James Burke: The Glass Rainbow

“Won’t change nothing. You’ll still be a big fat man calling other people names.”

“I’m looking for Herman Stanga. I owe him some money.”

The boy’s expression showed no recognition of the lie. He stepped back from the Cadillac, nodding in approval, touching the chrome back of the outside mirror with his fingertips. His head was too small for his body, and his body too small for his baggy pants and bright orange and white polyester T-shirt.

“You just cruising around, handing out money? Leave it wit’ me. I’ll get it to the right person.”

“What’s your name?”

“Buford.”

“Tell your parents to use a better form of birth control, Buford.”

Then Clete saw a strange transformation take place in the boy’s face, a flicker of injury, the kind that went deep and couldn’t be feigned, like the pain of a stone bruise traveling upward from the foot into the viscera. Clete dropped his transmission into drive, then stuck it back in park. “What’s your last name?” he said.

“I ain’t got one. No, I take that back. My last name is Kiss-My-Ass-Fat-Man.”

“Get in the car, Kiss-My-Ass.”

The boy started to walk off. Four or five teenage boys were watching him from a side yard.

“Or go to jail,” Clete said, opening his PI badge holder. “They have a new pygmy unit there. You can test-drive it and see if you’d like to stay around for a while. Forget your partners over there. After you’re busted, they won’t take time to piss in your mouth.”

The boy hesitated, then got in the car, the big leather seat almost swallowing him up. He touched the polished wood of the dashboard and looked at the green glow of the dials. “Where we going?”

“Burger King. I eat five times a day. Right now my tank is empty. Can you handle a hamburger?”

“I ain’t against it.”

“If I catch you slinging dope again, I’ll personally put you in juvie.”

“If you was a cop, you’d know where Cousin Herman is at.”

“Herman Stanga is your cousin?”

“I’ve seen you in front of your office downtown. You’re a private detective.”

“You’re pretty smart for a midget. Where’s your cousin, Kiss-My-Ass?”

“Where he is every night, at the club in St. Martinville. You a child molester?”

“What if I stop the car and use you for a tent peg and hammer you down into one of these dirt yards?”

“I was just axing. You look kind of weird. You need an elephant trunk on your face to make it complete.” The boy put a mint in his jaw and sucked on it loudly. He glanced backward at the assembly of teenage boys disappearing into the dusk.

“What’s the name of your cousin’s club?” Clete said.

“Your stomach and your butt must weigh t’ree hundred pounds by themselves. How you chase after people wit’ all that weight? You must put cracks in the sidewalk. You be T. rex. Jurassic Park comes to New Iberia.”

“The name of the club?”

“The Gate Mout’.”

“Those guys back there were holding your stash?”

“Ax them.”

“They’ll chew you up and spit you out, Kiss-My-Ass. So will your cousin. You talk like an intelligent kid. Why not act like it?”

They were stopped at a traffic light now, the sky as purple as a cloak, cars streaming up and down a street lined with strip malls and discount outlets and fast-food restaurants. The boy whose first name was Buford opened the car door and stepped out and closed the door behind him. “T’anks for the ride, Mr. Fat Man,” he said.

Then he was gone.

THE CLUB WAS located on a long two-lane state road that followed Bayou Teche into St. Martinville’s black district, all the way to a town square that opened onto lovely vistas of oak trees and flowers and elephant ears planted along the bayou’s edge, a historic Acadian church, and nineteenth-century frame buildings with balconies and wood colonnades whose soft decay only added to the aesthetic ambience of the square. But the black district was another world and not one that lent itself to postcard representation. The gutters were banked with beer cans and wine bottles and paper litter, the noise from the juke joints throbbing and incessant, each bar on the strip somehow connected to a larger culture of welfare and bail bond offices, a pawnshop that sold pistols that could have been made out of melted scrap metal, and a prison system that cycled miscreants in and out with the curative effectiveness of a broken turnstile.

The ceiling inside the Gate Mouth club seemed to crush down on the patrons’ heads. The walls were lacquered with red paint that gave off the soiled brightness of a burning coal. The booths were vinyl, the cushions split, the tables scorched with cigarette burns that in the gloom could have been mistaken for the bodies of calcified slugs. The atmosphere was not unlike a box, one whose doors and windows were perhaps painted on the walls and were never intended to be functional. When Clete entered the room, he felt a sense of enclosure that was like a vacuum sucking the air out of his lungs.

He stood at the bar, his hat on, his powder-blue sport coat covering the handcuffs that were drawn through the back of his belt and the blue-black.38 he carried in a nylon shoulder holster. He was the only white person at the bar, but no one looked directly at him. Finally the bartender approached him, a damp rag knotted in one hand, his eyes averted, lights gleaming on his bald head. He did not speak.

“Two fingers of Jack and a beer back,” Clete said.

A woman on the next stool got up and went into the restroom. The bartender shifted a toothpick in his mouth with his tongue and poured the whiskey in a glass and drew a mug of draft beer. He set both of them on napkins in front of Clete. Clete removed a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and set it on the bar.

“Anything else?” the bartender said.

“I like the happy, neighborhood-type mood in here. I bet it’s Mardi Gras here every day.”

The bartender propped his arms on the bar, his eye sockets cavernous, his impatience barely constrained. “Somebody did you something?” he said.

“Is this place named for Gatemouth Brown, the musician?” Clete asked.

“What are you doing in here, man?”

“Waiting on my change.”

“It’s on the house.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Then you got no bidness in here.”

“The twenty is for you. I need to talk to Herman Stanga.”

The muscles on the backs of the bartender’s arms were knotted and tubular, one-color tats scrolled on his forearms.

“I’m out of New Orleans and New Iberia,” Clete said. “I chase bail skips and other kinds of deadbeats. But that’s not why I’m here. How about losing the ofay routine?”

The bartender removed the toothpick from his mouth and looked toward the back door. “Some nights we cook up some links and chops. They ain’t half bad,” he said. “But don’t give me no shit out there.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Clete said.

Clete poured his Jack Daniel’s into his beer mug and drank it. He walked through a back hallway stacked with boxes, and out the back door into a rural scene that seemed totally disconnected from the barroom. The back lot was spacious and dotted with live oaks and pecan trees, the limbs and trunks wound with strings of white lights. A barbecue pit fashioned from a split oil drum leaked smoke into the canopy and drifted out over Bayou Teche. People were drinking out of red plastic cups at picnic tables, some of the tables lit by candles set inside blue or red vessels that looked like they had been taken from a church.

Clete had never seen Herman Stanga but had heard him described and had no difficulty singling him out. Stanga was sitting with a woman in the shadows, at a table under a live oak that was not wrapped with lights. Both ends of the tabletop were covered with burning candles, guttering deep inside their votive containers. The woman was over thirty, heavy in the shoulders and arms, her blouse and dress those of a countrywoman rather than a regular at a juke.