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I looked at the mug shots of Fluck and Raintree and was reasonably sure that these were the same men who had been in Weldon’s house (I say “reasonably sure” because a booking-room photograph is often taken when the subject is tired, angry, drunk, or drugged, and recidivists constantly change their hairstyles, grow and shave mustaches and hillbilly sideburns, and become bloated on jailhouse fare like grits, spaghetti, and mashed potatoes).
But Fluck’s file told me little that I didn’t already know, or couldn’t have guessed at. At seventeen he had pushed another boy down a stairs at the Superdome and broken his arm, but the charge had been dropped. He had been banned for life from Louisiana racetracks after he was caught feeding a horse a speedball; he had been in the New Orleans city prison twice, once for beating up a taxicab driver, a second time for distribution of obscene film materials. His mainline fall had been at Parchman, where he did a five-year jolt and went out on what is called “max-time,” which meant he either gave the hacks constant trouble and earned no good-time, or he refused parole because he didn’t want to go back on the street under supervision.
But because he had gone out on max-time, Parchman had no address for him, and he hadn’t been arrested again in the two years since his discharge. His parents were deceased, and neither the New Orleans phone directory nor any of the utility companies listed anyone by the name of Fluck.
Eddy Raintree’s photo stared at me out of his file with a face that had the moral depth and complexity of freshly poured cement. He had a sixth-grade education, a dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps, and had never had a more skilled job than that of fry cook and hod carrier. He had been in the Calcasieu, West Baton Rouge, and Ascension parish prisons for bigamy, check writing, arson, and sodomy with animals. He went down for three years in Angola for possession of stolen food stamps, and he spent two of those three years in lockdown with the big stripes (the violent and unmanageable) after he was suspected of involvement in a gang rape that left a nineteen-year-old convict dead in a shower stall.
He, like Jewel Fluck, had gone out max-time three years ago, and there was no current address for him. But at the bottom of Raintree’s prison sheet was a notation that Captain Delbert Bean had recommended that this man be reclassified as a big stripe, and that no good-time be applied toward his early release from the farm.
Early Monday morning I drove up to Angola, north of Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River, rolled across the cattle guard between the gun towers and the fences topped with rolls of razor wire, and followed the narrow road past the Block, an enormous fenced compound where both the snitches and the big stripes were kept in lockdown, through fields of sweet potatoes and corn and freshly plowed acreage that dipped all the way down to the river basin. I passed the old prison cemetery, where those who die while incarcerated do Angola time for all eternity; the bulldozed and weed-grown foundations of the sweat boxes on Camp A (there had been two of them, upright, narrow cast-iron places of torment, with a hole the diameter of a cigar to breathe through, the space so tight that if a convict collapsed, his knees and buttocks would wedge against the walls); the crumbled ruins of the stone buildings left over from the War Between the States (which for years had been used to house Negro inmates, including three of the best twelve-string blues guitarists I know of—Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, and Hogman Mathew Maxie); and finally the old Red Hat House down by the river bank, a squat, ugly off-white building that took its name from the red-painted straw hats worn by the big-stripe levee gangs who were locked there before the building became the home of the electric chair, which has since been moved to a more modern environment, one with tile walls that glow with the clean, antiseptic light of a physician’s clinic.
The Mississippi was high and churning with mud and uprooted trees, and out on the flat, among the willows, I saw Captain Delbert Bean on horseback, a pearl-gray Stetson hat slanted on his head, working a gang of convicts who were filling sandbags out of a dump truck and laying them along the base of the levee.
That levee is a burial ground for an untold number of convicts who were murdered, some as object lessons, by prison personnel. Ask anyone who ever worked in Angola, or did time there. I will not use their names, but there used to be two old-time gunbulls, brothers, who would get sodden and mean on corn whiskey, sometimes take a nap under a tree, then awake, single out some hapless soul, tell him to start running, and then kill him.
Delbert Bean was a dinosaur left over from that era. He had been a prison guard for forty-seven years, and I don’t believe that in his life he had ever traveled farther away from the farm than New Orleans or Shreveport. He had no family or friends that I knew of, no external frame of reference, little knowledge of change in the larger world. His eyes were a washed-out blue, his skin covered with brown spots the size of dimes, his liver eaten away with cirrhosis. His stomach looked like a watermelon under his long-sleeved blue shirt. The accent was north Louisiana hill country, the voice absolutely certain when he spoke, and the face absolutely joyless.
He was not a man whom you either liked or disliked. He had been jailing most of his life, and I suspected that at the center of his existence was a loneliness and perversion so great that if he ever became privy to it he would blow his brains all over the ceiling of the little frame house where he lived with others like himself in the free people’s compound.
He handed the reins of his horse to a black inmate and walked with a cane up a path through the willows toward me. The bottom of the cane was seated inside a twelve-inch steel tube. A briar pipe protruded from inside the holster belt of his chrome-plated nine-millimeter automatic. He shook hands with the limpness of a man who was not used to social situations, filled his pipe, and pushed the tobacco down with his thumb while his eyes watched the men filling and hefting sandbags below us. I had known him for fifteen years, and I did not once remember his addressing me by name.
“Eddy Raintree,” he said, acknowledging my question. “Yeah, he was one of mine. What about him?”
“I think he helped kill a deputy sheriff. I’d like to run him to ground, but I’m not sure where to start.”
He lit his pipe and watched the smoke drift off into the wind.
“His kind used to run their money through their pecker on beer and women. Now they do it with dope. I caught him and another one once cooking down some blues to shoot in an eyedropper. They was using
the edge of a dollar bill for an insulator. No more sense than God give a turnip.”
“Was he in any racial beefs?”
“When you got nigger and white boys in the same cage, there ain’t any of them wouldn’t cut each other’s throats.”
“Do you know if he was in the AB?”
“The what?”
“The Aryan Brotherhood.”
“We ain’t got that in here.”
“That’s funny. It’s the fashion everywhere else.” I tried to smile.
But he was not given to humor about his job.
“Let me sit down. My hip’s hurting,” he said. He raised his cane in the air and shouted, “Walnut!” A mulatto convict, his denims streaked with mud and sweat, dropped his shovel, picked up a folding chair, ran it up the incline, and popped it open for the captain.
“Tell Mr. Robicheaux what you’re in for,” the captain said.
“Suh?”
“You heard me.”
The convict’s eyes focused on a tree farther down the levee. “Murder, two counts,” he said, quietly.
“Whose murder?” the captain asked.
