He drank from his beer, a slow, steady sip that showed neither
29 6
BURNING ANGEL
need nor particular pleasure. He blew a cloud of cigarette smoke into the violet air. “We're going to eat in a minute,” he said.
“I'm going to try to reopen the vehicular homicide case on Julia and Moleen.”
“Be my guest. They weren't involved.”
I looked at his rugged profile, the blond crewcut, the lump of cartilage in the jaw, the green eyes that were often filled with the lights of envy, and felt the peculiar sensation I was looking at an innocent who had no awareness of the lines he had stepped across.
“Moleen's mixed up with people who don't take prisoners, Roof,” I said.
“Are you kidding? He's a needle dick. His wife slides up and down the banister all morning to keep his lunch warm.”
“See you around,” I said.
I woke early the next morning and drove out to the Bertrand plantation.
Why?
I really didn't know. The cement trucks, graders, and bulldozers were all idle and unattended now, sitting quietly among the swaths of destruction they had cut from the highway back to the treeline. Why had a company called Blue Sky Electric chosen this spot for its location? Access to the railroad? That was part of it, obviously. But there were a lot of train tracks in the state of Louisiana.
Maybe the answer lay in who lived here.
They were by and large disenfranchised and uneducated, with no political or monetary power. You did not have to be a longtime resident of Louisiana to understand their historical relationship to corporate industries.
Those who worked in the canneries were laid off at the end of the season, then told at the state of employment office that their unemployment claims were invalid because their trade was exclusively that of professional canners; and since the canneries were closed for the season, the workers were not available for work, and hence ineligible for the benefits that had been paid into their fund.
This was the Orwellian language used to people who had to sign their names with an X. For years the rice and sugar mills fired anyone who used the word union and paid minimum wage only because of their participation in interstate commerce. During the civil rights era, oil men used to joke about having “a jig on every rig.” But the racial invective was secondary to the real logos, which was to ensure the availability of a huge labor pool, both black and white, that would work for any wage that was offered them.
The stakes today, however, were geographical. The natural habitat's worst enemies, the chemical plants and oil refineries, had located themselves in a corridor along the Mississippi known as Toxic Alley, running from Baton Rouge down to St. Gabriel.
Almost without exception the adjacent communities were made up of blacks and poor whites.
I drove down the dirt road and stopped in front of Luke Fontenot's house. I saw his face at the window, then he opened the screen and walked out on the gallery, shirtless, barefoot, a jelly glass full of hot coffee in his hand.
“Something happen?” he said.
“No, I was just killing time. How you doing, Luke?”
“Ain't doing bad .. . You just driving around?”
“That's about it.”
He inserted a thumbnail in his teeth, then folded his fingers and looked at the tops of his nails. “I need legal advice about something.”
“Go ahead.”
“Got to have your promise it ain't going nowhere.”
“I'm a police officer, Luke.”
“You a police officer when you feel like being one, Mr. Dave.”
“I'd better get to the office.”