James Burke: A Stained White Radiance

"Sure," he said, and took his package out of his shirt pocket. He shook one loose and offered it to me.

"Lucky Strikes are too strong for me," I said. "Thanks, anyway. How about taking a walk with me?"

"Uh, I'm not quite following this. What are we doing, Dave?"

"Come on, I'll buy you a snowball. I just need some feedback from you." I smiled at him.

It was bright and warm outside, and a rainbow haze drifted across the lawn from the water sprinklers. The palm trees were green and etched against the hard blue sky, and on the corner, by a huge live oak tree whose roots had cracked the curb and folded the sidewalk up in a peak, a Negro in a white coat sold snowballs out of a handcart that was topped with a beach umbrella.

I bought two spearmint snowballs, handed one to Garrett, and we sat down side by side on an iron bench in the shade.

His holster and gunbelt creaked like a horse's saddle. He put on his sunglasses, looked away from me, and constantly fiddled with the corner of his mustache.

"The dispatcher was telling me about that beef in Houston," I said. "It sounds like you got a bad deal."

"I'm not complaining. I like it over here. I like the food and the French people."

"But maybe you took two steps back in your career," I said.

"Like I say, I got no complaint."

I took a bite out of my snowball and looked straight ahead.

"Let me cut straight to it, podna," I said. "You're a new man and you're probably a little ambitious. That's fine. But you tainted the crime scene out at the Sonniers'."

He cleared his throat and started to speak, then said nothing.

"Right? You climbed over that brick retaining wall and looked around on the mud-bank? You dropped a cigarette butt on the grass?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you find anything?"

"No, sir."

"You're sure?" I looked hard at the side of his face. There was a red balloon of color in his throat.

"I'm sure."

"All right, forget about it. There's no harm done. Next time out, though, you secure the scene and wait on the investigator."

He nodded, looking straight ahead at some thought hidden inside his sunglasses, then said, "Does any of this go in my jacket?"

"No, it doesn't. But that's not the point, here, podna.

We're all clear on the real point, aren't we?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good, I'll see you inside. I have to return a phone call."

But actually I didn't want to talk with him anymore. I had a feeling that Deputy Garrett was not a good listener.

I called Lyle Sonnier's number in Baton Rouge and was told by a secretary that he was out of town for the day. I gave the spent.308 casing to our fingerprint man, which was by and large a waste of time, since fingerprints seldom do any good unless you have the prints of a definite suspect already on file. Then I read the brief paperwork on the prowler reports made by Barna Sonnier, but it added nothing to my knowledge of what had happened out at the Sonnier place. I wanted to write it all off and leave Weldon to his false pride and private army of demons, whatever they were, and not spend time trying to help somebody who didn't want any interference in his life. But if other people had had the same attitude toward me, I had to remind myself, I would be dead, in a mental institution, or putting together enough change and crumpled one-dollar bills in a sunrise bar to buy a double shot of Beam, with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, in the vain hope that somehow that shuddering rush of heat and amber light through my body would finally cook into ashes every snake and centipede writhing inside me. Then I would be sure that the red sun burning above the oaks in the parking lot would be less a threat to me, that the day would not be filled with metamorphic shapes and disembodied voices that were like slivers of wood in the mind, and that ten A.M. would not come in the form of shakes so bad that I couldn't hold a glass of whiskey with both hands.

At noon I drove home for lunch. The dirt road along the bayou was lined with oak trees that had been planted by slaves, and the sun flashed through the moss-hung branches overhead like a heliograph. The hyacinths were thick and in full purple flower along the edges of the bayou, their leaves beaded with drops of water, like quicksilver, in the shade.

Out in the sunlight, where the water was brown and hotlooking, dragonflies hung motionless in the air and the armor-plated backs of alligators turned in the current with the suppleness of snakes.

A dozen cars and pickup trucks were parked around the boat ramp, dock, and bait shop that I owned and that my wife, Bootsie, and an elderly black man named Batist operated when I wasn't there. I waved at Batist, who was serving barbecue lunches on the telephone-spool tables under the canvas awning that shaded the dock. Then I turned into my dirt drive and parked under the pecan trees in front of the rambling cypress-and-oak house that my father had built by himself during the Depression. The yard was covered with dead leaves and moldy pecan husks, and the pecan trees grew so thick against the sky that my gallery stayed in shadow almost all day, and at night, even in the middle of summer, I only had to turn on the attic fan to make the house so cool that we had to sleep under sheets.

My adopted daughter Alafair had a three-legged pet raccoon named Tripod, and we kept him on a chain attached to a long wire that was stretched between two oaks so he could run up and down in the yard. For some reason whenever someone pulled into the drive Tripod raced back and forth on his wire, wound himself around a tree trunk, tried to clatter up the bark, and usually crashed on top of one of the rabbit hutches, almost garroting himself.

I turned off the truck engine, walked across the soft layer of leaves under my feet, picked him up in my arms, and untangled his chain. He was a beautiful coon, silver-tipped, fat and thick across the stomach and hindquarters, with a big ringed tail, a black mask, and salt-and-pepper whiskers. I opened one of the unused hutches, where I kept his bag of cornbread and dry cracklings, and filled up his food bowl, which was next to the water bowl that he used to wash everything he ate.

When I turned around, Bootsie was watching me from the gallery, smiling. She wore white shorts, wood sandals, a faded pink peasant's blouse, and a red handkerchief tied up in her honey-colored hair. In the shadow of the gallery her legs and arms seemed to glow with her tan. Her figure was still like a girl's, her back firm with muscle, her hips smooth and undulating when she walked. Sometimes when she was asleep I would put my hand against her back just to feel the tone of her muscles, the swell of her lungs against my palm, as though I wanted to assure myself that all the heat, the energy, the whirl of blood and heartbeat under her tanned skin were indeed real and ongoing and not a deception, that she would not awake in the morning stiff with pain, her connective tissue once more a feast for the disease that swam in her veins.

She leaned against the gallery post with one arm, winked at me, and said, "Comment la vie, good-looking'?"

"How you doin' yourself, beautiful?" I said.

"I made jtoutfee for your lunch."

"Wonderful."

"Did Lyle Sonnier get hold of you at the office?"

"No. He called here?"

"Yes, he said he had something important to tell you."

I squeezed her with one arm and kissed her neck as we went inside. Her hair was thick and brushed in swirls, tapered and stiff on her neck and lovely to touch, like the clipped mane on a pony.

"Do you know why he's calling you?" she said.

"Somebody took a shot at Weldon Sonnier this morning."

"Weldon? Who'd do that?"

"You got me. I think Weldon knows, but he's not saying. The older Weldon gets, the more I'm convinced he has concrete in his head."