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The wind was hot through my truck windows as I drove across the causeway over the Atchafalaya marsh. The air tasted like brass, like it was full of ozone, and I could smell dead fish on the banks of the willow islands and the odor of brine off the Gulf. The willows looked wilted in the heat, and the few fishermen who were out had pulled their boats into the warm shade of the oil platforms that dotted the bays.
I thought of an event, a low moment in my life, that had occurred almost fifteen years ago. I had been sent to Las Vegas to pick up a prisoner at the county jail and escort him back to New Orleans. But the paperwork and the court clearance had taken almost two days, and I walked in disgust from the courthouse down a palm-lined boulevard in 115-degree heat to a casino and cool bar, where I began drinking a series of vodka collinses as though they were soda pop. Then I had a blackout and seven hours disappeared from my day. I woke up in a rented car out on the desert about 10 P.M., my head and body as numb and devoid of feeling and connection with the day as if I had been stunned from crown to sole with novocaine, the distant neon city blazing in the purple cup of mountains.
There was blood on my shirt and my knuckles, and a woman’s compact was on the floor. My wallet was gone, along with my money, traveler’s checks, credit cards, identification, and finally my shield and my .38 special. I remembered nothing except walking from the bar to a twenty-one table with my drink in my hand and sitting among a polite group of players from Ocala, Florida.
I drove trembling back to the hotel and tried to drink myself sober with room-service Jim Beam. By midnight I went into the DTs and believed that the red message light on my phone meant that once again I had received a long-distance call from the dead members of my platoon. When I finally became rational enough to pick up the receiver and talk to the desk clerk,
I was told that I had a message from Cletus Purcel.
I had to use both hands to dial his number, while the sweat slid out of my hair and down the sides of my face. Six hours later he was standing in my hotel room in his Budweiser shorts, sandals, porkpie hat, and cutoff LSU T-shirt that looked like a tank top on a hippo.
He sat on the side of the bed and listened to my story again, chewing gum, nodding, looking between his knees at the floor; then he left and didn’t come back until three in the afternoon. When he did, he dropped a paper sack on the dresser and said, smiling, “Time to pick up our prisoner and boogie on down the road. The Chinese broad got away with your traveler’s checks, but I got your money, credit cards, your shield, and your piece back. The American guy working with her is heading back to the Coast by Greyhound to make some long-range dental plans. He’s looking forward to it, he said. There’s no paperwork on this one, mon.”
“What Chinese? What are you talking about?”
“She and her pimp picked you up in a parking lot outside a bar at the end of the Strip. You were too drunk to start your car. They said they’d drive you back to the hotel. You’re lucky he didn’t put a shank in you. I took a gut ripper off him that must have been eight inches long.”
“I don’t remember any of it.” My hands still felt thick and wooden when I tried to open and close them.
“Sometimes you lose. Forget it. Come on, let’s eat a steak and blow this shithole. I think they got the architects for this place out of a detox center.”
Then he looked at me quietly, and I saw the pity and concern in his eyes.
“You dropped your brains in a jar of alcohol for a few hours,” he said. “Big deal. When I worked Vice I got rolled by one of my own snitches. Plus she gave me the gon. What bothers me is I think I knew she had it when I got in the sack with her.”
He grinned and blew a stream of cigarette smoke into the stale refrigerated air.
That was my old partner before whiskey and uppers and shylocks made him a fugitive from his own police department.
HIS FACE WHITENED when he tried to sit farther up in bed and reach the water glass and the glass straw on the nightstand.
“Don’t try to move around with broken ribs, Clete,” I said, and handed him the glass.
His green eyes were red along the rims, and they blinked like a bird’s while he sucked on the straw with the corner of his mouth. Divots of hair had been shaved out of his head, and his scalp was sewn with butterfly stitches in a half-dozen places.
“Man, what a drag,” he said. “They say I’m supposed to be in here two more days. I don’t think I can cut it. You ought to see my night nurse. She looks like the Beast of Buchenwald. She tried to shove a thermometer up my butt while I was asleep.”
“They hit you with pipes?”
“No, the little guy had brass knuckles, and Jack Gates, the guy I made for sure, had a baton.”
“The cop I talked to said they beat you up with pipes.”
“Then they got it wrong in the report. They sound like the same incompetent guys we used to work with.”
“How’d they get into your apartment?”
“Picked the lock, I guess. Anyway, Jack Gates was behind the door when I walked in. He caught me right across the ear with the baton. Damn, those things hurt. I crashed right over my new TV set. Then that little fuck was all over me. The last thing I remember I was falling through the furniture, trying to get my piece untangled from my coat, those brass knuckles bouncing off my head, and Gates trying to get a clear swing to take me off at the neck. That’s when I grabbed him around the head and tore the stocking off his face. The first thing I saw was all the metal in his teeth. Then it was lights out for Cletus. That sawed-off little fart caught me right at the base of the skull.
“It was just like you said, Gates has a scrap yard for a mouth. I should have made the connection before. He was a button man for Joey Gouza, but I heard he moved to Fort Lauderdale or Hallendale two or three years ago and got ice-picked by a chippy or something. But it was Jack Gates, mon, a real barf bucket. I heard Joey Gouza caught his brother-in-law skimming off his whores, so he told Gates to create an object lesson. The brother-in-law was a big, soft mushy guy who couldn’t climb a stairs without pulling himself up the banister with both hands. Gates wined and dined him at Copeland’s, got him stinking drunk, and kept telling him about these hot-assed Mexican broads over in Galveston. So the tub got his ovaries fired up, and Gates drove them out to a private airport in Kenner, all the time telling the tub what these broads would do for his sex life. Then ole Jack walked him out to the runway, lit a cigar for him, and pushed him into an airplane propeller.”
“You think he’s working for Gouza now?”
“He’s got to be. You don’t resign from Joey Meatballs. It’s a lifetime job.”
“Where’d he get that name?”
“His old man ran a spaghetti place on Felicity. In fact, Joey still owns three or four Italian restaurants around town. But the story is when he was a kid in the reformatory a redneck guard made Joey cook him meatballs all the time. Except Joey would always spit in them or mash up dead cockroaches in them. Have you ever seen him? His mother must have been knocked up by a street lamp.”
