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“Legion killed a man in Morgan City. A man from up Nort’ who was down here writin’ a book.”
“He was never arrested?”
“The people in the bar said the man threatened Legion with a gun and Legion took it from him and shot him. It ain’t true, though.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“A black man in the kitchen seen Legion get the gun from under the bar and follow him out in the parking lot. Legion shot the man so close his coat caught on fire. Then he shot him again on the ground. This was maybe t’urty or t’urty-five years ago.”
“Thanks for you help, Ladice.”
“Jimmy Dean Styles was out here.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. He axed about my granddaughter, Rosebud, how’s she doin’ and all. Why would he come out here axing about Rosebud?”
I remembered taking Rosebud’s sketch of the reclining nude to the Carousel, the nightclub half-owned by Styles, and Styles stealing a look at it, his head tilted curiously.
“Let me know if he comes around again,” I said.
I took off my sunglasses and folded them and replaced them in my shirt pocket and tried to seem casual.
“You tell me only what you feel like I should know, huh? That’s the way it’s always been, Mr. Dave. Ain’t changed. The little people ain’t got the same rights as everybody else. That’s how come Legion could take any black girl he wanted into the trees or the canebrake, make them carry his baby and never tell who the father was. When you talk down to me like you just done? You’re no different from Legion, no.”
Late that night a huge rental moving van lumbered down a state road outside town, followed by two big cars filled with men who looked straight ahead, somber, not talking to one another, their faces marked with purpose. The caravan passed through a black slum far out in the parish, crossed a bridge over a coulee, and turned down a shell road that led to a cluster of burial crypts in a cemetery by the bayou. The men piled out of the cars and unwound a firehose that had been stolen from an apartment building in Lafayette, then screwed the hose onto a fire hydrant by the side of the shell road. One man fitted a wrench on top of the hydrant and revolved it around and around until the hose was hard and stiff with pressurized water.
They unlocked the back doors of the van and threw them back on the hinges, and the high-beam headlights from the cars lit up ten terrified black men inside. Two of the men from the cars, all of whom were white, pushed open the valve on the firehose and directed a skin-blistering jet of water inside the van, skittering the black men across the floor, blowing them against the walls, knocking them back down when they tried to rise, bursting against their faces and groins with the force of huge fists.
The men from the cars gathered in a semicircle to watch, lighting up cigarettes now, laughing in the iridescent spray that floated in the headlights.
Then a man with a body as compact as a stack of bricks, with dead gray eyes and a haircut like a 1930s convict, walked into the light. He wore a suit with suspenders and only a formfitting, ribbed undershirt beneath the coat.
“Get ’em out of there and line ’em up,” he said.
“Hey, Joe, some fun, huh?” one of the men on the hose said, then looked at the man with dead eyes and went silent and shut off the valve on the nozzle.
The men who had ridden in the two cars pulled the black men tumbling out of the van and shoved them through the cemetery to the edge of the bayou. When a black man looked back over his shoulder, he was hit with either a sap or a baton or kicked so hard between his buttocks, he had to fight to gain control of his sphincter.
A few minutes later all of the black men stood in a row, most of them trembling uncontrollably now, looking across the water, their clothes molded wetly against their bodies, their fingers laced on top of their heads.
The man with dead eyes walked up and down behind the row, staring at the back of each black man’s head.
“My name is Joe Zeroski. I got nothing against you personally. But you’re pimps and rock dealers, and that means nobody cares what happens to you. You’re gonna tell me what I want to know about my little girl. Her name was Linda, Linda Zeroski,” he said.
He pointed at the back of a huge black kid nicknamed Baby Huey, who had played football at Grambling before he had gone to prison for statutory rape. One of Joe’s crew stepped forward with a stun gun cupped in his hand, an electrical thread of light crackling between the extended prongs. He touched the prongs to Baby Huey’s back, which left Baby Huey writhing in the grass, his eyes bulging with shock.
Joe looked down at him. “Who picked up my daughter on the corner?” he asked.
“Washington Trahan was her manager. I didn’t know nothing about her,” Baby Huey said.
“The piece of shit you call a manager blew town. That means you take his weight. You think about that the next time you see him,” Joe said, and nodded to the man with the stun gun.
When the man with the stun gun was finished, Baby Huey was curled in an embryonic ball, begging for his mother, shivering like a dog trying to pass glass.
Joe Zeroski walked farther down the line, then paused behind a slender, light-skinned man with moles on his face and a mustache and hair that was buzzed on the temples and cut long in back. Joe nodded to the man with the stun gun, but suddenly the intended victim dropped his arms and shook his head violently, his eyes squeezed shut, crying out, “It was Tee Bobby Hulin. He did at least one white chick already. He always lookin’ for white bread. Everybody on the corner know it. It’s him, man.”
“I already checked him out. Four people put him in a club in St. Martinville,” Joe said.
