James Burke: Creole Belle

He bought a big bag of hot beignets for Miss Alice that cost him twice the amount she had given him. He listened to one song played by a string-and-rub-board band at the entrance to Pirates Alley, then walked back to St. Ann, his mind free of worry.

As soon as he turned the corner on St. Ann, he saw a large black Buick with charcoal-tinted windows parked illegally in front of his building. By the time he reached the foyer that gave onto his office, he had little doubt who had parked it there. He could hear the voice of Alice Werenhaus in the courtyard: “I told the pair of you, Mr. Purcel is not here. I also told you not to go inside the premises without his permission. If you do not leave right now, I will have you arrested and placed in the city prison. I will also have your automobile towed to the pound. Excuse me. Are you smirking at me?”

“We didn’t know we were gonna get a show,” the voice of Waylon Grimes replied.

“How would you like your face slapped all over this courtyard?” Miss Alice said.

“How’d you know I’m a guy who likes it rough? You charge extra for that?” Grimes said.

“What did you say? You repeat that! Right now! Say it again!”

“You promise to hit me?” Grimes said.

Clete walked through the shade of the foyer and into the courtyard, squinting in the glare at Grimes and a bald man who wore a suit and carried a clipboard in his hand.

“What do you think you’re doing, Waylon?” Clete said.

“Mr. Benoit here is our appraiser. Bix is thinking of buying you out, less the principal and the vig on your marker,” Grimes replied. “But this place looks like it has some serious problems. Right, Mr. Benoit?”

“You have some settling, Mr. Purcel,” the appraiser said. “You see those stress cracks in the arch over your foyer? I notice the same tension in the upper corners of your windows. I suspect you have trouble opening them, don’t you? That’s because your foundation may be sinking, or you may have Formosan termites eating through the concrete. There’s a possibility here of structural collapse.”

“The roof is caving in? People will be plunging through the floors?” Clete said.

“I don’t know if it would be that bad, but who knows?” Benoit said. He was smiling, his pate shiny in the sunlight. He seemed to be clenching his back teeth to prevent himself from swallowing. “Have you seen any buckling in the floors?”

“This building has been here for over a hundred and fifty years,” Clete said. “I renovated it after Katrina, too.”

“Yeah, it’s old and storm-damaged. That’s why it’s falling apart,” Grimes said.

“Get out of here,” Clete said.

“It don’t work that way, Purcel,” Grimes said. “Under Louisiana law, that marker is the same as a loan agreement signed at a bank. You fucked yourself. Don’t blame other people.”

“Watch your language,” Clete said.

“You worried about the bride of Frankenstein, here? She’s heard it before. You killed a woman. Who are you to go around lecturing other people about respect? I heard you blew her head off in that shootout on the bayou.”

Clete never blinked, but his face felt tight and small and cold in the wind. There was a tremolo in his chest, like a tuning fork that was out of control. He thought he heard the downdraft of helicopters and a sound like tank treads clanking to life and grinding over banyan trees and bamboo and a railed pen inside which hogs were screaming in panic. He smelled an odor that was like flaming kerosene arching out of a gun turret. His arms hung limply at his sides, and his palms felt as stiff and dry as cardboard when he opened and closed his hands. His shirt and tie and sport coat were too tight on his neck and shoulders and chest; he took a deep breath, as though he had swallowed a chunk of angle iron. “I killed two,” he said.

“Say again?” Grimes asked.

“I killed two women, not just one.”

Waylon Grimes glanced at his wristwatch. “That’s impressive. But we’re on a schedule, here.”

“Yes, we should be going,” the appraiser added.

“The other woman was a mamasan,” Clete said. “She was trying to hide in a spider hole while we were trashing her ville. I rolled a frag down the hole. There were kids in there, too. What do you think about that, Waylon?”

Grimes massaged the back of his neck with one hand, his expression benign. Then a short burst of air escaped his mouth, as though he were genuinely bemused. “Sounds like you got issues, huh?” he said.

“Is that a question?”

“No. I wasn’t in the service. I don’t know about those kinds of issues. What I was saying is we’re done here.”

“Then why did you make it sound like a question?”

“I was trying to be polite.”

“The mamasan lives on my fire escape now. Sometimes I leave a cup of tea on the windowsill for her. Look right over your head. There’s her teacup. Are you laughing at me, Waylon?”

“No.”

“If you’re not laughing at me, who are you laughing at?”

“I’m laughing because I get tired of hearing you guys talk about the war. If it was so fucking bad, why did you go over there? Give it a rest, man. I read about a guy at the My Lai massacre who told a Vietnamese woman he was gonna kill her baby unless she gave him a blow job. Maybe that was you, and that’s why your head is fucked up. The truth is, I don’t care. Pay your marker or lose your building. Can you fit that into your head? You killed a mamasan? Good for you. You killed her kids, too? Get over it.”

Clete could feel a constriction in one side of his face that was not unlike an electric shock, one that robbed his left eye of sight and replaced it with a white flash of light that seemed to explode like crystal breaking. He knew he had hit Waylon Grimes, but he wasn’t sure where or exactly how many times. He saw Grimes crash through the fronds of a windmill palm and try to crawl away from him, and he saw the appraiser run for the foyer, and he felt Alice Werenhaus trying to grab his arms and wrists and prevent him from doing what he was doing. All of them were trying to tell him something, but their voices were lost in the squealing of the hogs and the Zippo-track rolling through the hooches and the downdraft of a helicopter blowing a rice paddy dry while a door gunner was firing an M60 at a column of tiny men in black pajamas and conical straw hats who were running for the tree line.

Clete picked up Waylon Grimes by the front of his shirt and shoved him through a cluster of banana plants into the side of the building, pinning him by his throat against the wall, driving his fist again and again into the man’s face, saliva and blood stringing across the plaster.

He dropped Grimes to the ground and kicked at him once and missed, then steadied himself with one hand against the wall and brought his foot down with all his weight on Grimes’s rib cage. It was then that Clete knew, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he was not only capable of killing a man with his bare hands but he could literally tear him into pieces with no reservation or feeling whatsoever. That was what he commenced doing.

Out of nowhere, Alice Werenhaus pushed past him, her feet sinking to the ankles in the mixture of black dirt and coffee grinds and guano that Clete used in his gardens, dropping onto all fours and forming a protective arch over Grimes’s body, her homely face terrified. “Please don’t hit him anymore. Oh, Mr. Purcel, you frighten me so,” she said. “The world has hurt you so much.”

Our home was located on a one-acre lot shaded by live oak and pecan trees and slash pines on East Main in New Iberia, right up the street from the Shadows, a famous antebellum home built in the year 1831. Even though our house was also constructed in the nineteenth century, it was of much more modest design, one that was called “shotgun” because of its oblong structure, like a boxcar’s, and the folk legend that one could fire a bird gun through the front door and the pellets would exit the back entrance without ever striking a wall.