James Burke: A Stained White Radiance

"You've got it turned around. You went out to Weldon's, but he wouldn't tell you diddly-squat, would he?"

"What about Weldon's?"

"Somebody shot at him. Bama called me right after she called y'all. Look, Dave, Weldon's not going to cooperate with you. He can't. He's afraid."

"Of what?"

"The same thing most people are afraid of when they're afraid-facing up to the truth about something."

"Weldon doesn't impress me as a fearful man."

"You didn't know our old man."

"What are you talking about, Lyle?"

"The man with the burned-off face that Bama saw through her window. I've seen him, too. He was sitting in the third row at last Sunday's telecast. I almost pulled the mike out of the jack when my eyes got focused on him and I saw the face behind all that scar tissue. It was like holding up a photographic negative to a light until you see the image inside the shadows, you know what I mean? By the end of the sermon sweat was sliding off my face as big as marbles. It was like that old son of a buck reached up with a hot finger and poked it right through my belly button."

He tried to grin, but it wasn't convincing.

"You're not making any sense, partner," I said.

"I'm talking about my old man, Verise Sonnier. He was gone when I went down into the audience, but it was him. God didn't make two of his kind."

"Your father was killed in Port Arthur when you were a kid."

"That's what they said. That's what we hoped." He grinned again, then shook the humor out of his face.

"Buried alive under a pile of white-hot boilerplates when that chemical factory blew. Somebody shoveled up a pillow sack full of ashes and bone chips and said that was him. But my sister Drew got a letter from a man in the San Antonio city jail who said he was our old man and he wanted a hundred dollars to go to Mexico." He paused and stared at me a moment to emphasize his point, as though he were looking into a television camera. "She sent it to him."

"I'm afraid this has the ring of theater to it, Lyle."

"Yeah?"

"Why would your father want to hurt Weldon?"

He looked away into the trees, his face shadowed, and brushed idly at the chain of scar tissue that seemed to flow out of the corner of his eye.

"He has reason to want to hurt all of us. After we thought he was dead, we did something to somebody who was close to him." He looked back into my face. "We hurt this person bad."

"What did you do?"

"I've made my peace on it. Somebody else will have to tell you that."

"Then I don't know what I can do for you."

"I can tell you what Weldon did to him. Or at least what the old man thinks Weldon did to him." He waited, and when I didn't respond he continued. "When we were kids the old man had this obsession. He was going to be an independent wildcatter, a kind of legend like Glenn McCarthy over in, Houston. He started off as a jug hustler with an offshore seismographic outfit, roughnecked all over Texas and Oklahoma, then started contracting board roads in the marsh for the Texaco Company. After a while he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya basin and buying up a bunch of rusted junk to put his first rig together. A geologist from Lafayette told him the best place to punch a hole was right there on our farm.

"Except the old man had a problem with that. He was a traiture, you know, and always claimed he could cure warts, stop bleeding in cut hogs, blow the fire out of a bum, cause a woman to have a boy or a girl, all that kind of 'white witch' stuff. But he also told us there were Indians buried in an old Spanish well in the middle of our sugarcane field, and if he drilled a hole on our property their spirits would be turned loose on us.

"He was afraid of spirits in the ground, all right, but I think of a different kind. My uncle got drunk once and told me the old man hired this black man for thirty cents an hour to plow his field. The black man ran the plow across a rock and busted it, then just lay down under a tree and took a nap. The old man found the busted plow and the mule still in harness in the row, and he walked over to the tree and kicked this fellow awake and started hollering at him. That black fellow made a big mistake. He sassed my old man.

The old man went into a rage, chased him across the field, and broke open his skull with a hoe. My uncle said he buried him somewhere around that Spanish well."

"What does this have to do with Weldon?"

"Are you sure you're listening to me? As greedy and driven to be a success as he was, the old man was afraid to drill on his own property. But not Weldon, podna. That's where he built his first rig, and he cored right down through the center of that Spanish well, I think just to make a point. A floorman on that rig told me the drill bit brought up pieces of bone when they first punched into the ground."

"I'll keep all this in mind. Thanks for coming out, Lyle."

"You don't look upon it as the big breakthrough in your case?"

"When people go about trying to kill other people with forethought and deliberation, it's usually over money. Not always, but most times."

"Well, a man hears when it's time for him to hear."

"Is that right?"

"I was never a good listener. At least not till somebody up on high got my attention. I don't fault you, Dave."

"Do you know what passive-aggressive behavior is?"

"I never went to college, like you and Weldon. It sounds real deep."

"It's not a profound concept. A person who has a lot of hostility learns how to mask it in humility and sometimes even in religiosity. It's very effective."

"No kidding? You learn all that in college? It's too bad I missed out." He grinned with the side of his mouth, his teeth barely showing, like a possum.

"Let me ask you something fair and square, with no bullshit, Lyle," I said.

"Go ahead."

"Do you hold your last day against me?"

"What do you mean?"

"In Vietnam. I sent you into that tunnel. I wish we'd blown it and passed it on by."

"You didn't send me down there. I liked it down there. It was my own underground horror show. I made those zips think the scourge of God had crawled down into the bowels of the earth. It wasn't a good way to be, son." He flinched good-naturedly and raised his hands, palms outward, in front of him. "Sorry, it's just a manner of speaking."

I looked at my watch.

"I guess that's my cue to go," he said. "Thanks for your time. Say good-bye to Bootsie for me, and don't think too unkindly of me."

"I don't."

"That's good."

Without saying anything further, he turned and walked through the dead leaves toward his Cadillac. Then he stopped, rubbed the back of his neck hard, as though a mosquito had burrowed deep into his skin, then turned around and stared blankly at me, his jaw slack with a sudden and ugly knowledge.

"It's a disease that lives in the blood. It's called hipus. I'm sorry, Dave. God's truth, I am," he said.

My mouth fell open, and I felt as though a cold wind had blown through my soul.

The next morning was Saturday, and the sun came up as pink as a rose over the willow trees and dead cypress in the marsh and the clouds of mist that rolled out of the bays.

Batist and I opened up the bait shop at first light, and the air was so cool and soft, so perfect with blue shadows and the smell of night-blooming jasmine, that I forgot about Lyle's visit and his attempt to appear omniscient about my wife's illness. I had concluded that Lyle was little different from any other televangelist huckster and that somebody close to Bootsie had told him about her problem. But regardless I wasn't going to clutter my weekend with any more thoughts about the Sonnier family.

Some people were born to take a fall, I thought, and Weldon was probably one of them. I also had a feeling that Lyle was one of those theological self-creations whose own neurosis would eventually eat him like an overturned basket of hungry snakes.