DR08 - Burning Angel (40 page)

“It's going to pass,” I said.

“What?” She looked at me blankly.

“You didn't have a choice. If you hadn't picked up Clete's call, I'd be dead.”

“Clete? Clete didn't .. . The phone rang out in the garden and he said, ”Dave's in trouble. I can't help him. It's too far to come now.

You have to do it.“

”

“Who?”

“I can't handle this. You said you saw his tattoo on the remains in the morgue. You swore you did. But I know that voice, Dave. My God .. .” But she didn't finish. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and began to weep.

Chapter 37

i BELIEVE MOLE EN Bertram! was like many of my generation with whom I grew up along Bayou Teche. We found ourselves caught inside a historical envelope that we never understood, borne along on wind currents that marked our ending, not our beginning, first as provincial remnants of a dying Acadian culture, later as part of that excoriated neo-colonial army who would go off to a war whose origins were as arcane to us as the economics of French poppy growers.

When we finally made a plan for ourselves, it was to tear a hole in the middle of our lives.

I don't know why Moleen chose to do it in an apartment off Rampart, near the edge of the Quarter, not far from the one-time quadroon brothels of Storyville and the Iberville Project where Sonny Boy grew up. Perhaps it was because the ambiance of palm fronds, rusting grillwork, and garish pastels that tried to cover the cracked plaster and crumbling brick was ultimately the signature of Moleen's world-jaded, alluring in its decay, seemingly reborn daily amidst tropical flowers and Gulf rainstorms, inextricably linked to a corrupt past that we secretly admired.

At five in the morning I got the call from an alcoholic ex-Homicide partner at First District Headquarters.

“The coroner won't be able to bag it up till after eight, in case you want to come down and check it out,” he said, “How'd you know to call me?” I said. “Your business card was on his nightstand. That and his driver's license were about all he had on him. The place got creeped before we arrived.” He yawned into the phone. “What was he, a pimp?”

The flight in the department's single-engine plane was only a half hour, but the day was already warm, the streets dense with humidity, when Helen Soileau and I walked through the brick-paved courtyard of the building, into the small apartment whose walls were painted an arterial red and hung with black velvet curtains that covered no windows. Moleen and Ruthie Jean lay fully clothed on top of the double bed, their heads wrapped in clear plastic bags. A crime scene photographer was taking their picture from several angles; each time his flash went off their faces seemed to leap to life inside the folds of the plastic. “He was a lawyer, huh? Who was the broad?” my ex-partner said. He wore a hat and was drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. “Just a farm girl,” I said. “Some farm girl. She did both of them.”

“She did what?” I said. “His bag was tied from behind, hers in front. I hope she was a good piece of ass,” he said. “Shut up,” Helen said. “Did you hear me? Just shut the fuck up.”

Later, Helen and I turned down an offer of a ride to the airport and instead walked up to Canal to catch a cab. The street was loud with traffic and car horns, the air stifling, the muted sun as unrelenting and eye-watering as a hangover. The crowds of people on the sidewalks moved through the heat, their faces expressionless, the gaze in their eyes introspective and dead, preset on destinations that held neither joy nor pain, neither loss nor victory. “What are you doing, Streak?”

Helen said. I took her by the hand and crossed to the neutral ground, drew her with me into the belly of the great iron streetcar from the year

1910 that creaked on curved tracks past the Pearl, with its scrolled black colonnade on the corner of Canal and St. Charles, where Sonny Boy used to put together deals under a wood-bladed fan, on up the avenue, clattering past sidewalks cracked by oak roots as thick as swollen fire hoses, into a long tunnel of trees and heliographic light that was like tumbling through the bottom of a green well, to a place where, perhaps, the confines of reason and predictability had little application.

Epilogue

FALL is a strange time of year in southern Louisiana. After first frost robins fill the trees along the bayou and camellias that seem fashioned from crepe paper bloom with the colors of spring, even though winter is at hand. The sky is absolutely blue and cloudless, without an imperfection in it, but at evening the sunlight hardens and grows cold, as it might in a metaphysical poem, the backroads are choked with cane wagons on their way to the mill, and the stubble fires on the fields drench the air with an acrid, sweet smell like syrup scorched on a woodstove.

Bootsie and I took Alafair to the LSU-Ole Miss game that year and later stopped for crawfish at Possum's on the St. Martinville Road. It had been a wonderful day, the kind that memory will never need to improve upon, and when we got home we lighted Alafair's jack-o'-lanterns on the gallery and fixed hand-crank ice cream and frozen blackberries in the kitchen.

Maybe it was the nature of the season, or the fact that quail and dove freckled the red sun in my neighbor's field, but I knew there was something I had to do that evening or I would have no rest.

And like some pagan of old, weighing down spirits in the ground with tablets of stone, I cut a bucket full of chrysanthemums and drove out to the Bertrand plantation, down the dirt road past the tenant houses, to the grove of gum trees that had once been a cemetery for slaves.

When I got out of the truck the air was damp and cold and smelled like dust and rain; curlicues of sparks fanned out of the ash in the fields and I could hear leaves swirling dryly across the concrete pad abandoned by the construction company.

I put on my raincoat and hat and walked across the field to the treeline and the collapsed corn crib where Ruthie Jean and Moleen had begun their affair, where they had been spied on by the overseer whom Luke Fontenot would later kill, where they had reenacted that old Southern black-white confession of need and dependence that, in its peculiar way, was a recognition of the simple biological fact of our brotherhood.

And for that reason only, I told myself, I stuck the flowers by their stems in what was left of the crib's doorway, then began walking back toward my truck just as the first raindrops clicked against the brim of my hat.

But I knew better. All our stories began here-mine, Moleen's, the Fontenot family's, even Sonny's. Born to the griff, pool halls, and small-time prize rings, he somehow stepped across an unseen line and became someone whom even he didn't recognize. The scars on his body became lesions on our consciences, his jailhouse re bop a paean for Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill.

If I learned anything from my association with Moleen and Ruthie Jean and Sonny Boy, it's the fact that we seldom know each other and can only guess at the lives that wait to be lived in every human being.

And if you should ever doubt the proximity of the past, I thought to myself, you only had to look over your shoulder at the rain slanting on the fields, like now, the smoke rising in wet plumes out of the stubble, the mist blowing off the lake, and you can see and hear with the clarity of a dream the columns marching four abreast out of the trees, barefoot, emaciated as scarecrows, their perforated, sun-faded

colors popping above them in the wind, their officers cantering their horses in the field, everyone dressing it up now, the clatter of muskets shifting in unison to the right shoulder, yes, just a careless wink of the eye, just that quick, and you're among them, wending your way with liege lord and serf and angel, in step with the great armies of the dead.

James Lee Burke is the author of twelve previous novels including seven featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux, and a volume of short stories. The Lost Get-Back Boogie was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and Black Cherry Blues won the Edgar Award in 1989. He divides his time between Missoula, Montana and Louisiana.

Author photograph by Tomm Furch.