“The old man had a heart attack.
He got up to fix a sandwich at four this morning, the next thing his wife heard him crash across the kitchen table.”
“How bad is it?”
“They had to use the electric paddles. They almost didn't get him back.” I looked through the windshield at the quiet flow of traffic on the street, the people gazing in shop windows, and felt, almost with a sense of shame, my unacknowledged and harbored resentment lift like a film of ash from a dead coal. “Where is he now?” I asked. “Iberia General .. . Hold on, that's not where we're going. He wants us to interview a guy in a county lockup in east Texas.”
“Us?”
“You got it, sweet cakes.”
“I need to talk with him, Helen.”
“Later, after we get back. This time we're doing it his way. Come on, shake it, you're on the clock, Streak.” The county prison was an old, white brick two-story building just across the Sabine River, north of Orange, Texas. From the second-story reception room Helen and I could look down onto the exercise yard, the outside brick wall spiraled with razor wire, and the surrounding fields that were a shimmering violent green from the spring rains. Two guards in khaki uniforms without guns crossed the yard and unlocked a cast-iron, slitted door that bled rust from the jamb, and snipped waist and leg chains on a barefoot leviathan of a man in jailhouse whites named Jerry Jeff Hooker who trudged between them as though a cannonball were hung from his scrotum. When the two guards, both of them narrow-eyed and cheerless piney woods crackers, brought him into the reception room and sat him down in front of a scarred wood table in front of us and slipped another chain around his belly and locked it behind the chair, which was bolted to the floor, I said it would be all right if they waited outside. “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.“