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“You,” he said. “The man hepping that black bitch spread them rumor.”
He walked out of the shadows into the moonlight. The skin of his face was white, furrowed in vertical lines. One oily strand of black hair hung from under his hat, across his ear.
“Mistake to come around my house, Legion,” I said.
“That’s what you t’ink,” he replied, and swung a blackjack down on my head, clipping the crown of the skull.
I fell on the side of the road, against the embankment of my yard. I could smell leaves and grass and the moist dirt on my hands as he walked toward me. His blackjack hung from his fingers, like a large, leather-sheathed darning sock.
“I’m a police officer,” I heard myself say.
“Don’t matter what you are, no. When I get finish here, you ain’t gonna want to tell nobody about it,” he replied.
He backstroked me across the side of the head, and when I tried to curl into a ball, he beat my arms and spine and kneecaps and shins, then pulled me by my shirt onto the road and laid into my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. The lead weight inside the stitched leather sock was mounted on a spring and wood handle, and with each blow I could feel the pain sink all the way to the bone, like a dentist’s drill hollowing into marrow.
He stopped and stood erect, and all I could see of him were his khaki-clad legs and loins and the western belt buckle on his flat stomach and the blackjack hanging motionlessly from his hand.
I was sitting up now, my legs bent under me, my ears ringing with sound, my stomach and bowels like wet newspaper torn in half. If he had hit me again, I couldn’t have raised my arms to ward off the blow.
He lifted me by the front of my shirt and dropped me in a sitting position on the embankment of my yard. He slipped the blackjack into his side pocket and looked down at me.
“How you feel?” he asked.
He waited in the silence for my reply.
“I’ll ax you again,” he said.
“Go fuck yourself,” I whispered.
He knotted my hair in his fist and wrenched back my head and kissed me hard on the mouth, pushing his tongue inside. I could taste tobacco and decayed food and bile in his saliva and smell the road dust and body heat and dried sweat in his shirt.
“Go tell them all what I done to you. How I whipped you like a dog and used you for my bitch. How it feel, boy? How it feel?” he said.
CHAPTER 10
The sunrise in the morning was pink and misty, like the colors and textures inside a morphine dream, and through the window at Iberia General I could see palm trees and oaks hung with moss along the Old Spanish Trail and a white crane lifting on extended wings off the surface of the bayou. The sheriff sat hunched in a chair at the foot of my bed, staring at the steam rising from his paper coffee cup, his face angry, conflicted with thought.
Clete stood silently against one wall, rolling a matchstick from side to side in his mouth, his massive arms folded on his chest. Through the open door I saw Bootsie in the hall, talking to a physician in green scrubs.
“The guy comes out of nowhere, beats the shit out of you with a sap, gives no explanation, and drives off?” the sheriff said.
“That’s about it,” I said.
“You didn’t get a license number?” he asked.
“The lights were off on the dock. There was mud on the tag.”
The sheriff started to look at Clete, then forced his eyes back on me, not wanting to recognize Clete as a legitimate presence in the room.
“So I’m to conclude maybe one of our clientele got discharged from Angola and decided to square an old beef? Except the cop he clocked, one with thirty years’ experience, didn’t recognize him. That makes sense to you?” he said.
“It happens,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t,” he replied.
I kept my eyes flat, my expression empty. My face felt out of round, my forehead as large as a muskmelon. When I moved any part of my body, the pain telegraphed all the way through my system and a wave of nausea rose into my mouth.
“You mind if we have a minute alone?”
