The Neon Rain (29 page)

I followed him across town in the traffic. Up ahead at a red light, as the heat and humidity of the day began to gather and intensify among the tall buildings and jammed automobiles, I saw him yawn widely, rub his face as though he were trying to put life back in dead tissue, and rest his head against the door. There was a man with a real dose of the yellow-dog blues, I thought. By midmorning he would be sweating heavily, emptying the water cooler, debating whether he should eat more aspirin, hiding with his misery in the darkness of a toilet stall; at noon he would emerge into the sun’s glare and the roar of traffic, and drive across Canal to a café where nobody knew him so he could drink beer with his meal until one o’clock and glue his day back together. He was serving hard time, but it was about to get worse.

He double-parked in front of the Greyhound bus depot and went inside, putting on his coat. Five minutes later he was back in his car, working his way into the traffic, looking around as though the whole world were coming at him in the rearview mirror.

I went back to my houseboat, called the hospital about Jimmie, pumped iron, ran four miles along the lakefront, cleaned and oiled my twelve-gauge, and cooked some red-fish and dirty rice for lunch while I listened to an old recording of Blind Lemon Jefferson:

Dig my grave with a silver spade
And see that my grave is kept clean.
Oh dear Lord, lower me down on a golden chain.

I wondered why it was that only black people seemed to treat death realistically in their art. White people wrote about it as an abstraction, used it as a poetic device, concerned themselves with it only when it was remote. Most of Shakespeare’s and Frost’s poems about death were written when both men were young. When Billie Holiday, Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Leadbelly sang about it, you heard the cock of the prison guard’s rifle, saw the black silhouette suspended from a tree against a dying red sun, smelled the hot pine box being lowered into the same Mississippi soil a sharecropper had labored against all his life.

That afternoon I went up to the hospital and spent two hours with Jimmie. He slept with the remoteness of someone who had moved off into another dimension. Occasionally his mouth twitched, as though a fly had settled on it, and I wondered what painful shard of memory was at work under the almost featureless, ashlike mask that had become his face. I hoped he was not remembering the gun flashes fired point-blank at his head through the door of the toilet stall. Few people appreciate the level of terror that a person experiences at that moment. Soldiers learn not to talk about it. Civilian victims try to explain it to friends and therapists, and are often treated with the sympathy we extend to babbling psychotics. But the best description I ever heard of it was not from a soldier or victim. We had a serial killer in an isolation cell at the First District, and he gave an interview to a woman reporter from the
Times-Picayune
. I’ll never forget his words:

“There’s no rush in the world like it. They drown when you point it at them. They beg and piss their pants. They cry, they tell you to do it to somebody else, they try to hide behind their own hands. It’s like watching somebody melt into pudding.”

But I had no way of knowing what battle Jimmie was fighting inside himself. Maybe nothing went on inside Jimmie. Tomorrow they were going into his skull with the brace and bit to pick out the fragments of lead and bone that were stuck in his brain. But maybe they wouldn’t simply find brain cells that were prized and broken as though they had been teased with an icepick; it was possible that the injuries were larger, the doctor said, like the dead and pulpy edges of bruised fruit. If so, his mind could deteriorate to the point that his thoughts would be little more than sand patterns drifting back and forth under the currents of a dull sea.

At five o’clock I was parked a block down Basin from First District headquarters when Clete walked out the front door. I followed him again to the Greyhound bus depot and watched him double-park, go inside, then return a few minutes later to his automobile. Even though I was now sure what he was up to, I had trouble believing it. We were required by department policy to carry our weapons both on and off duty, but his wife’s fears and objections about guns were evidently enough to make him put himself in a position that was incredibly vulnerable.

I watched his car head off into the traffic, then I drove to an open-air café on Decatur across from the French Market, sat at the raw bar and ate a bowl of shrimp gumbo and two dozen oysters on the half-shell, and read the afternoon newspaper. A young crowd was in the café, and they were playing Island music on the jukebox, drinking Jax on tap, and eating oysters as fast as the Negro barman could rake them out of the ice bins and shuck them open on a tray. After the traffic had thinned and the streets had cooled in the lengthening shadows, I drove back to Clete’s house off Carondelet.

When he opened the door he had a can of beer in his hand, and he wore a pair of baggy swimming trunks and a T-shirt that said DON’T MESS WITH MY TOOT-TOOT ON THE FRONT. His eyes were bleary, and I suspected that he had skipped supper and had already committed himself to a serious evening of mentally sawing himself apart.

“Hey, Dave, what’s happening?” he said. “Come on out on the back porch. I’m tying some flies. I think I’m going out to Colorado and do some trout fishing.”

“Where’s Lois?”

“She took the girls to a show. I think they go to about ten shows a week. I don’t care, though. She gets discount tickets from the bank, and it’s better for them than watching that MTV stuff. They’re her kids, anyway, right? Say, tell me something. Did I see you down on Canal this morning?”

“Maybe.”

“Going down to see Jimmie?”

“I saw him this afternoon.”

“Oh. How is he?”

“He goes into surgery again tomorrow. We’ll know a lot more then.”

“I’m real sorry about Jimmie. He’s a fine guy.”

“I appreciate it, Clete.”

“Excuse the mess out here. Just throw those magazines on the floor and sit down. You want a Coke or coffee or something?”

“No, thanks.”

He had built the sun porch himself three years ago. It looked like a cracker box hammered onto the back of the house. Vases of unwatered brown ferns and wilted spider plants hung in the windows, and the throw rugs he used to cover the concrete pad looked like discarded colored towels. He had set up a card table in the center of the room, and on it was a fly-tying vise, spools of thread, different types of bird feathers, and a tangle of tiny hooks. An unfinished, ragged fly was clamped in the vise.

He sat down in a canvas chair and took another beer from an ice-filled cooler.

“I’m going to take two weeks’ vacation time, and we’re going to head out to Colorado,” he said. “Lois is going to visit her Buddhist priest, maybe get him out of her system, then we’re going to camp on the Gunnison River, fish, backpack, live in a tent, do all that health stuff. I can get off cigarettes, lose some weight, maybe cut down on the booze. It’s a chance for us to get a fresh start. I’m really looking forward to it.”

“I’ve got your nine-millimeter.”

“What?”

“I followed you to the bus depot.”

The stiff skin around his mouth tried to wrinkle into a smile.

“What are we talking about?” he said.

“I followed you there this morning and again this afternoon. Then I got Bobo Getz to open your locker for me. You remember him. He used to buy room keys off the hookers at the Ramada.”

His face became wooden. He lowered his eyes and slid a cigarette in and out of the pack.

“What are you trying to do to me, Dave?” he asked.

“Nobody has done anything to you. You jumped into the pig flop by yourself.”

“So I’m ashamed of leaving my weapon in a bus locker. But this isn’t a home. It’s a goddamn lunatic asylum. Who the hell set you up as my judge?”

“Run that game on somebody else. Ballistics will match your weapon to the bullet that came out of Bobby Joe Starkweather. You should have lost it somewhere.”

“Yeah? Maybe I didn’t expect my partner to boost it from me.” He took the cigarette out of the pack, lighted it with a Zippo, dropped the lighter loudly on the tabletop, and rubbed his hand over his face while he blew out the smoke. “So you gonna put me in the wringer?”

“Why’d you do it?”

“Ten thousand bucks.”

I didn’t say anything. I looked at his big hands, the way a cigarette looked so small in them, his scarred, poached face, and wondered what had happened to the good-humored and intelligent man I used to work with.

“Come on, he was garbage and you know it,” he said. “The credit union wouldn’t give me another loan, I’m still paying alimony to my first wife, I owe the finance company, and I was paying fifty a week to a shylock. I could have handled it, but I had some complications with a girl. She said she was a month late, and she stiffed me for a grand to get lost without having a talk with Lois. That’s about all it would have taken to put her in a hospital.”

“Who paid you, Clete?”

“Murphy.”

“Why did he want him killed? Why did he want a cop to do it?”

“What difference does it make?”

“You’re going to have to explain it sometime.”

“He said the guy was an asshole, he was out of control or something.”

“Murphy didn’t need to pay cops to hit somebody.”

His brow wrinkled. He wiped a piece of tobacco off the corner of his mouth.

“You said ‘didn’t.’”

“He’s not a player anymore.”

It took a second for the recognition to work into his eyes.

“Man, you don’t fuck around, do you?” he said.

“Come on, Clete, why a cop?”

He waited a moment, and I saw the heat come back in his face.

“He said he worked for a guy, I suppose that general, what’s his name, the guy whose house you got busted at, he said the guy didn’t believe in whacking his own people. It’s probably bullshit. All of them are slime, anyway.”

“So you knew Murphy before?”

“No. He knew me. At least he knew I was paying a shylock.” He drank from his beer can, inhaled from his cigarette, studied his hands, then raised his eyes again.

“Where do we go from here, partner?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is a piece of shit like Starkweather this important?”

“You not only killed a man for money, you could have brought him and Murphy in. You could have gotten me off the hook.”

“I don’t read it that way. But I don’t guess that’s important now. Are you going to give them my piece?”

“I don’t have it.”

“What?”

“I just guessed you were dropping it and picking it up at the bus locker.”

He shook his head and blew out his breath as though I’d kicked him in the stomach.

“Damn, if you aren’t slick, Streak.” He began to flick the fly clamped in the vise with his fingernail. “What do you think I ought to do now?”

“I don’t care what you do,” I said. “Get out of town. Go to Colorado. Take up Zen with Lois. I just know one thing for sure—don’t ever call me ‘partner’ again.”

TWELVE

Jimmie went into surgery at eight the next morning, and they didn’t wheel him into the recovery room until almost noon. The doctor found me in the waiting room and sat down in his greens on the leather couch next to me. He was prematurely bald and talked with a west Texas accent. His fingers looked as though they could cover a basketball.

“I call this kind a dusting-and-cleaning situation,” he said. “There was a messy spot or two, but most everything was on the surface. All things considered, it cleaned up beautifully. I’m still concerned about that eye, but at least I don’t think we’re talking about paralysis anymore. I hope that’s good news for you this morning.”

“It is, Doctor.”

“Now, about the other stuff—general recovery, post-effects, psychological trauma, we can’t really tell you. There’s a lot about the brain we don’t understand. I’ve had to cut ‘em open and go in with an ice-cream scoop, and somehow the other parts of the brain compensate and the person can live a fairly normal life. Then I’ve seen a simple fracture cause a guy headaches that almost drove him to suicide. It’s like the jack-in-the-box. Sometimes you just don’t know what’s going to jump up at you. But we’ve got a great eye man here and fine therapists, and every day it’s going to get better for your brother. You follow me? In other words, we’ve got it turned around, and that’s what counts.”

We shook hands, then I stopped by the gift shop downstairs and had fresh flowers sent up to Jim’s room. I saw a big plastic crawfish in the gift case, and I had the salesgirl tie it with a bow to the flower vase.

I went back to the files at the
Picayune
‘s morgue. Once again, the photographs and news stories sent me back across the sea, back into the era that would always be mine, whether I had wanted it or not. As I stared at the pictures of grunts loading their wounded into a dustoff, the elephant grass flattening around them, their dust-filmed faces streaked with dried sweat, their heads twisted back at the gunfire they still heard behind them, I felt like a leper who could not stop picking at his own crusted lesions. And like that leper, I knew I was about to sink my finger into a dark recess of pain and grief that did not cauterize with time. I flipped the frames of microfilm up on the viewing screen until I saw again the series of photographs taken during and after the My Lai massacre. I had never been able to rid myself of one of those photographs since I had first seen it in
Newsweek
magazine fifteen years ago. The villagers had been herded together, a GI with an M-16 was facing them, and a woman was begging with clasped hands while her little boy, not more than five, held her skirt and looked out from behind her with uncomprehending terror on his face. His mouth was open, the skin of his face was stretched tight with fear, and his eyes were wide with the knowledge that his mother’s words could not protect him from what was about to happen.

The next frame on the microfilm showed the ditch where they were executed. On the floor of the ditch, amid the tangle of dead adults, was the body of a little boy who wore the same short pants and T-shirt as the child in the first picture. This was the war that an American President called a holy cause.