James Burke: Creole Belle

Humble abode or not, it was a fine place to live. The windows reached all the way to the ceiling and had ventilated storm shutters, and in hurricane season, oak limbs bounced off our roof without ever shattering glass. I had extended and screened the gallery across the front, and hung it with a glider, and sometimes on hot afternoons I would set up the ice-cream freezer on the gallery and we would mash up blackberries in the cream and sit on the glider and eat blackberry ice cream.

I lived in the house with my daughter, Alafair, who had finished law school at Stanford but was determined to be a novelist, and with my wife, Molly, a former nun and missionary in Central America who had come to Louisiana to organize the sugarcane workers in St. Mary Parish. In back, there was a hutch for our elderly raccoon, Tripod, and a big tree above the hutch where our warrior cat, Snuggs, kept guard over the house and the yard. I had been either a police officer in New Orleans or a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish since I returned from Vietnam. My history is one of alcoholism, depression, violence, and bloodshed. For much of it I have enormous regret. For some of it I have no regret at all, and given the chance, I would commit the same deeds again without pause, particularly when it comes to protection of my own.

Maybe that’s not a good way to be. But at some point in your life, you stop keeping score. It has been my experience that until that moment comes in your odyssey through the highways and byways and back alleys of your life, you will never have peace.

I had been home from the recovery unit nine days and was sitting on the front step, cleaning my spinning reel, when Clete Purcel’s restored Cadillac convertible with the starch-white top and freshly waxed maroon paint job pulled into our driveway, the tires clicking on the gravel, a solitary yellow-spotted leaf from a water oak drifting down on the hood. When he got out of the car, he removed the keys from the ignition and dropped them in the pocket of his slacks, something he never did when he parked his beloved Caddy on our property. He also looked back over his shoulder at the one-way traffic coming up East Main, fingering the pink scar that ran through one eyebrow to the bridge of his nose.

“You run a red light?” I asked.

He sat down heavily next to me, a gray fog of weed and beer and testosterone puffing out of his clothes. The back of his neck was oily, his face dilated. “Remember a guy name of Waylon Grimes?”

“He did some button work for the Giacanos?”

“Button work, torture, extortion, you name it. He came to my place with Bix Golightly. Then he came back with a property appraiser. That’s after he was warned.”

“What happened?”

“He said some stuff about Vietnam and killing women and kids. I don’t remember, exactly. I lost it.”

“What did you do, Clete?”

“Tried to kill him. Alice Werenhaus saved his life.” He took a breath and lifted one arm and placed his hand on top of his shoulder, his face flinching. “I think I tore something loose inside me.”

“Have you been to a doctor?”

“What can a doctor do besides open me up again?”

“Has Grimes filed charges?”

“That’s the problem. He told the ambulance attendants that he fell from my balcony. I think he plans to square it on his own. I think Golightly has given him the addresses of my sister and niece.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Golightly told me he was going to do it unless I paid him for the marker. You know the word about Bix. He’s a nutjob, and he’d gut and stuff his own mother and use her for a doorstop, but he’s straight up when it comes to a debt, either collecting or paying it. What do you think I ought to do?”

“Talk to Dana Magelli at NOPD.”

“What should I tell him? I tried to beat a guy to death, but I’m the victim, and now I need a couple of cruisers to follow my family around?”

“Find something else to use against Grimes,” I said.

“Like what?”

“The death of the child he ran over.”

“The parents are scared shitless. They’re also both junkies. I think Grimes was delivering their skag when he killed their kid.”

“I don’t know what else to offer.”

“I can’t let my sister and niece take the fall for what I did. This is eating my lunch.”

“You stop having the thoughts you’re having.”

“What else am I going to do? Grimes should have been cycled through a septic tank a long time ago.”

I heard the front door open behind me. “I thought I heard your voice, Clete. You’re just in time for dinner,” Molly said. “Is everything okay out here?”

Clete turned down the invitation, claiming he was meeting someone for supper down the street at Clementine’s, which meant he would close the bar there and probably sleep in the back of his car that night or in his office on Main or perhaps at the motor court down the bayou, where he rented a cottage. Regardless of how the evening ended, it was obvious Clete had returned to his old ways, mortgaging tomorrow for today, holding mortality at bay with vodka and weed and a case of beer he kept iced down in the backseat of the Caddy, and in this instance maybe toying with the idea of premeditated murder.

After we ate supper, I tried to read the paper and put Clete’s problems with Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly out of my mind. I couldn’t. Clete would always remain the best friend I’d ever had, a man who once carried me down a fire escape with two bullets in his back, a man who would give up his life for me or Molly or Alafair.

“I’m going to take a walk,” I said to Molly. “You want to go?”

She was baking a pie in the kitchen, and there was a smear of flour on her cheek. Her hair was red and cut short, her skin powdered with freckles. Sometimes her gestures and expressions would take on a special kind of loveliness, like a visual song, without her being aware of it. “You’re going to talk to Clete?” she said.

“I guess.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“No reason.”

“Clete won’t talk openly if I’m there.”

“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “You look beautiful.”

I picked up the iPod given to me by Tee Jolie Melton and strolled down East Main under the canopy of live oaks arching over the street. The streetlamps had just come on, and fireflies were lighting in the trees and bamboo along Bayou Teche. I walked out on the drawbridge at Burke Street and looked down the long dark tidal stream that eventually dumped into the Gulf. The tide was coming in, and the water was full of mud and sliding high up on the banks when a boat passed, the lily pads in the shallows rolling like a green carpet. For me, Louisiana has always been a haunted place. I believe the specters of slaves and Houma and Atakapa Indians and pirates and Confederate soldiers and Acadian farmers and plantation belles are still out there in the mist. I believe their story has never been adequately told and they will never rest until it is. I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind-numbing, on a level with telling fond tales about one’s rapist.

But these are dismal thoughts, and I try to put them aside. As I gazed down the Teche, I clicked on the iPod and found one of Tee Jolie’s recordings. She was singing “La Jolie Blon,” the heartbreaking lament that you hear once and never forget for the rest of your life. Then I remembered that Alafair had said she had not been able to find Tee Jolie’s songs in the contents. How was that possible? There on the bridge, in the gloaming of the day, while the last of the sunlight blazed in an amber ribbon down the center of the bayou, while the black-green backs of alligator gars rolled among the lily pads, I listened to Tee Jolie’s beautiful voice rising from the earphones that rested on the sides of my neck, as though she were speaking French to me from a bygone era, one that went all the way back to the time of Evangeline and the flight of the Acadian people from Nova Scotia to the bayou country of South Louisiana. I did not realize that I was about to relearn an old lesson, namely that sometimes it’s better to trust the realm of the dead than the world of the quick, and never to doubt the existence of unseen realities that can hover like a hologram right beyond the edges of our vision.