James Burke - Crusader's Cross

Troy Bordelon was a bully when I knew him at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette. SLI, as it was called, had been the first integrated college in the South. As far as I knew, there were no incidents when the first black students enrolled, and by and large the students, both white and black, treated one another respectfully. Except for Troy Bordelon. His name was French, but he came from a sawmill town north of Alexandria, an area where the deeds of the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia were burned into Reconstruction history with a hot iron.

Troy kept the tradition alive and well.

A black kid from Abbeville by the name of Simon Labiche was the only person of color in my ROTC unit. Troy did everything in his power to make Simon's life miserable. During drill he stepped on Simon's heels, throwing him off-step, constantly murmuring racial and sexual insults in his ear. When Simon made the drill team and was scheduled to perform at the halftime ceremonies during the homecoming game, Troy brought him a goodwill offering of a cold drink from the refreshment stand. It was loaded with a high-powered laxative that can cause the red scours in cattle.

Simon, dressed in chrome-plated helmet, white scarf, and white leggings, fouled himself in front of twenty thousand people, dropped his M-l in the mud, and fled the field in shame.

But Troy did not confine his abuse to minorities. He bullied anyone who exposed a chink in his armor, and most often these were people who reminded Troy of himself. Nor did the passage of time bring him the wisdom that would allow him to understand the origins of his sadistic inclinations. He returned to his hometown, where he was related to the sheriff and the president of the parish police jury, and went to work for a finance company, one that was owned by the same family who owned the cotton gin and the lumberyards in town.

His power over poor whites and people of color was enormous. He was loud, imperious, and unflagging in his ridicule of the vulnerable and the weak. For Troy, an act of mercy was an act of identification with his victim.

Oddly, when traveling through New Iberia, he would always call me up for coffee or to share a meal. I suspected I belonged in Troy's mind to a self-manufactured memory about his college days in Lafayette, a time he evidently looked back upon with nostalgia. Or maybe because I was a police officer, he enjoyed being in the company of someone who represented power and authority.

"We had some real fun back then, didn't we?" he'd say, and slap me hard on the arm. "Dances and all that. Playing jokes on each other in the dorm. Hey, you remember when -"

I'd try to smile and avoid looking at my watch.

Then one fine day in early June, after I had hung it up with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department, I got a call from Troy's estranged wife, a schoolteacher named Zerelda. Years ago, at age thirty-five, she had looked sixty. I couldn't even imagine what she probably looked like today. "He wants to see you. Can you drive up this afternoon?" she said.

"He doesn't have a telephone?" I said.

"He's at Baptist Hospital. As far as I'm concerned, you can rip out his life-support system. But the poor fuck is scared shitless of dying. So what's a Christian girl to do?" she said.

Evidently Troy's denouement began with the new waitress in the Blue Fish Café – an overweight, big-boned country girl whose mouth was painted bright red, her hair shampooed and blow-dried for her first day on the job. She was eager to please and thought of her new situation as an opportunity to be a cashier or a hostess, a big jump up from her old job at the Wal-Mart. When Troy came in for his breakfast he lit up a cigarette in the nonsmoking section, sent his coffee back because it was not hot enough, and told the waitress there were dishwater spots on his silverware. When his food was served, he complained his steak was pink in the middle, his eggs runny, and he had been given whole wheat rather than rye toast.

When the girl spilled his water, he asked if she was an outpatient at the epileptic rehabilitation center. By the end of his meal she was a nervous wreck. While she was bent over his table, clearing his dishes, he told others a loud joke about a big-breasted woman and a farm equipment salesman who sold milking machines. The girl's face burned like a red lightbulb.

Then one of those moments occurred that no one in a small town ever expects. The owner of the restaurant was a hard-packed, rotund Lebanese man who attended the Assembly of God Church and whose taciturn manner seldom drew attention to him. Without saying a word, he picked up a Silex of scalding hot coffee and poured it over the crown of Troy Bordelon's head.

After Troy stopped screaming, he attacked the owner with his fists and the fight cascaded through the dining area into the kitchen. It should have ended there, with two over-the-hill men walking away in shame and embarrassment at their behavior. Instead, when they had stopped fighting and a peacemaker asked both men to apologize, Troy gathered the blood and spittle in his mouth and spat it in the owner's face. The owner responded by plunging a razor-edged butcher knife four times through Troy's chest.

It was dusk when I arrived at the hospital in the little town where Troy had spent most of his life. It was a beautiful evening, the summer light high in the sky, the moon rising over red cotton land and a long bank of green trees on the western horizon. The air smelled of chemical fertilizer, distant rain, night-blooming flowers, and the fecund odor of the ponds on a catfish farm. I didn't want to go into the hospital. I was never good at deathbed visits, nor at funerals, and now, with age, I resented more and more the selfish claims the dead and dying lay on the quick.

Troy was spread out on his bed in the intensive-care unit like a pregnant whale that had been dropped from a high altitude, his blond hair still cut in a 1950s flattop, now stiff with burn ointment. What his wife had referred to as his life-support system was a tangle of translucent tubes, oxygen bottles, IV sacs, a catheter, and electronic monitors that, upon first glance, made me think that perhaps technology might give Troy another season to run.

Then he took a breath and a sucking noise came from inside his chest that I never wanted to hear again.

He had vomited into his oxygen mask, and a nurse was wiping off his face and throat. He wrapped a meaty hand around mine, squeezing with a power and strength I didn't think him capable of.

"Sir, you'll need to lean down to hear your friend," the nurse said.

I put my ear close to Troy's mouth. His breath rose against my skin like a puff of gas from a sewer grate. " 'Member that colored… that black kid, the one we played the joke on with the laxative?" he whispered.

"I do," I said, although the word "we" had not been part of what happened.

"I feel bad about that. But that's the way it was back then, huh? You reckon he knows I'm sorry?"

"Sure he does," I replied.

I heard him swallowing, the saliva clicking in his windpipe.

"Years ago, you knew a girl who was a whore," he said. "They snatched her up. My uncle was a cop in Galveston. He was one of the guys who snatched her. I saw where they took her. I saw the room she was in."

I looked down at him. His eyes were wide-set, round, his youthful haircut and porcine face like a grotesque caricature of the decade he never allowed himself to grow out of. "What was the name of the girl?" I said.

He wet his lips, his hand knotting my shirt. "I don't know. She burned some people for a lot of money. You and your brother took her out of a cathouse. So they snatched her up."

I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. "Your uncle and who?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Cops and a pimp. She had a mandolin. They busted it up."