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Welcome to the other side of the equation in the American criminal justice system.
Our room was still in disarray after being to
ssed by Nate Baxter and his people. Batist's cardboard suitcase had been dumped on the bed, and half of his clothes were on the floor. I picked them up, refolded them, and began replacing them in the suitcase. Underneath one of his crumpled shirts was the skull of what had once been an enormous catfish. The texture of the bone was old, a shiny gray, mottled with spots the color of tea, polished smooth with rags.
I remembered when Batist had caught this same mud cat three years ago, on a scalding summer's day out on the Atchafalaya, with a throw line and a treble hook thick with nutria guts. The catfish must have weighed thirty-five pounds, and when Batist wrapped the throw line around his forearm, the cord cut into his veins like a tourniquet, and he had to use a club across the fish's spine to get it over the gunwale. After he had driven an ice pick into its brain and pinned it flat on the deck, skinned it and cut it into steaks, he sawed the head loose from the skeleton and buried it in an anthill under a log. The ants boiled on the impacted meat and ate the bone and eye sockets clean, and now when you held up the skull vertically, it looked like a crucified man from the front. When you reversed it, it resembled an ecclesiastical, robed figure giving his benediction to the devout. If you shook it in your hand, you could hear pieces of bone clattering inside. Batist said those were the thirty pieces of silver that Judas had taken to betray Christ.
It had nothing to do with voodoo. It had everything to do with Acadian Catholicism.
Before I left the guesthouse for the jail, I called up Hippo Bimstine at one of his drugstores.
'How bad you want that Nazi sub, Hippo?' I asked.
'It's not the highest priority on my list.'
'How about twenty-five grand finder's fee?'
'Jesus Christ, Dave, you were yawning in my face the other day.'
'What do you say, partner.'
'There's something wrong here.'
'Oh?'
'You found it, didn't you?'
I didn't answer.
'You found it but it's not in the same place now?' he said.
'You're a wealthy man, Hippo. You want the sub or not?'
'Hey, you think that's right?' he asked. 'I tell you where it's at, you find it and up the fee on me? That's like you?'
'Maybe you can get somebody cheaper. You know some guys who want to go down in the dark on a lot of iron and twisted cables?'
'Put my schlong in a vise, why don't you?'
'I've got to run. What do you say?'
'Fifteen.'
'Nope.'
'Hey, New Orleans is recessed. I'm bleeding here. You know what it cost me to get rid of—when he was about to be our next governor? Now my friends are running a Roto-Rooter up my hole.'
(Hippo had spent a fortune destroying the political career of an ex-Klansman who had run for both the governor's office and the U.S. Senate. My favorite quote of Hippo's had appeared in Time magazine, during the gubernatorial campaign; he said of the ex-Klansman, '—doesn't like us Jews now. Check out how he feels after I get finished with him.')
'I won't charge expenses,' I said.
'I'm dying here. Hemorrhaging on the floor. I'm serious. Nobody believes me. Dave, you take food stamps?'
Hippo, you're a jewel, I thought.
Batist and I picked up my boat and left the dock at three the next morning. The breeze was up, peppered with light rain, and you could smell the salt spray breaking over the bow. The water was as dark as burgundy, the chop on the edge of the swells electric with moonlight, the wetlands to the north green and gray and metamorphic with mist. To the southeast I could see gas flares burning on some offshore rigs; then the wind dropped and the sky turned the color of bone and I could see a red glow spreading out of the water into the clouds.
It was completely light when I cut the engine and drifted above the spot where I had dove down into darkness and the sounds of grinding metal three days earlier. Batist stood on the bow, feeding the anchor rope out through his palms, until it hit bottom and went slack; then he tied it off on a cleat.
