Creole Belle (26 page)

The white woman and the black woman looked at each other, then at the Hispanic girl. The three of them rose from the booth and, without speaking a word, went out the front door of the club.

“I guess this means we’re not gonna be drinking buddies,” Ronnie Earl said.

“I can hook you up now and take you to the Lafayette PD. Or I can call them and have them pick you up. Or you can give up the hitter in the freezer truck. I think the hitter was your brother.”

“I haven’t seen my brother since I went inside. I heard he was dead or living in western Kansas. I cain’t remember which it was.”

“Stand up and put your hands behind you.”

“No problem. I’ll be out in two hours. I read about that shooting. I was playing bridge in Lake Charles the day it happened. I’ve got twenty witnesses you can call.”

“I’ve got a flash for you, Ronnie Earl. It’s not me who wants to hang you out to dry. It’s Lafayette PD. They’ve got a special hard-on for child molesters around here. They don’t care how they put you away. What you’re doing is five-star dumb,” I said.

“So is everything in my life. Do what you’re gonna do, but one thing I want to clear up: I never harmed a child. The other stuff I did. The short-eyes charge was a bum beef. Y’all sent me up wit’ a bad jacket. I paid a big price for that, man.”

“That’s the breaks, Ronnie.”

“How’d you know I got AIDS?”

“I didn’t.”

“I got a cut on my wrist. When a cut doesn’t heal, does that mean something?”

My hands froze.

“Got you, motherfucker,” he said.

Sometimes the perps, even the worst of them, have their moments.

A strange phenomenon occurred while I was hooking up Ronnie Earl Patin and patting him down for weapons and jailhouse contraband. I saw the entirety of the club as though it had been freeze-framed inside a camera lens. I saw my friend Harvey, beetle-browed and head-shaved, his big arms propped on the bar, looking wanly at an Iberia cop he had picked up from a greasy pool of water, a cop who might now cost him his job; I saw the prostitute in the low-cut blouse and short skirt talking on her cell phone as she went out a side exit; I saw a handicapped man whose arms were too short for his truncated body trying to push coins into the jukebox, his fingers as inept as Vienna sausages; I saw all the sad burnt-out ends of the days and nights I had spent in bars from Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley to the backstreets of Manila to a poacher’s community in the Atchafalaya Basin, where I traded my army-issue wristwatch, one that survived the detonation of a Bouncing Betty, for a half-pint bottle of bourbon and a six-pack of hot beer. I saw all the detritus and waste
and wreckage of my misspent life laid out before me, like a man flipping through his check stubs and realizing that the reminders of one’s moral and psychological bankruptcy never go away.

“You gonna bust me or not?” Patin said.

“Right now I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you,” I said. “It’s not a time for you to shoot off your mouth.”

“I’ve still got two full shot glasses on the table. You drink one, I’ll drink the other. Who’s the wiser? Come on, you know you want it. You’re just like me. I’ve cut my intake in half by getting laid every day. What do you do? And don’t lie to me. You’re one thirsty son of a bitch.”

I pushed him through the front door into the parking lot and took out my cell phone. The battery was dead. “Is your cell phone in your car?”

“I walked here. And I don’t have a cell phone. I think they’re for people who need to beat off more. I cain’t believe this is happening. You got to bum a phone off the guy you’re busting?” He started laughing uncontrollably, tears running down his cheeks.

I unlocked the manacle on one of his wrists. The sun was red and as big as a planet and starting to set behind the trees on the western side of the highway that led to Opelousas. I threaded the loose manacle through the rear bumper on my unmarked car and relocked it on Ronnie Earl Patin’s wrist, forcing him to kneel on the asphalt. “I’m going to use the phone inside. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.

“You’re leaving me out here?”

“What does it look like?”

“Take me in.”

“You did eight years in Camp J, Ronnie. You probably could have snitched your way out, but you didn’t. Not many guys can say that. You’re a stand-up guy, but for me that means you’re probably a dead end. So now you’re Lafayette PD’s problem.”

“I got bad knees. I used to do floor work without pads,” he said.

“I believe it,” I said. I got my raincoat off the back floor and folded it into a square and squatted down and slipped it under his shins.

He looked up at me, his mouth twisted with discomfort. “You gonna drink my booze?”

“You never can tell,” I said.

I went back inside the club. Maybe I should have transported him down to Lafayette PD in the back of the unmarked car, even though there was no D-ring on the back floor. Maybe I should have kicked him loose and tried to follow him to his next destination. Maybe I should have pulled in the three hookers. Maybe I shouldn’t have let my cell phone battery go down, even though I later discovered the recharger problem lay in the dash-lighter connection. I dialed 911 on a pay phone and watched the handicapped man dancing with an imaginary woman in front of the jukebox. I looked for the prostitute I had offered to buy a bowl of gumbo, but she was nowhere in sight. I watched Harvey washing glasses in a sink of dirty water and wondered what would have happened if he had left me lying behind the B-girl joint at the Underpass. Would I have been a feast for jackals? Would I have been jackrolled or even beaten to death? Would I have begged for my life if someone had pointed a switchblade under my chin? All of these things were part of the menu when you were a gutter drunk.

I lifted my hand in a silent thank-you to Harvey as my 911 call was transferred to a Lafayette PD detective. The low ceiling and painted-over cinder-block walls of the club and the stink of cigarettes and urine from the restrooms seemed to squeeze the oxygen out of the room. I pulled loose my tie and unbuttoned my collar and took a deep breath. I closed and opened my eyes, the veins shrinking across one side of my head, my old problems with vertigo returning for no apparent reason. My gaze wandered to the shot glasses of whiskey that had been abandoned on Ronnie Earl’s table. Then I stared at the cigarette burns on the floor. All of them looked like the calcified bodies of water leeches. My hand made a wet noise against the phone receiver when I squeezed it.

My 911 call to the dispatcher and my conversation with the detective could not have taken over three minutes. The handicapped man was dancing to the same song that had been playing on the jukebox when I entered the club. But I knew I had swung on a slider, one that
had Vaseline all over it. The black prostitute at the bar had been too cool after making me for a cop. She had realized it, too, and had become petulant and turned herself into a victim in order to muddy my perception of her behavior.
You dumb bastard
, I said to myself. I hung up the phone and flung open the front door.

The shot came from far down the street, from either the backseat of an automobile on the corner or a shut-down filling station behind it, one whose broken windows and empty bays lay deep in the shadow of a giant live oak. The report was a single loud crack, probably that of a scoped, high-powered rifle. Maybe the bullet struck another surface before it found its target, or maybe the powder was wet or old and had degraded in the casing. Regardless of the cause, the pathologist would later conclude that the round had started to topple when it cut a keyhole through Ronnie Earl Patin’s face and ripped out part of his skull and spilled most of his brains onto the trunk of the unmarked car.

When I got to him, my .45 in my hand, the cooling of the late afternoon marred by dust and road noise and the smell of rubber and exhaust fumes, he was slumped sideways on his knees, like a child who fell asleep while at prayer. I stared at the traffic and at the smoke from trash fires rising into the red sun and wondered if Ronnie Earl Patin’s soul had taken flight from his body. I also wondered if his life would have been different had I not made sure he went up the road with a short-eyes in his jacket. The answer was probably no. But it’s hard to hate the dead, no matter what they have done. That’s the power they hold over us.

C
LETE GAVE HIS
bed to Gretchen and made a bed for himself on the sofa in his cottage at the motor court. “I can get my own place,” she said.

“All the cottages are rented up. A decent motel here is at least sixty a night. You want to watch James Dean, don’t you? Maybe the motel service doesn’t have the same selections. I have all the channels.”

To say she wanted to watch James Dean was an understatement. After she had watched
Giant
, Clete thought she would turn off the set and go to sleep. Instead, she used the bathroom and went immediately back to the bed, lying on her stomach, her head at the foot of the mattress, her chin propped up on both hands. Clete tried to stay with
East of Eden
, then pulled two pillows over his face while the patriarchal voice of Raymond Massey seemed to thud inside his head with the regularity of stones falling down a well. When he woke at four
A.M
., the bed was empty, the volume on the set barely audible. The bathroom door was open, the light off, the chain in place on the front door. He gathered the sheet around him and stood up so he could see on the far side of the bed. Gretchen lay on the floor in front of the set like a little girl, still on her stomach, her arms hooked around a pillow, her chin raised, the soles of her bare feet in the air. She was watching the last scene in
Rebel Without a Cause
, a glazed look in her eyes. He sat down in a stuffed chair, the sheet wadded
in his lap. As he watched her, he knew he should not speak, in the same way you know not to speak to someone during certain moments inside a church.

“You know why the title of this movie is wrong?” she said.

“I never thought about it a lot,” he replied.

“It’s not about rebelling against anything. It’s the other way around. The movie comes together in the scene at the observatory. Natalie Wood and James Dean and Sal Mineo are hiding from the police and the bullies. James Dean believes he’s responsible for killing Buzz when they played chicken on the bluffs with the stolen cars. When he tries to turn himself in, the bullies hunt him down. James and Natalie and Sal want to be a family because they don’t have families of their own. They’re like the Holy Family inside the manger. They’re not rebels at all. They want to be loved. The only heavens that are real to them are the stars in the top of the planetarium.”

“Did you know there’s a slipup in that film?” Clete said. “Sal Mineo goes out in the dark with the semi-automatic. James Dean has already taken out the magazine. He tries to tell the cops the gun’s empty, but they shoot Sal anyway. The truth is, the gun wasn’t empty. Sal Mineo fired it earlier, which means a shell was in the chamber.”

“That’s all you got out of the film? That a great director like Nicholas Ray didn’t know anything about guns? That the cops did what they were supposed to do? Maybe James Dean had already cleared the chamber. It just wasn’t on camera. Or maybe a piece of footage hit the cutting room floor. Many of the people on the set were veterans of World War Two or Korea. You don’t think they knew how to clear a semi-auto?”

“I was just making an observation.”

“Don’t pass it on to anyone with a brain. You’ll embarrass yourself.”

“You know a lot about firearms,” he said.

“Duh,” she replied.

He bent behind the TV and pulled out the plug and turned off the overhead light. Even with the pillows packed down on his head and his face shoved into the sofa cushions, he couldn’t get Gretchen’s words out of his head. What had he expected? For Gretchen to turn
out to be someone other than the figure in the Orioles baseball cap and red windbreaker he had watched raise a semi-auto eye level to Bix Golightly’s face and pump three rounds into his head and mouth? Gretchen not only knew about guns, she was the kind of person whose residual anger was so great that, given the chance, she would burn out the rifling in the barrel of an automatic weapon and stay high as a kite on it.

He didn’t fall asleep until the first gray light of dawn touched the eastern sky and the fog from the bayou billowed through the trees and surrounded the walls of his cottage and closed him off from the rest of the world.

W
HEN
C
LETE AND
Gretchen woke, he fixed cereal and coffee for both of them, then fried four eggs and several pieces of bacon and slathered eight slices of bread with mayonnaise and made sandwiches that he wrapped in foil. He went outside and picked a handful of mint leaves from a wet spot below the water hydrant in the flower bed, then washed the leaves and sprinkled them inside a quart bottle of orange juice. He put the sandwiches and orange juice and a sack of frozen shrimp in his ice chest.

“Want to tell me what you’re doing?” she said, flipping through the pages of a
Newsweek
magazine.