James Burke: A Stained White Radiance

After we had rented most of our boats, Batist and I seined the dead shiners out of the aluminum bait tanks, poured crushed ice over the beer and soda pop in the coolers, and started the fire in the barbecue pit I had made by splitting an' oil drum with an acetylene torch, hinging it, and welding metal legs on the bottom. By eight o'clock the sun was bright and hot in the sky, burning the mist out of the cypress trees, and on the wind you could smell the faint odor of a dead animal back in the marsh.

"You got somet'ing on your mind, Dave?" Batist asked.

He had a head like a cannonball; a pair of surplus navy dungarees hung on his narrow hips, and his wash-torn undershirt looked like strips of white rag on his massive coal-black chest and back.

"No, not really."

He nodded, put a dry cigar in his mouth, and looked out the window at a tangle of dead trees and hyacinths floating past us in the bayou's current.

"It ain't bad to have somet'ing on your mind, no," he said. "It's bad when you don't tell nobody."

"What do you say we season the chickens?"

"She gonna be all right. You gonna see. That's what they got all them doctors for."

"I appreciate it, Batist."

I saw Alafair walk down through the pecan trees from the house with Tripod on his chain. She was in third grade now, a little bit fat across the stomach, so that her old gold-and purple LSU T-shirt, with a smiling Mike the Tiger on it, exposed her navel and the top of her elastic-waisted jeans. She had shiny black hair cut in bangs, skin that stayed tan year-round, wide-set Indian teeth, and a smile that was so broad it made her dark eyes squint almost completely shut. Now adays, when I would pick her up, she felt heavy and compact in my arms, full of energy and play and expectation.

But three years ago, when I pulled her from a crashed and submerged plane out on the salt, one piloted by a Lafayette priest who was transporting illegal refugees from El Salvador, her lungs had been filled with water, her eyes dilated with terror as we rose in a rush of bubbles toward the Gulf's surface, her little bones as thin and frail as a bird's.

Tripod thumped out on the dock, rattling his chain across the board planks behind him.

"Dave, you left the bag of rabbit food on top of the hutch. Tripod threw it all over the yard," Alafair said. Her face was beaming.

"You think that's funny, little guy?" I said.

"Yeah," she said, and grinned again.

"Batist says you brought Tripod down to the bait shop yesterday and he got into the hard-boiled eggs."

Her face became vague and quizzical.

"Tripod did that?" she said.

"Do you know anyone else who would wash a hardboiled egg in the bait tank?"

She looked across the bayou speculatively, as though the answer to a profound mystery lay among the branches of the cypress trees. Tripod zigzagged back and forth on his chin, sniffing the smell of fish in the dock.

I rubbed the top of Alafair's head. Her hair was already warm from the sunlight.

"How about a hied pie, little guy?" I said, and winked at her. "But you and Tripod show some discretion with Batist."

"Show what?"

"Keep that coon away from Batist."

I brought a tray of seasoned and oiled chickens out of the shop and began laying them on the barbecue grill. The hickory wood I used for fuel had burned into hot, white coal, and the oil from the chickens dripped into the ash and steamed away in the wind. I could feel Alafair's eyes on the side of my face.

"Dave?"

"What is it, Alf'?"

"Bootsie told me not to tell you something."

"Maybe you'd better not tell me, then." I turned my head to smile at her, but her dark eyes were veiled and troubled.

"Bootsie dropped a fork on the floor," she said. "When she picked it up her face got all white and she sat down real hard in a chair."

"Was that this morning?"

"Yesterday, when I came home from school. She started to cry, then she saw me looking at her. She made me say I wouldn't tell."

"It's not bad to tell those kinds of things, Alf"

"Is Bootsie sick again, Dave?"

"I think maybe we need to change her medicine again. That's all."

"That's all?"

"It's going to be all right, little guy. Let me finish up here, and we'll get Boots and go to Mulate's for crawfish."

She nodded her head silently. I hoisted her up on my hip.

Tripod ran in circles at our feet, his chain clanking on the wood.

"Hey, let's buy you some new Baby Squanto books today," I said.

"I'm too old to read Baby Squanto."

I pressed her against me and looked over the top of her head at the shadowed front of my house and thought I could feel my pulse beating in my throat with the urgency of a damaged watch that was about to run out of time.

I wasn't able to keep our weekend entirely free of the Sonniers after all. That afternoon, after we drove back from Mulate's in a rain shower, the phone was ringing as we ran from the truck through the pecan trees onto the gallery. I picked up the receiver in the kitchen and blotted the rainwater out of my eyes with the back of my wrist.

"I thought I'd check in with you before we left town," the voice said.

"Weldon?"

Yeah. Bania and I are going to visit her mother in Baton Rouge. We'll probably be gone a week or so. I thought I should tell you."

"Why?"

"What do you mean 'why'? That's what you're supposed to do when you're part of a case, aren't you? Check in with the authorities, that sort of thing?"

"You weren't cooperative yesterday, Weldon. I think you have information you're not giving me. I have my doubts about our level of sincerity here."

"I get the feeling I shouldn't have bothered you today."

"Your brother Lyle paid me a visit. He told me a long story about your father."

"Lyle's a great entertainer. Did you know he had a zydeco band before he got hit with a bolt of religion?"

"He said the prowler your wife saw was your father. He said he's seen the man in his TV audience in Baton Rouge."

"Years ago Lyle put so many chemicals in his head it glows in the dark. He has hallucinations."

"Was Bama hallucinating?"

"You're poking a stick in the wrong place, Dave."

Before I spoke again I waited a moment and looked out the screen at the rain falling through the limbs of the mimosa tree in my backyard.

"So there's nothing to Lyle's story, then?" I asked.

"As a matter of fact, there is. But it's not anything you might be interested in. The truth is that Lyle takes money from a lot of pitiful nigras and poor white trash who think heat lightning is a sign out of Revelation. But after the television cameras are off and the audience goes home, my brother has problems with his conscience. Instead of dealing with it, he's developed this obsession that our old man is back from the dead and is trying to thread our souls on a fish stringer."

"How long will you be gone?"

"A week or so."

"Give me your mother-in-law's address and phone number."

I wrote them down on a notepad.

"Did you make plaster casts of those footprints by the bayou?" he asked.

"We're a low-budget department, Weldon. Also, plaster casts usually tell us that the suspect wore shoes. Let me explain something to you. There's not a lot of interest down there about your shooter. Why is that? you ask. Because when the intended victim acts like Little Orphan Annie, with wide, empty eyes, it's hard to get other people to bite their nails over that person's fate. If you want to let a hired gumball cancel your ticket, maybe we figure that's your business."

In my mind's eye I could almost see his hand squeezing on the receiver.

"What do you mean 'hired gumball'?" he said.

"People around here usually kill only their friends and relatives. They usually do it in bars and bedrooms. A longrange shooter, a guy probably using a scope, a guy who got in and out without being seen, I think we're talking about a contract killer, Weldon. There was something else I didn't tell you. Our fingerprint man didn't find even a trace of a print on that shell casing. In all probability that means the shooter wiped each shell clean before he loaded the rifle. It sounds pretty professional to me."