James Burke: Purple Cane Road

I drove through the city, then east on Highland, out into the country again, and turned on a shell road that led back into a grove of trees. I saw Clete's maroon Cadillac parked by a white cinder-block apartment building whose windows were nailed over with plywood. A second car, a new Buick with tinted windows, was parked next to a cluster of untrimmed banana trees. A light burned behind the plywood on the second floor of the building, and another light was turned on inside a shed that had been built over the stairwell on the roof.

I clipped my holster on my belt and got out of the truck and walked toward the front entrance. It had stopped raining now, and the wind puffed the trees over my head. The dark blue paint of the Buick was luminous with the rainwater that had beaded into drops as big as quarters on the wax.

I heard feet scraping on the roof, then a man's voice yell out and a sound like a heavy weight crashing through tree limbs.

I slipped the.45 out of its holster and went to the side of the building and looked up toward the roof. I saw Clete Purcel lean over the half-wall that bordered the roof, stare at something down below, then disappear.

I went in the front door and climbed the stairs to a hallway that was littered with garbage and broken plaster. Only one room was lighted. The door was open and a video camera on a tripod was propped up by a bed with a red satin sheet on it.

I went up another stairwell to the roof. I stepped out on the gravel and tar surface and saw Clete grab a black man by his belt and the back of his collar and run him toward the wall, then fling him, arms churning, into a treetop down below.

"What are you doing?" I said incredulously.

"They were gang-banging a pair of sixteen-year-old girls down there and filming it. Zipper and his pals have gone into the movie business," Clete said. He wore a blue-black.38 in a nylon and leather shoulder holster. A flat-sided sap stuck out of his back pocket. "Right, Zip?"

He kicked the sole of a mulatto who was handcuffed by one wrist to a fire-escape rung. The mulatto's eyes were turquoise, the irises ringed with a frosted discoloration. A puckered, concentric gray scar was burned into one cheek. His hair was almost white, straight, like a Caucasian's, cut short, his body as taut and shiny as wrapped plastic, his arms scrolled with jailhouse art.

"Robicheaux?" he said, focusing on my face.

"Why's Little Face Dautrieve collecting news articles on Letty Labiche?" I asked.

"Her brains are in her ass. That's where they suppose to be. Say, your man here kind of out of control. How 'bout a little intervention?"

"I don't have much influence with him," I said.

"It's your flight time, Zipper. I'm not sure I can hit that tree again, though," Clete said. He pulled his revolver from his shoulder holster and threw it to me, then leaned down and unlocked the cuff on Zipper's wrist and jerked him to his feet.

"Look over the side, Zipper. It's going to break all your sticks, guaranteed. Last chance, my man," Clete said.

Zipper took a breath and raised both hands in front of him, as though placating an unteachable adversary.

"I tole you, Little Face got her own groove. I don't know why she do what she do," he said.

"Wrong answer, shithead," Clete said, and hooked one hand under Zipper's belt and clenched the other tightly on the back of his neck.

Zipper's face twisted toward mine, the rictus of his mouth filled with gold and silver, his breath a fog of funk and decayed shrimp.

"Robicheaux, your mama's name was Mae… Wait, it was Guillory before she married. That was the name she went by… Mae Guillory. But she was your mama," he said.

"What?" I said.

He wet his lips uncertainly.

"She dealt cards and still hooked a little bit. Behind a club in Lafourche Parish. This was maybe 1966 or '67," he said.

Clete's eyes were fixed on my face. "You're in a dangerous area, sperm breath," he said to Zipper.

"They held her down in a mud puddle. They drowned her," Zipper said.

"They drowned my… Say that again," I said, my left hand reaching for his shirt, my right lifting Clete's.38 toward his face.

"These cops were on a pad. For the Giacanos. She saw them kill somebody. They held her down in the mud, then rolled her into the bayou," Zipper said.

Then Clete was between me and Zipper Clum, shoving me in the chest, pushing away the gun in my hand as though it were attached to a spring. "Look at me, Streak! Get out of it! Don't make me clock you, noble mon… Hey, that's it. We're copacetic here, yes in-deedy. Nothing rattles the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide."

MY FATHER WAS AN enormous, black-haired, illiterate Cajun whose saloon brawls were not only a terrifying experience for his adversaries but beautiful to watch. He would back against a wall in Provost's or Slick's or Mulate's and take on all comers, his hamlike fists crashing against the heads of his opponents, while cops and bouncers tried to nail him with pool cues and chairs and batons before he destroyed the entire bar. Blood would well out of his scalp and glisten in his beard and wild, curly hair; the more his adversaries hit him, the more he would grin and beckon the brave and incautious into range of his fists.

That was the Aldous Robicheaux people saw publicly, fighting, his shirt and striped overalls ripped off his back, his wrists handcuffed behind him while a half dozen cops escorted him to a police car. They never saw what my father and mother did to each other at home before my father went to the saloon to find a surrogate for the enemy he couldn't deal with inside his own breast.

My mother was a plump, attractive woman who worked for thirty cents an hour in a laundry that employed mostly Negro women. She loved to dress up and wear her lavender pillbox hat, one with a stiff white net on it, and go to dance halls and crawfish boils and the fais-dodo in Breaux Bridge. While my father was in the parish prison, other men came to our house, and two of them offered my mother access to what she thought was a much better world than the one she shared with my father.

Hank was a soldier stationed at Fort Polk, a tall, sun-browned man with a red, welted scar from Omaha Beach on his shoulder who told my mother he belonged to the stagehands union in Hollywood. In the morning he would go into the bathroom when my mother was already in there, and I would hear them laughing through the door. Then he would stay in there a long time by himself, filling the room with steam. When I went in to bathe before school, no warm water was left in the tank, and he would tell me to heat a pan on the stove and wash with a rag at the kitchen sink.

"Mama wants me to take a whole bath," I said one morning.

"Suit yourself, kid. Scrub out the tub when you get finished. I don't like sitting in somebody else's dirt," he replied.

He smelled of testosterone and shaving cream and the cigarette he kept balanced on the lavatory while he combed Lucky Tiger into his hair in front of the mirror, a towel wrapped around his hips. He saw me watching him in the mirror and he turned and cocked his fists like a prizefighter's.

He and my mother boarded the Sunset Limited in 1946 and went out to Hollywood. On the platform she hugged me against her and kept patting me on the head and back as though her hands could convey meaning her words could not.

"I'm gonna send for you. I promise, Davy. You gonna see movie stars and swim in the ocean and go on roller-coaster rides out over the water, you. It ain't like here, no. It don't never rain and people got all the money they want," she said.

When she returned to New Iberia on the bus, the ticket purchased with money my father had to wire a priest, she showed me postcards of Angel's Flight and Grauman's Chinese Theater and the beach at Malibu, as though these were magic places that had defined her experience in California rather than a garage apartment by a downtown freeway where Hank had left her one morning with the icebox empty and the rent unpaid.