James Burke - Purple Cane Road

Saturday afternoon Dana Magelli walked into my bait shop, carrying a tackle box and a spinning rod. His blue jeans and tennis shoes looked like they had just come out of the box.

"Got any boats for rent?" he asked.

"Take your pick," I said.

He pulled a soda out of the cooler and wiped the melted ice off the can and put a dollar on the counter and sat down on a stool. A customer was dipping shiners with a net out of the aerated tank in back and dropping them in a shiner bucket. Dana waited until the customer had finished and gone outside, then he said, "You and Purcel haven't been running a game on Jim Gable, have you?"

"What game?"

"He says he found glass in his soup at a restaurant. He says people are following him. He says he saw what he believes was a scoped rifle in a window."

"Gee, that's too bad."

"Evidently he's got a fuckpad with an unlisted number. One of his broads is getting calls that scare her shitless."

"You think Clete and I are behind this?"

"Purcel's an animal. He's capable of anything. Last night somebody blew out Gable's car window with double-ought bucks and missed his head by about two inches."

"It's Remeta."

"You're not involved? I have your word?"

"I'm not involved, Dana."

"You all right?" he said.

"Why?"

"Because you don't look it."

"Must be the weather."

He gazed at the sunlight and shadows on the bamboo and the willows bending in the breeze off the Gulf.

"You must have a funny metabolism," he said.

I HAD given my word to Dana that I was not involved in the harassing of Jim Gable or the shotgun attack upon him. I had said nothing about future possibilities.

Early Sunday morning I drove to Lafourche Parish and headed south through the cane fields toward the Gulf. The wind was blowing hard and the sky had turned black and I could feel the barometer dropping. I drove down Purple Cane Road, past the general store and the dance hall where my mother used to work, while raindrops as big as marbles broke against my windshield. In the distance I could see the three-story, coffee-colored stucco house where Jim and Cora Gable lived, the palm trees blowing above the roof.

But no one came to the door. I waited in my truck until almost noon under a sky sealed with clouds that looked like black ink floating inside an inverted bowl. I don't know what I expected to do or to find, but I knew that my mother's murderers would never be apprehended by my simply letting the system move forward of its own accord. The temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees and through the window I could smell speckled trout schooling up in the bay and the cool, wet odor of dust blowing out of the cane, and when I shut my eyes I was a little boy again, driving down Purple Cane Road with my mother and the bouree man named Mack, wondering what had happened to my father, Big Aldous, and our home on the bayou south of New Iberia.

Then the front door opened and Cora Gable looked out at my truck, her face as white and threaded with lines as old plaster, her scalp showing when the wind blew her hair. I got out of the truck and walked toward her. Her mouth was bright red in the gloom, and she tried to smile, but the conflict in her face made me think of a guitar string wound so tightly on its peg that it seems to tremble with its own tension.

"Oh, Mr. Robicheaux," she said.

"Is Jim home?"

"Sir, this upsets me. You attacked my husband. Now you're here."

"I think your husband is responsible for Micah's death, Miss Cora."

"Micah went back to New Mexico. Jim gave him money to go. What are you telling me?"

"May I come in?"

"No, you may not. Jim said you'd do something like this. I think I have some things of your mother's. Wasn't her name Guillory? They were in a shed. Maybe you should take them and go."

"You have belongings of my mother?"

"Yes, I think I do." Her face became disconcerted, wrapped in conflicting thoughts, as though she were simultaneously asking and answering questions inside her own head. "I don't know where they are right now. I can't be responsible for other people's things."

I stepped closer to the door. The rain was slanting out of the sky, running off the tiles on the roof, clicking on the banks of philodendron and caladium that lined the brick walkway.

"Go away before I call the police," she said, and closed the heavy door with both hands and shot the bolt inside.

I DROVE BACK up the dirt road. Just as I reached the general store, I felt my left front tire go down on the rim. I pulled into the store's parking lot and got the jack, lug wrench, a pair of cloth gloves, and the spare out of the back and squatted down by the front fender and began spinning the nuts off the flat. I heard a car pull in next to me and someone walk toward the entrance of the store, then pause.

"Lo and behold, it's the Davester," a man's voice said.

I looked up into the grinning face of Jim Gable. He wore a tweed sports coat and tan slacks and shined loafers and a pink shirt with a silver horse monogrammed on the pocket. There was only a yellow discoloration around one eye and the corner of his mouth from the blows he had taken at the Shrimp Festival.

He looked up at the gallery where an old man in overalls and a little boy sat on a wood bench, drinking soda pop and cracking peanuts.

"That's a mean-looking lug wrench in your hand. You're not in a volatile mood, are you?" he said.

"Not in the least, Jim."

"Don't get up. I suspect you've already bothered my wife. I'll get the feedback from her later," he said.

He walked past me, on up the steps and across the gallery, through the screen door and into the store. He shook hands with people, then opened the screen again in a gentlemanly fashion to let an elderly lady enter. I fitted the spare onto the axle and tightened down the wheel nuts and lowered the jack, then went inside the store.

Gable sat at a table with a checkerboard painted on top of it, drinking from a paper cup filled with coffee. The inside of the store smelled like cheese and lunch meat and microwave boudin and the green sawdust that was scattered on the floor. I turned a chair around and sat down facing Gable.

He grinned at me as he had outside, but his eyes wouldn't hold on mine.

"Remeta missed you with double-ought bucks? Maybe he's slipping. I'd hate to have him on my case," I said.

He pulled at his collar and looked sideways out the window at the abandoned nightclub next door and the old Jax beer sign swinging on its chains.

"You don't have any idea of what's going on, do you?" he said.

"I don't have to. Time and Remeta are on my side."

A family dressed in Sunday clothes came in, folding umbrellas, blowing and laughing at the rain.

"I've pulled your sheet. You have a violent, alcoholic history. You've spent a whole career discrediting yourself," he said.

I stared directly into Gable's eyes.

"I know you murdered my mother. I know the words she spoke just before you and your partner killed her. 'My name's Mae Robicheaux. My boy fought in Vietnam. My husband was Big Aldous Robicheaux.' I'm going to smoke you myself or be there when you ride the needle, Jim," I said.

He kept his eyes on mine now, so he would not have to look at the people who were staring at us from the grocery counter.

"I'm going to walk out of here now. These are my neighbors. You're not going to do anything. I'm carrying a weapon, but my hands are on the table. Everyone can see that," he said.

"I promised Boots I wouldn't repeat my old behavior. I'm usually pretty good about keeping my word, Jim, but I'm just human. Also, I want you to understand the nature of our relationship and to form an idea of what will probably happen whenever we meet. So, in that spirit-" I said, and balled up my fist inside my cloth glove and leaned across the table and hooked him in the eye and knocked him into a stack of canned vegetables.