IT was sunrise when I turned into Buford LaRose's house the next morning. I saw him at the back of his property, inside a widely spaced stand of pine trees, a gray English riding cap on his head, walking with a hackamore in his hand toward a dozen horses that were bolting and turning in the trees. The temperature had dropped during the night, and their backs steamed like smoke in the early light. I drove my truck along the edge of a cleared cane field and climbed through the railed fence and walked across the pine needles into the shade that smelled of churned sod and fresh horse droppings.
I didn't wait for him to greet me. I took a photograph from my shirt pocket and showed it to him.
"You recognize this man?" I asked.
"No. Who is he, a convict?"
"Mingo Bloomberg. He told me he delivered money to your house for Jerry Joe Plumb."
"Sorry. I don't know him."
I took a second photograph from my pocket, a Polaroid, and held it out in my palm.
"That was taken last night," I said. "We had him in lockup for his own protection. But he hanged himself with a towel in the shower."
"You really know how to get a jump start on the day, Dave. Look, Jerry Joe's connected to a number of labor unions. If I refuse his contribution, maybe I lose several thousand union votes in Jefferson and Orleans parishes."
"It sure sounds innocent enough."
"I'm sorry it doesn't fit into your moral perspective… Don't go yet. I want to show you something."
He walked deeper into the trees. Even though there had been frost on the cane stubble that morning, he wore only a T-shirt with his khakis and half-topped boots and riding cap. His triceps looked thick and hard and were ridged with flaking skin from his early fall redfish-ing trips out on West Cote Blanche Bay. He turned and waited for me.
"Come on, Dave. You made a point of bringing your photographic horror show to my house. You can give me five more minutes of your time," he said.
The land sloped down through persimmon trees and palmettos and a dry coulee bed that was choked with leaves. I could hear the horses nickering behind us, their hooves thudding on the sod. Ahead, I could see the sunlight on the bayou and the silhouette of a black marble crypt surrounded by headstones and a carpet of mushrooms and a broken iron fence. The headstones were green with moss, the chiseled French inscriptions worn into faint tracings.
Buford pushed open the iron gate and waited for me to step inside.
"My great-grandparents are in that crypt," he said. He rubbed his hand along the smooth stone, let it stop at a circular pinkish white inlay that was cracked across the center. "Can you recognize the flower? My great-grandfather and both his brothers rode with the Knights of the White Camellia."
"Your wife told me."
"They weren't ashamed of it. They were fine men, even though some of the things they did were wrong."
"What's the point?"
"I believe it's never too late to atone. I believe we can correct the past, make it right in some way."
"You're going to do this for the Knights of the White Camellia?"
"I'm doing it for my family. Is there something wrong with that?" he said. He continued to look at my face. The water was low and slow moving in the bayou and wood ducks were swimming along the edge of the dead hyacinths. "Dave?"
"I'd better be going," I said.
He touched the front of my windbreaker with his fingers. But I said nothing.
"I was speaking to you about a subject that's very personal with me. You presume a great deal," he said. I looked away from the bead of light in his eyes. "Are you hard of hearing?" He touched my chest again, this time harder.
"Don't do that," I said.
"Then answer me."
"I don't think they were fine men."
"Sir?"
"Shakespeare says it in King Lear. The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. They terrorized and murdered people of color. Cut the bullshit, Buford."
I walked out the gate and back through the trees. I heard his feet in the leaves behind me. He grabbed my arm and spun me around.
"That's the last time you'll turn your back on me, sir," he said.
"Go to hell."
His hands closed and opened at his sides, as though they were kneading invisible rubber balls. His forearms looked swollen, webbed with veins.
"You fucked my wife and dumped her. You accuse me of persecuting an innocent man. You insult my family. I don't know why I ever let a piece of shit like you on my property. But it won't happen again. I guarantee you that, Dave."
He was breathing hard. A thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, had come into his eyes, stayed a moment, then left. He slipped his hands stiffly into his back pockets.
The skin of my face felt tight, suddenly cold in the wind off the bayou. I could feel a dryness, a constriction in my throat, like a stick turned sideways. I tried to swallow, to reach for an adequate response. The leaves and desiccated twigs under my feet crunched like tiny pieces of glass.
"You catch me off the clock and repeat what you just said…," I began.
"You're a violent, predictable man, the perfect advocate for Aaron Crown," he said, and walked through the pines toward the house. He flung the hackamore into a tree trunk.
That night I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling, then sat on the side of the bed, my thoughts like spiders crawling out of a paper bag I didn't know how to get rid of. A thick, low fog covered the swamp, and under the moon the dead cypress protruded like rotted pilings out of a white ocean.
"What is it?" Bootsie said.
"Buford LaRose."
"This morning?"
"I want to tear him up. I don't think I've ever felt like that toward anyone."
"You've got to let it go, Dave."
I rubbed my palms on my knees and let out my breath.
"Why does he bother you so much?" she asked.
"Because you never let another man talk to you like that."
"People have said worst to you." She lay her hand on my arm. "Put the covers over you. It's cold."
"I'm going to fix something to eat."
"Is it because of his background?"
"I don't know."
She was quiet for a long time.
"Say it, Boots."
"Or is it Karyn?" she asked.
I went into the kitchen by myself, poured a glass of milk, and stared out the window at my neighbor's pasture, where one of his mares was running full-out along the fence line, her breath blowing, her muscles working rhythmically, as though she were building a secret pleasure inside herself that was about to climax and burst.
The next morning I parked my truck on Decatur Street, on the edge of the French Quarter, and walked through Jackson Square, past St. Louis Cathedral, and on up St. Ann to the tan stucco building with the arched entrance and brick courtyard where Clete Purcel kept his office. It had rained before dawn, and the air was cool and bright, and bougainvillea hung through the grill work on the balcony upstairs. I looked through his window and saw him reading from a manila folder on top of his desk, his shirt stretched tight across his back, his glasses as small as bifocals on his big face.
I opened the door and stuck my head inside.
"You still mad?" I said.
"Hey, what's goin' on, big mon?"
"I'll buy you a beignet," I said.
He thought about it, made a rolling, popping motion with his fingers and hands, then followed me outside.
"Just don't talk to me about Aaron Crown and Buford LaRose," he said.
"I won't."
"What are you doing in New Orleans?"
"I need to check out Jimmy Ray Dixon again. His office says he's at his pool hall out by the Desire."
He tilted his porkpie hat on his head, squinted at the sun above the rooftops.
"Did you ever spit on baseballs when you pitched American Legion?" he said.
We had beignets and coffee with hot milk at an outdoor table in the Cafe du Monde. Across the street, sidewalk artists were painting on easels by the iron fence that bordered the park, and you could hear boat horns out on the river, just the other side of the levee. I told him about Mingo Bloomberg's death.
"It doesn't surprise me. I think it's what they all look for," he said.
"What?"
"The Big Exit. If they can't get somebody to do it for them, they do it themselves. Most of them would have been better off if their mothers had thrown them away and raised the afterbirth."
"You want to take a ride?"
"That neighborhood's a free-fire zone, Streak. Let Jimmy Ray slide. He's a walking ad for enlistment in the Klan."
"See you later, then."
"Oh, your ass," he said, and caught up with me on the sidewalk, pulling on his sports coat, a powdered beignet in his mouth.
The pool room was six blocks from the Desire welfare project. The windows were barred, the walls built of cinder blocks and scrolled with spray-painted graffiti. I parked by the curb and stepped up on the sidewalk, unconsciously looked up and down the street.
"We're way up the Mekong, Dave. Hang your buzzer out," Clete said.
I took out my badge holder and hooked it through the front of my belt, listened to somebody shatter a tight rack and slam the cue stick down on the table's edge, then walked through the entrance into the darkness inside.
The low ceiling seemed to crush down on the pool shooters like a fist. The bar and the pool tables ran the length of the building, a tin-hooded lamp creating a pyramid of smoky light over each felt rectangle. No one looked directly at us; instead, our presence was noted almost by osmosis, the way schooled fish register and adjust to the proximity of a predator, except for one man, who came out of the rest room raking at his hair with a steel comb, glanced toward the front, then slammed out of a firedoor.
Jimmy Ray Dixon was at a card table in back, by himself, a ledger book, calculator, a filter-tipped cigar inside an ashtray, and a stack of receipts in front of him. He wore a blue suit and starched pink shirt with a high collar, a brown knit tie and gold tie pin with a red stone in it.
"I seen you on TV, still frontin' points for the man killed my brother," he said, without looking up from his work. He picked up a receipt with his steel hook and set it down again.
"I need your help," I said. I waited but he went on with his work. "Sir?" I said.
"What?"
"Can we sit down?"
"Do what you want, man."
Clete went to the bar and got a shot and a beer, then twisted a chair around and sat down next to me.
"Somebody put a hit on Mingo Bloomberg," I said.
"I heard he hung himself from a water pipe in y'all's jail," Jimmy Ray said.
"Word gets around fast."
"A dude like that catch the bus, people have parades."
"He told me a black guy out of Miami had a contract on him. He said a guy who looks like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit."
Clete scraped a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the next table, his eyes drifting down the bar.
"Maybe you ought to give some thought to where you're at," Jimmy Ray said.
"You heard about a mechanic out of Miami?" I said.
"I tell you how I read this sit'ation. You put a snitch jacket on a guy and jammed him up so he didn't have no place to run. So maybe somebody's conscience bothering him, know what I mean?" he said.
"I think the same hitter popped Lonnie Felton's scriptwriter."
"Could be. But ain't my bidness."
"What is your business?"
"Look, man, this is what it is. A smart man got his finger in lots of pies. Don't mean none of them bad. 'Cause this guy's a brother, you ax me if I know him. I don't like to give you a short answer, but you got a problem with the way you think. It ain't much different than that cracker up at Angola."
Clete leaned forward in his chair, cracked the shell off a peanut, and threw the peanut in his mouth.
"You still pimp, Jimmy Ray?" he asked, his eyes looking at nothing.
"You starting to burn your ticket, Chuck."
"I count eight bail skips in here. I count three who aren't paying the vig to the Shylock who lent them the bail. The guy who went out the door with his hair on fire snuffed one of Dock Green's hookers in Algiers," Clete said.
"You want to use the phone, it's a quarter," Jimmy Ray said.
"No black hitter works the town without permission. Why let him get the rhythm while you got the blues?" Clete said.
"All my blues is on the jukebox, provided to me by Mr. Jerry Joe Plumb, boy you grew up with," Jimmy Ray said to me.
"Crown has to stay down for Buford LaRose to go to Baton Rouge. Tell me you're not part of this, Jimmy Ray," I said.
He looked up at the clock over the bar. "The school kids gonna be out on the street. Y'all got anything in your car you want to keep?… Excuse me, I got to see how much collards I can buy tonight."
He began tapping figures off a receipt onto his calculator.
That evening, under a gray sky, Alafair and I raked out the shed and railed horse lot where she kept her Appaloosa. Then we piled the straw and dried-out green manure in a wheelbarrow and buried it in the compost pile by our vegetable garden. The air was cool, flecked with rain, and smelled like gas and chrysanthemums.
"Who's that man down on the dock, Dave?" Alafair said.
He was squatted down on his haunches, with his back to us. He wore a fedora, dark brown slacks, and a scuffed leather jacket. He was carving a stalk of sugarcane, notching thick plugs out of the stalk between his thumb and the knife blade, feeding them off the blade into his mouth.
"He was in the shop this afternoon. He has a red parachute tattooed on his arm," she said.
I propped my foot on the shovel's blade and rested my arm across the end of the shaft. "Jerry Joe Plumb," I said.
"Is he a bad man?"
"I was never sure, Alf. Tell Bootsie I'll be along in a minute."
I walked down to the end of the dock and leaned my palms on the rail. Jerry Joe continued to look out at the brown current from under the brim of his fedora. He folded his pocketknife against the heel of his hand. The blade was the dull color of an old nickel.
"You figure I owe you?"
"What for?"
"I took something out of your house a long time ago."
"I don't remember it."
"Yeah, you do. I resented you for it."
"What's up, partner?"
The scar at the corner of his eye looked like bunched white string.
"My mom used to clean house for Buford LaRose's parents… The old man could be a rotten bastard, but he gave me a job rough-necking in West Texas when I was just seventeen and later on got me into the airborne. It was the way the old man treated Buford that always bothered me, maybe because I was part responsible for it. You think they won't take you off at the neck because they're rich? It's not enough they win; somebody's got to lose. What I'm saying is, everybody's shit flushes. You're no exception, Dave."
"You're not making any sense."
"They'll grind you up."
What follows is my best reconstruction of Jerry Joe's words.