James Burke: Heaven’s Prisoners

He came early the next morning, when the sun was still misty and soft in the trees, even before the pools of rain had dried on the road, so that his government car splashed mud on a family of Negroes walking with cane poles toward my fishing dock. I walked into the kitchen where Annie and Alafair were just finishing their breakfast.

"Why don't you take her down to the pond to feed the ducks?" I said.

"I thought we'd go into town and buy her some clothes."

"We can do that later. Here's some old bread. Go out the back door and walk through the trees."

"What is it, Dave?"

"Nothing. Just some minor bullshit. I'll tell you about it later. Come on, off you go."

"I'd like to know when you first thought you could start talking to me like this."

"Annie, I'm serious," I said.

Her eyes flicked past me to the sound of the car driving across the pecan leaves in front. She picked up the cellophane bag of stale bread, took Alafair by the hand, and went out the back screen door through the trees toward the pond at the end of our property. She looked back once, and I could see the alarm in her face.

The man got out of his gray U.S. government motor-pool car, with his seersucker coat over his shoulder. He was middle-aged, thick across the waist, and wore a bow tie. His black hair was combed across his partially bald head.

I met him on the gallery. He said his name was Monroe, from the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New Orleans. While he talked, his eyes went past me into the gloom of the house.

"I'd ask you in, but I'm on my way down to the dock," I said.

"That's all right. I just need to ask you one or two things," he said. "Why didn't you all wait for the Coast Guard after you called in on the emergency channel?"

"What for?"

"Most people would want to hang around. For curiosity, if nothing else. How often do you see a plane go down?"

"My wife gave them the position. They could see the oil and gas on the water. They didn't need us."

"Huh," he said, and took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He rolled it back and forth between his fingers without lighting it and looked away at the pecan trees. The tobacco grains crackled dryly inside the paper. "I got a problem, though. A diver found a suitcase in there with a bunch of child's clothes in it. A little girl's, in fact. But there wasn't a kid in that plane. What's that suggest to you?"

"I'm late for work, Mr. Monroe. Would you like to walk down to the dock with me?"

"You don't like federal people too much, do you?"

"I haven't known that many. Some of them are good guys, some of them aren't. I guess you tapped into my file."

He shrugged.

"Why do you think illegals would carry a child's clothing with them when they had no child? I'm talking about people that left the banana farm one step ahead of the National Guard shredding them into dog food. Or at least that's what they tell the press."

"I don't know."

"Your wife told the Coast Guard you were going to dive that wreck. Are you going to tell me you only saw three people down there?"

I looked back at him.

"What do you mean, three?" I said.

"The pilot was a priest named Melancon, from Lafayette. We've been watching him for a while. We think the two women were from El Salvador. At least that's where the priest had been flying them out from before."

"What about the guy in the pink shirt?"

His face became perplexed, his eyes muddy with confusion.

"What are you talking about?" he said.

"I damn near tore the shirt off him. He was in the back. His neck was broken and he had a tattoo over one nipple."

He was shaking his head. He lit his cigarette and blew smoke out into the dappled sunlight.

"You're either a good storyteller or you see things nobody else knows about," he said.

"Are you calling me a liar?" I asked quietly.

"I won't play word games with you, Mr. Robicheaux."

"It seems to me that's just what you're doing."

"You're right, I did get feedback on your file before I came down here. You have an amazing record."

"How's that?"

"You blew away three or four people, one of whom was a government witness. That's real hardball, all right. You want me to come back out with a warrant?"

"I don't think I'm going to see you for a while. You dumped the wheelbarrow on its side, podna. Your people are into something they haven't let you in on yet."

I saw his eyes darken.

"I'd tend to my own business if I was you," he said.

"There's something I didn't tell you. The UPI in New Orleans called me last night. I told them there were four dead people in that plane. I hope you guys aren't going to tell people I can't count."

"You don't need to worry about what we do. Just keep your own act clean, and we'll get along fine."

"I think you've been talking to wetbacks for too long. I think you should give some thought to your words before you say things to people."

He dropped his cigarette on the ground, pressed it out with his shoe, and smiled to himself as he got in his car. He started his engine. A shaft of sunlight cut across his face.

"Well, you've made my day," he said. "I always like to be reassured that I'm on the right side of the fence."

"One other thing. When you drove in here, you splashed mud on some people. Try to be more careful when you leave."

"Anything you say," he said, and smiled up at me, then accelerated slowly down my lane.

Very cool, Robicheaux, I thought. There's nothing like rattling the screens on the baboon cage. But what should you do in a situation like that? Most government employees aren't bad guys; they're just unimaginative, they feel comfortable in a world of predictable rules, and they rarely question authority. But if you run up against the nasty ones and they sense fear in you, they'll try to dismantle you one piece at a time.

I went down to the dock, put fresh ice in the beer and pop coolers, seined out the dead shiners from the bait tanks, started the fire in the split oil drum that I used for a barbecue pit on the side porch, oiled and seasoned the twenty-five pounds of chickens and pork chops that I would grill and sell at lunchtime, and then fixed myself a big glass of Dr. Pepper filled with shaved ice, mint leaves, and cherries, and sat at a table under the porch awning and watched some Negroes fishing under a cypress on the opposite bank of the bayou. They wore straw hats and sat on wood stools close together with their cane poles motionless over the lily pads. I had never understood why black people always fished together in close groups, or why they refused to move from one spot to another, even when the fish weren't biting; but I also knew that if they didn't catch anything, no one else would, either. One of the cork bobbers started to tremble on the surface, then slide along the edge of the lily pads, then draw away toward the bottom; a little boy jerked his cane up, and a big sunfish exploded through the water, its gills and stomach painted with fire. The boy held it with one hand, worked the hook out of its mouth, then dipped his other hand into the water and lifted out a shaved willow branch dripping with bluegill and goggle-eye perch. I watched him thread the sharpened tip of the branch through the sunfish's gill and out its mouth, then replace it in the water. But watching that scene out of my own youth, living that moment with yesterday's people, wouldn't take my mind off that ugly scar of smoke across the sky at Southwest Pass or a woman who would hold a child up into a pocket of air while her own lungs filled with water and gasoline.

That afternoon I drove into New Iberia and bought a copy of the Times-Picayune . The wire service story said that the bodies of three people, including that of a Catholic priest, had been removed from the plane. The source of the story was St. Mary Parish sheriff's office. Which meant the sheriff's office had been told that three bodies were recovered, or that only three had been brought into the parish coroner's office.