A love affair with Louisiana is in some ways like falling in love with the biblical whore of Babylon. We try to smile at its carnival-like politics, its sweaty, whiskey-soaked demagogues, the ignorance bred by its poverty and the insularity of its Cajun and Afro-Caribbean culture. But our self-deprecating manner is a poor disguise for the realities that hover on the edges of one's vision like ditty smudges on a family portrait.
The state roadsides and parking lots of discount stores are strewn, if not actually layered, with mind-numbing amounts of litter, thrown there by the poor and the uneducated and the revelers for whom a self-congratulatory hedonism is a way of life. With regularity, land developers who are accountable to no one bulldoze out stands of virgin cypress and two-hundred-year-old live oaks, often at night, so the irrevocable nature of their work cannot be seen until daylight, when it is too late to stop it. The petrochemical industry poisons waterways with impunity and even trucks in waste frdm out of state and dumps it in open sludge pits, usually in rural black communities.
Rather than fight monied interests, most of the state's politicians give their constituency casinos and Powerball lotteries and drive-by daiquiri windows, along with low income taxes for the wealthy and an eight and one quarter percent sales tax on food for the poor.
Why meditate upon a depressing subject?
Because on occasion an attempt at redress can come from an unexpected source.
On Monday afternoon Marvin Oates was pulling his suitcase on wheels down a rural road that traversed cattle acreage and pecan orchards, across a bridge that spanned a coulee lined with hardwoods and palmettos, past neat cottages with screened porches and shade trees. Up ahead was the Boom Boom Room, the dilapidated Iberia Parish bar owned by Jimmy Dean Styles. A red convertible, the top down, roared past him, the stereo blaring. A bag of fast-food trash and beer cans sailed out of the backseat and exploded against the trunk of a pecan tree, showering litter in a yard.
Marvin Oates labored down the road, the roller skate affixed to the bottom of his suitcase grating against the road surface with the unrelieved intensity of marbles rolling down a corrugated tin roof. When he reached the Boom Boom Room, three of Jimmy Styles's rappers and two tattooed, peroxided white women in shorts were drinking long-necked beer and passing a joint by the side of the convertible.
A line of sweat leaked from Marvin's hat down his cheek. He loosened his tie, craned his neck, blew out his breath, as though releasing the heat trapped inside his sports coat.
"Excuse me, but back yonder one of y'all threw a bag of trash out your car," he said.
"Say what?" said a tall man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows.
"There's some old colored folks living in that house where you flung your garbage. How'd you like it if you was them and you had to pick up lunch trash with mouth germs all over it?" Marvin said.
"Where you from, cracker?" the tall man with orange and purple hair said.
"Where folks ain't so ashamed of what they are they got to pay a couple of fat whores to take their dick out of their pants for them," Marvin said.
"Hey, Jimmy Sty, come out here! You got to check this out!" another black man called out. Then he turned back to Marvin. "Run all that by us again, man."
"Ain't my purpose to get nobody mad. I'm going back on my route now. Lessen one of y'all is interested in a magazine subscription or a discount Bible offer," Marvin said.
"You believe this motherfucker?" the man with orange and purple hair said, then balanced his beer bottle on the oyster shells.
"You ask me a question, I give you a straight answer. The Bible is my road map, sir. You don't like what you hear, that's your dadburn problem," Marvin said, and blotted his forehead on his coat sleeve. "It's flat burning up, ain't it?"
The group around the convertible was now joined by others from inside the bar, including Jimmy Dean Styles. They stared at Marvin in dismay.
"Somebody put you up to this? Or you just a dumb white motherfucker want to commit suicide?" said a man with a nylon stocking crimped down on his head.
Marvin looked innocuously at a cloud, his eyebrows raised. "Most of y'all got born 'cause your mama dint have money for an abortion. That's why you call other people 'motherfucker' all the time. It's 'cause y'all know everybody in town got in your mother's drawers. So anytime you insult other folks with a bad name like that, it's on your own self. I ain't trying to hurt your feelings. It's just a psychological fact."
The tall man with rings in his eyebrows picked up his beer bottle from the oyster shells, tossed Marvin Oates's hat into the crowd, and smashed the bottle across Marvin's head. The crowd roared.
Marvin fell across his suitcase and took a kick in the ribs and another between his buttocks. He pushed himself up on the convertible's bumper, his coat powdered with white dust, his eyes closing, then opening, as though a piece of sharp metal was buried deep in his bowels.
He felt the back of his head and swallowed, then walked unsteadily on the shells and found his hat and knocked it clean of dust on his leg.
"You still ain't got the right to throw trash in old folks' yard," he said.
The crowd surged forward, but Jimmy Dean Styles stepped between Marvin and his adversaries and leaned over and retrieved the tow strap of Marvin's suitcase from the dust and placed it in his hand.
"Don't come around here no more," he said.
Marvin stared into Styles's eyes, as though looking for an answer to an ancient question about the nature of evil.
"Who are you?" Marvin asked.
"The man who know a nigger when he see one. You better hoof it, bro," Styles replied.
Helen and I were on our way back from an inter-agency law enforcement meeting in Jeanerette when we passed the situation in progress in front of the Boom Boom Room. We pulled to the side of the road and told Marvin to get in the backseat of the cruiser, behind the steel-mesh screen.
He threw his suitcase on the seat and pulled the coned brim of his hat down on his brow as we roared away, looking back through the window like a Pony Express rider who had been saved by friends from Indians.
"You crazy, Marvin?" Helen said, glancing in the rearview mirror.
"What's the name of that guy, the one in charge back there?" Marvin asked.
"Jimmy Dean Styles. Why do you ask?" I said.
"I just feel sorry for them people, that's all." He sprayed his mouth with an atomizer.
Helen and I dropped him off downtown, by the Shadows, his face freckled with the sunshine that fell through the oak limbs overhead.
"He seems to have people of color on the mind," I said.
"He should," Helen said.
"Pardon?"
"His mother took on all comers. I always heard Marvin's father was black," she said.
That same afternoon Clete Purcel drove to the motor court on the bayou, where he used to live, and knocked on Joe Zeroski's cottage door.
"What'd you want, Purcel?" one of Joe's men said. He was bald and wore slacks and a strap undershirt. Pieces of his sandwich were hanging from his mouth while he ate. A television set blared in the background.
"Where's Joe?" Clete asked.
"He ain't here."
Clete looked through oaks at the bayou, a tugboat passing, the sunlight breaking like glass on the water.
"You want to tell me what I already know, or you want to clean the dog food out of your mouth and answer my question?" he said.
Then Clete drove from the motor court, across the drawbridge, to a Catholic church on the other side of the bayou. He walked inside and saw Joe Zeroski seated in a pew, by a rack of burning candles, in an otherwise empty church. Clete went back outside and waited. Five minutes later Joe emerged in the sunlight, putting on his hat as he exited the vestibule. He stared at Clete.
"You following me?" Joe asked.
"I didn't know you went to church."
"I burn a candle for my daughter. Why you here, Purcel?"
Joe wore a gray suit and a gray and red tie, and the wind blew his tie over his shoulder.
"The sheriffs department is looking at a guy by the name of Legion Guidry for Linda's murder. I thought you ought to know that," Clete said.
"What, you owe me favors?"
"You were always straight up with me. So was Frankie Dogs. Who knows, maybe Frankie Dogs was on to the guy. Maybe that's why Frankie got clipped."
Joe studied the trees along the bank of the bayou, popped a crick out of his neck, as though there were a thought behind his eyes he couldn't deal with.
"I had her cremated. There wasn't no way to fix her face for the funeral," he said.
"Guidry has a long history of violence against females, Joe. You said it yourself, how many guys like this are running around in one small town?"
"Say this guy's name again."
Late that evening Clete sat with me at the redwood table under the mimosa in my backyard and told me the story of his conversation with Joe Zeroski. When he finished, he took off his Marine Corps utility cap and refitted it on his head and looked at the purple light in the sky and the wind blowing across my neighbor's cane field, his green eyes red-rimmed with fatigue.
"I thought the drought was over. Two days of dry weather and it's the dust bowl again," he said.
"You bothered about taking Zeroski over the hurdles?" I asked.
"Joe will probably eat his gun one day. But he never tried to jam anybody who wasn't in the life. I guess if I could feel sorry for a gumball, I do for him," Clete said.
"We don't have any influence over these guys. Stop trying to orchestrate them, Clete."
"I think I ought to call him up," he said.
I squeezed Clete's bicep, hard, my fingers biting deep into the muscle. "Once and for all and forever, leave Zeroski and especially Legion Guidry alone." I tightened my grasp when Clete tried to pull away from me. "Did you hear me? Legion Guidry comes from someplace the rest of us don't. That's a theological statement."
"Sometimes I wish you didn't share all your thoughts, big mon."
I awoke before sunrise on Tuesday and walked down the slope through the oaks and pecan trees to the bait shop. The fog was a bluish gray in the fjalse dawn, then the sun broke on the horizon and the fog turned the color of cotton candy and I could see snow egrets rising like confetti above the cypress trees in the swamp.
Batist and I scrubbed down the spool tables, popped opened the umbrellas above them, picked up beer cans and bait cups from the boat ramp, and used a boat hook to gather floating trash from the pilings under the dock. All of this was done under the supervision of Tripod, Alafair's fat, three-legged, silver-ringed pet coon. Then Batist took a break and poured a cup of coffee for himself from a drip pot on the gas burner and dropped a red quarter into the jukebox and played Guitar Slim's "I Done Got Over It." The haunting sounds of Slim's music reverberated across the water and into the trees like electronic echoes inside a stone pipe.
"Why'd you play that particular song?" I asked.
"The man talking about getting over it. You don't never get ahead of it. You just get over it. I t'ink he figured out what it was all about."
"You think Tee Bobby Hulin murdered that white girl?" I asked.
Batist picked up Tripod from a shelf, where he was sniffing a glass jar filled with candy bars. Batist opened the screen and dropped him with a thump on the dock.
"That boy ain't no good, Dave. You don't believe I'm right, ax yourself who he hang around wit'. Jimmy Dean Styles say jump, Tee Bobby say 'How high?'"
Then, as irony would have it, just as I was about to go up to the house and change clothes for work, the phone on the counter rang. It was Sister Helen Bienvenu, the nun who gave art lessons at the public library.
"I did something I think I shouldn't have," she said.
"What's that, Sister?" I said.
"Rosebud Hulin did a lovely drawing of Amanda Boudreau with her parents. I think the photo was in the Daily Iberian about a week ago. When she finished it, she pressed it into my hands, as though she wanted me to give it to someone. There was a kind of sadness in her I can't adequately describe."
"I don't understand. What did you do that was improper?" I said.
"I gave the drawing to the Boudreau family. I didn't tell them who drew it, but last night Mrs. Boudreau was at the library and saw Rosebud in my drawing class. It was obvious she made the connection. I feel like I've exacerbated an already very bad situation."
"Did you ask Rosebud why she wanted to draw the Boudreau family?"
"Yes. She ran away from me. What are you going to do, Mr. Robicheaux?" she said.
"Did you tell anybody else about this?"
"No. But there was a black man who saw the drawing. He came to the class one night to drive Rosebud home. She wouldn't go with him. He owns a bar."
"Jimmy Dean Styles?"
"Yes, I think that's his name."
"Styles is a bad guy, Sister. Don't have anything to do with him."
"This upsets me, Mr. Robicheaux," she said.
"You didn't do anything wrong."
"Did Rosebud witness a murder? Please don't lie to me," she said.
I went up to the house and changed clothes and fixed coffee and a pan of hot milk and ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and blueberries at the kitchen table. Bootsie came out of the bedroom in her terry-cloth bathrobe and took the medication that kept her lupus, what we called the red wolf, in abeyance. Then she sat down across from me and wrapped the inflatable tourniquet of her blood pressure monitor around her upper arm. She waited for the digital numerals to stop flashing on the monitor, then pushed the button on the air release valve and puffed out her cheeks, exasperated at not being able to change a condition that seemed both unfair and without origin.
"You've eaten salt and fried food every day of your life and your systolic is ten points above a cadaver's. What's your secret, Streak?" she said.
"Picture of Dorian Gray syndrome."
"Let me take your blood pressure," she said.
"I'd better get on the road."
"No, I want to see if my monitor's accurate," she said.
She wrapped my arm and pumped the rubber ball in her hand. She looked at the numbers on the monitor and punched the air release, her expression neutral.
"Your systolic is 165 over 90," she said. I turned the page on the newspaper and tried to shine her on.
"That's almost forty points above your normal," she said.
"Maybe I'm off my feed this morning."
She put the monitor back in its box and began fixing cereal for herself at the drainboard. When she spoke again, her back was still turned to me.
"All my diet pills are gone. So is the aspirin. So are all the megavitamins I bought in Lafayette. What the hell are you doing, Dave?" she said.
I went to the office and tried to concentrate on a back-load of paperwork in my intake basket, A dozen messages were on my voice mail, a dozen more in my mailbox. A homeless man, who daily walked the length of the city with all his belongings rolled inside a yellow tent that he carried draped over his neck and shoulders like a gigantic cross, wandered in off the street and demanded to see me.
His eyes were filled with madness, his skin grimed almost black, his yellow hair glued together with his own body grease, his odor so offensive that people left the room with handkerchiefs over their mouths.
He said he had known me in Vietnam, that he'd been a medic who had loaded me with blood-expander and shot me up with morphine and pulled me onboard a slick and held me in his arms while the air frame rang with AK-47 rounds from the canopy sweeping by below us.
I looked into his seamed, wretched face and saw no one there I recognized.
"What was your outfit, Doc?" I asked.
"Who gives a shit?" he replied.
"I've got twenty bucks here. Sorry it's not more."
He balled his hand on the bill I gave him. His nails were as thick as tortoiseshell, gray through the tops with the amounts of dirt impacted under them.
"I had a rosary wrapped around my steel pot. I gave it to you. Don't let them get behind you, motherfucker," he said.
After he was gone we opened the windows and Wally the dispatcher had the janitor wipe down the chair the deranged man had sat in.
"You knew that guy?" Wally said.
"Maybe."
"You want me to have him picked up, take him to a shelter?"
"The war's over," I said, and went back to my office.
At ten o'clock my skin was coming off. I drank water at the cooler, chewed two packs of gum, went to Baron's Health Club and pounded the heavy bag, then returned to the office, sweating inside my clothes, burning with irritability.
I checked but a cruiser and drove out to the home of Amanda Boudreau's parents. I found Mr. Boudreau at the back of his property, under shade trees by the coulee, uncrating and assembling an irrigation pump. It was a large, expensive machine, the most sophisticated one on the market. But he had no well or water lines to attach it to, no network of ditches to carry the water it would draw from the aquifer.
He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt and new strap overalls, dark blue and still stiff from the box. His face was flushed, his knuckles skinned where his hand had slipped on a wrench.
"I ain't gonna get caught by drought again," he said. "Last year almost all my cane dried up. Ain't gonna allow it to happen again. No, sir."
"I think the drought is pretty well busted," I said, looking at a bank of black clouds in the south.
"I'm gonna be ready, me. That's the way my father always talked. I’m gonna be ready, me,'" he said. I squatted down next to him.
"I know you and Mrs. Boudreau don't think well of me, but I lost both my mother and my wife, Annie, to violent people. I wanted to find those people and kill them. There's nothing wrong in feeling that way. But I don't want to see a good man like yourself take matters into his own hands. You're not going to do that, are you, sir?"
He clapped his broad hand on a mosquito that had landed on the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm.
"Lou'sana's been drying up. Gonna dig me a well. Gonna have ditches and lines all through those fields. It can get dry as a brick in a stove, but I'm gonna have all the water I want," he said. He went back to his work, twisting a wrench on a nut, his meaty, skinned hand shining with sweat.
I stopped at a phone booth and called Clete's apartment.
"You still have flashbacks?" I asked.
"About 'Nam? Not much. Sometimes I dream about it. But not much."
"A guy came off the street today. He said he was the medic who took care of me when I was hit."
"Was he?"
"He was deranged. His hair was blond. The kid who got me to battalion aid was Italian, from Staten Island."
"So shit-can it."
"The homeless man had a New York accent. What's a New York street person doing around here?" I said.
"Where are you, big mon?"
I drove to Jimmy Dean Styles's New Iberia bar and was told by his bartender that Jimmy Dean was at his other club, the one he owned jointly with a bondsman in St. Martinville. I was there in twenty minutes. Styles was at the bar, reading a newspaper while he dipped cracklings into a bowl of red sauce and ate them, wiping his fingers on a moist towel, his eyes never leaving the page he was reading.
"You follow the market?" I asked.
"High-yield municipals, Lou'sana Chuck. Pay twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Like a girl got her groove with the right people, it always working, know what I'm sayin'? I can help you with something?" Styles replied.
"I don't know if you can or not, but hold that thought. Where's your rest room?" I said.
He nodded his head toward the rear of the building and dipped a crackling into his bowl and inserted it in his mouth, an amused light in his eyes.
His entourage of rappers and whores were at tables by the dance floor. They paid no attention to me as I passed. Inside the rest room I washed my face with cold water and looked in the mirror. I could hear a sound in my ears, like wind whistling inside a tin can, feel a pressure band along the side of my head, as though I were wearing a tight hat. A jukebox began playing by the dance floor, and I would have sworn the voice on the recording was Guitar Slim's. I washed my face again. When I closed my eyes against the coldness of the water, I saw faces from my platoon, kids who had been out too long, their legs pocked with jungle ulcers, the smell of trench foot rising from their socks, scared shitless of night-trail toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105's, nobody in touch with who they used to be. A San Bernardino hot-rodder with a juju bag tied under his throat and a scalp lock to his rifle. A black kid from West Memphis, Arkansas, zoned on uppers and too many firefights, a green sweat towel draped over his head like a monk's cowl, the barrel of his blooker painted with tiger stripes. I could hear them marching, blade-faced, their uniforms stiff with salt, feeding off one another's anger, their boots thudding across a wooden bridge.
I spit in the lavatory and dried my face on my shirt rather than touch the cloth towel on the roller, then went out the door, the breeze from a fan suddenly cool on my skin, my heart racing.
Jimmy Dean Styles closed his newspaper and lifted a demitasse of coffee to his lips.
"Marse Charlie not wit' you today?" he said.
"You were at Rosebud Hulin's art class. That area is now off-limits for you. If she needs a ride, I'll provide one," I said.
"I don't know you, never brought you no grief, never given you no truck, but you always in my face and on my case. What is it wit' you, Chuck?"
"I don't think you're hearing me. Rosebud Hulin is out of your life. We're together on that, right?"
"You wrapped too tight for your job, man. I got a girl over there can take care of that for you, unzipper your problem, know what I'm sayin', but in the meantime don't be jabbing your finger at me."
"Just so you understand later why it all went south, you shouldn't call a guy 'Chuck,' not unless you've paid some dues, humped a sixty-pound pack for twenty klicks in the rain, had Sir Charles kick your ass, seen your friends blown into hamburger, that sort of thing. You reading me, partner?"
"You got a serious jones, Lou'sana Chuck. Now shake your cakes down the road, before I have you picked up," he said.
I caught him solidly on the jaw with a right cross, snapping his head sideways, slinging food out of his mouth, then hooked him in the eye and caught him with another right, this time in the throat, before he could get off the bar stool. He threw two fast punches at me, off balance, unable to draw his arms back for a full swing, and I slipped one of his punches, took the other on the ear, and then hit him with everything I had.
I put my whole weight into each blow, breaking his nose, splitting his mouth against his teeth, gashing open the skin above one eye. He managed to roll off the stool and right himself, even to get his guard up and catch me once, hard, in the chest, but I drove my fist into his rib cage, right under the heart, and saw his willpower leave him, his resistance drain from his face, like water bursting from the bottom of a balloon. I hooked him in the kidney, then in the stomach, doubling him over, forcing him to cling to the stool for support.
But I couldn't let go of it. I seized the back of his head and drove his face down on the knurled edge of the bar, smashing it into the wood, over and over, while behind me women screamed and a tall black man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows tried to get his arms around me and put himself between me and Jimmy Dean Styles.
I pulled my.45 and barrel-stroked the man with orange and purple hair across the face, knocking him to the floor, then racked a round into the chamber and aimed the sight between his eyes, my hands streaked with Jimmy Style's blood, shaking on the grips.
"I'll get out of town. I promise. Don't do it, man. Please," the man on the floor said, turning his face to one side.
A dark stain spread through his slacks.
I was arrested before I could get out of the parking lot. Ten minutes later I was escorted in cuffs inside the St. Martin Parish Jail, my shirt split down the back, and pushed inside the drunk tank. My skin felt dead to the touch, my muscles without texture or tone, as though I had just come off a two-day whiskey drunk. The voices of the inmates around me seemed muffled, filtered through wet cotton, even though some of them appeared to know me and were speaking directly in my face. In my mind's eye I saw a homeless man bent under a cross made of a rolled yellow tent stuffed with all his earthly belongings, and I knew that for all of us who had been there the war would never be over and the real enemy was not Jimmy Sty but a violent creature who rose with me in the morning and lived quietly inside my skin, waiting for the proper moment to vent his rage upon the world.