Creole Belle (73 page)

Dupree was sitting up, brushing broken leaves and grains of black dirt off his hands. “Could I have a lock of your hair as a souvenir?” he said to Gretchen. “You wouldn’t mind, would you? Ask Daddy if he would mind. You two are wonderful at melodrama. The little half-kike telling Daddy she’s going to be a good little girl now.”

Clete removed the plastic bottle from the pocket of his trousers and eased himself down on one knee, the leaves crackling under him, his face draining with the effort. The left side of his shirt was soaked with blood above the place where it tucked into his belt. He steadied himself, unscrewing the small cap on the bottle with his thumb, the bottle concealed below his thigh. “How many did you kill in that camp?” he asked.

“The people who died in the camps were killed by the Reich. A soldier only carries out orders. A good soldier serves his prince. An unfortunate soldier is one who doesn’t have a good prince.”

“I got it,” Clete said. “You’re a victim yourself.”

“Not really. But I’m not a villain, either. Your government killed more than one hundred thousand civilians in Iraq. How can you think of yourself as my moral superior?”

“You’ve got a point there. I’m not superior to anybody or anything. That’s why I’m the guy who’s going to give you what you deserve and make sure you never hurt anyone again.”

I realized what Clete was holding in his hand. “Clete, rethink this. He’s not worth it,” I said.

“You got to do something for kicks,” he replied.

Clete pushed Alexis Dupree on his back and pinned him in the leaves with one hand. Dupree’s face was filled with shock and disbelief as he realized what was about to happen.

“Auf Wiedersehen,”
Clete said. He forced the spout on the bottle past Dupree’s lips and over his teeth and pushed it deep into his mouth until the liquid Drano was pouring smoothly and without obstruction down his throat.

The consequence was immediate. A terrible odor not unlike the
smell from an incinerator at a rendering plant rose from Dupree’s mouth. He made a gurgling sound like an air hose bubbling underwater. His legs stiffened and his feet thrashed wildly in the leaves, and his face contorted and seemed to age a century in seconds. Then a dry click came from his throat, as though someone had flicked off a light switch, and it was over.

Clete got to his feet, off balance, and let the bottle drop from his hand. He stared up the incline at the plantation house. “That fire is spreading. Maybe we should do something about that,” he said.

I had no idea what he meant. I picked up the bottle and walked deeper into the trees and scooped out a hole in the dirt with my foot and dropped the bottle into it and covered it over, my heart sick at the burden I knew Clete would carry for the rest of his life. The pontoon plane streaked past me, lifting out of the fog, banking above a sugarcane field where the stubble burned in long red lines and the smoke hung like dirty gray rags on the fields. As I walked back up the slope, I realized Clete had not gone directly to the house but to a loamy spot next to a clump of wild blackberry bushes on the bayou’s edge and was dragging a heavily laden tarp from a hole, the dirt sliding off the plastic as he worked it up the slope. Two road flares were stuck in his back pockets. He fitted his hands through the grips of two five-gallon gas containers and tried to pick them up. One of them fell hard on the ground and stayed there.

“Help me,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“It’s not over.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“You think I went too far with the old man?”

“What do I know?” I said, avoiding his eyes.

“He had it coming. You know he did. He was evil. The real deal. You know it.”

“Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. I did not let him see my face when I spoke.

“What kind of answer is that?” he said. “Come on, Dave, talk to me.”

I turned and headed up to the house by myself. I could hear him
laboring up the incline, dragging one of the fuel containers behind him like a mythological figure pushing a great stone up a hill.

E
VEN AS I
outdistanced him to the house, I knew I was selling Clete Purcel short. You should never keep score in your life or anyone else’s. And you never measure yourself or anyone else by one deed, whether it’s for good or bad. It had taken me a long time to learn that lesson, so why was I forgetting it now? What Clete had done was wrong, but what he had done was also understandable. What if our situation had turned around on us again? What if Alexis Dupree had been given another chance to get his hands on Gretchen Horowitz and Alafair?

For those who would judge Clete harshly, I’d have to ask them if they ever served tea to the ghost of a mamasan they killed. I’d also ask them how they would like to live with the knowledge that they had rolled a fragmentation grenade into a spider hole where her children tried to hide with their mother. Those were not hypothetical questions for Clete. They were the memories that waited for him every night he lay down to sleep.

I was on the lawn and could see the carriage house and the driveway and the towering oak trees in the front yard. I turned around and looked at Clete, still lumbering after me, the gas container swinging from his arm. “What’s going on, gyrene?” I said.

He set the container down, his chest rising and falling inside his shirt. I walked back to him and removed my coat and pulled it over his shoulders. In the background I could see Alafair and Gretchen down by the coulee, helping Helen Soileau and Tee Jolie to their feet.

“It’s not over,” Clete said.

“You’re right. It never is,” I replied.

“You don’t look too good.”

“I’m okay. It’s just a flesh wound.”

“No, there’s no exit wound. Alafair was wrong, Dave. You’ve got a big leak in you. Sit down in the gazebo. I’ll be back.”

“You know better than that,” I said.

But the adrenaline of the last fifteen minutes was ebbing, and my
confidence was fading. The yard and plantation house and windmill palms and azalea and camellia bushes bursting with flowers were going in and out of focus, like someone playing with a zoom lens on a camera.

“Hang tight, Dave,” Clete said.

He went through the kitchen entrance of the house, the gasoline sloshing inside the plastic container, the road flares sticking out of his back pocket, my coat draped on his shoulders. I followed him and was immediately struck by the density of the heat stored in the house. The fire Gretchen started in the dining room had spread along the carpet and climbed up two of the walls and was flattening against the ceiling. Smoke was climbing in a dirty plume through a hole that probably was once a conduit for the exhaust funnel on a gas-fed space heater.

“Clete?” I called out.

There was no answer.

“Clete! Where are you? It’s a match factory in here.”

I saw a door hanging open in the hallway. The gasoline container was sitting next to the doorjamb. Downstairs I could hear metal clanging and pipes rattling and bouncing on concrete. I went down the stairs, holding on to the handrail. A solitary light was burning behind a central heating unit, and I could see shadows moving on the wall, but I couldn’t see Clete. “What are you doing?” I said.

“They hung her up and beat the shit out of her,” he said.

Varina Leboeuf lay on the floor, surrounded by broken plaster and pieces of water pipe Clete had torn out of the ceiling. Manacles from separate sets of handcuffs were locked on her wrists. When she looked up at me, I could hardly recognize her face.

“She says Pierre told the gumballs to do it,” Clete said.

In spite of his wounds, he picked Varina up on his shoulder and labored up the stairs with her as though she were a sack of feed. “I’m going to finish up here. Take her outside,” he said.

“Time to dee-dee, Cletus.”

“Not yet,” he replied.

I managed to get Varina Leboeuf out on the lawn while Clete went to work inside. I couldn’t tell if she knew what was going on. I believed
she was wicked and she used people and discarded them when they were no longer of value to her. I believed she was heartless and mean-spirited and narcissistic and understood no emotions other than her own pain or the pleasure she experienced during moments of self-gratification. I also felt I couldn’t judge her. In her own mind, she thought of herself as normal and believed her misdeeds were somehow necessary. The worst irony of all was that in many ways, her perspective wasn’t totally dissimilar to Tee Jolie’s. They were for sale in different ways, but just the same, they were for sale.

I left her on the lawn and went back inside. Clete had traversed the entire first floor of the home and returned to the kitchen, where the gas container was resting upside down in the sink. He removed the road flares from his back pockets and stared at me, waiting to see what his beat partner from the old First District in New Orleans was going to say. The color had left his face, from either blood loss or exhaustion. I could feel the heat through the dining room wall.

“I checked the old man’s study,” he said. “The place is vacuumed. We’ll never prove any of the things we’ve learned about these people. It’s the right thing to do, Streak. Some of those guys might still be out there.”

He waited for me to reply.

“Streak?” he said.

“Do it,” I said.

He pulled the plastic cap off a flare and inverted the cap and struck the tip of the flare against the striker. When the flare burst alight, he walked into the hallway with it and tossed it into the living room. Either because of the preheated condition of the house or the influx of cold oxygen from outside, the moment of ignition produced a stunning effect. The rooms abruptly filled with the rosy coloration of a sunset during the summer solstice. The glow intensified and seemed to gather in the water-stiffened wallpaper, the oak floors, the walnut balustrades, the antique furniture, and the bookshelves lined with leather-bound collectibles. We backed out the kitchen door into the coldness of the night as the entire house lit up in a strange and sequential fashion, as though someone were running from room to room, clicking on a series of lamps with red shades.

I heard no glass break, no explosion of a gas main, no violent sounds of studs and joists and nails wrenching apart in the heat. Instead, Croix du Sud Plantation was slowly collapsing and devolving back into itself, whispering its own story on the wind, sparks stringing off the roof, the only earthly reminder of the slaves and convicts who had built and maintained it disappearing with it inside the smoke.

Clete and I walked toward the coulee to rejoin Alafair and Helen and Gretchen. Our wounds were severe, but we would survive them. We were out of step and out of sync with the world and with ourselves, and knowing this, we held on to each other like two men in a gale, the fire burning so brightly behind us that the backs of our necks glowed with the heat.

I
N THE SPRING
Molly and Alafair and I returned to our old haunts in Key West, and three days later, Clete Purcel joined us at the motel on the foot of the island. Key West is a fine place to visit, and it reminds me in many ways of old New Orleans, with its gingerbread houses and palm trees and genteel sense of decay and neon-scrolled pretense at vice that in reality is an illusion. At one time it was the real thing. Like South Louisiana, it originated as a displaced piece of the Spanish and French colonial world that floated across the Caribbean and affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States.

Its culture was antithetical to the Enlightenment. Its residents were pirates and slavers and mulatto and Hispanic whores and American adventurers who hoped to create personal fiefdoms in the West Indies and Nicaragua. Its veneer of Christianity disguised a pagan world that provided a home to people who could never live in a society that was Anglo-Saxon in origin and governed by the descendants of Puritans. License and lucre constituted its ethos. Those who didn’t like it could take up sweet-potato farming in Georgia.

Almost year-round, the air was warm and smelled of salt and rain and tropical flowers from all over the world. The winter was not really winter at all, and therein may lie Key West’s greatest charm. If one does not have to brood upon the coming of winter and the shortening of the days and the fading of the light, then perhaps one does not have to brood upon the coming of death. When the season
is gentle and unthreatening and seems to renew itself daily, we come to believe that spring and the long days of summer may be eternal after all. When we see the light trapped high in the sky on a summer evening, is it possible we are looking through an aperture at our future rather than at a seasonal phenomenon? Is it possible that the big party is just beginning?

We scuba-dived off Seven Mile Reef and trolled for marlin and, in the evening, cooked redfish wrapped in tinfoil on a hibachi on the beach in front of our motel down at the southernmost point on the island. The waves were black at night and strung with foam when they capped on the sandbars, and toward dawn, when the stars went out of the sky, the sun would rise without warning in an explosion of light on the eastern rim of the world, and the water outside our motel window would be flat and calm and turquoise and blue, dimpled with rain rings, and sometimes a flying fish would be sailing through the air as though determined to begin a new evolutionary cycle.