James Burke: Burning Angel

“Ease up, Clete,” I said.

“I don’t like people staring at me.” The soles of his loafers tapped up and down on the floor.

“You want to tell me what it is?”

“Emile Pogue’s trying to set you up.”

“Oh?”

“You’re going to step right into it, too.” He paced in front of my desk and kept snapping his fingers and hitting his hands together. “I shouldn’t have come in here.”

“Just tell me what happened.”

“He called my office. He said he wants to give himself up.”

“Why didn’t he call me?”

“He thinks you’re tapped.”

“Where is he, Clete?”

“I knew it.”

It was late afternoon when we put my boat into the Atchafalaya River and headed east into the basin and the huge network of bayous, bays, sandbars, and flooded stands of trees that constitute the alluvial system of the river. The sun was hot and bloodred above the willow islands behind us and you could see gray sheets of rain curving out of the sky in the south and waves starting to cap in the bay. I opened up both engines full throttle and felt the water split across the bow, hiss along the hull like wet string, then flatten behind us in a long bronze trough dimpled with flying fish that glided on the wind like birds.

Clete sat on a cushioned locker behind me, his Marine Corps utility cap on the back of his head, pressing rounds from a box of .223 ammunition into a second magazine for my AR-15. Then he inverted the magazine and jungle-clipped it with electrician’s tape to one that was already in the rifle. He saw me watching him.

“Lose the attitude, big mon. You blink on this dude and he’ll take your eyes out,” he said above the engine’s noise.

I cut back on the throttle on the east side of the bay and let the wake take us into a narrow bayou that snaked through a flooded woods. Cottonmouth moccasins lay coiled on top of dead logs and the lowest cypress branches along the banks, and ahead I saw a white crane lift from a tiny inlet matted with hyacinths and glide for a time above the bayou, then suddenly rise through a red-gold, sunlit break in the canopy and disappear.

Clete was standing beside me now. There was no wind inside the trees, and I could smell mosquito dope running in his sweat. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand and swatted mosquitoes away from his hair.

“It’s like being up the Mekong. It’s got to be a setup,” he said.

“I think he’s scared.”

“My ass. This guy’s been killing people all his life. We can go around a corner and he can chop us into horse meat.”

“That’s not it. He’s had too many other chances.”

Clete pointed a finger at me, his eyes hard and big in his face, then went out of the cabin and worked his way forward to the bow, where he knelt on one knee with the AR-15 propped on his thigh, the sling wrapped around his forearm.

The sun fell through the canopy and illuminated a sunken houseboat and the pale, bloated carcass of a wild hog that had wedged under the porch roof. The metallic green backs of alligator gars rolled against the surface, then their long jaws and files of needlelike teeth parted as they went deep into the pocket where the hog’s stomach used to be.

Up ahead was a blind corner. I began to believe Clete had been right. Not only were the risks all ours, I had allowed myself to be convinced that an amoral, pathological man was more human, more capable of remorse, than he had ever shown himself to be previously. This bayou, shut off from light, filled with insects and gars and poisonous snakes, vaguely scented with the smells of decay and death, a place Joseph Conrad would have well understood, was Pogue’s chosen environment, and so far we were operating on his terms.

I cut the engines, and in the sudden quiet I heard our wake sliding back across the sandbars into the woods, a crescendo of birds’ wings flapping in the trees, a ‘gator slapping its tail in water. But I didn’t hear the St. Mary Parish sheriff’s boat, with Helen Soileau on it, that should have been closing the back door on Emile Pogue.

I started to use the radio, then I saw Clete raise his hand in the air.

Someone was running in the woods, crashing through brush, splashing across a slough. I felt the bow bite into a sandbar and the boat become motionless. I went forward with Clete and tried to see through the tree trunks, the tangle of air vines, the leaves that tumbled out of the canopy, the pools of mauve shadow that seemed to take the shape of animals.

Then we heard the roar of an airboat out on the next bay.

“How do you figure that?” Clete said.

“Maybe he wants another season to run.”

We dropped off the bow onto the sandbar and worked our way along the bank and through the shallows to the corner. The back of Clete’s neck was oily with sweat, inflamed with insect bites. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, paused at the bend in the bayou, then stepped out in the open, his face blank, his eyes flicking from one object to the next.

He pointed.

An aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied with a chain to a cypress knee on the bank, and beyond it a shack was set back in the willows on pilings. The screens were webbed with rust, dead insects, and dirt, and the tin roof had long ago taken on the colors of a woods in winter. The base of the pilings glistened with a sheen like petroleum waste from the pools of stagnant water they sat in. Clete pressed a wadded handkerchief to his face. The dry ground behind the shack was blown with bottle flies and reeked of unburied excrement.

I slipped my .45 from my holster, pulled back the slide on a hollow-point round, and moved through the trees toward the rear of the shack while Clete approached the front. The water had receded only recently, and the sand was wet and curled over my tennis shoes like soft cement. I heard sound inside the shack, then realized a radio was playing. It was Ravel’s Bolero , compelling and incessant, building like a painful obsession you can’t let go of.

I came out of the trees ten feet from the rear of the shack and saw Clete poised by the front entrance, his face waiting. I held up my hand, then brought it down and we both went in at the same time.

Except my foot punched through a plank on the back step that was as soft as rotted cork. I stumbled into the interior still limping, my .45 pointed straight out with both hands. Clete was silhouetted against the broken light beyond the front door, his rifle hanging from his right hand. He was looking at something on the floor.

Then I saw him, amidst the litter of soiled clothes and fishing gear and barbells. He lay on his back by a small table with a shortwave radio on it, dressed in jeans, a sleeveless green T-shirt, suspenders, his bare feet like pale white blocks of wood. A dark pool shaped like a deformed three-leaf clover swelled from the back of his neck. I knelt beside him.

He opened his mouth and coughed on an obstruction deep in his throat.

His tongue was as red and bright as licorice. I started to turn him on his side.

“Don’t do it, chief,” he whispered. “He broke the shank off inside.”

“Who did this to you, Emile?”

“Never saw him. A pro. Maybe that cocksucker Marsallus.”

His eyes came together like BB’s, then refocused on my face.

“We’re going to put you on my boat, then get you out in the bay so a chopper can pick you up,” I said.

But he was already shaking his head before I finished my words. His eyes slid off my face onto my shirt.

“What is it?” I said.

“Lean close.”

I lowered my ear toward his mouth, then realized that was not what he wanted. His hand lifted up and clenched around my religious medal and chain, knotted it across his knuckles, held me hovering above the shrunken pinpoints of his eyes.