“I don’t want to hear it, Aldous.”
Suddenly the boats of the state liquor agents came to life, lurching out over the waves, their own searchlights now vectoring Ciro and my father. Ciro swung the wheel hard to starboard, veering around a sandbar, moving over shallow water, the bow hammering against the outgoing tide.
Up ahead was the mouth of the Atchafalaya River. My father watched the coastline draw nearer, the moss straightening on the dead cypress trunks, the flooded willows and gum trees and saw grass denting and swaying in the wind. The tarp on the cases of whiskey and rum tore loose and flapped back against the pilothouse, blocking any view out the front window. My father cut the other ropes on the tarp and peeled it off the stacked cases of liquor and heaved it over the gunnel. When he looked at the shore again, he saw a series of sandbars ridging out of the bay like the backs of misplaced whales.
“Oh, Ciro, what you gone and did?” he said.
The boat rocketed between two sandbars, just as someone began firing an automatic weapon in short bursts from one of the state boats. Whiskey and rum and broken glass fountained in the air, then a tracer round landed on the deck like a phosphorus match and a huge handkerchief of flame enveloped the pilothouse.
But Ciro never cut the throttle, never considered giving up. The glass in the windows blackened and snapped in half; blue and yellow and red fire streamed off the deck into the water.
“Head into them leafs!” my father yelled, and pointed at a cove whose surface was layered with dead leaves.
The boat’s bow crashed into the trees, setting the canopy aflame. Then my father and Ciro were overboard, splashing through the swamp, their bodies marbled with firelight.
They ran and trudged and stumbled for two miles through chest-deep water, sloughs, air vines, and sand bogs that were black with insects feeding off cows or wild animals that had suffocated or starved in them.
Three hours later the two of them sat on a dry levee and watched the light go out of the sky and the moon fade into a thin white wafer. Ciro’s left ankle was the size of a cantaloupe.
“I’m gonna get my car. Then we ain’t touching the liquor bidness again,” my father said.
“We ain’t got a boat to touch it wit’,” Ciro said.
“T’ank you for telling me that. The next time I work for Mr. Julian LaSalle, go buy a gun and shoot me.”
“He paid my daughter’s hospital bills. You too hard on people, Aldous,” Ciro said.
“He gonna pay for our boat?”
My father walked five miles to the grove of swamp maples where he had parked his automobile. When he returned to pick Ciro up, the sky was blue, the wildflowers blooming along the levee, the air bright with the smell of salt. He came around a stand of willows and stared through the windshield at the scene he had blundered into.
Three men in fedora hats and ill-fitting suits, two of them carrying Browning automatic rifles, were escorting Ciro in wrist manacles to the back of a caged wagon, one with iron plates in th
e floor. The wagon was hooked to the back of a state truck and two Negroes who worked for Julian LaSalle were already sitting inside it.
My father shoved his transmission in reverse and backed all the way down the levee until he hit a board road that led through the swamp. As he splashed through the flooded dips in the road and mud splattered over his windshield, he tried not to think of Ciro limping in manacles toward the jail wagon. He hit a deer, a doe, and saw her carom off the fender into a tree, her body broken. But my father did not slow down until he was in Morgan City, where he entered the back of a Negro café and bought a glass of whiskey that he drank with both hands.
Then he put his big head down on his arms and fell asleep and dreamed of birds trapped inside the foliage of burning trees.
CHAPTER 2
Cops, street reporters, and hard-core caseworkers usually hang around with their own kind and form few intimate friendships with people outside their own vocation. They are not reclusive or elitist or self-anointed. They simply do not share the truth of their experience with outsiders. If they did, they would probably be shunned. In one of the Feliciana parishes, I knew a black man who had been a sergeant in Lt. William Calley’s platoon at My Lai. He had stood above the ditch at My Lai and machine-gunned children and women and old men while they begged for their lives. Years later the sergeant’s son died of a drug overdose in his front yard. The sergeant believed his son’s death was payback for the ditch at My Lai. He covered the walls of his home with pictures and news articles that detailed the atrocity he had participated in and relived his deeds at My Lai twenty-four hours a day.
But the politicians who sent my friend the sergeant into that Third World village would never have to carry his burden, nor would any civil or military authority ever hold them accountable.
That’s the way it is. The right people seldom go down. Closure is a word that does not work well with the victims of violent crime. If you’re a cop and you’re lucky, you won’t let your point of view put you in late-hour bars.
On a spring Saturday afternoon last year, I answered the phone on my desk at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and knew I had just caught one of those cases that would never have an adequate resolution, that would involve a perfectly innocent, decent family whose injury would never heal.
The father was a cane farmer, the mother a nurse at Iberia General. Their sixteen-year-old daughter was an honor student at the local Catholic high school. That morning she had gone for a ride across a fallow cane field on a four-wheeler with her boyfriend. A black man who had been sitting on his back porch nearby said the four-wheeler had scoured a rooster tail of brown dust out of the field and disappeared in a grove of gum trees, then had rumbled across a wooden bridge into another field, one that was filled with new cane. A low-roofed gray gas-guzzler was parked by the coulee with three people inside. The black man said the driver tossed a beer can out the window and started up his automobile and drove in the same direction as the four-wheeler.
My partner was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career as a meter maid at NOPD, then had worked as a patrolwoman in the Garden District before she returned to her hometown and began her career over again. She had a masculine physique and was martial and often abrasive in her manner, but outside of Clete Purcel, my old Homicide partner at NOPD, she was the best police officer I had ever known.
Helen drove the cruiser past the grove of gum trees and crossed the bridge over the coulee and followed a dirt track through blades of cane that were pale green with the spring drought and whispering drily in the wind. Up ahead was a second grove of gum trees, one that was wrapped with yellow crime scene tape.
“You know the family?” Helen asked.
“A little bit,” I replied.