James Burke: Burning Angel

The coffin was oversize, an ax handle across, and had been made of wood and cloth and festooned with what had once been silk roses and angels with a one-foot-square glass viewing window in the lid. The sides were rotted out, the slats held in place by vinyl garbage bags and duct tape. Sweet Pea had wedged a piece of plywood under the bottom to keep it from collapsing and spilling out on the highway, but the head of the coffin protruded out over the bumper. The viewing glass had split cleanly across the middle, exposing the waxen and pinched faces of two corpses and nests of matted hair that had fountained against the coffin’s sides.

A uniformed deputy grinned at me from behind his sunglasses.

“Sweet Pea said he’s giving bargain rates on the broad in the box,” he said.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Wally didn’t tell you?”

“No, he was in a comic mood, too.”

The smile went out of the deputy’s face. “He says he’s moving his relatives to another cemetery.”

I walked to the driver’s door. Sweet Pea squinted up at me against the late sun. His eyes were the strangest I had ever seen in a human being. There were webbed with skin in the corners, so that the eyeballs seem to peep out from slits like a baby bird’s.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Believe it,” the woman next to him said, disgusted. Her pink shorts were grimed with dirt. She pulled out the top of her shirt and smelled herself.

“You think it’s Mardi Gras?” I said.

“I don’t got a right to move my stepmother?” Sweet Pea said. His few strands of hair were glued across his scalp.

“Who’s in the coffin with her?”

His mouth made a wet silent O, as though he were thinking. Then he said, “Her first husband. They were a tight couple.”

“Can we get out of the car and get something to eat?” the woman next to him said.

“It’s better you stay where you are for a minute,” I said.

“Robicheaux, cain’t we talk reasonable here? It’s hot. My ladies are uncomfortable.”

“Don’t call me by my last name.”

“Excuse me, but you’re not understanding the situation. My stepmother was buried on the Bertrand plantation ‘cause that’s where she growed up. I hear it’s gonna be sold and I don’t want some cocksucker pouring cement on top of my mother’s grave. So I’m taking them back to Breaux Bridge. I don’t need no permit for that.”

He looked into my eyes and saw something there.

“I don’t get it. I been rude, I did something to insult you?” he said.

“You’re a pimp. You don’t have a lot of fans around here.”

He bounced the heels of his hands lightly on the steering wheel. He smiled at nothing, his white eyebrows heavy with sweat. He cleaned one ear with his little finger.

“We got to wait for the medical examiner?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I don’t want nobody having an accident on my seats. They drunk two cases of beer back at the grave,” he said.

“Step over to my office with me,” I said.

“Beg your pardon?” he said.

“Get out of the car.”

He followed me into the shade on the lee side of the store. He wore white slacks and brown shoes and belt and a maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest. His teeth looked small and sharp inside his tiny mouth.

“Why the hard-on?” he said.

“I don’t like you.”

“That’s your problem.”

“You got a beef with Sonny Boy Marsallus?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Because you think he’s piecing into your action.”

“You’re on a pad for Marsallus?”

“A woman was beaten to death last night, Sweet Pea. How you’d like to spend tonight in the bag, then answer some questions for us in the morning?”

“The broad was Sonny’s punch or something? Why ‘front me about it?”

“Nine years ago I helped pull a girl out of the Industrial Canal. She’d been set on fire with gasoline. I heard that’s how you made your bones with the Giacanos.” He removed a toothpick from his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth. He shook his head profoundly.

“Nothing around here ever changes. Say, you want a sno’ball?” he said.

“You’re a clever man, Sweet Pea.” I pulled my cuffs from my belt and turned him toward the cinder-block wall.

He waited calmly while I snipped them on each wrist, his chin tilted upward, his slitted eyes smiling at nothing.

“What’s the charge?” he asked.

“Hauling trash without a permit. No offense meant.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. He flexed his knees, grunted, and passed gas softly. “Boy, that’s better. T’anks a lot, podna.”

That evening my wife, Bootsie, and I boiled crawfish in a big black pot on the kitchen stove and shelled and ate them on the picnic table in the backyard with our adopted daughter, Alafair. Our house had been built of cypress and oak by my father, a trapper and derrick man, during the Depression, each beam and log notched and drilled and pegged, and the wood had hardened and grown dark with rainwater and smoke from stubble burning in the cane fields, and today a ballpeen hammer would bounce off its exterior and ring in your palm. Down the tree-dotted slope in front of the house were the bayou and dock and bait shop that I operated with an elderly black man named Batist, and on the far side of the bayou was the swamp, filled with gum and willow trees and dead cypress that turned bloodred in the setting sun.

Alafair was almost fourteen now, far removed from the little Salvadoran girl whose bones had seemed as brittle and hollow as a bird’s when I pulled her from a submerged plane out on the salt; nor was she any longer the round, hard-bodied Americanized child who read Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books and wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a Baby Orca T-shirt and red and white tennis shoes embossed with LEFT and RIGHT on each rubber toe. It seemed that one day she had simply stepped across a line, and the baby fat was gone, and her hips and young breasts had taken on the shape of a woman’s. I still remember the morning, with a pang of the heart, when she asked that her father please not call her “little guy” and “Baby Squanto” anymore. She wore her hair in bangs, but it grew to her shoulders now and was black and thick with a light chestnut shine in it. She snapped the tail off a crawfish, sucked the fat out of the head, and peeled the shell off the meat with her thumbnail. “What’s that book you were reading on the gallery, Dave?” she asked. “A diary of sorts.”

“Whose is it?”

“A guy named Sonny Boy.”

“That’s a grown man’s name?” she asked.

“Marsallus?” Bootsie said. She stopped eating. Her hair was the color of honey, and she had brushed it up in swirls and pinned it on her head. “What are you doing with something of his?”

“I ran into him on Canal.”

“He’s back in New Orleans? Does he have a death wish?”

“If he does, someone else may have paid the price for it.”

I saw the question in her eyes.

“The woman who was killed up on the St. Martin line,” I said. “I think she was Sonny’s girlfriend.”

She bit down softly on the corner of her lip. “He’s trying to involve you in something, isn’t he?”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe. I knew him before you did, Dave. He’s a manipulator.”

“I never figured him out, I guess. Let’s go into town and get some ice cream,”

I said. “Don’t let Sonny job you, Streak,” she said.

I didn’t want to argue with Bootsie’s knowledge of the New Orleans mob. After she married her previous husband, she had found out he kept the books for the Giacano family and owned half of a vending machine company with them. She also discovered, when he and his mistress were shot gunned to death in the parking lot of Hialeah race track, that he had mortgaged her home on Camp Street, which she had brought free and clear to the marriage.