“Tell that to the nigger trusty whose arm he busted backward on a toilet bowl,” one of them said, and took up his position five feet behind Hooker.
“You want to run it by us, Jerry Jeff?” I said.
His skin was as pale as dough, his massive arms scrolled with green dragons, his pale blond eyebrows ridged like a Neanderthal’s. “I was the wheel man on the Marsallus hit,” he said. “I testify against Emile Pogue, I walk on the vehicular homicide.”
“Wheelman?” I said.
“I drove. Emile chopped him.”
“Witnesses say there were two shooters,” Helen said.
“There was only one,” he said.
“We have trouble buying your statement, Jerry Jeff,” I said.
“That’s your problem,” he said.
“You’re copping to a murder beef,” Helen said.
“Marsallus ain’t dead.”
I felt my heart quicken. He looked at my face, as though seeing it for the first time.
“He was still flopping around in the waves when we left,” he said.
“A guy in New Orleans, Tommy Carrol, got clipped the other night with a nine-Mike. That’s Marsallus’s trademark.”
“You a military man?” I said.
“Four-F,” he answered. He tried to straighten himself in his chains. His breath wheezed in his chest. “Listen, these people here say I got to do a minimum two-bit in the Walls.”
“That doesn’t sound bad for a guy who went through a red light drunk and killed a seventy-year-old woman,” I said.
“That’s at Huntsville, my man, with the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerrilla Liberation Army. For white bread it’s the Aryan Brotherhood or lockdown. Fuck that.”
Helen and I let our eyes meet.
“You’re jail wise but you got no sheet. In fact, there’s no jacket of any kind on you anywhere,” I said.
“Who gives a shit?” he said.
“Who put out the hit?” I asked.
“Give me a piece of paper and a pencil,” he answered.
I placed my notebook and felt pen in front of him and looked at one of the guards. He shook his head.
“We need this, sir,” I said.
He snuffed down in his nose and unlocked Hooker’s right wrist from the waist chain, then stepped back with his palm centered on the butt of his baton. Hooker bent over the pad and in a surprisingly fluid calligraphy wrote a single sentence, You give me the name of the donkey you want and I’ll pin the tail on him.
“Bad choice of words,” I said, tearing the page from the pad.
“Emile used a .223 carbine. He had Marsallus trapped in a phone booth but he blew it,” he said.
“You’ll rat-out Pogue to beat a two-year bounce?” I said.
His free hand rolled into a big fist, the veins in his wrist cording with blood, as though he were pumping a small rubber ball. “I’m in the first stage of AIDS. I don’t want to do it inside,” he said.
“What’s it gonna be?”
“We’ll think about it,” Helen said.
His nose was starting to run. He wiped it on the back of his wrist and laughed to himself.
“What’s funny?” I said.
“Think about it? That’s a kick. I’d do more than think, Muffy,” he said, his blue eyes threaded with light as they roved over her face.
“You killed my animals and birds,” she said.
He twisted his neck until he could see the guard behind him. “Hey, Abner, get me a snot rag or walk me back to my cell,” he said.
The sheriff was in the Intensive Care unit when Helen and I visited him at Iberia General in the morning. Tubes dripped into his veins, fed oxygen into his nose; a shaft of sunlight cut across his forearm and seemed to mock the grayness of his skin. He looked not only stricken but also somehow diminished in size, shrunken skeletally, the eyes hollow and focused on concerns that floated inches from his face, like weevil worms.
I sat close to his bed and could smell an odor similar to withered flowers on his breath.
“Tell me about Hooker,” he whispered.
“It’s time to let other people worry about these guys, skipper,” I said.
“Tell me.”
I did, as briefly and simply as possible.
“Say the last part again,” he said.
“He used the term ‘nine-Mike’ for a nine-millimeter,” I said. “ ‘Mike’ is part of the old military alphabet. This guy came out of the same cookie cutter as Emile Pogue and the guy named Jack.”
He closed and opened his eyes, wet his lips to speak again. He tilted his head until his eyes were looking directly into mine. He was unshaved, and there were red and blue veins, like tiny pieces of thread, in the hollows of his cheeks.
“Last night I saw star shells bursting over a snowfield filled with dead Chinese,” he said. “A scavenger was pulling their pockets inside out.”
“It was just a dream,” I said.
“Not just a dream, Dave.”
I heard Helen rise from her chair, felt her hand touch my shoulder.
“We should go,” she said.
“I was wrong. But so were you,” he said.
“No, the fault was mine, Sheriff, not yours,” I said.
“I squared it with the prosecutor’s office. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”
He lifted his hand off the sheet. It felt small and lifeless inside mine.
But I didn’t go back to the office the next day. Instead, Batist and I took my boat all the way down Bayou Teche, through the vast green splendor of the wetlands, where blue herons and cranes glided above the flooded gum trees and the rusted wrecks of oil barges, into West Cote Blanche Bay and the Gulf beyond, while a squall churned like glazed smoke across the early sun.
My father, Aldous, was an old-time oil field roughneck who worked the night tower on the monkey board high above the drill platform and the sliding black waves of the Gulf of Mexico. The company was operating without a blowout preventer on the wellhead, and when the bit punched into a natural gas dome unexpectedly, the casing geysered out of the hole under thousands of pounds of pressure, a spark danced off a steel surface, and the sky blossomed with a flame that people could see from Morgan City to Cypremort Point.
My father clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the darkness, but the derrick folded in upon itself, like coat hanger wire melting in a furnace, taking my father and nineteen other men with it.
I knew the spot by heart; I could even feel his presence, see him in my mind’s eye, deep below the waves, his tin hat cocked at an angle, grinning, his denim work clothes undulating in the tidal current, one thumb hooked in the air, telling me never to be afraid. Twice a year, on All Saints’ Day and the anniversary of his death, I came here and cut the engines, let the boat drift back across the wreckage of the rig and quarter boat which was now shaggy with green moss, and listened to the water’s slap against the hull, the cry of seagulls, as though somehow his voice was still trapped here, waiting to be heard, like a soft whisper blowing in the foam off the waves.
He loved children and flowers and women and charcoal-filtered bourbon and fighting in bars, and he carried the pain of my mother’s infidelity like a stone bruise and never let anyone see it in his eyes. But once on a duck hunting trip, after he got drunk and tried to acknowledge his failure toward me and my mother, he said, “Dave, don’t never let yourself be alone,” and I saw another dimension in my father, one of isolation and loneliness, that neither of us would have sufficient years to address again.
The water was reddish brown, the swells dented with rain rings. I walked to the stern with a clutch of yellow roses and threw them into the sun and watched a capping wave break them apart and scatter their petals through the swell.