DR10 - Sunset Limited (26 page)

"Boy, the miracle of computers," he said. He glanced out at a
boat that was moored in the center of the bay. It was the kind used for
swamp tours, wide across the beam, domed with green Plexiglas, its
white hull gleaming.

"Where were you Sunday evening, Cisco?" I said.

"Rented a pontoon plane and took a ride out on the Gulf."

"I have to pass on relevant information about you to a
homicide investigator in San Antonio."

"So why tell me about it?"

"I try to do things in the daylight, at least when it involves
people I used to trust."

"He's saying you're being treated better than you deserve,"
Helen said.

"The guy who soared on gilded wings out the hotel window? I
think the Jersey Bounce was too easy. You saying I did it? Who cares?"
Cisco replied.

"Rough words," I said.

"Yeah?" He picked up a pair of field glasses from a table and
tossed them at me. "Check out the guys who are on that boat. That's
reality out there. I wish it would go away, but I'm stuck with it. So
give me a break on the wiseacre remarks."

I focused the glasses through an open window on a
linen-covered table where Billy Holtzner and his daughter and two Asian
men were eating.

"The two Chinese are the bean counters. When the arithmetic
doesn't come out right, they count the numbers a second time on your
fingers. Except your fingers aren't on your hands anymore," he said.

"I'd get into a new line of work," I said.

"Dave, I respect you and I don't want you to take this wrong.
But don't bother me again without a warrant and in the meantime kiss my
royal ass," Cisco said.

"You only try to get men to kiss your ass?" Helen said.

He walked away from us, both of his hands held in the air, as
though surrendering to an irrational world, just as a twin-engine
amphibian roared across the swamp at treetop level, a pipe in the stern
blowing curds of black smoke across the sun.

THAT EVENING I JOGGED to the
drawbridge on the dirt road while
heat lightning veined the clouds and fireflies glowed and faded like
wet matches above the bayou's surface. Then I did three sets each of
push-ups, barbell curls, dead lifts, and military presses in the back
yard, showered, and went to bed early.

On the edge of sleep I heard rain in the trees and Bootsie
undressing in the bathroom, then I felt her weight next to me on the
bed. She turned on her side so that her stomach and breasts were
pressed against me, and put one leg across mine and her hand on my
chest.

"You're drawn to people who have problems. My problem is I
don't like other women making overtures to my husband," she said.

"I think that's a problem I can live with," I replied.

She raised her knee and hit me with it. Then her hand touched
me and she lifted her nightgown and sat on my thighs and leaned over me
and looked into my face.

Outside the window, I could see the hard, thick contours of an
oak limb, wrapped with moonlight, glistening with rain.

THE NEXT DAY WAS Saturday. At false
dawn I woke from a dream
that lingered behind my eyes like cobweb. The dream was about Megan
Flynn, and although I knew it did not signify unfaithfulness, it
disturbed me just as badly, like a vapor that congeals around the heart.

In the dream she stood on a stretch of yellow hardpan, a
treeless purple mountain at her back. The sky was brass, glowing with
heat and dust. She walked toward me in her funny hat, her khaki clothes
printed with dust, a tasseled red shawl draped around her shoulders.

But the red around her shoulders was not cloth. The wound in
her throat had drained her face of blood, drenching her shirt,
tasseling the ends of her fingers.

I went down to the dock and soaked a towel in the melted ice
at the bottom of the cooler and held it to my eyes.

It was just a dream, I told myself. But the feeling that went
with it, that was like toxin injected into the muscle tissue, wouldn't
go away. I had known it in Vietnam, when I knew someone's death was at
hand, mine or someone for whom I was responsible, and it had taken
everything in me to climb aboard a slick that was headed up-country,
trying to hide the fear in my eyes, the dryness in my mouth, the rancid
odor that rose from my armpits.

But that had been the war. Since then I'd had the dream and
the feelings that went with it only once—in my own house, the
night my wife Annie was murdered.

TWENTY YEARS AGO ALEX Guidry had owned
a steel-gray two-story
frame house outside Franklin, with a staircase on the side and a
second-floor screened porch where he slept in the hot months. Or at
least this is what the current owner, an elderly man named Plo Castile,
told me. His skin was amber, wizened, as hairless as a manikin's, and
his eyes had the blue rheumy tint of oysters.

"I bought this property fo'teen years ago from Mr. Alex. He
give me a good price, 'cause I already owned the house next do'," he
said. "He slept right out yonder on that porch, at least when it wasn't
cold, 'cause he rented rooms sometimes to oil-field people."

The yard was neat, with two palm trees in it, and flowers were
planted around the latticework at the base of the main house and in a
garden by a paintless barn and around a stucco building with a tin roof
elevated above the walls.

"Is that a washhouse?" I said.

"Yes, suh, he had a couple of maids done laundry for them
oil-field people. Mr. Alex was a good bidness-man."

"You remember a black woman named Ida Broussard, Mr. Plo?"

He nodded. "Her husband was the one been in Angola. He run a
li'l sto'." His eyes looked at a cane field beyond the barbed-wire
fence.

"She come around here?"

He took a package of tobacco and cigarette papers out of his
shirt pocket. "Been a long time, suh."

"You seem like an honest man. I believe Ida Broussard was
murdered. Did she come around here?"

He made a sound, as though a slight irritation had flared in
his throat.

"Suh, you mean they was a murder here, that's what you
saying?" But he already knew the answer, and his eyes looked into space
and he forgot what he was doing with the package of tobacco and
cigarette papers. He shook his head sadly. "I wish you ain't come here
wit' this. I seen a fight. Yeah, they ain't no denying that. I seen it."

"A fight?"

"It was dark. I was working in my garage. She drove a truck
into the yard and gone up the back stairs. I could tell it was Ida
Broussard 'cause Mr. Alex had the floodlight on. But, see, it was cold
wet'er then and he wasn't sleeping on the porch, so she started banging
on the do' and yelling he better come out.

"I seen only one light go on. All them oil-field renters was
gone, they was working seven-and-seven offshore back then. I didn't
want to hear no kind of trouble like that. I didn't want my wife to
hear it either. So I went in my house and turned on the TV.

"But the fighting stopped, and I seen the inside light go out,
then the floodlight, too. I t'ought: Well, he ain't married, white
people, colored people, they been doing t'ings together at night they
don't do in the day for a long time now, it ain't my bidness. Later on,
I seen her truck go down the road."

"You never told anyone this?"

"No, suh. I didn't have no reason to."

"After she was found dead in the swamp?"

"He was a policeman. You t'ink them other policemen didn't
know he was carrying on wit' a colored woman, they had to wait for me
to tell them about it?"

"Can I see the washhouse?"

The inside was cool and dank and smelled of cement and water.
Duckboards covered the floor, and a tin washtub sat under a water
spigot that extended from a vertical pipe in one wall. I placed my palm
against the roughness of the stucco and wondered if Ida Broussard's
cries or strangled breath had been absorbed into the dampness of these
same walls.

"I boil crabs out here now and do the washing in my machine,"
Mr. Plo said.

"Are those wood stairs out there the same ones that were on
the building twenty years ago?" I asked.

"I painted them. But they're the same."

"I'd like to take some slivers of wood from them, if you don't
mind."

"What for?"

"If you see Alex Guidry, you can tell him I was here. You can
also tell him I took evidence from your staircase. Mr. Plo, I
appreciate your honesty. I think you're a good man."

He walked across his yard toward the front door, his face
harried with his own thoughts, as wrinkled as a turtle's foot. Then he
stopped and turned around.

"Her husband, the one run the li'l sto'? What happened to
him?" he asked.

"He went back to prison," I answered.

Mr. Plo crimped his mouth and opened his screen door and went
inside his house.

FROM HIS KITCHEN WINDOW Swede
Boxleiter could see the bayou
through the pecan trees in the yard. It was a perfect evening. A boy
was fishing in a green pirogue with a bamboo pole among the lily pads
and cattails; the air smelled like rain and flowers; somebody was
barbecuing steak on a shady lawn. It was too bad Blimpo nailed him
coming out of the graveyard. He liked being with Cisco and Megan again,
knocking down good money on a movie set, working out every day, eating
seafood and fixing tropical health drinks in the blender. Louisiana had
its moments.

Maybe it was time to shake it. His union card was gold in
Hollywood. Besides, in California nobody got in your face because you
might be a little singed around the edges. Weirded out, your arms
stenciled with tracks, a rap sheet you could wallpaper the White House
with? That was the bio for guys who wrote six-figure scripts. But he'd
let Cisco call the shot. The problem was, the juice was just too big on
this one. Taking down punks like Rodney Loudermilk or that accountant
Anthony Whatever wasn't going to get anybody out of Shitsville.

He loaded the blender with fresh strawberries, bananas, two
raw eggs, a peeled orange, and a can of frozen fruit cocktail, and
flicked on the switch. Why was that guy from the power company still
messing around outside?

"Hey, you! I told you, disconnect me again, your next job is
gonna be on the trash truck!" Swede said.

"That's my day job already," the utility man replied.

They sure didn't have any shortage of wise-asses around here,
Swede thought. How about Blimpo in his porkpie hat hooking him to a car
bumper and going up to the Terrebonne house and bringing this guy back
down to the crypt, like Swede's the pervert, a dog on a chain, not this
fuck Terrebonne crawling around on his hands and knees, smoothing out
the bones and rags in the casket, like he's packing up a rat's nest to
mail it somewhere.

"What are you doing with my slingshot?" Swede said through the
window.

"I stepped on it. I'm sorry," the utility man said.

"Put it down and get out of here."

But instead the utility man walked beyond Swede's vision to
the door and knocked.

Swede went into the living room, shirtless and barefoot, and
ripped open the door.

"It's been a bad week. I don't need no more trouble. I pay my
bill through the super, so just pack up your shit and—" he
said.

Then they were inside, three of them, and over their shoulders
he saw a neighbor painting a steak with sauce on a grill and he wanted
to yell out, to send just one indicator of his situation into the
waning light, but the door closed quickly behind the men, then the
kitchen window, too, and he knew if he could only change two seconds of
his life, revise the moment between his conversation with the utility
man at the window and the knock on the door, none of this would be
happening, that's what two seconds could mean.

One of them turned on the TV, increasing the volume to an
almost deafening level, then slightly lowering it. Were the three men
smiling now, as though all four of them were involved in a mutually
shameful act? He couldn't tell. He stared at the muzzle of the .25
automatic.

Man, in the bowl, big time, he thought.

But a fellow's got to try.

His shank had a four-inch blade, with a bone-and-brass handle,
a brand called Bear Hunter, a real collector's item Cisco had given
him. Swede pulled it from his right pocket, ticking the blade's point
against the denim fabric, opening the blade automatically as he swung
wildly at a man's throat.

It was a clean cut, right across the top of the chest,
slinging blood in a diagonal line across the wall. Swede tried to get
the second man with the backswing, perhaps even felt the knife arc into
sinew and bone, but a sound like a Chinese firecracker popped inside
his head, then he was falling into a black well where he should have
been able to lie unmolested, looking up at the circle of peering faces
far above him only if he wanted.

But they rolled him inside a rug and carried him to a place
where he knew he did not want to go. He'd screwed up, no denying it,
and they'd unzipped his package. But it should have been over. Why were
they doing this? They were lifting him again now, out of a car trunk,
over the top of the bumper, carrying him across grass, through a fence
gate that creaked on a hinge, unrolling him now in the dirt, under a
sky bursting with stars.

One of his eyes didn't work and the other was filmed with
blood. But he felt their hands raising him up, molding him to a
cruciform design that was foreign to his life, that should not have
been his, stretching out his arms against wood. He remembered pictures
from a Sunday school teacher's book, a dust-blown hill and a darkening
sky and helmeted soldiers whose faces were set with purpose, whose
fists clutched spikes and hammers, whose cloaks were the color of their
work.

Hadn't a woman been there in the pictures, too, one who
pressed a cloth against a condemned man's face? Would she do that for
him, too? He wondered these things as he turned his head to the side
and heard steel ring on steel and saw his hand convulse as though it
belonged to someone else.