His words hung in the silence like the sound of a slap. He and everyone around him walked past me toward the end of the motor court as though I were not there. I could hear dead leaves blowing in a vortex around me.
Helen looked over her shoulder, then walked back toward me. Her shirtsleeves were rolled in cuffs, her arms pumped. She squeezed my wrist.
“He just found out his wife has cancer. He’s not himself, bwana,” she said.
“This is a mistake.”
“Forget I said anything.”
She followed the others, her shotgun held in two hands, canted at an upward angle, her jeans tight on her rump, her handcuffs drawn through the back of her belt.
A moment later the sheriff was on the bullhorn, his voice echoing off the trees and cottages. But I couldn’t hear his words. My ears were ringing now, my scalp cold in the wind. Joe Zeroski came out of his cottage, barechested, wearing sweatpants and a pair of snow-white tennis shoes, a piece of fried chicken in his hand, his face like that of a man who might have been working in front of a blast furnace.
“What is this?” he said.
“Tell all your people to get out here,” the sheriff said.
“I don’t got to tell them. They go where I go. I asked you what this is. We got the Mickey Mouse show here?” Joe said.
“You kidnapped a bunch of black men. They won’t file charges on you, but I know what you did. Here’s the search warrant if you care to look at it, Mr. Zeroski,” the sheriff said.
“Wipe your ass with it,” Joe replied.
Uniformed deputies and city police were now pulling Joe’s people out of their cottages, lining them up, pushing them into search positions against trees and cars.
“Turn around and place your hands on that tree, please,” the sheriff said to Joe.
Nests of veins rippled through Joe’s chest and shoulders; rose petals of color bloomed in his throat. He threw his chicken bone into the bushes.
“Somebody beat my daughter so bad her face didn’t look human. But you’re out here, knocking around blue-collar guys ain’t done you nothing. You know why that is? Because I bother you. You can’t do nothing about the degenerates you got in this town, so you lean on people you think are easy. Hey, you’re as old as I am. I look easy to you?” Joe said.
Joe saw two uniformed deputies shove a man with a leviathan stomach and melancholy face and jowls like a St. Bernard’s over a car fender. “Hey, that’s Frankie Dogs they’re rousting,” Joe said. “You know who Frankie Dogs is? Even in a shithole like this they got to know who that is. Hey, you get your fucking hands off me.”
But two deputies already had Joe against the tree and were feeling inside his thighs.
Just then a city cop escorted Clete Purcel and Zerelda Calucci out of Zerelda’s cottage. It was all moving fast now.
“What do you want to do with him ?” the city cop asked, indicating Clete.
“He goes down with the rest,” the sheriff replied.
Clete and Zerelda propped their arms against the side of Clete’s Cadillac, waiting to be searched. Clete looked at me over his shoulder, then raised his eyebrows and looked away and watched a tugboat passing on the bayou, his sandy hair blowing in the wind.
Cletus, Cletus, I thought.
Joe Zeroski began to fight with the deputies who were shaking him down. A half-dozen cops swarmed him, including the city cop who had been about to search Clete and Zerelda.
Marvin Oates was standing right behind Zerelda now, his face trans-fixed, a strange, almost ethereal light in his eyes. He stepped closer to her, as though drawing near a presence from another world, leaves crackling under the soles of his shoes. He leaned down toward her shoulders, perhaps trying to breathe in the heat from her body or the perfume in her hair. Then his hands slid down the muscles in her back, under her arms and on her sides. I saw her body jerk, as though she were being sexually violated, but Oates whispered something in her ear and his hand went to her blue jeans pocket and came away with a small bag, which he pushed up into his coat sleeve.
I headed toward him with my cane, the shotgun still propped on my shoulder.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
His face drained.
“Trying to hep out,” he replied.
“You’re not a police officer. You don’t have the right to put your hand on anybody here. You understand that?” I said.