“She says, ‘Well, just eat by yourself, Clete Purcel.’ And the two of them walk on down the street to the ice cream parlor. I’ve gotten blown out of the water twice by a meltdown who pulls a suitcase full of magazines and Bibles around town on a roller skate. My self-esteem is on a level with spit on the sidewalk.”
“It sounds like you’re off the hook with Zerelda. Count your blessings,” I said.
He rubbed his face against his hand. I could hear his whiskers against his skin.
“After Zerelda and Gomer are gone, Frankie Dogs comes up to me and says, ‘I seen that guy before.’
“I ask him where, like at that point I really care.
“Frankie Dogs says, ‘He used to sell vacuum cleaners to the niggers up Tchoupitoulas. The vacuum cleaners cost four hundred dollars, but they were Korean junk. He’d talk the niggers into signing a loan they’d never get out of.’
“I say, ‘Thanks for telling me that, Frankie.’
“Frankie goes, ‘He was around three or four times looking for Zerelda. Joe don’t want him here. You ain’t got to worry about him kicking you out of the sack.’”
Clete blew air out his nose and picked up his coffee cup and stared out the window, as though he couldn’t believe the implication that the success of his love life was dependent upon the Mafia’s intercession.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“Nothing. I moved out of the motor court. Why is stuff like this always happening to me?” he said.
Search me, I thought.
The next day I tried to concentrate on the investigation into the murder of Linda Zeroski. But the pimps and crack dealers and street whores who had been Linda’s friends all stonewalled me and I got absolutely nowhere. I had another problem, too. I could not get the man named Legion off my mind. In the midst of a conversation or a meal, I would see his mouth leaning down to mine and smell the tobacco odor of his breath, the dried testosterone on his clothes, and I would have to break from whatever I was doing and walk away from the curious stares I received from others. The first story I had heard about Legion had been told to me by Batist’s sister. I remembered her describing Legion’s arrival on Poinciana Island and the ex-convict who had taken one look at the new overseer and leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles into New Iberia, never to return, even for his pay.
I made a phone call to a retired Angola gunbull by the name of Buttermilk Strunk, then signed out of the office and drove to a small pepper farm and tin-roofed white frame house not far from the entrance of the prison. Buttermilk was not a rotund, happy, doughlike creature, as his name might suggest. Instead, he was one of those for whom psychiatrists and theologians do not have an adequate category.
It is difficult to describe in a convincing way the kind of place Angola was in the Louisiana of my youth, primarily because no society wishes to believe itself capable of the kinds of abuse that occur when we allow our worst members, usually psychopaths themselves, to have sway over the powerless.
For the inmates on the Red Hat gang, which was assigned to the levee along the river, it was double time and hit-it-and-git-it from sunrise to sunset, or what the guards called “cain’t-see to cain’t-see.” The guards on the Red Hat gang arbitrarily shot and killed and buried troublesome convicts without ever missing a beat in the work schedule. The bones of those inmates still rest, unmarked, under the buttercups and the long green roll of the Mississippi levee.
The sweatboxes were iron cauldrons of human pain set in concrete on Camp A, where Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, Hogman Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Welch did their time. Convicts who passed out on work details were stretched on anthills. Trusty guards, mounted on horseback and armed with chopped-down double-barreled shotguns, had to serve the time of any inmate they let escape. There was a high attrition rate among convicts who tried to run.
I sat at the kitchen table with Buttermilk Strunk, the curtains puffing in the breeze. His face was like a pie plate, his skin almost hairless, his eyes baby-blue, so pure in color they seemed incapable of moral doubt. His breath wheezed inside his massive chest, and he smelled of soap and talcum powder and the whiskey he drank from a jelly glass. His shirt was scissored off below his nipples, and the place where his liver was located looked as if a football had been sewn beneath the skin there. After he had retired from the prison, he had worked for five years for the state police. Whenever a convict ran, the state always called upon Buttermilk Strunk to bring him back. Buttermilk killed eight men and never returned a living convict to the prison system.
“Remember a guard named Legion, Cap? Maybe last name of Guidry?” I asked.
His eyes left mine uncertainly, then came back. “He worked at Camp I. That’s when it was half female,” he replied.
“Know much about him?”
“They run him off. Some of the colored girls said he was molesting them.”
“That’s all you recall about him?”
“Why you want to know?”
“I’ve had trouble with him.”
He started to take a drink from his jelly glass, then set it down. He got up from the table and poured his glass in the sink and rinsed it under the faucet.
“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.
“You read much of Scripture?”
“A bit.”
“Then you seen his name before. Don’t you drag that man into my life and don’t you tell nobody I was talking about him, either. You best be on your way, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said, his mouth puckered, his eyes steadfastly avoiding mine.