James Burke - Sunset Limited

LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON I RECEIVED a call from John Nash in Trinidad.

"Our friend Jubal Breedlove checked out of the clinic in Raton and is nowhere to be found," he said.

"Did he hook up with Scruggs?" I asked.

"It's my feeling he probably did."

The line was silent.

"Why do you feel that, Mr. Nash?" I asked.

"His car's at his house. His clothes seem undisturbed. He didn't make a withdrawal from his bank account. What does that suggest to you, Mr. Robicheaux?"

"Breedlove's under a pile of rock?"

"Didn't Vikings put a dog at the foot of a dead warrior?" he asked.

"Excuse me?"

"I was thinking about the family he murdered in the campground. The father put up a terrific fight to protect his daughter. I hope Breedlove's under a pile of rock by that campground."

AFTER WORK I HAD to go after a boat a drunk smashed into a stump and left with a wrenched propeller on a sandbar. I tilted the engine's housing into the stern of the boat and was about to slide the hull back into the water when I saw why the drunk had waded through the shallows to dry land and walked back to his car: the aluminum bottom had a gash in it like a twisted smile.

I wedged a float cushion into the leak so I could pull the boat across the bayou into the reeds and return with a boat trailer to pick it up. Behind me I heard an outboard come around the corner and then slow when the man in the stern saw me standing among the flooded willows.

"I hope you don't mind my coming out here. The Afro-American man said it would be all right," Billy Holtzner said.

"You're talking about Batist?"

"Yes, I think that's his name. He seems like a good fellow."

He cut his engine and let his boat scrape up on the sandbar. When he walked forward the boat rocked under him and he automatically stooped over to grab the gunnels. He grinned foolishly.

"I'm not very good at boats," he said.

My experience has been that the physical and emotional transformation that eventually comes aborning in every bully never takes but one form. The catalyst is fear and its effects are like a flame on candle wax. The sneer around the mouth and the contempt and disdain in the eyes melt away and are replaced by a self-effacing smile, a confession of an inconsequential weakness, and a saccharine affectation of goodwill in the voice. The disingenuousness is like oil exuded from the skin; there's an actual stink in the clothes.

"What can I do for you?" I said.

He stood on the sandbar in rolled denim shorts and tennis shoes without socks and a thick white shirt sewn with a half dozen pockets. He looked back down the bayou, listening to the drone of an outboard engine, his soft face pink in the sunset.

"Some men might try to hurt my daughter," he said.

"I think your concern is for yourself, Mr. Holtzner."

When he swallowed, his mouth made an audible click.

"They've told me I either pay them money I don't have or they'll hurt Geri. These men take off heads. I mean that literally," he said.

"Come down to my office and make a report."

"What if they find out?" he asked.

I had turned to chain the damaged hull to the back of my outboard. I straightened up and looked into his face. The air itself seemed fouled by his words, his self-revelation hanging in the dead space between us like a dirty flag. His eyes went away from me.

"You can call me during office hours. Whatever you tell me will be treated confidentially," I said.

He sat down in his boat and began pushing it awkwardly off the sandbar by shoving a paddle into the mud.

"Did we meet somewhere before?" he asked.

"No. Why?"

"Your hostility. You don't hide it well."

He tried to crank his engine, then gave it up and drifted with the current toward the dock, his shoulders bent, the hands that had twisted noses splayed on his flaccid thighs, his chest indented as though it had been stuck with a small cannonball.

I DIDN'T LIKE BILLY Holtzner or the group he represented. But in truth some of my feelings had nothing to do with his or their behavior.

In the summer of 1946 my father was in the Lafayette Parish Prison for punching out a policeman who tried to cuff him in Antlers Pool Room. That was the same summer my mother met a corporal from Fort Polk named Hank Clausson.

"He was at Omaha Beach, Davy. That's when our people was fighting Hitler and run the Nazis out of Europe. He got all kind of medals he gonna show you," she said.

Hank was lean and tall, his face sun-browned, his uniform always starched and pressed and his shoes and brass shined. I didn't know he was sleeping over until I walked in on him in the bathroom one morning and caught him shaving in his underwear. The back of his right shoulder was welted with a terrible red scar, as though someone had dug at the flesh with a spoon. He shook his safety razor in the stoppered lavatory water and drew another swath under his chin.

"You need to get in here?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"That's where a German stuck a bayonet in me. That was so kids like you didn't end up in an oven," he said, and crimped his lips together and scraped the razor under one nostril.

He put a single drop of hair tonic on his palms and rubbed them together, then rubbed the oil into his scalp and drew his comb back through his short-cropped hair, his knees bending slightly so he could see his face fully in the mirror.

Hank took my mother and me to the beer garden and bowling alley out on the end of East Main. We sat at a plank table in a grove of oak trees that were painted white around the trunks and hung with speakers that played recorded dance music. My mother wore a blue skirt that was too small for her and a white blouse and a pillbox hat with an organdy veil pinned up on top. She was heavy-breasted and thick-bodied, and her sexuality and her innocence about it seemed to burst from her clothes when she jitterbugged, or, even a moment later, slow-danced with Hank, her face hot and breathless, while his fingers slipped down the small of her back and kneaded her rump.

"Hank's in a union for stagehands in the movie business, Davy. Maybe we going out to Hollywood and start a new life there," she said.

The loudspeakers in the trees were playing "One O'clock Jump," and through the windows in the bar I could see couples jitterbugging, spinning, flinging each other back and forth. Hank tipped his bottle of Jax beer to his lips and took a light sip, his eyes focused on nothing. But when a blond woman in a flowered dress and purple hat walked across his gaze, I saw his eyes touch on her body like a feather, then go empty again.

"But maybe you gonna have to stay with your aunt just a little while," my mother said. "Then I'm gonna send for you. You gonna ride the Sunset Limited to Hollywood, you."

My mother went inside the bowling alley to use the rest room. The trees were glowing with the white flood lamps mounted on the branches, the air roaring with the music of Benny Goodman's orchestra. The blond woman in the flowered dress and purple hat walked to our table, a small glass of beer in one hand. The butt of her cigarette was thick with lipstick.

"How's the war hero?" she said.

He took another sip from his bottle of Jax and picked up a package of Lucky Strikes from the table and removed a cigarette gingerly by the tip and placed it in his mouth, never looking at the woman.

"My phone number's the same as it was last week. I hope nothing's been hard in your life," she said.

"Maybe I'll call you sometime," he replied.

"No need to call. You can come whenever you want," she said. When she grinned there was a red smear on her teeth.

"I'll keep it in mind," he said.

She winked and walked away, the cleft in her buttocks visible through the thinness of her dress. Hank opened a penknife and began cleaning his nails.