Mouse. That a boy. Step
lively now. Coming through here, gangway for the Mouse!" Clete said,
pushing chairs and tables out of the way with his buttocks.

Out on the street he unhooked Scarlotti from the vise grips
and bounced him off the side of a parked car, then slapped his face
with his open hand, once, twice, then a third time, so hard the inside
of Scarlotti's mouth bled.

"I'm not carrying, Mouse. Free shot," Clete said, his hands
palm up at his sides now.

But Scarlotti was paralyzed, his mouth hanging open, his lips
like red Jell-O. Clete grabbed him by his collar and the back of his
belt and flung him to the sidewalk, then picked him up, pushed him
forward, and flung him down again, over and over, working his way down
the sidewalk, clattering garbage cans along the cement. People stared
from automobiles, the streetcar, and door fronts but no one intervened.
Then, like a man who knows his rage can never be satiated, Clete lost
it. He drove Scarlotti's head into a parking meter, smashing it
repeatedly against the metal and glass. A woman across the street
screamed hysterically and people began blowing car horns. Clete spun
Scarlotti around by his bloodied shirtfront and threw him across a
laddered display of flowers under the canvas awning.

"Tell these people why this is happening, Ricky. Tell them how
you had a guy's teeth torn out, how you had a woman blindfolded and
beaten and held underwater," Clete said, advancing toward him, his
shoes crunching through the scattered potting soil.

Scarlotti dragged himself backward, his nose bleeding from
both nostrils. But the elderly woman who had set the flowers out on the
walk ran from the restaurant door and knelt beside him with her arms
stretched across his chest, as though she were preventing him from
rising. She screamed in Italian at Clete, her eyes serpentine and
liquid.

Benny Grogan, the ex-wrestler, touched Clete on the elbow.
Pieces of chipped beef still clung to his platinum hair. He held a
ball-peen hammer in his hand, but he tossed it onto a sack of peat
moss. For some reason, the elderly woman stopped screaming, as though a
curtain had descended on a stage.

"You see a percentage in this, Purcel?" Benny Grogan said.

Clete looked at the elderly woman squatted by her son.

"You should go to church today, burn a candle, Mouse," he said.

He got in his convertible and drove to the corner, his
tailpipe billowing white smoke, and turned down a shady side street
toward St. Charles. He took his seal-top coffee mug off the dashboard
and drank from it.

IT WAS EARLY SATURDAY MORNING and
Clete was changing a tire in
my drive while he talked, spinning a lug wrench on a nut, his love
handles wedging over his belt.

"So I took River Road and barrel-assed across the Huey Long
and said goodbye to New Orleans for a while," he said. He squinted up
at me and waited. "What?" he said.

"Scarlotti is a small player in this, Clete," I said.

"That's why you and Helen were pounding on his cage?" He got
to his feet and threw his tools in the trunk. "I've got to get some new
tires. I blew one coming off the bridge. What d'you mean, small player?
That pisses me off, Dave."

"I think he and the Giacano family put the hit on Cool Breeze
because he ratted them out to the Feds. But if you wanted to get even
for Megan, you probably beat up on the wrong guy."

"The greaseballs are taking orders, even though they've run
the action in New Orleans for a hundred years? Man, I learn something
every day. Did you read that article in the
Star
about Hitler hiding out in Israel?"

His face was serious a moment, then he stuck an unlit
cigarette in his mouth and the smile came back in his eyes and he
twirled his porkpie hat on his finger while he looked at me, then at
the sunrise behind the flooded cypresses.

I HELPED BATIST AT the bait shop, then
drove to Cool Breeze's
house on the west side of town and was told by a neighbor he was out at
Mout's flower farm.

Mout' and a Hmong family from Laos farmed three acres of
zinnias and chrysanthemums in the middle of a sugarcane plantation on
the St. Martinville road, and each fall, when football season began,
they cut and dug wagonloads of flowers that they sold to florists in
Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I drove across a cattle guard and down a
white shale road until I saw a row of poplars that was planted as a
windbreak and Cool Breeze hoeing weeds out in the sunlight while his
father sat in the shade reading a newspaper by a card table with a
pitcher of lemonade on it.

I parked my truck and walked down the rows of chrysanthemums.
The wind was blowing and the field rippled with streaks of brown and
gold and purple color.

"I never figured you to take up farming, Breeze," I said.

"I give up on some t'ings. So my father made this li'l job for
me, that's all," he said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"Getting even wit' people, t'ings like that. I ain't giving
nobody reason to put me back in jail."

"You know what an exhumation order is?" I asked.

As with many people of color, he treated questions from white
men as traps and didn't indicate an answer one way or another. He
stooped over and jerked a weed and its root system out of the soil.

"I want to have a pathologist examine your wife's remains. I
don't believe she committed suicide," I said.

He stopped work and rested his hands on the hoe handle. His
hands looked like gnarled rocks around the wood. Then he put one hand
inside the top of his shirt and rubbed his skin, his eyes never leaving
mine.

"Say again?"

"I checked with the coroner's office in St. Mary Parish. No
autopsy was done on Ida's body. It simply went down as a suicide."

"What you telling me?"

"I don't think she took her life."

"Didn't nobody have reason to kill her. Unless you saying
I… Wait a minute, you trying to—"

"You're not a killer, Breeze. You're just a guy who got used
by some very bad white people."

He started working the hoe between the plants again, his
breath coming hard in his chest, his brow creased like an old leather
glove. The wind was cool blowing across the field, but drops of sweat
as big as marbles slid off his neck. He stopped his work again and
faced me, his eyes wet.

"What we got to do to get this here order you talking about?"
he asked.

WHEN I GOT HOME a peculiar event was
taking place. Alafair and
three of her friends were in the front yard, watching a man with a
flattop haircut stand erect on an oak limb, then topple into space,
grab a second limb and hang from it by his knees.

I parked my pickup and walked across the yard while
Boxleiter's eyes, upside down, followed me. He bent his torso upward,
flipped his legs in the air, and did a half-somersault so that he hit
the ground on the balls of his feet.

"Alafair, would you guys head on up to the house and tell
Bootsie I'll be there in a minute?" I said.

"She's on the gallery. Tell her yourself," Alafair said.

"
Alf
. . ." I said.

She rolled her eyes as though the moment was more than her
patience could endure, then she and her friends walked through the
shade toward the house.

"Swede, it's better you bring business to my office," I said.

"I couldn't sleep last night. I always sleep, I mean dead,
like stone. But not last night. There's some heavy shit coming down,
man. It's a feeling I get. I'm never wrong."

"Like what?"

"This ain't no ordinary grift." He fanned his hand at the air,
as though sweeping away cobweb. "I never had trouble handling the
action. You draw lines, you explain the rules, guys don't listen, they
keep coming at you, you unzip their package. But that ain't gonna work
on this one." He blotted the perspiration off his face with the back of
his forearm.

"Sorry. You're not making much sense, Swede."

"I don't got illusions about how guys like me end up. But
Cisco and Megan ain't like me. I was sleeping in the Dismas House in
St. Louis after I finished my first bit. They came and got me. They see
somebody jammed up, people getting pushed around, they make those
people's problem their problem. They get that from their old man.
That's why these local cocksuckers nailed him to a wall."

"You're going have to watch your language around my home,
partner," I said.

His hand shot out and knotted my shirt in a ball.

"You're like every cop I ever knew. You don't listen. I can't
stop what's going on."

I grabbed his wrist and thrust it away from me. He opened and
closed his hands impotently.

"I hate guys like you," he said.

"Oh?"

"You go to church with your family, but you got no idea what
life is like for two-thirds of the human race."

"I'm going inside now, Swede. Don't come around here anymore."

"What'd I do, use bad language again?"

"You cut up Anthony Pollock. I can't prove it, and it didn't
happen in our jurisdiction, but you're an iceman."

"If I did it in a uniform, you'd be introducing me at the
Kiwanis Club. I hear you adopted your kid and treated her real good.
That's a righteous deed, man. But the rest of your routine is comedy. A
guy with your brains ought to be above it."

He walked down the slope to the dirt road and his parked car.
When he was out of the shade he stopped and turned around. His granny
glasses were like ground diamonds in the sunlight.

"How many people did it take to crucify Megan and Cisco's old
man and cover it up for almost forty years? I'm an iceman? Watch out
one of your neighbors don't tack you up with a nail gun," he yelled up
the slope while two fishermen unhitching a boat trailer stared at him
openmouthed.

I RAKED AND BURNED leaves that
afternoon and tried not to
think about Swede Boxleiter. But in his impaired way he had put his
thumb on a truth about human behavior that eludes people who are
considered normal. I remembered a story of years ago about a
fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in a
small Mississippi town not far from the Pearl River. One afternoon he
whistled at a white woman on the street. Nothing was said to him, but
that night two Klansmen kidnapped him from the home of his relatives,
shot and killed him, and wrapped his body in a net of bricks and wire
and sank it in the river.

Everyone in town knew who had done it. Two local lawyers,
respectable men not associated with the Klan, volunteered to defend the
killers. The jury took twenty minutes to set them free. The foreman
said the verdict took that long because the jury had stopped
deliberations to send out for soda pop.

It's a story out of another era, one marked by shame and
collective fear, but its point is not about racial injustice but
instead the fate of those who bear Cain's mark.

A year after the boy's death a reporter from a national
magazine visited the town by the Pearl River to learn the fate of the
killers. At first they had been avoided, passed by on the street,
treated at grocery or hardware counters as though they had no first or
last names, then their businesses failed—one owned a filling
station, the other a fertilizer yard—and their debts were
called. Both men left town, and when asked their whereabouts old
neighbors would only shake their heads as though the killers were part
of a vague and decaying memory.

The town that had been complicit in the murder ostracized
those who had committed it. But no one had been ostracized in St. Mary
Parish. Why? What was the difference in the accounts of the black
teenager's murder and Jack Flynn's, both of which seemed collective in
nature?

Answer: The killers in Mississippi were white trash and
economically dispensable.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON I FOUND Archer
Terrebonne on his side patio,
disassembling a spinning reel on a glass table top. He wore slippers
and white slacks and a purple shirt that was embroidered with his
initials on the pocket. Overhead, two palm trees with trunks that were
as gray and smooth as elephant hide creaked against a hard-blue sky.
Terrebonne glanced up at me, then resumed his concentration, but not in
an unpleasant way.

"Sorry to bother you on Sunday, but I suspect you're quite
busy during the week," I said.

"It's no bother. Pull up a chair. I wanted to thank you for
the help you gave my daughter."