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"Have dinner with us," I said.
"Yes, that's very kind of you. Your home seems to have a great warmth to it. From outside it truly looked like a haven in the storm. Could I have that drink after all?"
He sat at the table with a glass of cream sherry, his eyes abstract, feigning attention, like those of people who realize that momentary refuge and the sharing of fear with others will not relieve them of the fact that death may indeed have taken up residence inside them.
MONDAY MORNING I DROVE down Bayou Teche through Jeanerette into the little town of Franklin and talked to the chief of police. He was a very light mulatto in his early forties who wore sideburns and a gold ring in his ear and a lacquered-brim cap on the back of his head.
"A man name of Harpo? There used to be a Harpo Delahoussey. He was a sheriff's deputy, did security at the Terrebonne cannery," the police chief said.
"That's not the one. This guy was maybe his nephew. He was a Franklin police officer. People called him Little Harpo," I said.
He fiddled with a pencil and gazed out the window. It was still raining, and a black man rode a bicycle down the sidewalk, his body framed against the smoky neon of a bar across the street.
"When I was a kid there was a cop round here name of H. Q. Scruggs." He wet his lips. "When he come into the quarters we knew to call him Mr. H.Q. Not Officer. That wasn't enough for this gentleman. But I remember white folks calling him Harpo sometimes. As I recall, he'd been a guard up at Angola, too. If you want to talk about him, I'll give you the name and address of a man might hep you."
"You don't care to talk about him?"
He laid the pencil flat on his desk blotter. "I don't like to even remember him. Fortunately today I don't have to," he said.
CLEM MADDUX SAT ON his gallery, smoking a cigarette, in a swayback deer-hide chair lined with a quilt for extra padding. One of his legs was amputated at the torso, the other above the knee. His girth was huge, his stomach pressing in staggered layers against the oversized ink-dark blue jeans he wore. His skin was as pink and unblemished as a baby's, but around his neck goiters hung from his flesh like a necklace of duck's eggs.
"You staring at me, Mr. Robicheaux?" he asked.
"No, sir."
"It's Buerger's Disease. Smoking worsens it. But I got diabetes and cancer of the prostate, too. I got diseases that'll outlive the one that kills me," he said, then laughed and wiped spittle off his lips with his wrist.
"You were a gun bull at Angola with Harpo Scruggs?"
"No, I was head of farm machinery. I didn't carry a weapon. Harpo was a tower guard, then a shotgun guard on horseback. That must have been forty years ago."
"What kind of hack was he?"
"Piss-poor in my opinion. How far back you go?"
"You talking about the Red Hat gang and the men buried under the levee?"
"There was this old fart used to come off a corn-whiskey drunk meaner than a razor in your shoe. He'd single out a boy from his gang and tell him to start running. Harpo asked to get in on it."
"Asked to kill someone?"
"It was a colored boy from Laurel Hill. He'd sassed the field boss at morning count. When the food truck come out to the levee at noon, Harpo pulled the colored boy out of the line and told him he wasn't eating no lunch till he finished sawing a stump out of the river bottom. Harpo walked him off into some gum trees by the water, then I seen the boy starting off on his own, looking back uncertain-like while Harpo was telling him something. Then I heard it, pow, pow, both barrels. Double-ought bucks, from not more than eight or ten feet."
Maddux tossed his cigarette over the railing into the flower bed.
"What happened to Scruggs?" I asked.
"He done a little of this, a little of that, I guess."
"That's a little vague, cap."
"He road-ganged in Texas a while, then bought into a couple of whorehouses. What do you care anyway? The sonofabitch is probably squatting on the coals."
"He's squatting—"
"He got burned up with a Mexican chippy in Juarez fifteen years ago. Wasn't nothing left of him except a bag of ash and some teeth. Damn, son, y'all ought to update and get you some computers."
* * *
