James Burke: Sunset Limited

Mout' caught all the traffic walking from the Southern Pacific passenger station to the hotel, shined all the shoes that were set out in the corridors at night, and guaranteed you could see your face in the buffed point of your shoe or boot or your money would be returned. He shined the shoes of the entire cast of the 1929 film production of Evangeline ; he shined the shoes of Harry James's orchestra and of U.S. Senator Huey Long just before Long was assassinated.

"Where is Cool Breeze now, Mout'?" I said into the phone.

"You t'ink I'm gonna tell you that?"

"Then why'd you call?"

"Cool Breeze say they gonna kill him."

"Who is?"

"That white man run the jail. He sent a nigger try to joog him in the ear with a wire."

"I'll be over in the morning."

"The morning? Why, t'ank you, suh."

"Breeze went down his own road a long time ago, Mout'."

He didn't reply. I could feel the late-summer heat and the closeness of the air under the electric light.

"Mout'?" I said.

"You right. But it don't make none of it easier. No suh, it surely don't."

At sunrise the next morning I drove down East Main, under the canopy of live oaks that spanned the street, past City Hall and the library and the stone grotto and statue of Christ's mother, which had once been the site of George Washington Cable's home, and the sidewalks cracked by tree roots and the blue-green lawns rilled with hydrangeas and hibiscus and philodendron and the thick stand of bamboo that framed the yard of the 1831 plantation manor called The Shadows, and finally into the business district. Then I was on the west side of town, on back streets with open ditches, railroad tracks that dissected yards and pavement, and narrow paintless houses, in rows like bad teeth, that had been cribs when nineteenth-century trainmen used to drink bucket beer from the saloon with the prostitutes and leave their red lanterns on the gallery steps when they went inside.

Mout' was behind his house, flinging birdseed at the pigeons that showered down from the telephone wires into his yard. He walked bent sideways at the waist, his eyes blue with cataracts, one cheek marbled pink and white by a strange skin disease that afflicts people of color; but his sloped shoulders were as wide as a bull's and his upper arms like chunks of sewer pipe.

"It was a bad time for Breeze to run, Mout'. The prosecutor's office might have cut him loose," I said.

He mopped his face with a blue filling-station rag and slid the bag of birdseed off his shoulder and sat down heavily in an old barber's chair with an umbrella mounted on it. He picked up a fruit jar filled with coffee and hot milk from the ground and drank from it. His wide mouth seemed to cup around the bottom of the opening like a catfish's.

"He gone to church wit' me and his mother when he was a li'l boy," he said. "He played ball in the park, he carried the newspaper, he set pins in the bowling alley next to white boys and didn't have no trouble. It was New Orleans done it. He lived with his mother in the projects. Decided he wasn't gonna be no shoeshine man, have white folks tipping their cigar ashes down on his head, that's what he tole me."

Mout' scratched the top of his head and made a sound like air leaving a tire.

"You did the best you could. Maybe it'll turn around for him someday," I said.

"They gonna shoot him now, ain't they?" he said.

"No. Nobody wants that, Mout'."

"That jailer, Alex Guidry? He use to come down here when he was in collitch. Black girls was three dollars over on Hopkins. Then he'd come around the shoeshine stand when they was black men around, pick out some fella and keep looking in his face, not letting go, no, peeling the skin right off the bone, till the man dropped his head and kept his eyes on the sidewalk. That's the way it was back then. Now y'all done hired the same fella to run the jail."

Then he described his son's last day in the parish prison.

THE TURNKEY WHO HAD been a brig chaser in the Marine Corps walked down the corridor of the Isolation unit and opened up the cast-iron door to Cool Breeze's cell. He bounced a baton off a leather lanyard that was looped around his wrist.

"Mr. Alex says you going back into Main Pop. That is, if you want," he said.

"I ain't got no objection."

"It must be your birthday."

"How's that?" Cool Breeze said.

"You'll figure it out."

"I'll figure it out, huh?"

"You wonder why you people are in here? When you think an echo is a sign of smarts?"

The turnkey walked him through a series of barred doors that slid back and forth on hydraulically operated steel arms, ordered him to strip and shower, then handed him an orange jumpsuit and locked him in a holding cell.

"They gonna put Mr. Alex on suspension. But he's doing you right before he goes out. So that's why I say it must be your birthday," the turnkey said. He bounced the baton on its lanyard and winked. "When he's gone, I'm gonna be jailer. You might study on the implications."

At four that afternoon Alex Guidry stopped in front of Cool Breeze's cell. He wore a seersucker suit and red tie and shined black cowboy boots. His Stetson hung from his fingers against his pant leg.

"You want to work scrub-down detail and do sweep-up in the shop?" he asked.

"I can do that."

"You gonna make trouble?"

"Ain't my style, suh."

"You can tell any damn lie you want when you get out of here. But if I'm being unfair to you, you tell me to my face right now," he said.

"People see what they need to."

Alex Guidry turned his palm up and looked at it and picked at a callus with his thumb. He started to speak, then shook his head in disgust and walked down the corridor, the leather soles of his boots clicking on the floor.

Cool Breeze spent the next day scrubbing stone walls and sidewalks with a wire brush and Ajax, and at five o'clock reported to the maintenance shop to begin sweep-up. He used a long broom to push steel filings, sawdust, and wood chips into tidy piles that he shoveled onto a dustpan and dumped into a trash bin. Behind him a mulatto whose golden skin was spotted with freckles the size of dimes was cutting a design out of a piece of plywood on a jigsaw, the teeth ripping a sound out of the wood like an electrified scream.

Cool Breeze paid no attention to him, until he heard the plywood disengage from the saw. He turned his head out of curiosity just as the mulatto balled his fist and tried to jam a piece of coat-hanger wire, sharpened to a point like an ice pick and driven vertically through the wood handle off a lawn-mower starter rope, through the center of Cool Breeze's ear and into his brain.

The wire point laid open Cool Breeze's cheek from the jawbone to the corner of his mouth.

He locked his attacker's forearm in both bis hands, spun with him in circles, then walked the two of them toward the saw that hummed with an oily light.

"Don't make me do it, nigger," he said.

But his attacker would not give up his weapon, and Cool Breeze drove first the coat hanger, then the balled fist and the wood plug gripped inside the palm into the saw blade, so that bone and metal and fingernails and wood splinters all showered into his face at once.

He hid inside the barrel of a cement mixer, where by all odds he should have died. He felt the truck slow at the gate, heard the guards talking outside while they walked the length of the truck with mirrors they held under the frame.

"We got one out on the ground. You ain't got him in your barrel, have you?" a guard said.

"We sure as hell can find out," the truck driver said.

Gears and cogs clanged into place, then the truck vibrated and shook and giant steel blades began turning inside the barrel's blackness, lifting curtains of wet cement into the air like cake dough.