James Burke - The Glass Rainbow

“Don’t shine me on, Dave. What do you know about this St. Jude stuff?”

“Either I stay here tonight to protect you from yourself, or you give me your word you’re finished pissing off everybody on the planet.”

“You don’t get it, Streak. Just like always, you’ve got your head wrapped in concrete.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re yesterday’s bubble gum. We’re the freaks, not Herman Stanga. That guy has wrecked hundreds, maybe thousands, of people’s lives. Guys like us follow around behind him with a push broom and a dustpan.”

“What happened at the Gate Mouth?”

“I saw villagers in the Central Highlands. We’d lit up the ville. I heard AK rounds popping under the hooches. All the old people and children and women were crying. The VC had already blown Dodge, but we torched the place with the Zippo track anyway. It was a resupply depot. Their wells were full of rice. We had to do it, right?”

I leaned my forehead lightly against one of the bars. When I looked up, Clete was staring at the back of the cell as though the answer to a mystery lay inside the shadows cast by the lights in the corridor.

On the way out of the annex, I saw Emma Poche in a small side office, reading her book. “Your friend quiet down?” she said.

“I’m not sure. Call me again if there’s any more trouble.”

“Will do.”

“What are you reading?”

She held up the cover so I could see it. “ The Green Cage by Robert Weingart,” she said. “He’s an ex-con who supposedly works with some kind of self-help group around here. What do they call it? He’s hooked up with a rich guy in St. Mary Parish.”

“The local rich guy is Kermit Abelard.”

“Good book,” Emma said.

“Yeah, if you like to get into lockstep with the herd, it’ll do the trick,” I replied.

“You’re a joy, Streak,” she said, and resumed reading.

BY NOON THE next day Clete had been charged with destroying private property, resisting arrest, and felony assault. I went his bond for twenty-five thousand dollars and drove him back to the motor court on East Main in New Iberia, where he lived in a tan stucco cottage, under spreading oaks, no more than thirty yards from Bayou Teche. He showered and shaved and put on fresh slacks and a crisp shirt, and I drove him to Victor’s cafeteria and bought him a huge lunch and a pitcher of iced tea. He ate with a fork in one hand and a piece of bread in the other, his hat tilted forward, his skin lustrous with the energies that burned inside him.

“How you feel?” I asked.

“Fine. Why shouldn’t I?” he replied. “I need to rent a car and get back to my office and talk to my insurance man.”

“Why is it I think you’re not going to do that at all? Why is it I think you’ve got Herman Stanga in your bombsights?”

The cafeteria was crowded and noisy, the sound rising up to the high nineteenth-century stamped-tin ceiling. Clete finished chewing a mouthful of fried pork chop and mashed potatoes and swallowed. He spoke without looking at me, his eyes intense with thought. “Stanga set me up and I took the bait. He’ll be filing civil suit by the end of the day,” he said. “I’m going to take Stanga down with or without you, Dave.”

I paused before I spoke again. I could leave Clete to his own devices and let him try to resolve his troubles on his own. But you don’t let your friends down when they’re in need, and you don’t abandon a man who once carried you down a fire escape with two bullets in his back.

“Robert Weingart may be hooked up with this St. Jude Project,” I said. “At least that’s the impression I got from Emma Poche.”

“Weingart works with Stanga?”

“I’m not sure of that,” I said.

Clete wiped his mouth with his napkin and drank from his iced tea, pushing his half-eaten lunch away. “Does the St. Jude Project have an office hereabouts?”

“Not exactly. Want to take a little trip back into ‘the good old days’?” I said.

ST. MARY PARISH had a long history as a fiefdom run by a small oligarchy that had possessed power and enormous fortunes, actually hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time when the great majority of people in the parish had possessed virtually nothing. The availability of the ancient cypress trees, the alluvial soil that was among the most fertile in the world, the untapped oil and natural-gas domes that had waited aeons for the penetration of the diamond-crusted Hughes drill bit, and, most important, the low cost of black and poor-white labor seemed like the ultimate fulfillment of a corporate dream that only a divine hand could have fashioned. Even the curds of white smoke rising from the mills into the hard blue Louisiana sky could easily be interpreted as a votive offering to a benevolent capitalist deity.

To my knowledge, no members of the Abelard family had held rank of consequence in the Confederate army, nor had they participated in great battles, nor had their home been burned or vandalized by Yankee marauders. Nor did they choose to participate in the grand illusion that came to be known as the Lost Cause. In fact, rumors had persisted to the present time that the Abelards, originally from Pennsylvania, had gotten along very well with their Union occupiers and their cotton and molasses had been allowed to pass unobstructed up the Mississippi to markets in the North.

The patriarch was Peter Abelard. He had been a successful haberdasher in Philadelphia and New York City during the 1840s and had brought his wife and children to the South with one objective-to buy as much land and as many slaves as possible. By the outbreak of the war, he had owned 185 slaves and was renting fifty more, the latter in a category known as “wage slaves.” After Emancipation, while others watched in quiet desperation as their fortunes went down the sinkhole or joined terrorist groups like the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia, Peter Abelard formed a partnership with the man who had converted Angola Plantation into Angola Prison and turned it into a giant surrogate for the slave-labor system that Lincoln had signed out of existence with one stroke of his pen. The two men created the convict-lease system that became a prototype throughout the South, resulting, in Louisiana alone, in the deaths of thousands of inmates, mostly black, who died of malnutrition, disease, and physical abuse.

The Abelard estate was down at the bottom of St. Mary Parish, where the land bleeds gradually into sawgrass and ill-defined marshy terrain that is being eaten away by saltwater intrusion as far as the eye can see. The Abelard house, with its Greco columns and second-story veranda, had once been a magnificent structure inside an Edenic ambience that John James Audubon had painted because of the beautiful birds that lived among the trees and flowers. But now, as Clete and I drove south on the two-lane asphalt road, the vista was quite different.

A ten-thousand-mile network of canals that had been cut for the installation of pipelines and the use of industrial workboats had poisoned the root systems of living marsh along the entirety of the coast. The consequences were not arguable, as any collage of aerial photography would demonstrate. Over the years, the rectangular grid of the canals had turned into serpentine lines that had taken on the bulbous characteristics of untreated skin tumors. In the case of the Abelard plantation, the effects were even more dramatic, due in part to the fact that the grandfather had allowed drilling in the black lagoons and hummocks of water oaks and gum and cypress trees that had surrounded his house. Now the house sat in solitary fashion on a knoll, accessible only by a plank bridge, the white paint stained by smoke from stubble fires, its backdrop one of yellowed sawgrass, dead trees protruding from the brackish water, and abandoned 1940s oil platforms whose thick wood timbers were as weightless in the hand as desiccated cork.