By the time they returned to Lafayette, Ruthie Jean believed her life had turned a corner she had not thought possible.
“He’s leaving his wife?” I said.
“He give his word. He cain’t stay with Miss Julia no more,” Luke said.
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
“You’re a smart man, Luke. Where’s he going to take his law practice?”
“He sell the property, they ain’t gonna have to worry.”
“I see.”
I had an indescribably sad feeling inside that I could not translate into words. Then I saw Ruthie Jean come out of Bertie’s house and walk on her cane toward us. She looked beautiful. Her hair was brushed in thick swirls that curved on her high cheekbones, and the low-cut white knit dress she wore showed every undulation in her body. When she recognized me in the gloom, she went through the back door of the house.
“Are y’all staying here now?” I asked Luke.
“Yes, suh.”
“But it was Julia Bertrand who evicted y’all, wasn’t it?”
He studied the grove of gum trees at the end of the road.
“So it must be with her knowledge y’all are back here. Does that make sense to you?” I said.
“Talk to Aint Bertie, Mr. Dave.”
“I have too much respect for her. No offense meant. I’ll see you, Luke.”
“Moleen Bertrand gonna keep his word.”
When I started my truck he was standing alone in his yard, a jail-wise hustler, pulled from the maw of our legal killing apparatus, who grieved over his elderly aunt and put his trust in white people, whom a behaviorist would expect him to fear and loathe.
I wondered why historians had to look to the Roman arena for the seeming inexhaustible reservoirs of faith that can exist in the human soul.
The next evening, after I had closed the bait shop and dock, I put on my running shoes and gym shorts and worked out with my weights in the backyard. I did three sets of curls, dead lifts, and military presses, then jogged through the tunnel of trees by the bayou’s edge. The sky was the color of gunmetal, the sun a crack of fire on the western horizon. I came out of the trees, the wind in my face, and headed for the drawbridge.
For some reason I wasn’t even surprised when he came out of the shadows and fell in next to me, his tennis shoes powdering the dust in sync with mine, the granite head hunched down on his oily shoulders as though the neck had been surgically removed, his evenly measured breath warm with the smell of beer and tobacco.
“I saw you working out on the speed bag at Red Lerille’s Gym,” he said. “The trick’s to do it without gloves.” He held out his square, blunt hands, his words bouncing up and down in his throat. “I used to wrap mine with gauze soaked in lye water. Puts a sheath of callus on the outside like dry fish scale. The problem today is, some faggot cuts his hand on the bag, then you skin your hand on the same bag and you got AIDS, that’s what these cocksuckers are doing to the country.”
“What’s your problem, Pogue?”
“You gonna dime me?”
“I’m not a cop anymore, remember?”
“So the bar’s open,” he said, and pointed toward a brown Nissan parked by the side of the road.
“I’m tied up.”
“I got the cooler on the backseat. Take a break, chief. Nobody’s after your cherry,” he said.
Up ahead I could see the drawbridge and the bridge tender inside his little lighted house. Emile Pogue tugged his cooler out onto the road, stuck his corded forearm down into the water and melting ice, and pulled out two bottles of Coors.
“No, thanks,” I said.
He twisted off the cap on one bottle and drank it half-empty. His torso looked as taut and knurled as the skin on a pumpkin, crisscrossed with stitched scars, webbed with sinew like huge cat’s whiskers above the rib cage. He worked his arms through a sleeveless, olive green shirt.
“You don’t like me?” he said.
“No.”
He pinched his nostrils, flexed his lips back on his gums, looked up and down the road. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You put a stop to what’s happening, I’ll rat-fuck any grease ball you want, then I’m gone.”
“Stop what?”
“That demented guy, the one looks like a dildo you scrambled, Patsy Dapolito, he thinks Johnny Carp’s got a hit on him. It ain’t coming from Johnny, though.” His breath was like a slap, his body auraed with a fog of dried sweat and testosterone. He tapped me on the chest with his finger. “Look at me when I’m talking to you. Sonny killed my brother. So I had a personal and legitimate hard-on for the guy.”
“I hear you.”
“But that ain’t why Sonny’s back.”
I stared at him, open-mouthed. His eyes had the dead quality of ball bearings. He breathed loudly through his nose.
“Back?” I said.
“Get you some Q-Tips, open up the wax. Don’t tell me what I seen. Look, chief, till you been down in the bush with the Indians, done a few mushrooms with these fuckers, I’m talking about on a stone altar where their ancestors used to tear out people’s hearts, don’t knock what somebody else tells you he sees.”
“You lost me.”
“I saw him at a camp I use out in the Atchafalaya. I looked out in the trees, inside all this hanging moss, there was a swarm of moths or butterflies, except they were on fire, then they formed a big cluster in the shape of a guy, and the guy walked right through the trunk of a tree into the water. It was Sonny Marsallus, he was burning like hundreds of little tongues of flame under the water. I ain’t the only one seen it, either.”
His hand was squeezed like a huge paw around his beer bottle, his mouth an expressionless slit.
“I think we’re talking about an overload of acid or steroids, Emile,” I said.
“You get word to Sonny,” he said. “That Mennonite’s words... they were a curse. I’m saying maybe I’m damned. I need time to get out of it.”
His breath was rife with funk, his eyes jittering, riveted on mine.
“What Mennonite?” I said.
Sometimes you pull aside the veil and look into the Pit. What follows is my best reconstruction of his words.
Chapter 26
I had thirty guys strung out on the trail in the dark. It sounded like a traveling junkyard. I stopped them at the river, told the translator, Look, we got a problem here, two more klicks we’re in Pinkville South, know what I’m saying, we go in, make our statement, then boogie on back across the river, the beer is five hours colder and we let the dudes from Amnesty International count up the score. In and out, that’s the rhythm, none of our people get hurt, even the volunteers we took out of the last ville don’t need to walk through any toe-poppers.
I’m talking to guys here who think the manual of arms is a Nicaraguan baseball player.
Look, ace, you got to understand, I didn’t target the ville, it targeted itself. They were giving food to the people who were killing us. We warned them, we warned the American priest running the orphanage. Nobody listened. I didn’t have no grief with the Mennonite broad. I saw her in the city once, I tipped my hat to her. I admired her. She was a homely little Dutch wisp of a thing working in a shithole most people wouldn’t take time to spit on. The trouble came from a couple of liaison guys, officers who spent some time at a special school for greasers at Benning, listen, chief, I was an adviser, got me, I didn’t get paid for interfering, you see these guys walk a dude into a tin shed that’s got a metal bed frame in it, they close the door behind them, you’ll hear the sounds way out in the jungle and pretend it’s just monkeys shrieking.
Ellos! they’d yell when we came into the ville, and then try to hide. That was our name. As far as these poor bastards knew, I could have been Pancho Villa or Stonewall Jackson. Look, it got out of control. We were supposed to set up a perimeter, search for weapons, take one guy out in particular, this labor organizer, one object lesson, that’s all, they used to call it a Christmas tree, a few ornaments hanging off the branches in the morning, you with me, but the guy runs inside the church and the priest starts yelling at our people out on the steps, and pop pop pop, what was I supposed to do, man? Suddenly I got a feeding frenzy on my hands.