James Burke: Burning Angel

I looked out the window into the darkness, tried to clear an obstruction, like a fish bone, in my throat.

“Have you ever seen the man in the raincoat before?” I said.

“It was hard to see his face in the rain. It was pale, like it didn’t have any blood... He said, “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.” He walked with me till we could see the lights on the dock. Then I turned around and he was gone.”

I took Tripod out of her lap and set him on the counter, then bent over her and hugged her against my chest, pressed my cheek against the top of her head.

“You’re not mad?” she said.

“Of course not.”

Her eyes crinkled at the corners when she looked up at me. I smiled emptily, lest she sense the fear that hovered like a vapor around my heart.

The next morning the sun rose yellow and hot into a bone white sky. There was no wind, and the trees and flowers in my yard were coated with humidity. At 9 A.M. I glanced through my office window and saw Luke Fontenot park his car on the street and walk toward the entrance of the sheriff’s department, his rose-colored shirt peppered with sweat. Just before he went through the door, he rubbed his mouth unconsciously.

When he sat down in the metal chair in front of my desk, he kept glancing sideways through the glass at the uniformed deputies who passed in the corridor.

“It’s all right, Luke,” I said.

“I been in custody here. For killing a white man, back when things was a li’l different. You believe in the gris-gris, Mr. Dave?”

“No.”

“Aint Bertie do. She put the gris-gris on Moleen Bertrand, now she say she cain’t get it off.”

“That stuff’s superstition, partner.”

“Come out to the cafe where she work.”

“Bertie can take care of herself.”

“I ain’t worried about that old woman. It’s Ruthie Jean. Suh, ain’t it time you listen a li’l bit to what black folks got to say?”

Bertie Fontenot worked off and on in a black-owned clapboard cafe up Bayou Teche in Loreauville. She sat under a tarp extended on poles behind the building, next to a worktable and two stainless steel cauldrons that bubbled on a portable butane burner. The surrounding fields were glazed with sunlight, the shade under the tarp as stifling as a wool blanket on your skin.

Through the back screen I could hear the jukebox playing , I searched for you all night in vain, baby. But you was hid out wit’ another man.

“Tell him,” Luke said.

“What for? Some people always know what they know,” she said. She lifted her mammoth weight out of the chair and poured a wood basket filled with artichokes, whole onions, corn on the cob, and peeled potatoes into the cauldrons. Then she began feeding links of sausage into the steam, her eyes watering in the evaporation of salt and cayenne pepper. Stacked on the table were three swollen gunnysacks that moved and creaked with live crawfish.

“Aint Bertie, he took off from his work to come up here,” Luke said.

She wiped the perspiration off her neck with a tiny handkerchief and walked to her pickup truck, which was parked by an abandoned and partially collapsed privy, and came back into the shade with an old leather handbag drawn together at the top by a leather boot lace. She put her hand inside and removed a clutch of pig bones. They looked like long pieces of animal teeth against her coppery palm.

“It don’t matter when or where I trow them, they come up the same,” she said. “I ain’t got no power over what’s gonna happen. I gone along with Ruthie Jean, even though I knowed it was wrong. Now I cain’t undo any of it.”

She cast the bones from her hand onto the plank table. They seemed to bounce off the wood as lightly as sewing needles.

“See, all the sharp points is at the center,” she said. “Moleen Bertrand dragging a chain I cain’t take off. For something he done right here, it’s got to do wit’ a child, out on a dirt road, in the dark, when Moleen was drunk. There’s a bunch of other spirits following him around, too, soldiers in uniforms that ain’t nothing but rags now. Every morning he wake up, they sitting all around his room.”

“You told me you were worried about Ruthie Jean,” I said to Luke.

“She’s in a rooming house in New Orleans, off Magazine by the river. Waiting for Moleen to get his bidness things together, take her to the Islands,” he said.

“Some people give they heart one time, keep believing when they ain’t suppose to believe no more,” Bertie said. She unfolded the curved blade of a banana knife from its case, pulled a gunnysack filled with crawfish across the table toward her. “Moleen gonna die. Except there’s two bones in the middle of the circle. Somebody going wit him.”

“Maybe Moleen thinks New Orleans is a better place for her right now.

Maybe he’s going to keep his word,” I said.

“You wasn’t listening, Mr. Dave,” Luke said. “We ain’t tole you Moleen Bertrand sent her to New Orleans. It was a police officer, he come down here at night, carried her on down to the airport in Lafayette.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You got him right down the hall from you, Mr. White Trash himself, Rufus Arceneaux, same man run errands for Julia Bertrand,” she said.

She ripped the sack along the seam with her banana knife, then shucked it empty into the cauldron, where the crawfish stiffened with shock, as though they had been struck with electricity, and then roiled up dead in the churning froth.

That night the air was breathless, moonlit, filled with birds, stale with dust and the heat of the day that lingered in the baked wood and tin roofing of the house. It was long after midnight when the phone rang in the kitchen.

“You got the wrong signal, ace,” the voice said.

“Pogue?”

“Your little girl misunderstood.”

“No, you did. I told you not to come through the wrong man’s perimeter.”

“I was there to help. They got a mechanic on you.”

“Come anywhere near my house, I’m going to take you off at the neck.”

“Don’t hang up...” I could hear his breath rise and fall against the receiver. “The Dutchie don’t let me alone. I think I got only one way out. I cool out the hitter, I don’t let nobody hurt your family. The problem is, I got no idea who they sent in. I need time, man, that’s what you fucking don’t hear.”

“Do you know what ‘roid-induced psychosis is?” I said.

“No.”

“Too many injections in the butt. Then you drink a few beers and the snakes put on a special floor show. Don’t call here again.”

“You got cement around your head? I ain’t a bad guy. We went into Laos twice to get your friend back. You know anybody else who gave a shit about him?”

“You frightened my daughter. One way or another, that’s going to get squared, Emile.”

“ Me ? Marsallus was there. She didn’t tell you?”

“Your wheel man, Jerry Jeff Hooker, is in custody. He gave you up. Come in and maybe we can get you into a federal hospital.”

“I could smell Marsallus’s breath, it was like the stink when you pop a body bag. The Dutchie turned him loose on me. Laos, Guatemala, colored town out there on the highway, it’s all part of the same geography. Hell don’t have boundaries, man. Don’t you understand that?”

The phone was silent a long time. In the moonlight I saw an owl sink its razored beak into a wood rabbit in my neighbor’s field. Then Emile Pogue quietly hung up.

The sheriff had been moved out of Intensive Care into an ordinary room at Iberia General, one that was filled with flowers and slatted sunlight. But his new environment was a deception. His whiskers were white against his flaccid skin, and his eyes had a peculiar cast in them, what we used to call the thousand-yard stare, as though he could not quite detach himself from old events that were still aborning for him on frozen hilltops that rang with bugles.