But Trish and Clete’s destination was not the postcard picture he had witnessed from the plane. They landed in a bay full of fish-kill and rode across the interior in a misfiring taxi to a village that buzzed with flies and smelled of chickenshit and herbicide. The villagers were all Indians, who waved at Trish when they saw her through the taxi’s back windows. The houses were constructed of unpainted cinder blocks, the cookstove often a sheet of corrugated tin set on rocks under a lean-to. The community water wells were dug within a few feet of hog and goat pens. The only telephone lines Clete could see went into a cantina and a police station.
Trish had said little since they had gotten off the plane, and in fact had become reflective and somber. The taxi turned up a rutted road that led to a yellow building with a peaked tar-paper roof.
“I got involved with the guerrillas in El Sal in the eighties,” he said. “I don’t think any of this will change in our lifetimes.”
“So we shouldn’t try?”
He looked at the yellow building. “What is this place?”
“A home for handicapped kids. Either their parents don’t want them or are not equipped to raise them. Without the home, most of them would spend their lives on the street.”
Some of the children at the home had been born blind or without hands or feet, or with misshapen faces and twisted spines and spastic nervous systems. Some drooled and made unintelligible sounds. Others were harelipped, clubfooted, or had dwarf or bowed legs. Some had never walked.
When Clete was introduced to them, his smile felt like a surgical wound. He told Trish he had to use the restroom.
“Out back, the cinder-block building under the cistern. It has plumbing,” she said.
When he got outside, his eyes were brimming with tears. He washed his face in an aluminum basin and blew his nose on his handkerchief, then returned to the yellow building, a grin on his face.
The personnel at the home were Mennonites and Catholic lay missionaries, and seemed to glow with a level of humanity that Clete thought had little to do with political or perhaps even religious conviction. In fact, they seemed to be uncomplicated people who had little or no interest in the larger world and did not view themselves as exceptional and would probably not understand why anyone would treat them as such.
When Clete got back on the plane, he felt ten years older and for some reason could not even remember the details of what he had done the previous day, even the hosing down of Lefty Raguza at the casino. “You just visit here sometimes?” he asked Trish.
“No, I work here several months a year.”
“Who finances this place?”
“A bunch of assholes who don’t know they finance it,” she replied.
“Ever boost a savings and loan in Mobile?”
Her response was a deep-throated laugh. Chapter 10
T HE FACT THAT NO Jewish, Hispanic, Asian, Mideastern, or black person had ever been admitted to Tony Lujan’s fraternity did not seem significant to him. Clubs were meant to be private in nature. Like families. There was no law that said you had to let people of different religions and races marry into your family, was there? He had heard about a Jewish pledge who had been blackballed—a kid who later dropped out of college and got blinded in Iraq, but that was before Tony had joined the fraternity. Whenever he heard mention of the Jewish kid getting sandbagged by his fraternity brothers, he walked away from the conversation. Tony didn’t like problems, particularly when they were caused by wrongheaded people. If the kid was Jewish, why didn’t he just go to Tulane? It wasn’t Tony’s freight to carry.
Tomorrow morning, Tuesday, he and his attorney were scheduled to meet with the Iberia Parish district attorney. The D.A. had already presented the available choices for Tony in the most draconian terms. He would either accept a grant of immunity for his cooperation in the investigation of his father or be considered a suspect himself. Either way, he or his father was going to prison. Or maybe both of them would. “You’ve got the key to the jailhouse door,” the district attorney had said. “We’ll try to protect you up at Angola, but you wouldn’t be the first white college boy to get spread-eagled on the bars. Let me know what you decide.”
The image made Tony’s skin crawl, his buttocks constrict.
All this because of a wino on a road. All this because Monarch Little, in order to save his own black ass, had told the cops where his old man had gotten the Buick repaired. What had he ever done to Monarch Little? He hadn’t even known Monarch Little existed until the run-in at McDonald’s.
Tony could not get tomorrow’s meeting with the D.A. out of his mind. There had to be a way out. He had told his lawyer he had no knowledge about the wino’s death, but it was obvious the lawyer didn’t believe him.
“Your father or you ran over the guy, Tony,” the lawyer had said. “Unless you lent the car to somebody. You think that might have happened?”
“It could have,” Tony replied, watching the lawyer’s face.
“Forget I mentioned that,” the lawyer said.
Would his courage fail him? Could he take the weight and actually risk time on Angola Farm, where he would hoe soybeans under mounted guards who carried quirts and shotguns? Was he actually as small and frightened and weak as he felt? The D.A. obviously thought so. For the first time in his life, he understood why people killed themselves.
When he did not think his morning could get any worse, the professor in his political science class started in on institutionalized class and ethnic prejudice, asking Tony, in front of a hundred other students, if he believed campus fraternities and sororities had the right to discriminate in their admission policies.
“Isn’t ‘discrimination’ just another word for judgment?” Tony said. “People discriminate in the kind of food they eat or what part of town they live in. That’s how standards are established. People have a right to choose, don’t they, sir?”
“Let’s put it another way. Is the issue one of inclusion or exclusion?” the professor asked from behind his lectern, which was mounted on a stage, high above the class. “Doesn’t a fraternity pride itself on who it keeps out rather tha
n who it lets in? What’s the value of money if it doesn’t buy privilege? ‘Melting pot’ sounds good on paper, but the mix may not always be good for everyone. Is that the case, Tony?”