James Burke: A Stained White Radiance

"You're a smart cop."

I didn't answer and instead waited for him to speak again.

But he remained silent.

"You don't want to tell me anything else?" I said.

"It's a story that involves a lot of players. You couldn't guess at it."

"When people get into trouble, it's over money, sex, or power. Always. It's not a new script."

"This one is. It's a real stomach churner."

I waited again for him to continue, but he didn't.

"How about it?" I said.

"That's all I have to say, except I'm not going to do time and I'm not going to get clipped by some gumball. If that doesn't float with somebody, or if they want more information on that, they might try dialing 1-800-EAT SHIT for assistance. How's that sound?"

"Who said anything about doing time?"

"Nobody."

"I see. Have a nice trip to Baton Rouge. Tell me, though, before you hang up, how bad did you and Lyle hurt your father's friend?"

"What? What did you say?"

"You heard me."

"Yeah, I did. You listen to me, Dave. You stay out of my goddamn family's history. It doesn't have anything to do with this. You understand that?-Are we clear on that?"

"Call back when you have something of value to tell me, Weldon," I said, and softly replaced the receiver in the telephone cradle. I suspected that I left him with knives turning in his chest. But Weldon was one of those who became interested in the cathedral only after you barred its entrance to him.

Sunday night it rained again, and Bootsie, Alafair, and I drove to New Iberia and had dinner at Del's on East Main, then went to a movie. Later, it stopped raining, and the moon rose over the freshly plowed sugarcane fields in a sky that looked like black ink wash. I was restless and couldn't concentrate on the book I was reading or the movie that Bootsie was watching on television, and I told Bootsie that I was going back into town to drop off some overdue bills at the post office. Then I drove out to Weldon's place.

Why? I can't say, really-except that I suspected he was involved in something that went way beyond the confines of Iberia Parish. Over the years I had seen all the dark players get to southern Louisiana in one form or another: the oil and chemical companies who drained and polluted the wetlands; the developers who could turn sugarcane acreage and pecan orchards into miles of tract homes and shopping malls that had the aesthetic qualities of a sewer works; and the Mafia, who operated out of New Orleans and brought us prostitution, slot machines, control of at least two big labor unions, and finally narcotics.

They hunted on the game reserve. They came into an area where large numbers of the people were poor and illiterate, where many were unable to speak English and the politicians were traditionally inept or corrupt, and they took everything that was best from the Cajun world in which I had grown up, treated it cynically and with contempt, and left us with oil sludge in the oyster beds, Levittown, and the abiding knowledge that we had done virtually nothing to stop them.

I parked my truck on the blacktop in front of Weldon's house and looked at his flood lamps in the mist, the lighted chandelier that he had left on in the living room, the lawn that sloped away toward Bayou Teche, his boathouse, and the dark line of cypress trees along the bank. The shooter had probably come before dawn, maybe in a boat, and had crouched behind the brick retaining wall until he saw Weldon enter the dining room. So the shooter knew something about the layout of Weldon's house and property, I thought, and maybe about Weldon's habits as well; perhaps he even knew Weldon and had been in his house. If not, the person who hired the shooter was probably on familiar terms with Weldon.

It wasn't a profound theory, nor was it that helpful. I drove back home with the heat lightning flickering whitely over the southern horizon, then lay in the dark beside Bootsie and tried to fall asleep. Why did I preoccupy myself with Weldon's troubles, I asked myself? The answer was not long in coming. I rubbed my hand lightly over the curve of Bootsie's back, kissed the smooth grain of her skin, stroked the short-cropped stiff hair on her neck, and wondered in awe at how the flush of health in her complexion could be so successful a part of nature's masquerade. I had fantasies in which we changed the blood in her whole vascular system and rinsed disease out of her body; saw faith and prayer drive the red wolf from her like an exercised incubus; or simply awoke one fine morning to discover that a new drug as miraculous as penicillin or the polio vaccine had been invented, and that all our cares and worries about Bootsie had been illusionary and ultimately forgettable.

So when you have a problem that has no solution and you can no longer drink over it, you get psychologically drunk on somebody else's woe, I thought. And maybe I even resented and envied Weldon for what I thought was the simplicity of his problem.

The moon made a square of light on Bootsie's sleeping form. Her white silk gown looked almost phosphorescent, her bare shoulders as cool and bloodless as alabaster. I put my arm across her stomach and drew her against me, hooked one leg inside hers, and buried my face in her hair, as though anger and need were enough to hold both of us aloft, safe from the dark spin and pull of the earth beneath us.

Two days later I would learn that Weldon's problems were not simple ones, either, and my involvement with the Sonnier family would become much more than a dry drunk.

After I got home from work the following Tuesday Batist Aand I closed up the bait shop early because of an electrical storm that blew up out of the south. Three hours later the rain was still pouring down, lightning bolts were popping all over the marsh, and the air was heavy with the wet, sulfurous smell of ozone. The thunder reverberated like echoing cannon across the drenched countryside, and I could barely hear the dispatcher's voice when I answered the telephone in the kitchen.

"Dave, I think I made a mistake," he said.

"Speak louder. There's a lot of static on the line."

"I put my foot in something. A little bit ago a black man across the bayou from Weldon Sonnier's called in and said he saw somebody behind Weldon's house with a flashlight. He said he knew Mr. Weldon was out of town, so he thought he ought to call us. I was about to send LeBlanc and Thibodeaux, but Garrett was sitting by the cage and said he'd take it. I told him he wasn't on duty yet. He said he'd take it anyway, that he was helping you with the investigation about the shooting. So I let him go out there."

"Okay…"

"Then the old man calls up and wants to know where Garrett is, that he wants to talk with him right now, that there's been another complaint about him. Garrett cuffed a couple of kids and put them in the tank for shooting him the finger. The kids live two houses from the sheriff. That Garrett knows how to do it, doesn't he? Anyway, he doesn't answer his radio now, and I already sent LeBlanc and Thibodeaux somewhere else. You want to help me out?"

"All right, but you shouldn't have sent him out there by himself."

"You ever try to say 'no' to that guy?"

"Send LeBlanc and Thibodeaux for backup as soon as they're loose."

"You got it, Dave."

I put on my raincoat and rain hat, took my army.45 automatic from the dresser drawer in the bedroom, inserted the clip loaded with hollow-points into the magazine, and dropped the automatic and a spare clip in the pocket of my coat. Bootsie was reading under a lamp in the living room, and Alafair was working on a coloring book in front of the television set. The rain was loud on the gallery roof.

"I have to go out. I'll be back shortly," I said.

"What is it?" she said, looking up, her honey-colored hair bright under the lamp.