James Burke - Sunset Limited

"Do you need assistance getting inside?" Helen said.

"Assistance? That's a lovely word. No, right here will do just fine. My, hasn't this all been pleasant?" Lila said, and got out and sent a black gardener into the house for a shaker of martinis.

Helen started to shift into reverse, then stopped, dumbfounded, at what we realized was taking place under the live oak tree.

Billy Holtzner had summoned all his people around him. He wore khaki shorts with flap pockets and Roman sandals with lavender socks and a crisp print shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his flaccid arms.

Except for the grizzled line of beard that grew along his jawline and chin, his body seemed to have no hair, as though it had been shaved with a woman's razor. His workmen and actors and grips and writers and camera people and female assistants stood with wide grins on their faces, some hiding their fear, others rising on the balls of their feet to get a better look, while he singled out one individual, then another, saying, "Have you been a good boy? We've been hearing certain rumors again. Come on now, don't be shy. You know where you have to put it."

Then a grown man, someone who probably had a wife or girlfriend or children or who had fought in a war or who at one time had believed his life was worthy of respect and love, inserted his nose between Billy Holtzner's index and ring fingers and let him twist it back and forth.

"That wasn't so bad, was it? Oh, oh, I see somebody trying to sneak off there. Oh, Johnny …" Holtzner said.

"These guys are out of a special basement, aren't they?" Helen said.

Cisco Flynn walked toward the cruiser, his face good-natured, his eyes earnest with explanation.

"Have a good life, Cisco," I said out the window, then to Helen, "Hit it."

"You don't got to me tell me, boss man," she replied, her head looking back over her shoulder as she steered, the dark green shadows of oak leaves cascading over the windshield.

THAT NIGHT THE MOON WAS yellow above the swamp. I walked down to the dock to help Batist, the black man who worked for me, fold up the Cinzano umbrellas on our spool tables and close up the bait shop. There was a rain ring around the moon, and I pulled back the awning that covered the dock, then went inside just as the phone rang on the counter.

"Mout' called me. His son wants to come in," the voice said.

"Stay out of police business, Megan."

"Do I frighten you? Is that the problem here?"

"No, I suspect the problem is use."

"Try this: he's fifteen miles out in the Atchafalaya Basin and snakebit. That's not metaphor. He stuck his arm in a nest of them. Why don't you deliver a message through Mout' and tell him just to go fuck himself?"

After I hung up I nicked off the outside flood lamps. Under the moon's yellow light the dead trees in the swamp looked like twists of paper and wax that could burst into flame with the touch of a single match.

AT DAWN THE WIND was out of the south, moist and warm and checkered with rain, when I headed the cabin cruiser across a long, flat bay bordered on both sides by flooded cypress trees that turned to green lace when the wind bent their branches. Cranes rose out of the trees against a pink sky, and to the south storm clouds were piled over the Gulf and the air smelled like salt water and brass drying in the sun. Megan stood next to the wheel, a thermos cup full of coffee in her hand. Her straw hat, which had a round dome and a purple band on it, was crushed over her eyes. To get my attention, she clasped my wrist with her thumb and forefinger.

"The inlet past that oil platform. There's a rag tied in a bush," she said.

"I can see it, Megan," I replied. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face jerk toward me.

"I shouldn't speak or I shouldn't touch? Which is it?" she said.

I eased back the throttle and let the boat rise on its wake and drift into a cove that was overgrown by a leafy canopy and threaded with air vines and dimpled in the shallows with cypress knees. The bow scraped, then snugged tight on a sandspit.

"In answer to your question, I was out at your brother's movie set yesterday. I've decided to stay away from the world of the Big Score. No offense meant," I said.

"I've always wondered what bank guards think all day. Just standing there, eight hours, staring at nothing. I think you've pulled it off, you know, gotten inside their heads."

I picked up the first-aid kit and dropped off the bow and walked through the shallows toward a beached houseboat that had rotted into the soft texture of moldy cardboard.

I heard her splash into the water behind me.

"Gee, I hope I can be a swinging dick in the next life," she said.

THE HOUSEBOAT FLOOR WAS tilted on top of the crushed and rusted oil drums on which it had once floated. Cool Breeze sat in the corner, dressed in clothes off a wash line, the wound in his cut face stitched with thread and needle, his left arm swollen like a black balloon full of water.

I heard Megan's camera start clicking behind me.

"Why didn't you call the Feds, Breeze?" I asked.

"That woman FBI agent wants me in front of a grand jury. She say I gonna stay in the system, too, till they done wit' me."

I looked at the electrical cord he had used for a tourniquet, the proud flesh that had turned the color of fish scale around the fang marks, the drainage that had left viscous green tailings on his shirt. "I tell you what, I'll dress those wounds, hang your arm in a sling, then we'll get a breath of fresh air," I said.

"You cut that cord loose, the poison gonna hit my heart."

"You're working on gangrene now, partner."

I saw him swallow. The whites of his eyes looked painted with iodine.

"You're jail-wise, Breeze. You knew the Feds would take you over the hurdles. Why'd you want to stick it to Alex Guidry?"

This is the story he told me while I used a rubber suction cup to draw a mixture of venom and infection from his forearm. As I listened on one knee, kneading the puncture wounds, feeling the pain in his body flicker like a candle flame under his skin, I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, DOWN the Teche, he owned a dirt-road store knocked together from scrap boards, tin stripped off a condemned rice mill, and Montgomery Ward brick that had dried out and crusted and pulled loose from the joists like a scab. He also had a pretty young wife named Ida, who cooked in a cafe and picked tabasco peppers on a corporate farm. After a day in the field her hands swelled as though they had been stung by bumblebees and she had to soak them in milk to relieve the burning in her skin.

On a winter afternoon two white men pulled up on the bib of oyster shell that served as a parking lot in front of the gallery, and the older man, who had jowls like a bulldog's and smoked a cigar in the center of his mouth, asked for a quart of moonshine.

"Don't tell me you ain't got it, boy. I know the man from Miss'sippi sells it to you."

"I got Jax on ice. I got warm beer, too. I can sell you soda pop. I ain't got no whiskey."

"That a fact? I'm gonna walk back out the door, then come back in. One of them jars you got in that box behind the motor oil better be on the counter or I'm gonna redecorate your store."

Cool Breeze shook his head.

"I know who y'all are. I done paid already. Why y'all giving me this truck?" he said.

The younger white man opened the screen door and came inside the store. His name was Alex Guidry, and he wore a corduroy suit and cowboy hat and western boots, with pointed, mirror-bright toes. The older man picked up a paper bag of deep-fried cracklings from the counter. The grease in the cracklings made dark stains in the paper. He threw the bag to the younger man and said to Cool Breeze, "You on parole for check writing now. That liquor will get you a double nickel. Your woman yonder, what's her name, Ida? She's a cook, ain't she?"