James Burke: Burning Angel

“A lot of grief.”

Helen Soileau came through the door, without knocking, and dropped the crime scene report on my desk.

“You want to look it over and sign it?” she said. Her eyes went up and down Clete’s body.

“Do y’all know each other?” I said.

“Only by reputation. Didn’t he work for Sally Dio?” she said.

Clete fed a stick of gum in his mouth and looked at me.

“I’ll go over the report in a few minutes, Helen,” I said.

“We couldn’t get a print off the cigarette butt, but the casts on the footprints and tire tracks look good,” she said. “By the way, the .357 rounds were hollow-points.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Clete swiveled around in his chair and watched her go back out the door.

“Who’s the muff-driver?” he said.

“Come on, Clete.”

“One look at that broad is enough to drive you to a monastery.”

It was a quarter to five.

“Do you want to pull your car around front and I’ll meet you there?” I said.

He followed me in his old Cadillac convertible to the Henderson levee outside Breaux Bridge. We put my boat and outboard in the water and fished on the far side of a bay dotted with abandoned oil platforms and dead cypress trees. The rain was falling through shafts of sunlight in the west, and the rain looked like tunnels of spun glass and smoke rising into the sky.

Clete took a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer from the cooler and snapped off the top with his pocketknife. The foam slid down the inside of the neck when he removed the bottle from his mouth. Then he drank again, his throat working a long time. His face looked tired, vaguely morose.

“Were you bothered by that crack Helen made about Sally Dio?”

“So I ran security for a grease ball I also had two of his goons slam my hand in a car door. Sometime when you have a chance, tell the bride of Frankenstein what happened when Sal and his hired gum balls were flying friendly skies.”

The plane had crashed and exploded in a fireball on a mountainside in western Montana. The National Transportation Safety Board said someone had poured sand in the gas tanks.

Clete finished his beer and blew out his breath. He pushed his hand down in the ice for another bottle.

“You okay, partner?” I said.

“I’ve never dealt real well with that bullshit I got involved with in Central America. Sometimes it comes back in the middle of the night, I mean worse than when I got back from Vietnam. It’s like somebody striking a match on my stomach lining.”

There were white lines at the corners of his eyes. He watched his red-and-white bobber move across the water in the shade of an oil platform, dip below the surface and rise quivering again; but he didn’t pick up his rod.

“Maybe it’s time for the short version of the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes you just have to say fuck it,” I said.

“What’s the worst day you had in “Nam, I mean besides getting nailed by that Bouncing Betty?”

“A village chieftain called in the 105s on his own people.”

“Sonny Boy and I hooked up with the same bunch of gun runners It was like an outdoor mental asylum down there. Half the time I didn’t know if we were selling to the rebels or the government. I was so strung out on rum and dope and my own troubles I didn’t care, either. Then one night we got to see what the government did when they wanted to put the fear of God in the Indians.”

He pinched his mouth with his hand. His calluses made a dry sound like sandpaper against his whiskers. He took a breath and widened his eyes.

“They went into this one ville and killed everything in sight. Maybe four hundred people. There was an orphanage there, run by some Mennonites. They didn’t spare anybody... all those kids... man.”

He watched my face.

“You saw this?” I asked.

“I heard it, from maybe a half mile away. I’ll never forget the sound of those people screaming. Then this captain walked us through the ville. The sonofabitch didn’t give it a second thought.”

He put a Lucky Strike in his mouth and tried to light it with a Zippo cupped in his hands. The flint scratched dryly and he took the cigarette back out of his mouth and closed his big hand on it.

“Let the past go, Cletus. Haven’t you paid enough dues?” I said.

“You wanted to hear about Sonny Boy? Three weeks later we were with a different bunch of guys, I was so wiped out I still don’t know who they were, Cubans maybe and some Belgians working both sides of the street. Anyway, we were on a trail and we walked right into an L-shaped ambush, M-60’s, blookers, serious shit, they must have shredded twelve guys in the first ten seconds.

“Sonny was on point... I saw this... I wasn’t hallucinating... Two guys next to me saw it, too...”

“What are you talking about?”

“He got nailed with an M-60. I saw dust jumping all over his clothes. I didn’t imagine it. When he went down his shirt was soaked with blood. Three weeks later he shows up in a bar in Guatemala City. The rebels starting calling him the red angel. They said he couldn’t die.”

He took a long drink off the beer. The sunlight looked like a yellow flame inside the bottle.

“Okay, mon, maybe I fried my head down there,” he said. “But I stay away from Sonny. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like he’s got death painted on his skin.”

“It sounds like another one of Sonny’s cons.”

“There’s nothing like somebody else telling you what you saw. You remember what an M-60 bouncing on a bungee cord could do to an entire ville? How about a guy who gets it from ten yards away? No, don’t answer that, Dave. I don’t think I can handle it.”

In the silence I could hear the whir of automobile tires on the elevated highway that spanned the swamp. The setting sun looked like lakes of fire in the clouds, then a shower began to march across the bays and willow islands and dance in a yellow mist on the water around us. I pulled up the sash weight I used for an anchor, cranked the engine, and headed back for the levee. Clete opened another bottle of Dixie, then reached deep down in the crushed ice, found a can of Dr. Pepper, and tossed it to me. “Sorry, Streak,” he said, and smiled with his eyes.

But the apology would be mine to make.

That night I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a T-shirt, and drove out toward Spanish Lake and the little community of Cade. I can’t explain why I decided to jog there rather than along the bayou, by my house, south of town. Maybe it was because the only common denominator in the case, so far, was a geographical one. For no reason I understood, Sonny Boy had mentioned a barracoon, built near the lake by Jean Lafitte, then Sweet Pea Chaisson, who could never be accused of familial sentiment, other than a violent one, had decided to exhume his adoptive mother’s remains from the Bertrand plantation and transport them in a garbage truck back to Breaux Bridge. Both men operated in a neon and concrete world where people bought and sold each other daily and lived by the rules that govern piranha fish. What was their interest or involvement in a rural community of poor black people?

I parked my truck and jogged along a dirt road between sugarcane acreage, over the railroad tracks, past a dilapidated clapboard store and a row of shacks. Behind me, a compact white automobile turned off the highway, slowed so as not to blow dust in my face, and drove toward the lighted houses on the lake. I could see the silhouettes of two people talking to each other.

The breeze was warm and smelled of horses and night-blooming flowers, freshly turned soil, and smoke blowing off a stump fire hard by a pecan orchard. The tree trunks seemed alive with shadows and protean shapes in the firelight, as though, if you let imagination have its way, the residents from an earlier time had not yet accepted the inevitability of their departure.