James Burke: Burning Angel

“Keep this for me.”

“Keep it yourself,” I said.

“A lady’s holding a Xerox copy for me. You like poetry, confessional literature, all that kind of jazz. Nothing happens to me, drop it in the mail.”

“What are you doing, Sonny?”

“The world’s a small place today. People watch CNN in grass huts. A guy might as well play it out where the food is right.”

“You’re an intelligent man. You don’t have to be a punching bag for the Giacanos.”

“Check the year on the calendar when you get home. The spaghetti heads were starting to crash and burn back in the seventies.”

“Is your address inside?”

“Sure. You gonna read it?”

“Probably not. But I’ll hold it for you a week.”

“No curiosity?” he said, pulling his shirt back on. His mouth was red, like a woman’s, against his pale skin, and his eyes bright green when he smiled.

“Nope.”

“You should,” he said. He slipped on his coat. “You know what a barracoon is, or was?”

“A place where slaves were kept.”

“Jean Lafitte had one right outside New Iberia. Near Spanish Lake. I bet you didn’t know that.” He stuck me in the stomach with his finger.

“I’m glad I found that out.”

“I’m going out through the kitchen. The guys out front won’t bother you.”

“I think your frame of reference is screwed up, Sonny. You don’t give a pass to a police officer.”

“Those guys out there ask questions in four languages, Dave. The one with the fire hydrant neck, he used to do chores in the basement for Idi Amin. He’d really like to have a chat with me.”

“Why?”

“I capped his brother. Enjoy the spring evening, Streak. It’s great to be home.”

He unlocked the door and disappeared through the back of the restaurant.

As I walked back to the bar, I saw both the hatted man and his short companion staring through the front glass. Their eyes reminded me of buckshot.

Fuck it , I thought, and headed for the door. But a crowd of Japanese tourists had just entered the restaurant, and by the time I got past them the sidewalk was empty except for an elderly black man selling cut flowers out of a cart.

The evening sky was light blue and ribbed with strips of pink cloud, and the breeze off the lake balmy and bitten with salt, redolent with the smells of coffee and roses and the dry electric flash and scorch of the streetcar.

As I headed back toward my pickup truck, I could see heat lightning, out over Lake Pontchartrain, trembling like shook foil inside a storm bank that had just pushed in from the Gulf.

An hour later the rain was blowing in blinding sheets all the way across the Atchafalaya swamp. Sonny Boy’s notebook vibrated on the dashboard with the roar of my engine.

The next morning I dropped it in my file cabinet at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department unread and opened my mail while I drank a cup of coffee. There was a telephone message from Sonny Boy Marsallus, but the number was in St. Martinville, not New Orleans. I dialed it and got no answer.

I gazed out the window at the fine morning and the fronds on the palm trees lifting against the windswept sky. He was out of my jurisdiction, I told myself, don’t get mixed up in his grief. Sonny had probably been out of sync with the earth since conception, and it was only a matter of time before someone tore up his ticket.

But finally I did pull the jacket on Sweet Pea Chaisson, which stayed updated, one way or another, because he was one of our own and seemed to make a point of coming back to the Breaux Bridge-St. Martinville-New Iberia area to get in trouble.

I’ve never quite understood why behaviorists spend so much time and federal funding on the study of sociopaths and recidivists, since none of the research ever teaches us anything about them or makes them any better. I’ve often thought it would be more helpful simply to pull a half dozen like Sweet Pea out of our files, give them supervisory jobs in mainstream society, see how everybody likes it, then perhaps consider a more draconian means of redress, such as prison colonies in the Aleutians.

He had been born and abandoned in a Southern Pacific boxcar, and raised by a mulatto woman who operated a zydeco bar and brothel on the Breaux Bridge highway called the House of Joy. His face was shaped like an inverted teardrop, with white eyebrows, eyes that resembled slits in bread dough, strands of hair like vermicelli, a button nose, a small mouth that was always wet.

His race was a mystery, his biscuit-colored body almost hairless, his stomach a water-filled balloon, his pudgy arms and hands those of a boy who never grew out of adolescence. But his comic proportions had always been a deception. When he was seventeen a neighbor’s hog rooted up his mother’s vegetable garden. Sweet Pea picked up the hog, carried it squealing to the highway, and threw it headlong into the grille of a semi truck.

Nineteen arrests for procuring; two convictions; total time served, eighteen months in parish prisons. Somebody had been looking out for Sweet Pea Chaisson, and I doubted that it was a higher power.

In my mail was a pink memo slip I had missed. Written in Wally the dispatcher’s childish scrawl were the words Guess who’s back in the waiting room? The time on the slip was 7:55 A.M.

Oh Lord.

Bertha Fontenot’s skin was indeed black, so deep in hue that the scars on her hands from opening oyster shells in New Iberia and Lafayette restaurants looked like pink worms that had eaten and disfigured the tissue. Her arms jiggled with fat, her buttocks swelled like pillows over the sides of the metal chair she sat on. Her pillbox hat and purple suit were too small for her, and her skirt rode up above her white hose and exposed the knots of varicose veins in her thighs.

On her lap was a white paper towel from which she ate cracklings with her fingers.

“You decide to pry yourself out your chair for a few minutes?” she said, still chewing.

“I apologize. I didn’t know you were out here.”

“You gonna help me with Moleen Bertrand?”

“It’s a civil matter, Bertie.”

“That’s what you say before.”

“Then nothing’s changed.”

“I can get a white-trash lawyer to tell me that.”

“Thank you.”

Two uniformed deputies at the water fountain were grinning in my direction.

“Why don’t you come in my office and have some coffee?” I said.

She wheezed as I helped her up, then wiped at the crumbs on her dress and followed me inside my office, her big lacquered straw bag, with plastic flowers on the side, clutched under her arm. I closed the door behind us and waited for her to sit down.

“This is what you have to understand, Bertie. I investigate criminal cases. If you have a title problem with your land, you need a lawyer to represent you in what’s called a civil proceeding.”

“Moleen Bertrand already a lawyer. Some other lawyer gonna give him trouble back ‘cause of a bunch of black peoples?”

“I have a friend who owns a title company. I’ll ask him to search the courthouse records for you.”

“It won’t do no good. We’re six black families on one strip that’s in arpents. It don’t show in the survey in the co’rthouse. Everything in the co’rthouse is in acres now.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. If that’s your land, it’s your land.”

“What you mean if ? Moleen Bertrand’s grandfather give that land to us ninety-five years ago. Everybody knowed it.”

“Somebody didn’t.”

“So what you gonna do about it?”

“I’ll talk to Moleen.”

“Why don’t you talk to your wastebasket while you’re at it?”