Tee Bobby Hulin had parked his gas-guzzler by the cement boat ramp and had walked up into the gloom of the trees. His autistic sister, Rosebud, sat in the passenger's seat, a safety belt locked across her chest, staring at an empty pirogue floating aimlessly on the bayou. The evening was warm, the string of lightbulbs above my dock glowing with humidity, but Tee Bobby wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned at the wrists. His armpits were damp with sweat, his lips dry and caked at the edges.
"I just cut a CD. It's got 'Jolie Blon's Bounce' on it. Nobody else seem to like it too much. Anyway, see what you think," he said.
"I appreciate it, Tee Bobby. You kind of warm in that shirt?" I said.
"You know how it is," he replied.
"I can get you into a treatment program."
He shook his head and kicked gingerly at a tree root.
"Your sister okay?" I asked.
"Ain't nothing okay."
"We're getting ready to eat dinner right now. Maybe we can talk later," I said.
"I just dropped by, that's all."
It was dark where we stood under the trees, the molded pecan husks and blackened leaves soft under our feet, the air tannic, like water that has stood for a long time in a wooden cistern. The dying light was gold on the tops of the cypresses in the swamp, and snow egrets were rising into the light, their wings feathering in the wind.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"You busted up Jimmy Dean Styles real bad. You shamed him in front of other people. Jimmy Sty always square the score."
"Forget about Jimmy Sty. Tell the truth about what happened to Amanda Boudreau."
"The lie detector say I didn't do it. That's all that counts. I ain't raped or shot nobody. Got the proof."
"You were there."
He tried to stare me down, then his eyes watered and broke.
"I wish I ain't come here. The lie detector say I'm innocent. But ain't nobody listening," he said.
"That girl is going to live in your dreams. She'll stand by your deathbed. You'll never have any peace until you get honest on this, Tee Bobby."
"Oh, God, why you do this to me?" he said, and walked hurriedly down the incline, slightly off balance.
That night I listened to his CD down at the bait shop.
The rendition of his new composition, "Jolie Blon's Bounce," was the best Acadian rhythm and blues I had ever heard. But I had a feeling the larger world would never come to know the tormented musical talent of Tee Bobby Hulin.
The next morning the sheriff took me off the desk and sent me to New Orleans with Helen Soileau to pick up a prisoner. It was noon when we crossed the Mississippi and drove into the city. While she ate lunch, I went back across the river to Algiers and caught the end of a low-bottom AA meeting off an alley, next to a bar, in the back of a warehouse with painted-over windows.
But this was not an ordinary AA group.
The failed, the aberrant, the doubly addicted, and the totally brain-fried whose neurosis didn't even have a name found their way to the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting: strippers from the Quarter, psychotic street people, twenty-dollar hookers, peckerwood fundamentalists, leather-clad, born-again bikers, women who breast-fed their infants in a sea of cigarette smoke, a couple of cops who had done federal time, male prostitutes dying of AIDS, parolees with a lean, hungry look who sought only a signature on an attendance slip for their P.O.'s, methheads who drank from fire extinguishers in the joint, and Vietnam vets who wore their military tattoos and black- or olive-colored 1st Cav. and airborne T-shirts and still heard the thropping of helicopter blades in their sleep.
When it was my turn to speak, I began to do another Fifth Step, confessing my use of speed, the injury I had done Jimmy Dean Styles, the abiding anger and violence that seemed to afflict my life. But as I looked out into the smoke at the seamed and unshaved and rouged faces of the people sitting around the long table strewn with AA pamphlets, my words seemed twice-told and melodramatic, removed from the problems of people who counted themselves fortunate if they had food to eat that evening or a place to sleep that night.
I took a breath and started over again.
"An evil man did me physical injury. I think I know to at least a degree what a woman must feel like after she's been raped. For this deed and others he has committed, I believe this man does not deserve to live. These are serious and not idle thoughts that I have. In the meantime, I'm possessed of an enormous desire to drink," I said.
The discussion leader was a gaunt-faced biker with sunglasses as dark as welders' goggles and long silver hair that looked freshly shampooed and blow-dried.
"I'd get a lot of gone between me and them kind of thoughts, Dave. In California I went down for twenty-five and did twelve flat because of a dude like that. When I got out, I married his wife. She wrecked my truck, give my P.O. the clap, and run off with my Harley. Tell me that dude wasn't laughing in his grave," he said.
Everybody howled.
Except me and a street person at the far end of the table, a man with the glint of genuine madness in his eyes, his blond hair like melted and recooled tallow.
When the meeting broke up, he caught me at the door, his fingers biting into my upper arm, the vinegary stench of his body welling out of his yellow raincoat.
"Remember me?" he said.
"Sure," I replied.
"Not from New Iberia. You remember me from 'Nam?"
"A guy has lots of memories from the war," I said.
"I killed a child," he said.
"Sir?"
"We got into a meat grinder. It was after you got hit. We burned the ville. I seen a little girl run out of a hooch. She come apart in the smoke."
There were lines like pieces of white thread in the dirt around the corners of his eyes. His breath was odorless, his face inches from mine. He waited, as though I held a key that could unlock doors that were welded shut in his life.
"You want something to eat?" I asked.
"No."
"Take a ride with me," I said.
"Where?"
"I'm not sure," I replied.
There was no place for him, really. He was trapped inside memories that no human being should have to bear, and he would do the time and carry the cross for those makers of foreign and military policy who long ago had written their memoirs and appeared on televised Sunday-morning book promotions and moved on in their careers.
I took him to a motel and put two nights' rent on my credit card and gave him thirty dollars from my wallet.
"There's a Wal-Mart down the street. Maybe you can get yourself a razor and some clothes and a couple of food items," I said.
He was sitting on the bed in his motel room, staring at the motes of dust in a column of sunlight. I studied his face and his hair and eyes. I tried to remember the face of the medic who had cradled me in his arms as the AK-47 rounds from the trees below whanged off the helicopter's frame.
"How'd you get to New Orleans?" I asked.
"Rode a freight."
"The medic who saved my life was Italian. He was from Staten Island. You from Staten Island, troop?" I said.
"The trouble with killing somebody is it makes you forget who you used to be. I get places mixed up," he said. He rubbed his face on his sleeve. "You gonna pop that guy you was talking about in the meeting?"
Huey Lagneaux, also known as Baby Huey, had been hired as a bartender and bouncer at his uncle's club because of his massive size, the deep black tone of his skin, which gave him the ambience of a leviathan rising from oceanic depths, and the fact he only needed to lay one meaty arm over a troublemaker's shoulders in order to walk him quietly to the door.
But the uncle had also given him the job out of pity. Baby Huey had not been the same since he had been kidnapped by a collection of white men from New Orleans and prodded at gunpoint through a cemetery, down to the water's edge on Bayou Teche, and systematically tortured with a stun gun.
The club was on a back road out by Bayou Benoit, an area of deep-water bays, flooded cypress and willow and gum trees that under the rising moon was dented with what looked like rain rings from the night feeding of bream and largemouth bass. On Friday nights the club thundered with electronic sound, and the parking lot, layered from end to end with flattened beer cans, clattered like a tin roof under the hundreds of automobiles and pickup trucks driving across it. -
Tee Bobby Hulin was behind the microphone, up on the bandstand, in black slacks and a sequined purple shirt, his fingers splayed on the keys of an accordion whose case had the bright, wet shine of a freshly sliced pomegranate. The air was gray with cigarette smoke, heavy with the smell of body powder and sweat and perfume and okra gumbo. Baby Huey wiped down the bar and began rinsing a tin sink full of dirty glasses. When he looked up again, he saw a sheep-sheared white man in a tailored suit and a tropical shirt walking toward him, oblivious to the stares around him or even to the people who stepped out of his way before they were knocked aside.
"You know me?" the white man asked.
"Hard to forget, Mr. Zeroski," Baby Huey answered. He bent over the sink and washed the dish soap from his hands and wrists.
"A white man named Legion Guidry just went to the service window. Then I lost him. I hear he's got a camp around here," Joe said.
Baby Huey's face remained impassive, his gaze focused on the bandstand, the dancers out on the floor.
"You hear me?" Joe asked.
"I knew your daughter. She was nice to people. If I knew who killed her, I'd tell you. That night on the bayou, you didn't have no right to hurt me like that."
"You should have said that on the bayou. Maybe it would have gone down different."
"You wasn't looking for the troot. You was looking to get even," Baby Huey said.
Joe scratched at his cheek with the balls of his fingers.
"You keep the wrong company, you pay dues. They ain't always fair," he said. He took a one-hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and creased it lengthwise and placed it on the bar like a miniature tent.
Baby Huey pushed it away and dried a glass. "I ain't axed you for nothing. In case you ain't noticed, you in the wrong part of town," he said.
"Yeah, I got that impression when I walked in. You want to earn that hunnerd bucks and another hunnerd like it, or keep blaming me 'cause you decided to be a pimp and sell crack?"
Baby Huey filled a bowl with gumbo and put a spoon in it and set it on a napkin in front of Joe.
"It's on me. I made it this afternoon," Baby Huey said. "You want a beer wit' it?"
"I don't mind," Joe said.
"You got bidness wit' the man people call Legion, huh?" Baby Huey said.
"What do you mean the man they 'call' Legion?"
"He ain't got a first name. He ain't got a last name. Just 'Legion.' That's all black people ever call him."
"He's hard on women?" Joe said.
"If they the right color," Baby Huey said, and put the one-hundred-dollar bill in his shirt pocket.
They drove in Joe Zeroski's car up on a levee that looked out on a wide bay fringed with flooded cypresses. A storm was kicking up out on the Gulf, and the wind was blowing hard from the south, wrinkling the bay, puffing leaves out of the adjacent woods. Joe turned off on a dirt track, dropping down into persimmon and pecan trees, palmettos, and landlocked pools that had the greasy shine of an oil slick. Baby Huey pointed to a shack in a clearing, a lantern burning whitely on a table inside. In back were a privy and a collapsed smokehouse and Legion Guidry's truck, parked next to an oak that was nailed with the scraped hides of raccoons.
One of the truck's rear tires was flat on the rim. Joe cut the engine. Through the trees they could hear Tee Bobby's band belting out Clifton Chenier's "Hey, Tite Fille." They stepped out of the air-conditioned car into the darkness, the mosquitoes that boiled out of the trees, the wind that smelled of humus and beached fish.
"You stay where you are," Joe said, and pitched a cell phone to Baby Huey. "It goes south in there, you push the redial button and say 'Joe needs a hose crew.' Then you tell them where we're at and you take my car down the road and wait for whoever comes."
"That's Legion in there, Mr. Joe," Baby Huey said.
"I think you're a nice kid. I think you were sincere what you said about my daughter. But take the collard greens out of your mouth and tell me what you're trying to say. That's why you people are always gonna be cleaning toilets. You can't say what's on your mind."
Baby Huey shook his head. "Legion ain't no ordinary white man. He ain't no ordinary man of any kind."
Joe Zeroski opened the screen door of the shack and walked inside without knocking. While he and Baby Huey had talked outside, the tall, black-haired man in khaki clothes who sat at the table with a six-pack of beer and a bottle of bourbon in front of him had shown no curiosity about the headlights or the presence of others in his yard.
He knocked back a jigger of whiskey, took a sip of beer from a salted can, and picked up a burning cigarette from an inverted jar top. He drew in the smoke, the cigarette paper crackling in the silence.
"You busted up two of my men. But I'm letting that slide for now, 'cause maybe they were rude or maybe you didn't know who they were. But somebody beat my daughter to death and I'm gonna rip his ass. I hear you got a bad record with women," Joe said.
"Robicheaux send you?" Legion asked.
"Robicheaux?"
"You one of them dagos been staying in town, ain't you? Working for Dave Robicheaux."
"Are you nuts?" Joe said.
Then Joe heard a sound in a side room, behind a blanket that was hung with sliding hooks on a doorway. Joe pulled back the blanket and looked down at a black girl, probably not over eighteen, sitting on the side of a bed in shorts and a T-shirt razored off below her breasts, snorting a line off a broken mirror through a rolled five-dollar bill.
Joe took her by the arm and walked her barefoot and stoned to the front door.
"Go home. Or back to the nightclub. Or wherever you come from. But stay away from this man. Where's your father, anyway?" he said, and closed the door behind her. Then he turned around, his back feeling momentarily exposed, vulnerable.
Legion's face wore no expression, the skin white as a fish's belly, creased with vertical lines. He inhaled off his cigarette, the ash glowing red, crackling against the dry-ness of the paper.
"You just made a mistake," he said.
"Oh, yeah, how's that?" Joe asked.
"I paid forty dollars for her dope. So now you owe the debt."
"You're an ignorant and stupid man, but I'm gonna try to explain something to you as simply as I can. My daughter was Linda Zeroski. A degenerate piece of shit tied her to a chair not far from here and smashed every bone in her face with his fists."
Joe removed a.38 revolver with a two-inch barrel from the back of his belt. He flipped out the cylinder and dumped all six shells from the chambers into his palm.
"I'm gonna put two rounds back in the chambers and spin them around, then we're gonna-" he began.
That's when Legion Guidry slid a cut-down, double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun from a scabbard nailed under the table and raised it so the barrels were suddenly pointed into Joe Zeroski's face.
"Who's stupid now?" Legion said. "You got nothing smart to say, you? Just gonna stand there wit' your li'l gun wit'out no bullets in it? Time you got down on your knees, dago."
"I look Italian? Zeroski is Polish, you moron. Poles ain't Italians," Joe said.
Legion rose from the table and walked to the screen door, where Baby Huey stood frozen, his eyes wide at the scene taking place in front of him.
"Come inside," Legion said.
Baby Huey opened the screen and stepped out of the darkness into the white radiance of the lantern on the table. The muscles in his back jumped when the screen swung back into the jamb behind him.
"On your knees, nigger," Legion said.
"My uncle owns the nightclub. He knows where we're at," Baby Huey said.
"That's good. He come here, I'll shoot me two niggers 'stead of one," Legion said.
Baby Huey bent slowly to the floor, his knees popping, sweat breaking on his brow now, his gaze sliding down the length of Legion's body.
Legion screwed the barrels of the shotgun into Baby Huey"s neck and looked at Joe.
"T'row your li'l gun down and get on your knees, or I'm gonna blow the nigger's head off. Look into my eyes and tell me you don't t'ink I'll do it, no," he said.
Joe Zeroski let the.38 shells spill from his hand onto the floor, then tossed the revolver to one side and got to his knees.
Legion Guidry stood above him, his stomach and loins flat, his khaki shirt tucked tightly inside his western belt. He reached behind him and removed his straw hat from the back of a chair and fitted it on his head so that his face was now in shadow. He drank from his whiskey bottle and spread his feet slightly and cleared his throat.
"What you t'ink about to happen? Bet you didn't t'ink a day like this would ever come in your life, no," he said.
Then he unzipped his fly.
"How far you willing to go to keep a nigger alive?" he asked, pressing the shotgun harder into Baby Huey"s neck, his eyes riveted on Joe's.
Joe felt himself swallow, his hands balling at his sides.
Legion's finger was wrapped tightly inside the trigger guard on the shotgun. The back of his hand was spotted with sun freckles, his cuff buttoned at the wrist, his veins like pieces of green cord. Joe could smell the nicotine ingrained in his skin, the boilermakers that still hung on his breath, the raw odor of his manhood that seemed ironed into his clothes.
Joe Zeroski felt his heart thundering, then a rage well up in him that was like a fire blooming in his chest. His face grew tight and his scalp seemed to shrink and shift against his skull, his eyes bulge in their sockets, with either adrenaline or fear, he would never know which. "Go ahead and shoot, you worthless cocksucker. Me first. 'Cause I get the chance, I'm gonna tear your throat out," he said.
He heard Legion Guidry snort. "You t'ink pretty high of yourself, you. I wouldn't dirty my dick on a dago or a Pollack," Legion said, drawing his zipper back into place. "Give me your car keys."
"What?" Joe asked, staring up in disbelief at the mercurial nature of his tormentor.
"I'm taking your car to find my whore. I don't find my whore, I'm gonna come after you for my forty dollars. Next time you want to pretend like you a New Orleans gangster, remember what you look like right now, on your knees, next to a nigger, just about an inch from sucking a man's dick. Tell yourself later you wouldn't do it, no. Believe me, I wanted you to, you would, you," he said.
Legion collected Joe's automobile keys and his.38 revolver and shells. Minutes later, Baby Huey and Joe watched him drive away in Joe's automobile, the radio playing, Legion's hat and tall frame silhouetted against the front window. Baby Huey could hear Joe breathing in the darkness.
"You saved my life, Mr. Joe. I cain't believe you told him to shoot. That's the bravest thing I ever seen anybody do," he said.
Joe waved his hand to indicate he did not want to hear about it. Baby Huey started to speak again.
"Hey, forget it," Joe said.
"What we gonna do now?" Baby Huey asked, looking up the dirt track through the woods.
"It wasn't him beat my daughter to death," Joe said.
"How you know?"
"He don't have no feeling about people. It wasn't him. The ones to be afraid of are the ones got feelings about you. That's a sad truth, kid, but that's the way it is," Joe said.