“What’s on your mind, Pogue?”
“I think you’re not a bad dude. We need local guys to make it work. You want to piece off Purcel, it’s copacetic with us.”
“Make what work? Who’s us?”
“The whole fucking planet. Get with the program, ace.”
“I don’t know what the program is.”
He laughed, his voice wheezing as though there were pinholes in his lungs.
“I like you, motherfucker,” he said. “I told them to cut you in. I’d rather see you front points for us than y’all’s resident cunt, what’s the name, Bertrand?”
“Moleen?”
“Got to get the locals humping for you. Ever light up a ville with Zippo tracks? Something about the stink of fried duck shit really gets their attention.”
The phone receiver was warm and moist against my ear. Someone slammed the screen door behind me like the crack of a rifle.
“You were one of the shooters,” I said.
“The Marsallus gig? He took out some good men. He had it coming.”
“You fucked it up.”
I heard him shift the phone in his hand, his breath fan the mouthpiece in a dry, heated exhalation.
“Fucked it up, huh?”
“The Feds didn’t find a body. I think Sonny’ll be back to piss on your grave,” I said.
“You listen—” A nail caught in his throat and he began again. “We busted his wheels, ace. I saw the bone buckle. That punk’s down in the slime where he belongs.”
“He shows up when you don’t expect him. Your buddy Jack got capped before he knew what hit him. Think about it,” I said, and hung up the receiver.
I hoped I left him with razors turning in his viscera.
Chapter 22
At noon Tuesday a city cop picked up Ruthie Jean outside a restaurant on Main Street and took her to the city jail, where she was booked for disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct. He even cuffed her, put his hand hard inside her arm before he sat her down in the back of the cruiser and threw her cane across her lap and slammed the door to indicate his sympathies to anyone watching. I heard the story from a half dozen people, all of whom told it with a sense of genteel dismay, but I suspected they were secretly pleased, as small-town people are, when the sins of another are exposed and they no longer have to be complicit in hiding them.
People at first thought she was simply drunk, then they saw the feverish shine in the eyes, like someone still staring into the flame held to a crack pipe. An elderly woman who lived by Spanish Lake recognized and tried to counsel her, shushing her, patting her shoulders, trying to turn her away from Julia Bertrand, who had just parked her red Porsche at the curb in front of the Shadows and was walking cheerfully toward the restaurant, her mental fortifications in place, her long tan riding skirt whipping against her legs.
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said to the other white woman. “Ruthie Jean’s upset about a tenant problem Moleen had to settle on the plantation. Now, you go on about your business, Ruthie Jean, and don’t be bothering people. You want me to call somebody to drive you home?”
“You put me off the plantation, Julia. When you cut the balloon loose, it goes where it wants.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t address me by my first name.”
“You cain’t hide from your thoughts. Not when he touches you in the dark, under the sheets, his eyes shut, and you know where his hand’s been on me, you know he’s thinking of me and that’s why he does it to you with his eyes shut, he hurries it so he doesn’t have to think about who he’s doing it with, about how he’s making a lie for both y’all, just like he hepped make my baby and kept pretending I could have it without a husband and live on the plantation like colored folks are suppose to do, like his ancestors did to us, like there wasn’t any sin on the child, ‘cause the child got Bertrand blood in him.”
“How dare you!”
“You cain’t run away when you see that li’l boy in your headlights, either, see the fright in his li’l face, hear his voice speaking to you through the dirt they packed in his mouth. Liquor and drugs cain’t keep a spirit in the grave. That li’l boy, his name was John Wesley, he sits on the floor by your nightstand and whispers all the secrets he learned down in the ground, all the things he didn’t get to do, the questions he got about his momma and daddy and why they aren’t there to take care of him or bring him things on his birthday ‘cause your father run them out of the parish.”
“If you come close to me again, I’m going to slap your face.”
Julia crossed the street against the light, her waxed calves flashing like scissors.
But Ruthie Jean followed her, into the restaurant, through the linen-covered tables, past the framed charcoal sketches and pastel paintings of rural Louisiana on the walls, into an interior dining room that should have been an enclave for Julia but had become a cul-de-sac.
Julia sat erectly in her chair, her menu held tightly in her fingers, a bitter thought clenched in her face. When Ruthie Jean took a chair at the next table, Julia began to laugh. It was a braying, disconnected sound, ongoing, like furniture falling down stairs.
“Is anything wrong, Miss Julia?” the owner asked.
“I thought this was a private dining room. It is a private dining room, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes. When people reserve it for banquets and club meetings,” he answered.
“I’d like another table. Over there. By the window.”
“You bet. Are you sure everything’s all right, Miss Julia?”
“Are you blind, sir?”
The owner held the chair for her at a table whose linen glowed in the sunlight. Now Ruthie Jean approached both of them, her dark eyes as bright as glass.
“John Wesley was buried in the rain in a casket made of papier-mâché and kite sticks,” she said. “It’s rotted away, eaten up with worms now, and that’s how come he can visit in your room at night, sit right by your pillow and draw a picture in the air of the thing that got bounced up under your car and lost inside that sound that doesn’t ever go out of your head.”
“You’re a vicious, cunning, ungrateful nigra, Ruthie Jean. You can end in an asylum. Mark my word,” Julia said.
Someone was punching numbers on a telephone in the background.
“You cain’t do nothing to stop Moleen from coming ‘round my house again,” Ruthie Jean said. “But I don’t want him anymore. In Mexico one time he put a flower on my stomach and put his mouth on my nipples and put himself inside me and said I was all the food he’d ever need. Except he stole my nipples from my baby. That’s ‘cause y’all’s kind of white people don’t know how to love anything outside of what y’all need.”
After Ruthie Jean had been taken away in the cruiser, her soft black hair like the wig on a mannequin in the rear window, Julia sat numbed and motionless at the table in the deserted dining room; her lips were bloodless, her makeup dry and flaking from her facial hair, as though parched by an inner heat. One thumb kept digging into her cuticles, cutting half-moons into her knuckles, massaging a nest of thoughts that crawled through her veins like spiders.
She smiled and rose from the chair to meet her husband, who had just hurried from his law office down the street.
“Moleen, you dear,” she said. “How good of you to come. Is something bothering you? Oh, what shall we do, dear boy?”
She used one sharpened fingernail to draw vertical red lines in the skin under his eyes, as though she were imprinting tears on a clown.
At dusk that same evening Clete Purcel’s rust-eaten Caddy, with its mildewed and tattered top folded back at a twisted angle, throbbed into the drive and died like a sick animal.
He wore his porkpie hat and a tropical shirt with tiny purple sea horses printed all over it. He was eating an oyster po’-boy sandwich with one hand, tuning the radio with the other.