Sunset Limited (14 page)

Clete kept lifting his shirt up from his shoulders with his fingers.

“I got a terrible sunburn, Jimmy. I want to be back in the air-conditioning with a vodka and tonic, not listening to a shuck that might cause a less patient person to come around behind that counter,” Clete said.

Jimmy Figorelli scratched an eyebrow, took off his apron and picked up a broom and began sweeping up green sawdust from around an ancient Coca-Cola cooler that sweated with coldness.

“What I heard is the clip went to some guys already got it in for Broussard. It’s nigger trouble, Purcel. What else can I tell you?
Semper fi
,” he said.

“I heard you were in the First Cav at Khe Sanh,” I said.

“Yeah, I was on a Jolly Green that took a RPG through the door. You know what I think all that’s worth?”

“You paid dues lowlifes don’t. Why not act like it?” I said.

“I got a Purple Heart with a
V
for valor. If I ever find it while I’m cleaning out my garage, I’ll send it to you,” he said.

I could hear Clete breathing beside me, almost feel the oily heat his skin gave off.

“You know what they say about the First Cav patch, Jimmy. ‘The horse they couldn’t ride, the line they couldn’t cross, the color that speaks for itself,’” Clete said.

“Yeah, well, kiss my ass, you Irish prick, and get out of my store.”

“Let’s go,” I said to Clete.

He stared at me, his face flushed, the skin drawn back against the eye sockets. Then he followed me outside, where we stood under an oak and watched one of Jimmy Fig’s cabs pick up a young black woman who carried a red lacquered purse and wore a tank top and a miniskirt and white fishnet stockings.

“You didn’t like what I said?” Clete asked.

“Why get on the guy’s outfit? It’s not your way.”

“You got a point. Let me correct that.”

He walked back inside, his hands at his sides, balled into fists as big as hams.

“Hey, Jimmy, I didn’t mean anything about the First Cav. I just can’t take the way you chop onions. It irritates the hell out of me,” he said.

Then he drove his right fist, lifting his shoulder and all his weight into the blow, right into Jimmy Figorelli’s face.

Jimmy held on to the side of the Coca-Cola box, his hand trembling uncontrollably on his mouth, his eyes dilated with shock, his fingers shining with blood and bits of teeth.

THREE DAYS LATER IT began to rain, and it rained through the Labor Day weekend and into the following week. The bayou by the dock rose above the cattails and into the canebrake, my rental boats filled with water, and moccasins crawled into our yard. On Saturday night, during a downpour, Father James Mulcahy knocked on our front door.

He carried an umbrella and wore a Roman collar and a rain-flecked gray suit and a gray fedora. When he stepped inside he tried not to breathe into my face.

“I’m sorry for coming out without calling first,” he said.

“We’re glad you dropped by. Can I offer you something?” I said.

He touched at his mouth and sat down in a stuffed chair. The rain was blowing against the gallery, and the tin roof of the bait shop quivered with light whenever thunder was about to roll across the swamp.

“Would you like a drink, sir?” I asked.

“No, no, that wouldn’t be good. Coffee’s fine. I have to tell you about something, Mr. Robicheaux. It bothers me deeply,” he said.

His hands were liver-spotted, ridged with blue veins, the skin as thin as parchment on the bones. Bootsie brought coffee and sugar and hot milk on a tray from the kitchen. When the priest lifted the cup to his mouth his eyes seemed to look through the steam at nothing, then he said, “Do you believe in evil, Mr. Robicheaux? I don’t mean the wicked deeds we sometimes do in a weak moment. I mean evil in the darkest theological sense.”

“I’m not sure, Father. I’ve seen enough of it in people not to look for a source outside of ourselves.”

“I was a chaplain in Thailand during the Vietnam War. I knew a young soldier who participated in a massacre. You might have seen the pictures. The most unforgettable was of a little boy holding his grandmother’s skirts in terror while she begged for their lives. I spent many hours with that young soldier, but I could never remove the evil that lived in his dreams.”

“I don’t understand how—” I began.

He raised his hand. “Listen to me,” he said. “There was another man, a civilian profiteer who lived on the air base. His corporation made incendiary bombs. I told him the story of the young soldier who had machine-gunned whole families in a ditch. The profiteer’s rejoinder was to tell me about a strafing gun his company had patented. In thirty seconds it could tear the sod out of an entire football field. In that moment I think that man’s eyes were the conduit into the abyss.”

Bootsie’s face wore no expression, but I saw her look at me, then back at the priest.

“Please have dinner with us,” she said.

“Oh, I’ve intruded enough. I really haven’t made my point either. Last night in the middle of the storm a truck stopped outside the rectory. I thought it was a parishioner. When I opened the door a man in a slouch hat and raincoat was standing there. I’ve never felt the presence of evil so strongly in my life. I was convinced he was there to kill me. I think he would have done it if the housekeeper and Father Lemoyne hadn’t walked up behind me.

“He pointed his arm at me and said, ‘Don’t you break the seal.’ Then he got back in his truck and drove away with the lights off.”

“You mean divulge the content of a confession?” I asked.

“He was talking about the Terrebonne woman. I’m sure of it. But what she told me wasn’t under the seal,” he replied.

“You want to tell me about Lila, Father?” I said.

“No, it wouldn’t be proper. A confidence is a confidence. Also, she wasn’t entirely coherent and I might do her a great disservice,” he said. But his face clouded, and it was obvious his own words did little to reassure him.

“This man in the truck, Father? If his name is Harpo, we want to be very careful of him,” I said.

“His eyes,” the priest said.

“Sir?”

“They were like the profiteer’s. Without moral light. A man like that speaking of the confessional seal. It offends something in me in a way I can’t describe.”

“Have dinner with us,” I said.

“Yes, that’s very kind of you. Your home seems to have a great warmth to it. From outside it truly looked like a haven in the storm. Could I have that drink after all?”

He sat at the table with a glass of cream sherry, his eyes abstract, feigning attention, like those of people who realize that momentary refuge and the sharing of fear with others will not relieve them of the fact that death may indeed have taken up residence inside them.

MONDAY MORNING I DROVE down Bayou Teche through Jeanerette into the little town of Franklin and talked to the chief of police. He was a very light mulatto in his early forties who wore sideburns and a gold ring in his ear and a lacquered-brim cap on the back of his head.

“A man name of Harpo? There used to be a Harpo Delahoussey. He was a sheriff’s deputy, did security at the Terrebonne cannery,” the police chief said.

“That’s not the one. This guy was maybe his nephew. He was a Franklin police officer. People called him Little Harpo,” I said.

He fiddled with a pencil and gazed out the window. It was still raining, and a black man rode a bicycle down the sidewalk, his body framed against the smoky neon of a bar across the street.

“When I was a kid there was a cop round here name of H. Q. Scruggs.” He wet his lips. “When he come into the quarters we knew to call him Mr. H.Q. Not Officer. That wasn’t enough for this gentleman. But I remember white folks calling him Harpo sometimes. As I recall, he’d been a guard up at Angola, too. If you want to talk about him, I’ll give you the name and address of a man might hep you.”

“You don’t care to talk about him?”

He laid the pencil flat on his desk blotter. “I don’t like to even remember him. Fortunately today I don’t have to,” he said.

CLEM MADDUX SAT ON his gallery, smoking a cigarette, in a swayback deer-hide chair lined with a quilt for extra padding. One of his legs was amputated at the torso, the other above the knee. His girth was huge, his stomach pressing in staggered layers against the oversized ink-dark blue jeans he wore. His skin was as pink and unblemished as a baby’s, but around his neck goiters hung from his flesh like a necklace of duck’s eggs.

“You staring at me, Mr. Robicheaux?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“It’s Buerger’s Disease. Smoking worsens it. But I got diabetes and cancer of the prostate, too. I got diseases that’ll outlive the one that kills me,” he said, then laughed and wiped spittle off his lips with his wrist.

“You were a gun bull at Angola with Harpo Scruggs?”

“No, I was head of farm machinery. I didn’t carry a weapon. Harpo was a tower guard, then a shotgun guard on horseback. That must have been forty years ago.”

“What kind of hack was he?”

“Piss-poor in my opinion. How far back you go?”

“You talking about the Red Hat gang and the men buried under the levee?”

“There was this old fart used to come off a corn-whiskey drunk meaner than a razor in your shoe. He’d single out a boy from his gang and tell him to start running. Harpo asked to get in on it.”

“Asked to kill someone?”

“It was a colored boy from Laurel Hill. He’d sassed the field boss at morning count. When the food truck come out to the levee at noon, Harpo pulled the colored boy out of the line and told him he wasn’t eating no lunch till he finished sawing a stump out of the river bottom. Harpo walked him off into some gum trees by the water, then I seen the boy starting off on his own, looking back uncertain-like while Harpo was telling him something. Then I heard it,
pow, pow
, both barrels. Double-ought bucks, from not more than eight or ten feet.”

Maddux tossed his cigarette over the railing into the flower bed.

“What happened to Scruggs?” I asked.

“He done a little of this, a little of that, I guess.”

“That’s a little vague, cap.”

“He road-ganged in Texas a while, then bought into a couple of whorehouses. What do you care anyway? The sonofabitch is probably squatting on the coals.”

“He’s squatting—”

“He got burned up with a Mexican chippy in Juarez fifteen years ago. Wasn’t nothing left of him except a bag of ash and some teeth. Damn, son, y’all ought to update and get you some computers.”

TWELVE

TWO DAYS LATER I SAT at my desk, sifting through the Gypsy fortune-telling deck called the Tarot. I had bought the deck at a store in Lafayette, but the instruction book that accompanied it dealt more with the meaning of the cards than with the origins of their iconography. Regardless, it would be impossible for anyone educated in a traditional Catholic school not to recognize the historical associations of the imagery in the Hanged Man.

The phone on my desk buzzed.

“Clete Purcel and Megan Flynn just pulled up,” the sheriff said.

“Yeah?”

“Get him out of here.”

“Skipper—”

He hung up.

A moment later Clete tapped on my glass and opened the door, then paused and looked back down the hall, his face perplexed.

“What happened, the John overflow in the waiting room again?” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“A pall is hanging over the place every time I walk in. What do those guys do for kicks, watch snuff films? In fact, I asked the dispatcher that. Definitely no sense of humor.”

He sat down and looked around my office, grinned at me for no reason, straightened his back, flexed his arms, bounced his palms up and down on the chair.

“Megan’s with you?” I said.

“How’d you know that?”

“Uh, I think the sheriff saw y’all from his window.”

“The sheriff? I get it. He told you to roll out the welcome wagon.” His eyes roved merrily over my face. “How about we treat you to lunch at Lagniappe Too?”

“I’m buried.”

“Megan gave you her drill instructor impersonation the other day?”

“It’s very convincing.”

He beat out a staccato with his hands on the chair arms.

“Will you stop that and tell me what’s on your mind?” I said.

“This cat Billy Holtzner. I’ve seen him somewhere. Like from Vietnam.”

“Holtzner?”

“So we had nasty little marshmallows over there, too. Anyway, I go, ‘Were you in the Crotch?’ He says, ‘The Crotch?’ I say, ‘Yeah, the Marine Corps. Were you around Da Nang?’ What kind of answer do I get? He sucks his teeth and goes back to his clipboard like I’m not there.”

He waited for me to speak. When I didn’t he said, “
What
?”

“I hate to see you mixed up with them.”

“See you later, Streak.”

“I’m coming with you,” I said, and stuck the Hanged Man in my shirt pocket.

WE ATE LUNCH AT Lagniappe Too, just down from The Shadows. Megan sat by the window with her hat on. Her hair was curved on her cheeks, and her mouth looked small and red when she took a piece of food off her fork. The light through the window seemed to frame her silhouette against the green wall of bamboo that grew in front of The Shadows. She saw me staring at her.

“Is something troubling you, Dave?” she asked.

“You know Lila Terrebonne?”

“The senator’s granddaughter?”

“She comes to our attention on occasion. The other day we had to pick her up at the church, sitting by herself under a crucifix. Out of nowhere she asked me about the Hanged Man in the Tarot.”

I slipped the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the tablecloth by Megan’s plate.

“Why tell me?” she said.

“Does it mean something to you?”

I saw Clete lower his fork into his plate, felt his eyes fix on the side of my face.

“A man hanging upside down from a tree. The tree forms a cross,” Megan said.

“The figure becomes Peter the Apostle, as well as Christ and St. Sebastian. Sebastian was tied to a tree and shot with darts by his fellow Roman soldiers. Peter asked to be executed upside down. You notice, the figure makes a cross with his legs in the act of dying?” I said.