DR10 - Sunset Limited (5 page)

"No, thanks."

"I could never relate to Lila. I don't know what it is. Maybe
it's because she threw up in my lap once. I'm talking about your AA
buddy here."

"She didn't call me for help, Helen. If she had, it'd be
different."

"If she starts her shit with me, she's going into the drunk
tank. I don't care if her grandfather was a U.S. senator or not."

She went out to the parking lot. I sat behind my desk for a
moment, then pinged a paper clip in the wastebasket and flagged down
her cruiser before she got to the street.

LILA HAD A POINTED face and milky
green eyes and yellow hair
that was bleached the color of white gold by the sun. She was
lighthearted about her profligate life, undaunted by hangovers or
trysts with married men, laughing in a husky voice in nightclubs about
the compulsions that every two or three years placed her in a hospital
or treatment center. She would dry out and by order of the court attend
AA meetings for a few weeks, working a crossword puzzle in the
newspaper while others talked of the razor wire wrapped around their
souls, or staring out the window with a benign expression that showed
no trace of desire, remorse, impatience, or resignation, just temporary
abeyance, like a person waiting for the hands on an invisible clock to
reach an appointed time.

From her adolescent years to the present, I did not remember a
time in her life when she was not the subject of rumor or scandal. She
was sent off by her parents to the Sorbonne, where she failed her
examinations and returned to attend USL with blue-collar kids who could
not even afford to go to LSU in Baton Rouge. The night of her senior
prom, members of the football team glued her photograph on the rubber
machine in Provost's Bar.

When Helen and I entered the clubhouse she was by herself at a
back table, her head wreathed in smoke from her ashtray, her unfilled
glass at the ends of her fingertips. The other tables were filled with
golfers and bridge players, their eyes careful never to light on Lila
and the pitiful attempt at dignity she tried to impose on her
situation. The white barman and the young black waiter who circulated
among the tables had long since refused to look in her direction or
hear her order for another drink. When someone opened the front door,
the glare of sunlight struck her face like a slap.

"You want to take a ride, Lila?" I said.

"Oh, Dave, how are you? They didn't call you again, did they?"

"We were in the neighborhood. I'm going to get a membership
here one day."

"The same day you join the Republican Party. You're such a
riot. Would you help me up? I think I twisted my ankle," she said.

She slipped her arm in mine and walked with me through the
tables, then stopped at the bar and took two ten-dollar bills from her
purse. She put them carefully on the bar top.

"Nate, this is for you and that nice young black man. It's
always a pleasure to see you all again," she said.

"Come back, Miss Lila. Anytime," the barman said, his eyes
shifting off her face.

Outside, she breathed the wind and sunshine as though she had
just entered a different biosphere. She blinked and swallowed and made
a muted noise like she had a toothache.

"Please drive me out on the highway and drop me wherever
people break furniture and throw bottles through glass windows," she
said.

"How about home, instead?" I asked.

"Dave, you are a total drag."

"Better appreciate who your friends are, ma'am," Helen said.

"Do I know you?" Lila said.

"Yeah, I had the honor of cleaning up your—"

"Helen, let's get Miss Lila home and head back for the office."

"Oh, by all means. Yes, indeedy," Helen said.

WE DROVE SOUTH ALONG Bayou Teche
toward Jeanerette, where Lila
lived in a plantation home whose bricks had been dug from clay pits and
baked in a kiln by slaves in the year 1791. During the Depression her
grandfather, a U.S. senator, used dollar-a-day labor to move the home
brick by brick on flatboats up the bayou from its original site on the
Chitimacha Indian Reservation. Today, it was surrounded by a
fourteen-acre lawn, live oak and palm trees, a sky-blue swimming pool,
tennis courts, gazebos hung with orange passion vine, two stucco guest
cottages, a flagstone patio and fountain, and gardens that bloomed with
Mexicali roses.

But we were about to witness a bizarre spectacle when we
turned onto the property and drove through the tunnel of oaks toward
the front portico, the kind of rare event that leaves you sickened and
ashamed for your fellow human beings. A movie set consisting of
paintless shacks and a general store with a wide gallery set up on
cinder blocks, put together from weathered cypress and rusted tin roofs
and Jax beer and Hadacol signs to look like the quarters on a 1940s
corporation farm, had been constructed on the lawn, a dirt road laid
out and sprinkled with hoses in front of the galleries. Perhaps two
dozen people milled around on the set, unorganized, mostly at loose
ends, their bodies shiny with sweat. Sitting in the shade of a live oak
tree by a table stacked with catered food was the director, Billy
Holtzner, and next to him, cool and relaxed in yellow slacks and white
silk shirt, was his friend and business partner, Cisco Flynn.

"Have you ever seen three monkeys try to fuck a football? I'd
like to eighty-six the whole bunch but my father has a yen for a
certain item. It tends to come in pink panties," Lila said from the
back seat.

"We'll drop you at the porch, Lila. As far as I'm concerned,
your car broke down and we gave you a lift home," I said.

"Oh, stop it. Both of you get down and have something to eat,"
she said. Her face had cleared in the way a storm can blow out of a sky
and leave it empty of clouds and full of carrion birds. I saw her
tongue touch her bottom lip.

"Do you need assistance getting inside?" Helen said.

"Assistance? That's a lovely word. No, right here will do just
fine. My, hasn't this all been pleasant?" Lila said, and got out and
sent a black gardener into the house for a shaker of martinis.

Helen started to shift into reverse, then stopped,
dumbfounded, at what we realized was taking place under the live oak
tree.

Billy Holtzner had summoned all his people around him. He wore
khaki shorts with flap pockets and Roman sandals with lavender socks
and a crisp print shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his
flaccid arms.

Except for the grizzled line of beard that grew along his
jawline and chin, his body seemed to have no hair, as though it had
been shaved with a woman's razor. His workmen and actors and grips and
writers and camera people and female assistants stood with wide grins
on their faces, some hiding their fear, others rising on the balls of
their feet to get a better look, while he singled out one individual,
then another, saying, "Have you been a good boy? We've been hearing
certain rumors again. Come on now, don't be shy. You know where you
have to put it."

Then a grown man, someone who probably had a wife or
girlfriend or children or who had fought in a war or who at one time
had believed his life was worthy of respect and love, inserted his nose
between Billy Holtzner's index and ring fingers and let him twist it
back and forth.

"That wasn't so bad, was it? Oh, oh, I see somebody trying to
sneak off there. Oh,
Johnny
…" Holtzner
said.

"These guys are out of a special basement, aren't they?" Helen
said.

Cisco Flynn walked toward the cruiser, his face good-natured,
his eyes earnest with explanation.

"Have a good life, Cisco," I said out the window, then to
Helen, "Hit it."

"You don't got to me tell me, boss man," she replied, her head
looking back over her shoulder as she steered, the dark green shadows
of oak leaves cascading over the windshield.

THAT NIGHT THE MOON WAS yellow above
the swamp. I walked down
to the dock to help Batist, the black man who worked for me, fold up
the Cinzano umbrellas on our spool tables and close up the bait shop.
There was a rain ring around the moon, and I pulled back the awning
that covered the dock, then went inside just as the phone rang on the
counter.

"Mout' called me. His son wants to come in," the voice said.

"Stay out of police business, Megan."

"Do I frighten you? Is that the problem here?"

"No, I suspect the problem is use."

"Try this: he's fifteen miles out in the Atchafalaya Basin and
snakebit. That's not metaphor. He stuck his arm in a nest of them. Why
don't you deliver a message through Mout' and tell him just to go fuck
himself?"

After I hung up I nicked off the outside flood lamps. Under
the moon's yellow light the dead trees in the swamp looked like twists
of paper and wax that could burst into flame with the touch of a single
match.

AT DAWN THE WIND was out of the south,
moist and warm and
checkered with rain, when I headed the cabin cruiser across a long,
flat bay bordered on both sides by flooded cypress trees that turned to
green lace when the wind bent their branches. Cranes rose out of the
trees against a pink sky, and to the south storm clouds were piled over
the Gulf and the air smelled like salt water and brass drying in the
sun. Megan stood next to the wheel, a thermos cup full of coffee in her
hand. Her straw hat, which had a round dome and a purple band on it,
was crushed over her eyes. To get my attention, she clasped my wrist
with her thumb and forefinger.

"The inlet past that oil platform. There's a rag tied in a
bush," she said.

"I can see it, Megan," I replied. Out of the corner of my eye
I saw her face jerk toward me.

"I shouldn't speak or I shouldn't touch? Which is it?" she
said.

I eased back the throttle and let the boat rise on its wake
and drift into a cove that was overgrown by a leafy canopy and threaded
with air vines and dimpled in the shallows with cypress knees. The bow
scraped, then snugged tight on a sandspit.

"In answer to your question, I was out at your brother's movie
set yesterday. I've decided to stay away from the world of the Big
Score. No offense meant," I said.

"I've always wondered what bank guards think all day. Just
standing there, eight hours, staring at nothing. I think you've pulled
it off, you know, gotten inside their heads."

I picked up the first-aid kit and dropped off the bow and
walked through the shallows toward a beached houseboat that had rotted
into the soft texture of moldy cardboard.

I heard her splash into the water behind me.

"Gee, I hope I can be a swinging dick in the next life," she
said.

THE HOUSEBOAT FLOOR WAS tilted on top
of the crushed and
rusted oil drums on which it had once floated. Cool Breeze sat in the
corner, dressed in clothes off a wash line, the wound in his cut face
stitched with thread and needle, his left arm swollen like a black
balloon full of water.

I heard Megan's camera start clicking behind me.

"Why didn't you call the Feds, Breeze?" I asked.

"That woman FBI agent wants me in front of a grand jury. She
say I gonna stay in the system, too, till they done wit' me."

I looked at the electrical cord he had used for a tourniquet,
the proud flesh that had turned the color of fish scale around the fang
marks, the drainage that had left viscous green tailings on his shirt.
"I tell you what, I'll dress those wounds, hang your arm in a sling,
then we'll get a breath of fresh air," I said.

"You cut that cord loose, the poison gonna hit my heart."

"You're working on gangrene now, partner."

I saw him swallow. The whites of his eyes looked painted with
iodine.

"You're jail-wise, Breeze. You knew the Feds would take you
over the hurdles. Why'd you want to stick it to Alex Guidry?"

This is the story he told me while I used a rubber suction cup
to draw a mixture of venom and infection from his forearm. As I
listened on one knee, kneading the puncture wounds, feeling the pain in
his body flicker like a candle flame under his skin, I could only
wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always
sending forth our
worst members as our emissaries.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, DOWN the Teche, he
owned a dirt-road store
knocked together from scrap boards, tin stripped off a condemned rice
mill, and Montgomery Ward brick that had dried out and crusted and
pulled loose from the joists like a scab. He also had a pretty young
wife named Ida, who cooked in a cafe and picked tabasco peppers on a
corporate farm. After a day in the field her hands swelled as though
they had been stung by bumblebees and she had to soak them in milk to
relieve the burning in her skin.

On a winter afternoon two white men pulled up on the bib of
oyster shell that served as a parking lot in front of the gallery, and
the older man, who had jowls like a bulldog's and smoked a cigar in the
center of his mouth, asked for a quart of moonshine.

"Don't tell me you ain't got it, boy. I know the man from
Miss'sippi sells it to you."

"I got Jax on ice. I got warm beer, too. I can sell you soda
pop. I ain't got no whiskey."

"That a fact? I'm gonna walk back out the door, then come back
in. One of them jars you got in that box behind the motor oil better be
on the counter or I'm gonna redecorate your store."

Cool Breeze shook his head.

"I know who y'all are. I done paid already. Why y'all giving
me this truck?" he said.

The younger white man opened the screen door and came inside
the store. His name was Alex Guidry, and he wore a corduroy suit and
cowboy hat and western boots, with pointed, mirror-bright toes. The
older man picked up a paper bag of deep-fried cracklings from the
counter. The grease in the cracklings made dark stains in the paper. He
threw the bag to the younger man and said to Cool Breeze, "You on
parole for check writing now. That liquor will get you a double nickel.
Your woman yonder, what's her name, Ida? She's a cook, ain't she?"