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“You’re right, sir. I dint have no bidness coming here. I’m just a simple student at the university. You ain’t gonna have no trouble with the likes of me,” he said.
He hurried through the trees toward the bayou, pushing through bamboo and underbrush, his sports coat tearing on a thorn bush.
“Come back here,” I said.
But he was gone. I limped down to the bank and amid a tangle of morning glory vines saw a Ziploc bag that was fat with a greenish-brown substance inside. I poked at the bag with my cane, then picked it up and shook out the marijuana inside it and put the bag in my pocket.
When I got back up to the driveway, Joe Zeroski and all of his men were hooked up on a long wrist chain, and so were Clete and Zerelda.
“How about some slack on Purcel, Skipper?” I said.
“Let him sit in his own mess for a change,” the sheriff replied.
“Earlier today you made a remark about the women who were raped on the LaSalles’ plantation. You said maybe they should have gotten jobs somewhere else. I believe that’s the filthiest fucking thing I’ve ever heard you say, sir,” I said.
I pumped open the breech on my shotgun and threw the shotgun in the backseat of the sheriff’s cruiser. Then I hooked my walking cane on the limb of a persimmon tree, like a misplaced Christmas ornament, and limped unassisted toward the front of the motor court.
“Where you going, Dave?” Helen asked.
“To get a haircut,” I said, and gave her the thumbs-up sign.
Late that night, after Joe Zeroski and all of his men were released from jail, a car pulled into the motor court and stopped in front of Zerelda Calucci’s cottage. A young man in a white straw hat and pale blue cowboy shirt with flowers stitched on it got out of the car and walked to the cottage door, bending down briefly, then got back in the car and drove away. The next morning, when Zerelda Calucci opened her door, she found a dozen red roses, wrapped in green tissue paper, lying across a gold-embossed copy of the Bible.
CHAPTER 12
Friday night I experienced what recovering alcoholics refer to as drunk dreams, nocturnal excursions into the past that represent either a desire to get back on the dirty boogie or a fear of it. In my dream I visited a saloon on Magazine Street in New Orleans, where I stood at a mirrored bar with two inches of Beam in a glass and a long-necked Jax on the side. I drank as I did before I entered Alcoholics Anonymous, knocking back doubles with the careless disregard of a man eating a razor blade, confident that this time I would not wake trembling in the morning, filled with rage and self-hatred and an insatiable desire for more drink. Then I was in another saloon, this one located in an old colonial hotel in Saigon, one with wood-bladed ceiling fans and ventilated shutters on the windows and marble columns and potted palms set between tables that were covered with white linen. I wore a freshly pressed uniform and sat in a tall chair at a teakwood bar next to a friend, an Englishman who owned an export-import company there and who had been an intelligence agent in Hanoi when the Viet Minh, later named the Viet Cong, were America’s allies. He wore a white suit and a Panama hat and a trimmed white mustache, and was always kind and deferential toward those who thought they could succeed as colonials where he could not. Aside from his flushed complexion, the enormous quantities of scotch he drank seemed to have little influence on him.
He tapped my glass with his, his blue eyes sorrowful, and said, “You’re such a nice young officer. A shame you and your chaps have to die here. Oh, well, give the little buggers hell.”
Then it was night and I was looking out on a sea of windswept elephant grass lit by the phosphorus halos of pistol flares. Inside the grass toy men in conical straw hats and black pajamas, armed with captured American ordnance and French and Japanese junk, tripped a wire strung with C-rat cans. The Zippo-tracks cut loose, with a mewing sound like a kitten’s, arcing liquid flame over the grass, filling the sky with voices and a smell that no amount of whiskey ever rinses from the soul.
I sat up on the edge of the bed and pushed the sleep out of my eyes. The window curtains were blowing in the wind, and the clouds above the swamp were as black as soot, heat lightning ballooning inside them, and I could smell a trash fire in a coulee and hear the hysterical shrieking sound of a nutria calling to its mate.
I went into the bathroom and opened a bottle of aspirin and poured eight into my hand, then ate them off my palm, biting down on the acidic taste of each, cupping water into my mouth, taking the rush just as if I had eaten a handful of white speed.
I lay back down on top of the sheets, a pillow over my face, but did not sleep again until dawn.
It was Saturday morning and I drove to Morgan City and searched the city newspaper’s morgue for an account of a homicide involving the man some called Legion Guidry. It wasn’t hard to find. On a weekday night in December of 1966 a freelance writer named William O’Reilly, age thirty-nine, of New York City, had acted belligerent in a bar down by the shrimp docks. When asked to leave, he had pulled a pistol on the bartender. The bartender, one Legion Guidry, had tried to disarm him. William O’Reilly was shot twice, then had staggered into the parking lot, where he died. The story did not run until two days after the death of the victim and appeared on the second page of the newspaper. The story stated that William O’Reilly had been un
employed for several years and had been dismissed from both a newspaper and a university teaching job for alcohol-related problems.
I turned off the microfilm scanner and looked out the window at the palm trees and rooftops of Morgan City. I could see the bridges over the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya River and the shrimp boats and bust-head saloons down by the waterfront and the dead cypresses in the chain of bays that formed a deep-water channel into the Gulf of Mexico. But to the denizens of America’s criminal subculture, Morgan City was more than a piece of Jamaica sawed loose from the Caribbean. It had always been the place to go to if you were on the run and needed a new identity, access to dope, whores, foreign ports, and money that was not on the record. What better place to murder a worrisome alcoholic writer from New York and get away with it, I thought.
That afternoon Clete Purcel came into the bait shop and rented a boat. I had not seen him since he had been released from jail. “You want to talk about anything?” I asked.
“About getting put in the bag with psychopaths like Frankie Dogs? Not really,” he said.
“I was going to ask you if you’d had any contact with Legion Guidry.”
His face became vague, then he yawned and looked at his watch. “Wow, the fish are waiting,” he said.
He loaded his tackle box and cooler and spinning rod and himself into a narrow aluminum outboard and roared down the bayou, splitting the water in a yellow trough behind him. He returned just before dark, sunburned, his face dilated from drinking beer all afternoon, an eleven-pound large-mouth bass iced down in the cooler, the treble hooks of the Rapala still buried deep in its throat.
I heard him scaling and scraping out his fish under a faucet on the dock, then he entered the bait shop and washed his hands and face with soap at a sink in back and helped himself to a sandwich off the shelf and a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter, his eyes clear now. He counted the money out of his wallet for the sandwich and coffee, then lost his concentration and knitted his fingers in front of him.
“I need to put my schlong in a lockbox,” he said.
“You’re talking about your involvement with Zerelda?”
