Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

“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 J

ulia?”

“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-mache 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.

“Take a ride with me,” he said.

“What's up?”

“I need to talk, that's all.”

“Turn the radio down,” I said.

“Hey, you listen to Dr. Boogie and the Bon Ton Soul Train?”

“No.”

He started the engine again and kept feeding it the gas while the Caddy's gutted muffler vibrated and rattled against the frame.

“Okay!” I said, above the noise, and got in beside him. A few minutes later we were approaching the drawbridge. “Do you realize you always end up driving the same kind of cars grease balls do?” I said.

“That's because I buy them off grease balls I'm lucky I can afford grease ball hand-me-downs.”

I waited for him to get to it. We turned into New Iberia, then headed out toward Spanish Lake. He bit down softly on his thumbnail, his face reflective and cool in the wind.

“I heard about Sonny. The guy didn't deserve to die like that,” he said. We were on the old two-lane road now. The azaleas and purple wisteria along the roadside were still in bloom and you could see the lake through the trees. Clete's voice was hoarse, down in his throat.

“Something else bothers me, too.” He turned and looked at me. “I told you, when I hit Sonny, I got a red bruise on my knuckles, it looked like strawberry juice under the skin, it wouldn't go away?”

He shook his head, without waiting for me to answer.