James Burke: A Stained White Radiance

"Don't worry about it. I'll take it from here. Why don't you guys head up to the cafe for coffee?"

"She's the sister of that Nazi or Klan politician in New Orleans, isn't she?"

"You got it. Weldon knows how to pick 'em." Then I couldn't resist. "You know who Weldon's brother is, don't you?"

"No."

"Lyle Sonnier."

"That TV preacher in Baton Rouge? No kidding? I bet that guy could steal the stink off of shit and not get the smell on his hands."

"Welcome to south Louisiana, podna."

Weldon shook hands when he answered the door. His hand was big, square, callused along the heel and the index finger. Even when he grinned, Weldon's face was bold, the eyes like buckshot, the jaw rectangular and hard. His brown-gray crewcut was shaved close to the scalp above his large ears, and he always seemed to be biting softly on his molars, flexing the lumps of cartilage behind his jawline.

He wore his house slippers, a pair of faded beltless Levi's, and a paint-stained T-shirt that molded his powerful biceps and flat stomach. He hadn't shaved and he had a cup of coffee in his hand. He was polite to me-Weldon was always polite-but he kept looking at his watch.

"I can't tell you anything else, Dave," he said, as we stood in the doorway of his dining room. "I was standing there in front of the glass doors, looking out at the sunrise over the bayou, and pop, it came right through the glass and hit the wall over yonder." He grinned.

"It must have scared you," I said.

"Sure did."

"Yeah, you look all shaken up, Weldon. Why did your wife call us instead of you?"

"She worries a lot."

"You don't?"

"Look, Dave, I saw two black kids earlier. They chased a rabbit out of the cane-brake, then I saw them shooting at some mockingbirds up in a tree on the bayou. I think they live in one of those old nigger shacks down the road. Why don't you go talk to them?"

He looked at the time on the mahogany grandfather clock at the far end of the dining room, then adjusted the hands on his wristwatch.

"The black kids didn't have a shotgun, did they?" I asked.

"No, I don't think so."

"Did they have a.22?"

"I don't know, Dave."

"But that's what they'd probably have if they were shooting rabbits or mockingbirds, wouldn't they? At least if they didn't have a shotgun."

"Maybe."

I looked at the hole in the pane of glass toward the top of the French door. I pulled my fountain pen, one almost as thick as my little finger, from my pocket and inserted the end in the hole. Then I crossed the dining room and did the same thing with the hole in the wall. There was a stud behind the wall, and the fountain pen went into the hole three inches before it tapped anything solid.

"Do you believe a.22 round did this?" I asked.

"Maybe it ricocheted and toppled," he answered.

I walked back to the French doors, opened them onto the flagstone patio, and gazed down the sloping blue-green lawn to the bayou. Among the cypresses and oaks on the bank were a dock and a weathered boat shed. Between the mud-bank and the lawn was a low red-brick wall that Weldon had constructed to keep his land from eroding into the Teche.

"I think what you're doing is dumb, Weldon," I said, still looking at the brick wall and the trees on the bank silhouetted against the glaze of sunlight on the bayou's brown surface.

"Excuse me?" he said.

"Who has reason to hurt you?"

"Not a soul." He smiled. "At least not to my knowledge."

"I don't want to be personal, but your brother-in-law is Bobby Earl."

"Yes?"

"He's quite a guy. A CBS newsman called him 'the Robert Redford of racism."

"Yeah, Bobby liked that one."

"I heard you pulled Bobby across a table in Copeland's by his necktie and sawed it off with a steak knife."

"Actually, it was Mason's over on Magazine."

"Oh, I see. How did he like being humiliated in a restaurant full of people?"

"He took it all right. Bobby's not a bad guy. You just have to define the situation for him once in a while."

"How about some of his followers-Klansmen, American Nazis, members of the Aryan Nation? You think they're allright guys, too?"

"I don't take Bobby seriously."

"A lot of people do."

"That's their problem. Bobby has about six inches of dong and two of brain. If the press left him alone, he'd be selling debit insurance."

"I've heard another story about you, Weldon, maybe a more serious one."

"Dave, I don't want to offend you. I'm sorry you had to come out here, I'm sorry my wife is wired all the time and sees rubber faces leering in the window. I appreciate the job you have to do, but I don't know who put a hole in my glass. That's the truth, and I have to go to work."

"I've heard you're broke."

"What else is new? That's the independent oil business. It's either dusters or gushers."

"Do you owe somebody money?"

I saw the cartilage work behind his jaws.

"I'm getting a little on edge here, Dave."

"Yeah?"

"That's right."

"I'm sorry about that."

"I drilled my first well with spit and junkyard scrap. I didn't get a goddamn bit of help from anybody either- No loans, no credit, just me, four nigras, an alcoholic driller from Texas, and a lot of ass-busting work." He pointed his finger at me. "I've kept it together for twenty years, too, podna. I don't go begging money from anybody, and I'll tell you something else, too. Somebody leans on me, somebody fires a rifle into my house, I square it personally"

"I hope you don't. I'd hate to see you in trouble, Weldon. I'd like to talk with your wife now, please."

He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and dropped the heavy metal lighter indifferently on the gleaming wood surface of his dining-room table.

"Yeah, sure," he said. "Just take it a little bit easy. She's having a reaction to her medication or something. It affects her blood pressure."

His wife was a pate, small-boned, ash-blonde woman, whose milk-white skin was lined with blue veins. She wore a pink silk house robe, and she had brushed her hair back over her neck and had put on fresh makeup. She should have been pretty, but she always had a startled look in her blue eyes, as though she heard invisible doors slamming around her. The breakfast room was domed and glassed-in, filled with sunlight and hanging fern and philodendron plants, and the view of the bayou, the oaks and the bamboo, the trellises erupting with purple wisteria, was a magnificent one. But her face seemed to register none of it. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, the pupils shrunken to small black dots, her skin so tight that you thought perhaps someone was twisting the back of her hair in a knot. I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in the same home that had produced a man like Bobby Earl.

She had been christened Bama. Her accent was soft, pleasant to listen to, more Mississippi than Louisiana, but in it you heard a tremolo, as though a nerve ending were pulled loose and fluttering inside her.

She said she had been in bed when she heard the shot and the glass break. But she hadn't seen anything.

"What about this prowler you reported, Mrs. Sonnier? Do you have any idea who he might have been?" I smiled at her.

"Of course not."

"You never saw him before?"

"No. He was horrible."

I saw Weldon raise his eyes toward the ceiling, then turn away and look out at the bayou.

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"He must have been in a fire," she said. "His ears were little stubs. His face was like red rubber, like a big red inner tube patch."

Weldon turned back toward me.

"You've got all that on file down at your office, haven't you, Dave?" he said. "There's not any point in covering the same old territory, is there?"

"Maybe not, Weldon," I said, closed my small notebook, and replaced it in my pocket. "Mrs. Sonnier, here's one of my cards. Give me a call if you remember anything else or if I can be of any other help to you."