James Burke - The New Iberia Blues

The man and woman were my mother and father. Behind them, I saw Smiley Wimple with two little girls dressed in white and hung with chains of flowers. The wound in Smiley’s side glowed with an eye-watering radiance.

My truck shot past them, blowing newspaper and dust all over the road.

“Watch where you’re going!” Clete said.

“You saw that?” I said.

“Saw what?”

I looked in the rearview mirror. The newspaper had settled on the asphalt. There was nothing on either side of the highway except pastureland and cane fields. “Did you see those people?”

“What people?”

“Don’t shine me on,” I said.

“I didn’t see anything. What the hell are you talking about?”

I stared at him, then had to correct the wheel to keep from going off the shoulder. “I’m not going to jack you around. I just saw my parents. I saw Smiley, too. With two little girls.”

“Pull over.”

“No.”

“This isn’t Nam, Streak. You roger that, noble mon? We got no medevac. In the next fifteen minutes we may have to kick some serious ass. You stop talking bullshit.”

“I know what I saw. Don’t give me a bad time about it either.”

“Okay,” he replied. “Okay. We can’t blow it. These guys are going to kill Alafair.”

“Guys?”

“The sick fucks are working together.”

“For what purpose?”

“It’s about the jail. It’s a war on this whole fucking area.” He looked straight ahead, rigid in the seat, his fists clenched like small hams on his knees, his face as tight as latex stretched on his skull, his chest rising and falling.

“You’re losing it, Clete.”

“This from the guy who just saw his dead parents?”

His right hand was twitching on his thigh.

You know how death is. It can be a strange companion. Its smell is like no other in the world. I remember an ARVN graves unit digging up the bodies of villagers who had been buried alive along a streambed deep in the heart of Indian country. The stench broke through the soil and reminded me of the whores pouring their waste buckets into the privies behind the cribs on Railroad Avenue, back when I threw the newspaper in New Iberia’s old red-light district. The putrescence of the odor, however, doesn’t compare to the image of the flesh when it’s exposed by a shovel. It’s marbled with whitish-yellow boils and fissures in the skin that look like centipedes, and the eyes resemble fish scale and are either half-lidded or as bulging and black and white as an eight ball.

If a person is interested in the kind of war scene my patrol stumbled upon, I can add a few details to satisfy his curiosity. If our hypothetical observer had been there, he would have seen the bodies being rolled into tarps, and the hands of the dead that were little more than bones held together by a hank of skin; he would have also noticed that the fingernails were broken and impacted with dirt; that night our observer would have had a very stiff drink and tried to convince himself that Dachau and Nanking were a historical perversion and not a manifestation of the worm that lives in the human unconscious.

These are certainly not good images to reflect upon, but I like to offer them for the purview of those who love wars as long as they don’t have to participate in one. That said, the ubiquity of the worm does not manifest itself only on battlefields. It can take on an invisibility that is more insidious than the footage I can never rinse from my dreams. You don’t smell it or see it, but in your sleep, you see it grow in size and nestle on your chest and squeeze the air from your lungs. You spend the rest of the night with the light on or a drink in your hand or your hand clasped on a holy medal, and you pray on your knees for the dawn to come. After the sun breaks on the horizon, you may see figures standing in the shade of a building, or in an alleyway, or among wind-thrashed trees, and you’ll quickly realize the bell you hear tolling in the distance is one that no one else can either hear or see.

That’s when you know you’ve taken up residence in a very special place you cannot tell others about, lest you frighten them or embarrass yourself. You’ve seen the great reality and have accepted it for what it is, and in so doing, you have been set free. But by anyone’s measure, the dues you pay are not for everyone. Psychiatrists call it a Garden of Gethsemane experience. It’s a motherfucker, and you never want to have it twice.

I’m saying I no longer worry about death, at least my own. But the thought of losing my daughter was more than I could bear. There is no human experience worse than losing one’s child, and to lose a child at the hands of evil men causes a level of emotional pain that has no peer. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar. That is why I never argue with those who want to see the murderers of their children receive the ultimate penalty, although I do not believe in capital punishment.

We crossed the St. Martinville city limits and rode through the black district, past Bella Delahoussaye’s cottage, and stopped in front of the sheriff’s department. Sean McClain was standing outside his cruiser, waiting for us.

I parked and got out of the truck. “What do you have?”

“Wexler’s address up the bayou,” he replied. “A deputy said he saw the Lamborghini go through the square early this morning. He remembered it because it was in his brother-in-law’s repair shop for a couple of days.”

“That’s why Wexler was driving Butterworth’s Subaru in the park,” I said. “Is there a deputy sitting on Wexler’s place?”

“I told them not to do nothing till you got here.”

“Give me the address. Follow us but stay a block behind.”

“What about the St. Martin deputies?” Sean said.

I shook my head.

“Is that smart?” he said.

I looked at him without speaking.

“It’s your show,” he said.

We pulled into a shady lot on the Teche, just outside the city limits. The house was a large, weathered gingerbread affair, the wide, railed gallery overgrown with banana fronds, the rain gutters full of leaves and moss, the tin roof streaked with rust. The chimney was cracked, a broken lightning rod hanging from the bricks. There were no vehicles in the yard or garage. I got out and banged on the door, then circled the house. My caution about the St. Martin Parish authorities was unnecessary; no one was home. I splintered the front door out the jamb and went inside.

Every room was immaculate and squared away. I began pulling clothes off hangers and raking shelves onto the floor.

“What are you doing?” Clete said.

“Finding whatever I can.”

“We don’t know that Wexler has Alafair. Cormier is out there somewhere.”

“It’s Wexler. She was here. I can feel it.”

Clete looked at me strangely.

“It’s something a father knows,” I said.

Sean McClain was still outside. Through the open front door, I saw Bailey Ribbons pull into the lot in a cruiser. She got out and walked into the living room. “Helen says we’ll have the whole department on this, Dave. What do you have so far?”

“We found out from a St. Martin deputy that Wexler’s Lamborghini was in the shop. He’d probably borrowed Butterworth’s Subaru when Wimple accosted him.”

“You dumped his closets and shelves?” she said.

“I’m just getting started.”

“Maybe dial it down a little bit? We don’t want to lose something in the shuffle.”

She was right. I was in overdrive. “Check the kitchen. I’m going in the attic.”

I pulled down the drop door in the bedroom ceiling and climbed up the steps. I shone a penlight around the attic walls. A heavy trunk, a wardrobe box, and a handwoven basket-like baby carriage were in one corner. The wardrobe box was stuffed with historical costumes that smelled of mothballs. The baby carriage was filled with bandanas, women’s shoes, empty purses and wallets, and old Polaroids of third-world women in bars and cafés. All the women were smiling. The trunk was unlocked. I lifted the top. It was packed with video games, the kind that award the shooters or drivers points for the victims they rack up.