DR10 - Sunset Limited (4 page)

But the man named Swede Boxleiter was not one to concern
himself with the details of the alpine environment he found himself in.
The measure of his life and himself was the reflection he saw in the
eyes of others, the fear that twitched in their faces, the unbearable
tension he could create in a cell or at a dining table simply by not
speaking.

He didn't need a punk or prune-o or the narcissistic pleasure
of clanking iron in the yard or even masturbation for release from the
energies that, unsatiated, could cause him to wake in the middle of the
night and sit in a square of moonlight as though he were on an airless
plateau that echoed with the cries of animals. Sometimes he smiled to
himself and fantasized about telling the prison psychologist what he
really felt inside, the pleasure that climbed through the tendons in
his arm when he clasped a shank that had been ground from a piece of
angle iron on an emery wheel in the shop, the intimacy of that last
moment when he looked into the eyes of the hit. The dam that seemed to
break in his loins was like water splitting the bottom of a paper bag.

But prison shrinks were not people you confided in, at least
if you were put together like Swede Boxleiter and ever wanted to make
the street again.

In my dream he rose from his crouched position, reached up and
touched the moon, as though to despoil it, but instead wiped away the
red skein from one corner with his fingertip and exposed a brilliant
white cup of light.

I sat up in bed, the window fan spinning its shadows on my
skin, and remembered where I had seen him.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I went to the
city library on East Main
Street and dug out the old
Life
magazine in which
Megan's photos of a black rapist's death inside a storm drain had
launched her career. Opposite the full-page shot of the black man
reaching out futilely for the sunlight was the group photo of five
uniformed cops staring down at his body. In the foreground was Swede
Boxleiter, holding a Red Delicious apple with a white divot bitten out
of it, his smile a thin worm of private pleasure stitched across his
face.

BUT I WASN'T GOING to take on the
Flynns' problems, I told
myself, or worry about a genetic misfit in the Colorado pen.

I was still telling myself that late that night when Mout'
Broussard, New Iberia's legendary shoeshine man and Cool Breeze's
father, called the bait shop and told me his son had just escaped from
the parish prison.

CAJUNS OFTEN HAVE TROUBLE WITH the
th
sound in English, and as a result they drop the
h
or pronounce the
t
as a
d
.
Hence, the town's collectively owned shoeshine man, Mouth Broussard,
was always referred to as Mout'. For decades he operated his shoeshine
stand under the colonnade in front of the old Frederic Hotel, a
wonderful two-story stucco building with Italian marble columns inside,
a ballroom, a saloon with a railed mahogany bar, potted palms and slot
and racehorse machines in the lobby, and an elevator that looked like a
polished brass birdcage.

Mout' was built like a haystack and never worked without a
cigar stub in the corner of his mouth. He wore an oversized gray smock,
the pockets stuffed with brushes and buffing rags ribbed with black and
oxblood stains. The drawers under the two elevated chairs on the stand
were loaded with bottles of liquid polish, cans of wax and saddle soap,
toothbrushes and steel dental picks he used to clean the welts and
stitches around the edges of the shoe. He could pop his buffing rags
with a speed and rhythm that never failed to command a silent respect
from everyone who watched.

Mout' caught all the traffic walking from the Southern Pacific
passenger station to the hotel, shined all the shoes that were set out
in the corridors at night, and guaranteed you could see your face in
the buffed point of your shoe or boot or your money would be returned.
He shined the shoes of the entire cast of the 1929 film production of
Evangeline
; he shined the shoes of Harry James's
orchestra
and of U.S. Senator Huey Long just before Long was assassinated.

"Where is Cool Breeze now, Mout'?" I said into the phone.

"You t'ink I'm gonna tell you that?"

"Then why'd you call?"

"Cool Breeze say they gonna kill him."

"Who is?"

"That white man run the jail. He sent a nigger try to joog him
in the ear with a wire."

"I'll be over in the morning."

"The morning? Why, t'ank you, suh."

"Breeze went down his own road a long time ago, Mout'."

He didn't reply. I could feel the late-summer heat and the
closeness of the air under the electric light.

"Mout'?" I said.

"You right. But it don't make none of it easier. No suh, it
surely don't."

At sunrise the next morning I drove down East Main, under the
canopy of live oaks that spanned the street, past City Hall and the
library and the stone grotto and statue of Christ's mother, which had
once been the site of George Washington Cable's home, and the sidewalks
cracked by tree roots and the blue-green lawns rilled with hydrangeas
and hibiscus and philodendron and the thick stand of bamboo that
framed the yard of the 1831 plantation manor called The Shadows, and
finally into the business district. Then I was on the west side of
town, on back streets with open ditches, railroad tracks that dissected
yards and pavement, and narrow paintless houses, in rows like bad
teeth, that had been cribs when nineteenth-century trainmen used to
drink bucket beer from the saloon with the prostitutes and leave their
red lanterns on the gallery steps when they went inside.

Mout' was behind his house, flinging birdseed at the pigeons
that showered down from the telephone wires into his yard. He walked
bent sideways at the waist, his eyes blue with cataracts, one cheek
marbled pink and white by a strange skin disease that afflicts people
of color; but his sloped shoulders were as wide as a bull's and his
upper arms like chunks of sewer pipe.

"It was a bad time for Breeze to run, Mout'. The prosecutor's
office might have cut him loose," I said.

He mopped his face with a blue filling-station rag and slid
the bag of birdseed off his shoulder and sat down heavily in an old
barber's chair with an umbrella mounted on it. He picked up a fruit jar
filled with coffee and hot milk from the ground and drank from it. His
wide mouth seemed to cup around the bottom of the opening like a
catfish's.

"He gone to church wit' me and his mother when he was a li'l
boy," he said. "He played ball in the park, he carried the newspaper,
he set pins in the bowling alley next to white boys and didn't have no
trouble. It was New Orleans done it. He lived with his mother in the
projects. Decided he wasn't gonna be no shoeshine man, have white folks
tipping their cigar ashes down on his head, that's what he tole me."

Mout' scratched the top of his head and made a sound like air
leaving a tire.

"You did the best you could. Maybe it'll turn around for him
someday," I said.

"They gonna shoot him now, ain't they?" he said.

"No. Nobody wants that, Mout'."

"That jailer, Alex Guidry? He use to come down here when he
was in collitch. Black girls was three dollars over on Hopkins. Then
he'd come around the shoeshine stand when they was black men around,
pick out some fella and keep looking in his face, not letting go, no,
peeling the skin right off the bone, till the man dropped his head and
kept his eyes on the sidewalk. That's the way it was back then. Now
y'all done hired the same fella to run the jail."

Then he described his son's last day in the parish prison.

THE TURNKEY WHO HAD been a brig chaser
in the Marine Corps
walked down the corridor of the Isolation unit and opened up the
cast-iron door to Cool Breeze's cell. He bounced a baton off a leather
lanyard that was looped around his wrist.

"Mr. Alex says you going back into Main Pop. That is, if you
want," he said.

"I ain't got no objection."

"It must be your birthday."

"How's that?" Cool Breeze said.

"You'll figure it out."

"I'll figure it out, huh?"

"You wonder why you people are in here? When you think an echo
is a sign of smarts?"

The turnkey walked him through a series of barred doors that
slid back and forth on hydraulically operated steel arms, ordered him
to strip and shower, then handed him an orange jumpsuit and locked him
in a holding cell.

"They gonna put Mr. Alex on suspension. But he's doing you
right before he goes out. So that's why I say it must be your
birthday," the turnkey said. He bounced the baton on its lanyard and
winked. "When he's gone, I'm gonna be jailer. You might study on the
implications."

At four that afternoon Alex Guidry stopped in front of Cool
Breeze's cell. He wore a seersucker suit and red tie and shined black
cowboy boots. His Stetson hung from his fingers against his pant leg.

"You want to work scrub-down detail and do sweep-up in the
shop?" he asked.

"I can do that."

"You gonna make trouble?"

"Ain't my style, suh."

"You can tell any damn lie you want when you get out of here.
But if I'm being unfair to you, you tell me to my face right now," he
said.

"People see what they need to."

Alex Guidry turned his palm up and looked at it and picked at
a callus with his thumb. He started to speak, then shook his head in
disgust and walked down the corridor, the leather soles of his boots
clicking on the floor.

Cool Breeze spent the next day scrubbing stone walls and
sidewalks with a wire brush and Ajax, and at five o'clock reported to
the maintenance shop to begin sweep-up. He used a long broom to push
steel filings, sawdust, and wood chips into tidy piles that he shoveled
onto a dustpan and dumped into a trash bin. Behind him a mulatto whose
golden skin was spotted with freckles the size of dimes was cutting a
design out of a piece of plywood on a jigsaw, the teeth ripping a sound
out of the wood like an electrified scream.

Cool Breeze paid no attention to him, until he heard the
plywood disengage from the saw. He turned his head out of curiosity
just as the mulatto balled his fist and tried to jam a piece of
coat-hanger wire, sharpened to a point like an ice pick and driven
vertically through the wood handle off a lawn-mower starter rope,
through the center of Cool Breeze's ear and into his brain.

The wire point laid open Cool Breeze's cheek from the jawbone
to the corner of his mouth.

He locked his attacker's forearm in both bis hands, spun with
him in circles, then walked the two of them toward the saw that hummed
with an oily light.

"Don't make me do it, nigger," he said.

But his attacker would not give up his weapon, and Cool Breeze
drove first the coat hanger, then the balled fist and the wood plug
gripped inside the palm into the saw blade, so that bone and metal and
fingernails and wood splinters all showered into his face at once.

He hid inside the barrel of a cement mixer, where by all odds
he should have died. He felt the truck slow at the gate, heard the
guards talking outside while they walked the length of the truck with
mirrors they held under the frame.

"We got one out on the ground. You ain't got him in your
barrel, have you?" a guard said.

"We sure as hell can find out," the truck driver said.

Gears and cogs clanged into place, then the truck vibrated and
shook and giant steel blades began turning inside the barrel's
blackness, lifting curtains of wet cement into the air like cake dough.

"Get out of here, will you? For some reason that thing puts me
in mind of my wife in the bathroom," the guard said.

Two hours later, on a parish road project south of town, Cool
Breeze climbed from inside the cement mixer and lumbered into a cane
field like a man wearing a lead suit, his lacerated cheek bleeding like
a flag, the cane leaves edged with the sun's last red light.

"I DON'T BELIEVE IT, Mout'," I said.

"Man ain't tried to joog him?"

"That the jailer set it up. He's already going on suspension.
He'd be the first person everyone suspected."

"'Cause he done it."

"Where's Breeze?"

Mout' slipped his sack of birdseed over his shoulder and begin
flinging handfuls into the air again. The pigeons swirled about his
waxed bald head like snow-flakes.

MY PARTNER WAS DETECTIVE Helen
Soileau. She wore slacks and
men's shirts to work, seldom smiled or put on makeup, and faced you
with one foot cocked at an angle behind the other, in the same way a
martial artist strikes a defensive posture. Her face was lumpy, her
eyes unrelenting when they fixed on you, and her blond hair seemed
molded to her head like a plastic wig. She leaned on my office
windowsill with both arms and watched a trusty gardener edging the
sidewalk. She wore a nine-millimeter automatic in a hand-tooled black
holster and a pair of handcuffs stuck through the back of her gunbelt.

"I met Miss Pisspot of 1962 at the jail this morning," she
said.

"Who?"

"That FBI agent, what's her name, Glazier. She thinks we set
up Cool Breeze Broussard to get clipped in our own jail."

"What's your take on it?"

"The mulatto's a pipehead. He says he thought Breeze was
somebody else, a guy who wanted to kill him because he banged the guy's
little sister."

"You buy it?" I asked.

"A guy who wears earrings through his nipples? Yeah, it's
possible. Do me a favor, will you?" she said.

"What's up?"

Her eyes tried to look casual. "Lila Terrebonne is sloshed at
the country club. The skipper wants me to drive her back to Jeanerette."