DR10 - Sunset Limited (30 page)

"What can I do for you?" I said.

He stood on the sandbar in rolled denim shorts and tennis
shoes without socks and a thick white shirt sewn with a half dozen
pockets. He looked back down the bayou, listening to the drone of an
outboard engine, his soft face pink in the sunset.

"Some men might try to hurt my daughter," he said.

"I think your concern is for yourself, Mr. Holtzner."

When he swallowed, his mouth made an audible click.

"They've told me I either pay them money I don't have or
they'll hurt Geri. These men take off heads. I mean that literally," he
said.

"Come down to my office and make a report."

"What if they find out?" he asked.

I had turned to chain the damaged hull to the back of my
outboard. I straightened up and looked into his face. The air itself
seemed fouled by his words, his self-revelation hanging in the dead
space between us like a dirty flag. His eyes went away from me.

"You can call me during office hours. Whatever you tell me
will be treated confidentially," I said.

He sat down in his boat and began pushing it awkwardly off the
sandbar by shoving a paddle into the mud.

"Did we meet somewhere before?" he asked.

"No. Why?"

"Your hostility. You don't hide it well."

He tried to crank his engine, then gave it up and drifted with
the current toward the dock, his shoulders bent, the hands that had
twisted noses splayed on his flaccid thighs, his chest indented as
though it had been stuck with a small cannonball.

I DIDN'T LIKE BILLY Holtzner or the
group he represented. But
in truth some of my feelings had nothing to do with his or their
behavior.

In the summer of 1946 my father was in the Lafayette Parish
Prison for punching out a policeman who tried to cuff him in Antlers
Pool Room. That was the same summer my mother met a corporal from Fort
Polk named Hank Clausson.

"He was at Omaha Beach, Davy. That's when our people was
fighting Hitler and run the Nazis out of Europe. He got all kind of
medals he gonna show you," she said.

Hank was lean and tall, his face sun-browned, his uniform
always starched and pressed and his shoes and brass shined. I didn't
know he was sleeping over until I walked in on him in the bathroom one
morning and caught him shaving in his underwear. The back of his right
shoulder was welted with a terrible red scar, as though someone had dug
at the flesh with a spoon. He shook his safety razor in the stoppered
lavatory water and drew another swath under his chin.

"You need to get in here?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"That's where a German stuck a bayonet in me. That was so kids
like you didn't end up in an oven," he said, and crimped his lips
together and scraped the razor under one nostril.

He put a single drop of hair tonic on his palms and rubbed
them together, then rubbed the oil into his scalp and drew his comb
back through his short-cropped hair, his knees bending slightly so he
could see his face fully in the mirror.

Hank took my mother and me to the beer garden and bowling
alley out on the end of East Main. We sat at a plank table in a grove
of oak trees that were painted white around the trunks and hung with
speakers that played recorded dance music. My mother wore a blue skirt
that was too small for her and a white blouse and a pillbox hat with an
organdy veil pinned up on top. She was heavy-breasted and thick-bodied,
and her sexuality and her innocence about it seemed to burst from her
clothes when she jitterbugged, or, even a moment later, slow-danced
with Hank, her face hot and breathless, while his fingers slipped down
the small of her back and kneaded her rump.

"Hank's in a union for stagehands in the movie business, Davy.
Maybe we going out to Hollywood and start a new life there," she said.

The loudspeakers in the trees were playing "One O'clock Jump,"
and through the windows in the bar I could see couples jitterbugging,
spinning, flinging each other back and forth. Hank tipped his bottle of
Jax beer to his lips and took a light sip, his eyes focused on nothing.
But when a blond woman in a flowered dress and purple hat walked across
his gaze, I saw his eyes touch on her body like a feather, then go
empty again.

"But maybe you gonna have to stay with your aunt just a little
while," my mother said. "Then I'm gonna send for you. You gonna ride
the Sunset Limited to Hollywood, you."

My mother went inside the bowling alley to use the rest room.
The trees were glowing with the white flood lamps mounted on the
branches, the air roaring with the music of Benny Goodman's orchestra.
The blond woman in the flowered dress and purple hat walked to our
table, a small glass of beer in one hand. The butt of her cigarette was
thick with lipstick.

"How's the war hero?" she said.

He took another sip from his bottle of Jax and picked up a
package of Lucky Strikes from the table and removed a cigarette
gingerly by the tip and placed it in his mouth, never looking at the
woman.

"My phone number's the same as it was last week. I hope
nothing's been hard in your life," she said.

"Maybe I'll call you sometime," he replied.

"No need to call. You can come whenever you want," she said.
When she grinned there was a red smear on her teeth.

"I'll keep it in mind," he said.

She winked and walked away, the cleft in her buttocks visible
through the thinness of her dress. Hank opened a penknife and began
cleaning his nails.

"You got something to say?" he asked me.

"No, sir."

"That woman there is a whore. You know what a whore is, Davy?"

"No." There was a glaze of starch on his khaki thigh. I could
smell an odor like heat and soap and sweat that came from inside his
shirt.

"It means she's not fit to sit down with your mother," he
said. "So I don't want you talking about what you just heard. If you
do, you'd best be gone when I come over."

Three days later my aunt and I stood on the platform at the
train station and watched my mother and Hank climb aboard the Sunset
Limited. They disappeared through the vestibule, then she came back and
hugged me one more time.

"Davy, it ain't gonna be long. They got the ocean out there
and movie stars and palm trees everywhere. You gonna love it, you," she
said. Then Hank pulled her hand, and the two of them went into the
observation car, their faces opaque now, like people totally removed
from anything recognizable in their lives. Behind my mother's head I
could see mural paintings of mesas and flaming sunsets.

But she didn't send for me, nor did she write or call. Three
months later a priest telephoned collect from Indio, California, and
asked my father if he could wire money for my mother's bus ticket back
to New Iberia.

For years I dreamed of moonscape and skeletal trees along a
railroad bed where white wolves with red mouths lived among the
branches. When the Sunset Limited screamed down the track, the wolves
did not run. They ate their young. I never discussed the dream with
anyone.

A PSYCHOLOGIST WOULD PROBABLY agree
that unless a person is a
sociopath, stuffed guilt can fill him with a level of neurotic anxiety
that is like waiting for a headsman in a cloth hood to appear at the
prison door.

I didn't know if Alex Guidry was a sociopath or not, but on
Monday Helen and I began tightening a couple of dials on his head.

We parked the cruiser at the entrance to his home and watched
him walk from his bunkerlike brick house to the garage and open the
garage door, simultaneously looking in our direction. He drove down the
long shell drive to the parish road and slowed by the cruiser, rolling
down his window on its electric motor. But Helen and I continued
talking to each other as though he were not there. Then we made a
U-turn and followed him to the finance company his wife's family owned
in town, his eyes watching us in the rearview mirror.

Decades back the wife's father had made his way through the
plantation quarters every Saturday morning, collecting the half-dollar
payments on burial policies that people of color would give up food,
even prostitute themselves, in order to maintain. The caskets they were
buried in were made out of plywood and cardboard and crepe paper,
wrapped in dyed cheesecloth and draped with huge satin bows. The plots
were in Jim Crow cemeteries and the headstones had all the dignity of
Hallmark cards. But as gaudy and cheap and sad as it all was, the
spaded hole in the ground and the plastic flowers and the satin ribbons
that decorated the piled dirt did not mark the entrance to the next
world but the only level of accomplishment the dead could achieve in
this one.

The Negro burial insurance business had passed into history
and the plantation quarters were deserted, but the same people came
with regularity to the finance company owned by the wife's family and
signed papers they could not read and made incremental loan payments
for years without ever reducing the principal. A pawnshop stood next
door, also owned by the wife's family. Unlike most businesspeople,
Guidry and his inlaws prospered most during economic recession.

We parked behind his car and watched him pause on the sidewalk
and stare at us, then go inside.

A moment later a brown Honda, driven by a tall man in a gray
suit, pulled to the curb, on the wrong side of the street, and parked
bumper to bumper in front of Guidry's car. The driver, who was a DEA
agent named Minos Dautrieve, got out and met us on the sidewalk in
front of the finance company's glass doors. His crew-cut blond hair was
flecked with white threads now, but he still had the same tall, angular
good looks that sports photographers had loved when he played forward
for LSU and was nicknamed "Dr. Dunkenstein" after he sailed through the
air and slammed the ball so hard through the rim he shattered the
backboard like hard candy.

"How's the fishing?" he said.

"They've got your name on every fin," I said.

"I'll probably come out this evening. How you doin', Helen?"

"Just fine. Lovely day, isn't it?" she replied.

"Do we have our friend's attention?" he asked, his back to the
glass doors.

"Yep," I said.

He took a notebook out of his pocket and studied the first
page of it.

"Well, I have to pick up a couple of things for my wife, then
meet her and her mother in Lafayette. We'll see you-all," he said. He
put the notebook back in his pocket, then walked to the front doors of
the finance company, cupped his hands around his eyes to shield them
from the sun, and peered through the tinted glass.

After he had driven away, Alex Guidry came out on the sidewalk.

"What are you people doing?" he said.

"You're an ex-cop. Guess," Helen said.

"That man's a federal agent of some kind," Guidry said.

"The guy who just left? He's an ex-jock. He was ail-American
honorable mention at LSU. That's a fact," I said.

"What is this?" he said.

"You're in the shithouse, Mr. Guidry. That's what it is,"
Helen said.

"This is harassment and I won't put up with it," he said.

"You're naive, sir. You're the subject of a murder
investigation. You're also tied in with Harpo Scruggs. Scruggs has
asked for immunity. You know where that leaves his friends? I'd get a
parachute," I said.

"Fuck you," he said, and went back inside.

But his shirtsleeve caught on the door handle. When he pulled
at it he ripped the cloth and hit a matronly white woman between the
shoulder blades with his elbow.

TWO HOURS LATER GUIDRY called the
office.

"Scruggs is getting immunity for what?" he asked.

"I didn't say he was 'getting' anything."

I could hear him breathing against the receiver.

"First guy in line doesn't do the Big Sleep," I said.

"Same answer. Do your worst. At least I didn't flush my career
down the bowl because I couldn't keep a bottle out of my mouth," he
said.

"Ida Broussard was carrying your baby when you killed her, Mr.
Guidry."

He slammed down the phone.

THREE DAYS LATER, IN the cool of the
evening, Lila Terrebonne
and Geraldine Holtzner came down the dirt road in Clete Purcel's
chartreuse Cadillac, the top down, and pulled into the drive. Alafair
and I were raking leaves and burning them on the edge of the road. The
leaves were damp and black, and the smoke from the fire twisted upward
into the trees in thick yellow curds and smelled like marijuana burning
in a wet field. Both Lila and Geraldine seemed delighted with the
pink-gray loveliness of the evening, with our activity in the yard,
with themselves, with the universe.

"What are you guys up to?" I said.

"We're going to a meeting. You want to tag along?" Geraldine
said from behind the wheel.

"It's a thought. What are you doing with Clete's car?" I said.

"Mine broke down. He lent me his," Geraldine said. "I went
back to Narcotics Anonymous, in case you're wondering. But I go to AA
sometimes, too."

Lila was smiling, a wistful, unfocused beam in her eye. "Hop
in, good-looking," she said.

"Did y'all make a stop before you got here?" I asked.

"Dave, I bet you urinated on radiators in elementary school,"
Lila said.

"I might see y'all up there later. Y'all be careful about
Clete's tires. The air is starting to show through," I said.

"This is a lovely car. You drive it and suddenly it's 1965.
What a wonderful time that was, just before everything started to
change," she said.

"Who could argue, Lila?" I said.

Unless you were black or spent '65 in Vietnam, I thought as
they drove away.

THE AA MEETING THAT evening was held
in the upstairs rooms of
an old brick church out on West Main. The Confederates had used the
church for a hospital while they tried to hold back the Federals on the
Teche south of town; then, after the town had been occupied and looted
and the courthouse torched, the Federals inverted half the pews and
filled them with hay for their horses. But most of the people in the
upper rooms this evening cared little about the history of the
building. The subject of the meeting was the Fifth Step of AA recovery,
which amounts to owning up, or confessing, to one's past.