James Burke - The Glass Rainbow

“Shut up,” Clete said.

“Fuck you, man. I was in an adult prison when I was fifteen years old. Anyt’ing you can do to me has already been done, magnified by ten.”

Then Herman Stanga, his wrists still uncuffed, turned and spat full in Clete’s face.

Later, Clete would not be exactly sure what he did next. He would remember a string of spittle clinging to his face and hair. He would remember Herman Stanga’s fingers reaching for his eyes; he would remember the sour surge of whiskey and beer into his mouth and nose. He would remember grabbing Stanga from the back, lifting him high in the air, and smashing him into the tree trunk. He knew he fitted his hand around the back of Stanga’s neck and he knew he drove Stanga’s face into the bark of the tree. Those things were predictable and not unseemly or uncalled for. But the events that followed were different, even for Clete.

He felt a whoosh of heat on his skin as though someone had opened a furnace door next to his head. His heart was as hard and big as a muskmelon in his chest, hammering against his ribs, bursting with adrenaline, his strength almost superhuman. One hand was hooked through the back of Stanga’s belt, the other wrapped deep into the man’s neck. He drove Stanga’s head and face again and again into the tree trunk while people in the background screamed. Stanga’s body felt as light as a scarecrow’s in Clete’s hands, the arms flopping like rags with each blow.

When Clete dropped him to the ground, Stanga was still conscious, his face trembling with shock, his nose streaming blood, the split on his forehead ridged up like an orange starfish.

The images and sounds Clete saw and heard as he stumbled up the slope toward the street would remain with him for the rest of his life. The witnesses who had gathered on the slope had been transformed into a group of villagers in an Asian country that no one talked about anymore. Their throats were filled with lamentation and pleas for mercy, their eyes wide with terror, their fingers knitted desperately in front of them.

Clete could smell a stench like stagnant water and duck shit and inflammable liquid bursting alight and straw and animal hair burning. He wiped Stanga’s spittle off his face with his sleeve and pushed through the crowd, stumbling off balance, a man out of place and time, with no moat or castle to which he could return.

I GOT THE PHONE call from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department at 11:46 P.M. Clete had been barreling down the two-lane toward the Iberia Parish line when he hit the roadblock. Rather than think it through and let the situation decompress and play out of its own accord, he swung the Caddy onto a dirt road and tried to escape through a sugarcane field. The upshot was a blown tire, forty feet of barbed-wire fence tangled under his car frame, and a half-dozen Brahmas headed for Texas. The deputy who had called me was a fellow member of A.A. whom I saw occasionally at different meetings in the area. Her name was Emma Poche, and, like me, she had once been with the NOPD and had left the department under the same circumstances, ninety proof and trailing clouds of odium. Even today I had trepidation about Emma and believed she was perhaps one of those driven creatures who, regardless of 12-step membership, lived one drink and one click away from the Big Exit.

She lowered her voice and told me she was subbing as a night screw and that her call was unauthorized.

“I can’t understand you. Clete’s drunk?” I said.

“Who knows?” she replied.

“Say again?”

“He doesn’t act drunk.”

“What’s all that noise in the background?”

“Four deputies trying to move him from the tank into an isolation cell.”

The kitchen was dark, the moon high over the park on the far side of the bayou, the trees in the backyard full of light and shadows. I was tired and didn’t want to be pulled into another one of Clete’s escapades. “Tell those guys to leave him alone. He’ll settle down. He has cycles, kind of like an elephant in must.”

“That pimp from New Iberia, what’s his name?”

“Herman Stanga?”

“Purcel tore him up at a bar in the black district. And I mean tore him up proper. The pimp’s lawyer is down here now. He wants your friend charged with felony assault.”

“Stanga must have done something. Clete wouldn’t attack someone without provocation, particularly a lowlife like Stanga.”

“He just poleaxed a deputy. You’d better get your ass up here, Dave.”

I dressed and drove up the bayou ten miles to the lockup in the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Annex, next to the white-columned courthouse that had been built on the town square in the 1850s. Emma Poche met me at the door and walked me down to the holding cell where Clete had been forcibly transferred. Emma was around thirty-five and had gold hair and was slightly overweight, her cheeks always pooled with color, like a North European’s rather than a Cajun’s. A softcover book was stuffed in her back pocket. Before we got to the cell, she glanced behind her and touched my wrist with her fingers. “Does Purcel have flashbacks?” she said.

“Sometimes.”

“Get him moved to a hospital.”

“You think he’s psychotic?”

“Your friend isn’t the problem. A couple of my colleagues have a real hard-on for him. You don’t want him in their custody.”

“Thanks, Emma.”

“You can dial my phone anytime you want, hon.” She winked, her face deadpan. Then waited. “That was a joke.”

I wouldn’t have sworn to that. She stuck me in the ribs with her finger and walked back down the corridor, her holstered pistol canting on her hip. But I didn’t have time to worry about Emma Poche’s lack of discretion. Clete looked terrible. He was alone in the cell, sitting on a wood bench, his big arms propped on his kneecaps, staring straight ahead at the wall. He didn’t speak or acknowledge my presence.

Clete was a handsome man, his hair still sandy and cut like a little boy’s, his eyes a bright green, his skin free of tattoos and blemishes except for a pink scar through one eyebrow, where another kid had bashed him with a pipe during a rumble in the Irish Channel. He was overweight but could not be called fat, perhaps because of the barbells he lifted daily and the way he carried himself. When Clete’s boiler system kicked into high register, the kind that should have put his adversaries on red alert, his brow remained as smooth as ice cream, his eyes showing no trace of intent or anger, his physical movements like those of a man caught inside a photograph.

What usually followed was a level of mayhem and chaos that had made him the ogre of the legal system throughout southern Louisiana.

He turned his head sideways, his eyes meeting mine through the bars. The knuckles on his left hand were barked. “Just passing by?”

“Why’d you bust up Herman Stanga?”

“He spat on me.”

“So you had provocation. Why’d you run from the St. Martin guys?”

“I didn’t feel like putting up with their doodah.” He paused a moment. “I’d been smoking some weed earlier. I didn’t want them tearing my Caddy apart. They ripped out my paneling once before.”

So you wrecked your convertible for them, I thought.

“What?” Clete said.

“Did you knock down a screw?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe he slipped. I told those guys to keep their hands off me.”

“Clete-”

“Stanga was playing to an audience. I blew it. I stepped into his trap. He claims to be a member of a street-people outreach program called the St. Jude Project. You ever hear of it?”

“That’s not the issue now. I’ll have a lawyer down here in the morning to get you out. In the meantime-”