James Burke: Creole Belle

I did something then that some would consider bizarre. I broke my religious medal from its chain and pressed it in his hand. I don’t know if he had any idea what it was or if he cared, because I didn’t look at him again. Someone had gotten on board the pontoon plane and started up the engine. I ran toward Clete, on the far side of the gazebo, aiming the Beretta straight out in front of him with both hands, firing at the plane taxiing into the middle of the bayou, away from the overhang of the trees.

“Let them go,” I said. “There’s a guy behind the carriage house. I couldn’t get him.”

“If anybody got on that plane, it’s the Duprees,” he said.

“We’ll get them later,” I said.

“Screw that,” he said. He fired three more rounds, and I heard at least one of them hit the plane’s propeller. Then the bolt on his Beretta locked open on an empty chamber. He dropped the magazine from the frame and inserted the backup magazine and chambered a round.

“Let the plane go, Clete,” I said.

It wasn’t really a choice now. The pilot, whoever he or she was, had given it the gas. The plane lifted off the bayou briefly, sputtered once or twice, and set back down, the fog closing as it drifted around a bend with the incoming tide. Whoever was aboard was off the playing field, at least temporarily.

Clete’s face looked poached, his green eyes as big as Life Savers. I ejected a spent shell from the chamber of the twelve-gauge I had taken off the dying man and inserted three shells into the magazine, until I felt the spring come tight against my thumb. It was all going very fast now. I saw Gretchen and Alafair come out of the house. Gretchen was carrying Helen Soileau over her shoulder, and Alafair was pulling Tee Jolie Melton behind her. That was not all that was going on. Someone had started a fire inside the house, a small one certainly, with flames no bigger than the candles on a birthday cake burning in a darkened room, but it was a fire just the same.

“Who the hell did that?” Clete said.

“My bet is on Gretchen,” I said.

“Good for her,” he said.

“How about all the evidence in there? The computers, the paper files, the message machines, the cell phones?”

Clete’s attention had wandered. “On the other side of the coulee,” he said. “The door is open to the slave cabin. It wasn’t open a minute ago.”

I let my eyes sweep back and forth across the backyard. The wind had died, and there were no shadows moving on the grass. The man who had been behind the carriage house seemed to have disappeared. I could hear myself breathing in the silence, and steam was rising from my mouth. “I’ll check out the cabin,” I said. “A dead guy back there is wearing a coat that’ll fit you. Maybe we’re home free, partner.”

“These guys don’t give up that easily,” he replied, his teeth chattering. “We’re not finished with payback, either.”

“Get the coat. You’re going to come down with pneumonia.”

“Pull a coat off a dead guy with bullet holes in him?”

“Just do it. Don’t argue. For once in your life. I’ve never seen anything like it. You have a cinder block for a brain.”

“What’s wrong with that? It helps keep things simple,” he said.

“That’s what I mean. You’re hopeless.”

The moon was out from behind the clouds, and I could see the smile on his face. “Let’s see what’s going on inside Uncle Tom’s cabin,” he said.

We began walking across the lawn, past a stone birdbath and a Roman sundial and a dry goldfish pond scrolled with black mold. The water in the bayou had risen over the cypress knees and elephant ears and clumps of bamboo that grew along the banks. Leaves that were still yellow and red were floating on top of the water, and the caladiums someone had planted around the oaks reminded me of the ones I had seen through my window in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans.

Out in the fog, I could hear somebody grinding the electric starter on the pontoon plane. We walked down one side of a dry coulee and up the opposite slope, the leaves crackling under our shoes, the air filled with a bright, clean odor not unlike the smell of snow. The leaves had drifted in piles so thick and high they were over the tops of our shoes, and the sound of the leaves breaking made me think of squirrel hunting in the fall with my father, Big Aldous, when I was a young boy. I wondered where Big Aldous was. I wondered if he was with my mother and if they were both watching over me, the way I believe spirits sometimes do when they’re not ready to let go of the earth. My parents had died violent deaths while they were young, and they knew what it meant to have one’s life stolen, and for those reasons I had always thought they were with me in one fashion or another, trying to do the right thing from the Great Beyond.

The cabin was not over twenty yards ahead of us. It had been built of cypress planks and chinked with a mixture of mud and moss before the War Between the States, then restored and reroofed with corrugated tin and outfitted with an air conditioner for the guests of Croix du Sud. I had often wondered if the guests had any idea of the deprivation that characterized the lives of the historical occupants. I had the feeling they did not dwell upon questions of that sort and probably would be bored and offended if they were ever questioned on the subject.

Then a strange occurrence took place, maybe one that was the result of a cerebral accident inside my head. Or maybe I experienced one of the occasions when we glimpse through the dimension and see the people to whom we thought we had said good-bye forever. Inside an envelope of cool fire, right on the bank of the bayou, like the flame of a giant votive candle, I saw my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory, and my father, Big Aldous Robicheaux, looking at me. She wore the pale blue suit and the pillbox hat with the stiff veil she had always been so proud of, and Big Aldous was wearing his tin hat and hobnailed work boots and freshly laundered and starched PayDay overalls, his arms covered with hair as thick as a simian’s. At first I thought my parents were smiling at me, but they weren’t. Both were waving in a cautionary way, their mouths opening and closing without making any sound, their faces stretched out of shape with alarm.

That was when I saw Pierre Dupree walk straight at me from behind a tree, either a. 32 or. 25 semi-auto in his left hand, aiming into my face, his chin lifted in the air, as though even in killing someone, he could not give up the arrogant demeanor that seemed to be his birthright.

“At three o’clock, Dave!” I heard Clete shout.

I lifted the shotgun and fired, but I was too late. I saw the muzzle flash of the semi-auto like jagged fire leaping off a spark plug, but I didn’t hear the report. Instead, I felt a pain high up on my cheek, similar to a heavy-handed slap that comes out of nowhere.

The burst from my shotgun had not only gone wild; there had been dirt in the muzzle, and the barrel had exploded, splitting the steel all the way down to the pump. The buckshot in the load had ripped through the canopy, scattering leaves down upon us. I fell sideways, one arm extended like a man looking for a wall to lean against. Then I crashed to the ground.

Through a red haze, I saw Clete firing at Pierre Dupree, walking toward him, the ejected nine-millimeter casings flying into the darkness, shooting one bullet after another into Dupree’s chest and head and neck, then shooting him again at almost point-blank range as he lay dead and spread-eagled against the trunk of a live oak.

I sat up in the leaves and pushed myself against a tree trunk and tried to clear my vision and stop the ringing in my ears. Clete was squatted down in front of me, staring into my eyes, holding up my chin with one hand, his mouth moving, his words like the muted sounds of submerged rocks bumping together in a streambed.