“Fluck frightened my little girl, sheriff. He also threatened me. You figure who’s on my mind.”
“You sound a little sharp, podna.”
“This is the second time you’ve told me maybe it’s me who’s got a problem.”
“It wasn’t my intention to do so.”
“Look, sheriff, we haven’t turned the key on one guy in this case, except Gouza, and that was on a bum charge. When something like that happens, everybody gets impatient. Then a guy like Bobby Earl marshals a little pressure and convinces a few political oil cans that he’s a victim, a federal agency decides that it’s more interesting to throw a net over a mainline wiseguy like Gouza than a termite like Jewel Fluck, we local guys go along with it, and before you know it, half the cast is on the beach in the Virgin Islands and we’re trying to figure out why people think we’re schmoes.”
“Maybe after this one’s over, you should take a little vacation time.”
“It won’t change who’s out there.”
He did a rat-a-tat-tat on his thighs with his palms, then stood up, smiled, and walked out of my office without saying anything else.
I DROVE TO Baton Rouge that afternoon to question the burned man who called himself Vic Benson. It wasn’t to be the kind of interview that I had planned. I parked my truck at the end of Lyle’s brick driveway on Highland and walked up onto the columned porch to lift the brass door knocker that rang a set of musical chimes deep in the interior of the house, when Lyle walked out of the sideyard with a garden rake in his hand, wearing a T-shirt and jeans that hung off his hips. There were flecks of dirt and leaves in his mussed hair.
“Hey, Dave, what’s happening?” he said. “You’re just in time to fang down some barbecued pork chops. Come on around b
ack.”
“Thanks anyway, Lyle. I just need to ask Vic Benson a few questions. Is he staying over at your mission?”
“No.”
“He took off?”
“No.” He was smiling now.
“He’s here?”
“In the backyard. We just put in some pepper plants. It’s a little late but I think they’ll take.”
“He’s living with you?”
“Out in the garage apartment.”
“I think what you’re doing isn’t smart.”
“I’ve never done anything smart in my life, Dave. Like Waylon says, ‘I might be crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.’?”
“I’m not sure you want to hear everything I have to say to this man.”
“The words ain’t been made that’s gonna upset me, son . . . I mean Loot. Come on around back.”
The sweeping expanse of backyard was dotted with live oaks, lime trees, myrtle bushes, and circular weedless beds of roses and purple hydrangeas. Meat smoke from a stone fire pit drifted across the lawn and hung in the trees, and the Saint Augustine grass was so thick, so deeply blue and green in the evening shadows, that you felt you could dive into it as you would a deep pool of water.
Vic Benson was cutting back a clump of banana trees with a pair of garden shears. The blades of the shears were white and gummy with pulp. Each time he snapped the blades on a dead frond, the muscles in his face and neck flexed like snakes under his red scar tissue.
A thick-bodied black woman in a maid’s uniform began setting a table on the flagstone patio.
“Let’s sit down to eat, then you can ask the old man whatever you want,” Lyle said.
“This isn’t what I had in mind, Lyle.”
“Quit trying to plan everything. What the Man on High plans for you is better than anything you could plan for yourself. Isn’t that what y’all learn in AA? Look out yonder.” He pointed across the brick wall and bamboo that bordered his property. “See it, just above the trees out on Highland, my cross, right up there on top of my Bible college. Look, it’s silver and pink in the sunlight. Inside all that chrome is a charred wooden cross that was burned by Klansmen to terrorize black folk. Then the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock made it his so me and him could run scams on a bunch of north Miss’sippi country people who didn’t have two quarters to rub together in their overalls. Now it’s on top of a Bible college where kids go to school free and study for the ministry. You think that’s all accident? I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity. That’s the way I like to think about that cross up there.”
“I don’t like to cut into your sense of religiosity, Lyle, but how in the name of God do you justify all this?” I gestured at his house, his manicured lawns.