DR10 - Sunset Limited (23 page)

You didn't do wide end runs around Archer Terrebonne.

"It's wonderful to see her fresh and bright in the morning,
unharried by all the difficulties she's had, all the nights in
hospitals and calls from policemen," he said.

"I have a problem, Mr. Terrebonne. A man named Harpo Scruggs
is running all over our turf and we can't get a net over him."

"Scruggs? Oh yes, quite a character. I thought he was dead."

"His uncle was a guy named Harpo Delahoussey. He did security
work at y'all's cannery, the one that burned."

"Yes, I remember."

"We think Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a black man named Willie
Broussard and almost drowned Jack Flynn's daughter."

He set down the tiny screwdriver and the exposed brass
mechanisms of the spinning reel. The tips of his delicate fingers were
bright with machine oil. The wind blew his white-gold hair on his
forehead.

"But you use the father's name, not the daughter's. What
inference should I gather from that, sir? My family has a certain
degree of wealth and hence we should feel guilt over Jack Flynn's
death?"

"Why do you think he was killed?"

"That's your province, Mr. Robicheaux, not mine. But I don't
think Jack Flynn was a proletarian idealist. I think he was a
resentful, envious troublemaker who couldn't get over the fact his
family lost their money through their own mismanagement. Castle Irish
don't do well when their diet is changed to boiled cabbage."

"He fought Franco's fascists in Spain. That's a peculiar way
to show envy."

"What's your purpose here?"

"Your daughter is haunted by something in the past she can't
tell anybody about. It's connected to the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I
wonder if it's Jack Flynn's death that bothers her."

He curled the tips of his fingers against his palm, as though
trying to rub the machinist's oil off them, looking at them idly.

"She killed her cousin when she was fifteen. Or at least
that's what she's convinced herself," he said. He saw my expression
change, my lips start to form a word. "We had a cabin in Durango at the
foot of a mountain. They found the key to my gun case and started
shooting across a snowfield. The avalanche buried her cousin in an
arroyo. When they dug her out the next day, her body was frozen upright
in the shape of a cross."

"I didn't know that, sir."

"You do now. I'm going in to eat directly. Would you care to
join us?"

When I walked to my truck I felt like a man who had made an
obscene remark in the midst of a polite gathering. I sat behind the
steering wheel and stared at the front of the Terrebonne home. It was
encased in shadow now, the curtains drawn on all the windows. What
historical secrets, what private unhappiness did it hold? I wondered if
I would ever know. The late sun hung like a shattered red flame in the
pine trees.

I REMEMBER A CHRISTMAS DAWN five years
after I came home from
Vietnam. I greeted it in an all-night bar built of slat wood, the floor
raised off the dirt with cinder blocks. I walked down the wood steps
into a deserted parking area, my face numb with alcohol, and stood in
the silence and looked at a solitary live oak hung with Spanish moss,
the cattle acreage that was gray with winter, the hollow dome of sky
that possessed no color at all, and suddenly I felt the vastness of the
world and all the promise it could hold for those who were still its
children and had not severed their ties with the rest of the human
family.

Monday morning I visited Megan at her brother's house and saw
a look in her eyes that I suspected had been in mine on that Christmas
morning years ago.

Had her attackers held her underwater a few seconds more, her
body would have conceded what her will would not: Her lungs and mouth
and nose would have tried to draw oxygen out of water and her chest and
throat would have filled with cement. In that moment she knew the
heartbreaking twilight-infused beauty that the earth can offer, that we
waste as easily as we tear pages from a calendar, but neither would she
ever forget or forgive the fact that her reprieve came from the same
hands that did Indian burns on her skin and twisted her face down into
the silt.

She was living in the guest cottage at the back of Cisco's
house, and the French doors were open and the four-o'clocks planted as
borders around the trees were dull red in the shade.

"What's that?" she said.

I lay a paper sack and the hard-edged metal objects inside it
on her breakfast table.

"A nine-millimeter Beretta. I've made arrangements for
somebody to give you instruction at the firing range," I said.

She slipped the pistol and the unattached magazine out of the
sack and pulled back the slide and looked at the empty chamber. She
flipped the butterfly safety back and forth.

"You have peculiar attitudes for a policeman," she said.

"When they deal the play, you take it to them with fire
tongs," I said.

She put the pistol back in the sack and stepped out on the
brick patio and looked at the bayou with her hands in the back pockets
of her baggy khaki pants.

"I'll be all right after a while. I've been through worse,"
she said.

I stepped outside with her. "No, you haven't," I said.

"Excuse me?"

"It only gets so bad. You go to the edge, then you join a
special club. A psychologist once told me only about three percent of
the human family belongs to it."

"I think I'll pass on the honor."

"Why'd you come back?"

"I see my father in my sleep."

"You want the gun?"

"Yes."

I nodded and turned to go.

"Wait." She took her eyeglass case out of her shirt pocket and
stepped close to me. There was a dark scrape at the corner of her eye,
like dirty rouge rubbed into the grain. "Just stand there. You don't
have to do anything," she said, and put her arms around me and her head
on my chest and pressed her stomach flat against me. She wore doeskin
moccasins and I could feel the instep of her foot on my ankle.

The top of her head moved under my chin and against my throat
and the wetness of her eyes was like an unpracticed kiss streaked on my
skin.

RODNEY LOUDERMILK HAD LIVED two weeks
on the eighth floor of
the old hotel that was not two blocks from the Alamo. The elevator was
slow and throbbed in the shaft, the halls smelled bad, the fire escapes
leaked rust down the brick sides of the building. But there was a bar
and grill downstairs and the view from his window was magnificent. The
sky was blue and salmon-colored in the evening, the San Antonio River
lighted by sidewalk restaurants and gondolas that passed under the
bridges, and he could see the pinkish stone front of the old mission
where he often passed himself off as a tour guide and led college girls
through the porticoed walkways that were hung with grapevines.

He was blind in one eye from a childhood accident with a BB
gun. He wore sideburns and snap-button cowboy shirts with his
Montgomery Ward suits. He had been down only once, in Sugarland, on a
nickel-and-dime burglary beef that had gone sour because his fall
partner, a black man, had dropped a crowbar off the roof through the
top of a greenhouse.

But Rodney had learned his lesson: Stay off of roofs and don't
try to turn watermelon pickers into successful house creeps.

The three-bit on Sugarland Farm hadn't been a wash either. He
had picked up a new gig, one that had some dignity to it, that paid
better, that didn't require dealing with fences who took him off at
fifteen cents on the dollar. One week off the farm and he did his first
hit. It was much easier than he thought. The target was a rancher
outside Victoria, a loudmouth fat shit who drove a Cadillac with
longhorns for a hood ornament and who kept blubbering, "I'll give you
money, boy. You name the price. Look, my wife's gonna be back from the
store. Don't hurt her, okay…" then had started to tremble and
messed himself like a child.

"That goes to show you, money don't put no lead in your
pencil," Rodney was fond of telling his friends.

He also said the fat man was so dumb he never guessed his wife
had put up the money for the hit. But Rodney let him keep his
illusions. Why not? Business was business. You didn't personalize it,
even though the guy was a born mark.

Their grief was their own, he said. They owed money, they
stole it, they cheated on their wives. People sought justice in
different ways. The state did it with a gurney and a needle, behind a
viewing glass, while people watched like they were at an X-rated movie.
Man,
that
was sick.

Rodney showered in the small tin stall and put on a fresh
long-sleeve shirt, one that covered the tattooed chain of blue stars
around his left wrist, then looked at his four suits in the closet and
chose one that rippled with light like a sheet of buffed tin. He
slipped
on a new pair of black cowboy boots and fitted a white cowboy hat on
his head, pulling the brim at an angle over his blind eye.

All you had to do was stand at the entrance to the Alamo and
people came up and asked you questions. Clothes didn't make the person.
Clothes
were
the person, he told people. You ever
see a gun bull mounted on horseback without a hat and shades? You ever
see a construction boss on a job without a clipboard and hard hat and a
pocketful of ballpoints? You ever see a hooker that
ain't
made up to look like your own personal pinball machine?

Rodney conducted tours, gave directions around the city,
walked tourists to their hotels so they wouldn't be mugged by what he
called "local undesirables we're fixing to get rid of."

A buddy, a guy he'd celled with at Sugarland, asked him what
he got out of it.

"Nothing. That's the point, boy. They got nothing I want."

Which wasn't true. But how did you explain to a pipehead that
walking normals around, making them apprehensive one moment, relieving
their fears another, watching them hang on his words about the
cremation of the Texan dead on the banks of the river (an account he
had memorized from a brochure) gave him a rush like a freight train
loaded with Colombian pink roaring through the center of his head?

Or popping a cap on a slobbering fat man who thought he could
bribe Rodney Loudermilk.

It was dusk when Rodney came back from showing two elderly
nuns where Davy Crockett had been either bayoneted to death or captured
against the barracks wall and later tortured. They both had seemed a
little pale at the details he used to describe the event. In fact, they
had the ingratitude to tell him they didn't need an escort back to
their hotel, like he had BO or something. Oh, well. He had more
important things on his mind. Like this deal over in Louisiana. He'd
told his buddy, the pipehead, he didn't get into a new career so he
could go back to strong-arm and B&E bullshit. That whole scene
on the bayou had made him depressed in ways he couldn't explain, like
somebody had stolen something from him.

She hadn't been afraid. When they're afraid, it proves they
got it coming. When they're not afraid, it's like they're spitting in
your face. Yeah, that was it. You can't pop them unless they're afraid,
or they take part of you with them. Now he was renting space in his
head to a hide (that's what he called women) he shouldn't even be
thinking about. He had given her power, and he wanted to go back and
correct the images that had left him confused and irritable and not the
person he was when he gave guided tours in his western clothes.

He looked at the slip of paper he had made a note on when this
crazy deal started. It read:
Meet H.S. in New Iberia.
Educate a commonist?
A commonist? Republicans live in rich
houses, not commonists. Any dumb shit knows that. Why had he gotten
into this? He crumpled up the note in his palm and bounced it off the
rim of the wastebasket and called the grill for a steak and baked
potato, heavy on the cream and melted butter, and a green salad and a
bottle of champale.

It was dusk and a purple haze hung on the rooftops when a man
stepped out of a hallway window onto a fire escape, then eased one foot
out on a ledge and worked his way across the brick side of the
building, oblivious to the stares of two winos down in the alley eight
floors below. When the ledge ended, he paused for only a moment, then
with the agility of a cat, he hopped across empty space onto another
ledge and entered another window.

Rodney Loudermilk had just forked a piece of steak into his
mouth when the visitor seized him from behind and dragged him out of
his chair, locking arms and wrists under Rodney's rib cage, lifting him
into the air and simultaneously carrying him to the window, whose
curtains swelled with the evening breeze. Rodney probably tried to
scream and strike out with the fork that was in his hand, but a piece
of meat was lodged like a stone in his throat and the arms of his
visitor seemed to be cracking his ribs like sticks.

Then there was a rush of air and noise and he was out above
the city, among clouds and rooftops and faces inside windows that
blurred past him. He concentrated his vision on the dusky purple
stretch of sky that was racing away from him, just like things had
always raced away from him. It was funny how one gig led to another,
then in seconds the rounded, cast-iron, lug-bolted dome of an ancient
fire hydrant rose out of the cement and came at your head faster than a
BB traveling toward the eye.

THE ACCOUNT OF RODNEY Loudermilk's
death was given us over the
phone by a San Antonio homicide investigator named Cecil Hardin, who
had found the crumpled piece of notepaper by the wastebasket in
Loudermilk's hotel room. He also read us the statements he had taken
from the two witnesses in the alley and played a taped recording of an
interview with Loudermilk's pipehead friend.