James Burke: A Stained White Radiance

Weldon rubbed one hand on the back of the other and tried to hold the frown out of his face.

"I'll take a walk down to the back of your property, if you don't mind," I said.

"Help yourself," he said.

The Saint Augustine grass was wet with the morning dew and thick as a sponge as I walked between the oaks down to the bayou. In a sunny patch of ground next to an old gray roofless barn, one that still had an ancient tin Hadacol sign nailed to a wall, was a garden planted with strawberries and watermelons. I walked along beside the brick retaining wall, scanning the mudflat that sloped down to the bayou's edge.

It was crisscrossed with the tracks of neutrias and raccoons and the delicate impressions of egrets and herons; then, not far from the cypress planks that led to Weldon's dock and boathouse, I saw a clutter of footprints at the base of the brick wall.

I propped my palms on the cool bricks and studied the bank. One set of footprints led from the cypress planks to the wall, then back again, but somebody with a larger shoe size had stepped on top of the original tracks. There was also a smear of mud on top of the brick wall, and on the grass, right by my foot, was a Lucky Strike cigarette butt.

I took a plastic Ziploc bag from my pocket and gingerly scooped the cigarette butt inside it.

I was about to turn back toward the house when the breeze blew the oak limbs overhead, and the pattern of sun light and shade shifted on the ground like the squares in a net, and I saw a brassy glint in a curl of mud. I stepped over the wall, and with the tip of my pen lifted a spent.308 hull out of the mud and dropped it in the plastic bag with the cigarette butt.

I walked through the side yard, back out to the front drive and my pickup truck. Weldon was waiting for me. I held the plastic bag up briefly for him to look at.

"Here's the size round your rabbit hunter was using," I said. "He'd ejected it, too, Weldon. Unless he had a semi automatic rifle, he was probably going to take a second shot at you."

"Look, from here on out, how about talking to me and leaving Bama out of it? She's not up to it."

I took a breath and looked away through the oak trees at the sunlight on the blacktop road.

"I think your wife has a serious problem. Maybe it's time to address it," I said.

"I could see the heat in his neck. He cleared his throat.

"Maybe you're going a little beyond the limits of your job, too," he said.

"Maybe. But she's a nice lady, and I think she needs help."

He chewed on his lower lip, put his hands on his hips' looked down at his foot, and stirred a pattern in the pea gravel, like a third-base coach considering his next play.

"There are a bunch of twelve-step groups in New Iberia and St. Martinville. They're good people," I said.

He nodded without looking up.

"Let me ask you something else," I said. "You flew an observation plane off a carrier in Vietnam, didn't you? You must have been pretty good."

"Give me a chimpanzee, three bananas, and thirty minutes of his attention, and I'll give you a pilot."

"I also heard you flew for Air America."

"So?"

"Not everybody has that kind of material in You're not still involved in some CIA bullshit, He tapped his jaw with his finger like a drum.

"CIA… yeah, that's Catholic, Irish, and alcoholic, right? No, I'm a coonass, my religion is shaky, and I've never hit the juice. I don't guess I fit the category, Dave."

"I see. If you get tired of it, call me at the office or at home."

"Tired of what?"

"Jerking yourself around, being clever with people who're trying to help you. I'll see you around, Weldon."

I left him standing in his driveway, a faint grin on his mouth, a piece of cartilage as thick as a biscuit in his jaw, his big, square hands open and loose at his sides.

Back at the office I asked the dispatcher where Garrett, the new man, was.

"He went to pick up a prisoner in St. Martinville. You want me to call him?" he said.

"Ask him to drop by my office when he has a chance. It's nothing urgent." I kept my face empty of meaning. "Tell me, what kind of beef did he have with Internal Affairs in Houston?"

"Actually it was his partner who had the beef. Maybe you read about it. The partner left Garrett in the car and marched a Mexican kid under the bridge on Buffalo Bayou and played Russian roulette with him. Except he miscalculated where the round was in the cylinder and blew the kid's brains all over a concrete piling. Garrett got pissed off because he was under investigation, cussed out a captain, and quit the department. It's too bad, because they cleared him later. So I guess he's starting all over. Did something happen out there at the Sonniers'?"

"No, I just wanted to compare notes with him."

"Say, you have an interesting phone message in your box.

I raised my eyebrows and waited.

"Lyle Sonnier," he said, and grinned broadly.

On my way back to my office cubicle I took the small pile of morning letters, memos, and messages from my mailbox, sat down at my desk, and began turning over each item in the stack one at a time on the desk blotter. I couldn't say exactly why I didn't want to deal with Lyle. Maybe it was a little bit of guilt, a little intellectual dishonesty. Earlier that morning I had been willing to be humorous with Garrett about Lyle, but I knew in reality that there was nothing funny about him. If you flipped through the late-night cable channels on TV and saw him in his metallic-gray silk suit and gold necktie, his wavy hair conked in the shape of a cake, his voice ranting and his arms flailing in the air before an enrapt audience of blacks and blue-collar whites, you might dismiss him as another religious huckster or fundamentalist fanatic whom the rural South produces with unerring predictability generation after generation.

Except I remembered Lyle when he was an eighteen-year-old tunnel rat in my platoon who would crawl naked to the waist down a hole with a flashlight in one hand, a.45 automatic in the other, and a rope tied around his ankle as his lifeline. I also remembered the day he squeezed into an opening that was so narrow his pants were almost scraped off his buttocks; then, as the rope uncoiled and disappeared into the hillside with him, we heard a whoomph under the ground, and a red cloud of cordite-laced dust erupted from the hole. When we pulled him back out by his ankle, his arms were still extended straight out in front of him, his hair and face webbed with blood, and two fingers of his right hand were gone as though they had been lopped off with a barber's razor.

People in New Iberia who knew Lyle usually spoke of him as a flimflam man who preyed on the fear and stupidity of his followers, or they thought him as an entertaining borderline psychotic who had probably cooked his head with drugs. I didn't know what the truth was about Lyle, but I always suspected that in that one-hundredth of a second between the time he snapped the tripwire with his outstretched flashlight or army.45 and the instant when the inside of his head roared with white light and sound and the skin of his face felt like it was painted with burning tallow, he thought he saw with a third eye into all the baseless fears, the vortex of mysteries, the mockery that his preparation for this moment had become.

I looked at his Baton Rouge phone number on the piece of message paper, then turned the piece of paper over in my fingers. No, Lyle Sonnier wasn't a joke, I thought. I picked up my telephone and started to dial the number, then realized that Garrett, the ex-Houston cop, was standing in the entrance to my cubicle, his eyes slightly askance when I glanced up at him.

"Oh, hi, thanks for dropping by," I said.

"Sure. What's up?"

"Not much." I tapped my fingers idly on the desk blotter, then opened and closed my drawer. "Say, do you have a smoke?"