James Burke: Burning Angel

I didn’t want to talk to Bootsie in front of Alafair about the contents of Sonny’s notebook, either. Much of it made little sense to me — names that I didn’t recognize, mention of a telephone tree, allusions to weapons drops and mules flying dope under U.S. coastal radar. In fact, the concern, the place names, seemed a decade out-of-date, the stuff of congressional inquiry during the mid-Reagan era. But many of the entries were physical descriptions of events that were not characterized by ideology or after-the-fact considerations about legality or illegality:

The inside of the jail is cool and dark and smells of stone and stagnant water. The man in the corner says he’s from Texas but speaks no English. He pried the heels off his boots with a fork and gave the guards seventy American dollars. Through the bars I can see the helicopters going in low across the canopy toward the village on the hillside, firing rockets all the way. I think the guards are going to shoot the man in the corner tomorrow morning. He keeps telling anyone who will listen he’s only a marijuanista...

We found six cane cutters with their thumbs wired behind them in a slough two klicks from the place where we picked up our ammunition. They‘d had no connection with us. They had been executed with machetes while kneeling. We pulled out as the families were coming from the village...

Dysentery... water goes through me like a wet razor... burning with fever last night while the trees shook with rain... I wake in the morning to small-arms fire from the other side of an Indian pyramid that’s gray and green and smoking with mist, my blanket crawling with spiders...

“What are you thinking about?” Bootsie said on our way back from the ice cream parlor.

“You’re right about Sonny. He was born to the hustle.”

“Yes?”

“I just never knew a grifter who deliberately turned his life into a living wound.”

She looked at me curiously in the fading light.

I didn’t go directly to the department in the morning. Instead, I drove out past Spanish Lake to the little community of Cade, which was made up primarily of dirt roads, the old S.P. rail tracks, the dilapidated, paint less shacks of black people, and the seemingly boundless acreage of the Bertrand family sugar plantation.

It had rained earlier that morning, and the new cane was pale green in the fields and egrets were picking insects out of the rows. I drove down a dirt lane past Bertha Fontenot’s weathered cypress home, which had an orange tin roof and a tiny privy in back. A clump of banana trees grew thickly against her south wall, and petunias and impatiens bloomed out of coffee cans and rusted-out buckets all over her gallery. I drove past one more house, one that was painted, and parked by a grove of gum trees, the unofficial cemetery of the Negro families who had worked on the plantation since before the War Between the States.

The graves were no more than faint depressions among the drifting leaves, the occasional wooden cross or board marker inscribed with crude lettering and numbers knocked down and cracked apart by tractors and cane wagons, except for one yawning pit whose broken stone tablet lay half buried with fallen dirt at the bottom.

But even in the deep shade I could make out the name Chaisson cut into the surface.

“I can hep you with something?” a black man said behind me. He was tall, with a bladed face, eyes like bluefish scale, hair shaved close to the scalp, his skin the dull gold cast of worn saddle leather. He wore a grass-stained pink golf shirt, faded jeans, and running shoes without socks.

“Not really,” I said.

“You ax Mr. Moleen you can come on the property?” he said.

“I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux with the sheriff’s department,” I said, and opened my badge holder in my palm. He nodded without replying, his face deliberately simple and empty of any emotion he thought I might read there. “Aren’t you Bertie’s nephew?”

“Yes, suh, that’s right.”

“Your name’s Luke, you run the juke joint south of the highway?”

“Sometimes. I don’t own it, though. You know lots of things.” When he smiled his eyes became veiled. Behind him, I saw a young black woman watching us from the gallery. She wore white shorts and a flowered blouse, and her skin had the same gold cast as his. She walked with a cane, although I could see no infirmity in her legs.

“How many people do you think are buried in this grove?” I asked.

“They ain’t been burying round here for a long time. I ain’t sure it was even in here.”

“Is that an armadillo hole we’re looking at?”

“Miz Chaisson and her husband buried there. But that’s the only marker I ever seen here.”

“Maybe those depressions are all Indian graves. What do you think?”

“I grew up in town, suh. I wouldn’t know nothing about it.”

“You don’t have to call me sir.”

He nodded again, his eyes looking at nothing.

“You own your house, podna?” I said.

“Aint Bertie say she own it since her mother died. She let me and my sister stay there.”

“She says she owns it, huh?”

“Mr. Moleen say different.”

“Who do you believe?” I said, and smiled.

“It’s what the people at the co’rthouse say. You want anything else, suh? I got to be about my work.”

“Thanks for your time.” He walked off through the dappled light, his face turned innocuously into the breeze blowing across the cane field. Had I been a cop too long? I asked myself. Had I come to dislike someone simply because he’d been up the road?

No, it was the disingenuousness, the hostility that had no handles on it, the use of one’s race like the edge of an ax.

But why expect otherwise, I thought. We’d been good teachers.

Five minutes after I walked into my office, Helen Soileau came through the door with a file folder in her hand and sat with one haunch on the corner of my desk, her wide-set, unblinking pale eyes staring at my face.

“What is it?” I said.

“Guess who bailed out Sweet Pea Chaisson?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Jason Darbonne, over in Lafayette. When did he start representing pimps?”

“Darbonne would hitch his mother to a dogsled if the price was right.”

“Get this. The health officer wouldn’t let Sweet Pea transport the coffin back to Breaux Bridge, so he got a guy to haul it for ten bucks in a garbage truck.”

“What’s the file folder?”

“You wanted to question Pissant again? Too bad. The Feds picked him up this morning... Hey, I thought that’d give your peaches a tug.”

“Helen, could you give a little thought as to how you speak to people sometimes?”

“I’m not the problem. The problem is that black four-eyed fuck at the jail who turned our man over to the FBI.”

“What does the FBI want with a house creep?”

“Here’s the paperwork,” she said, and threw the folder on my desk. “If you go over to the lockup, tell that stack of whale shit to get his mind off copping somebody’ spud at least long enough to give us a phone call before he screws up an investigation.”

“I’m serious, Helen... Why not cut people a little... Never mind... I’ll take care of it.”

After she left my office I went over to see the parish jailer. He was a three-hundred-pound bisexual with glasses as thick as Coke bottles and moles all over his neck.

“I didn’t release him. The night man did,” he said.

“This paperwork is shit, Kelso.”

“Don’t hurt my night man’s feelings. He didn’t get out of the eighth grade for nothing.”

“You have a peculiar sense of humor. Roland Broussard was witness to a murder.”

“So talk to the Feds. Maybe that’s why they picked him up. Anyway, they just took him out on loan.”