"Why bring them home?"
"I've seen the guy. I'm sure of it. But I can't remember where."
"Around here?"
"No. Somewhere else. The top of his head looks like a yellow cake but he has no jaws. An obnoxious FBI agent told me he's pals with Cisco Flynn."
"A head like a yellow cake? A mainline con? Friends with Cisco Flynn?"
"Yeah."
"Wonderful."
That night I dreamed of the man named Swede Boxleiter. He was crouched on his haunches in the darkened exercise yard of a prison, smoking a cigarette, his granny glasses glinting in the humid glow of lights on the guard towers. The predawn hours were cool and filled with the smells of sage, water coursing over boulders in a canyon riverbed, pine needles layered on the forest floor. A wet, red dust hung in the air, and the moon seemed to rise through it, above the mountain's rim, like ivory skeined with dyed thread.
But the man named Swede Boxleiter was not one to concern himself with the details of the alpine environment he found himself in. The measure of his life and himself was the reflection he saw in the eyes of others, the fear that twitched in their faces, the unbearable tension he could create in a cell or at a dining table simply by not speaking.
He didn't need a punk or prune-o or the narcissistic pleasure of clanking iron in the yard or even masturbation for release from the energies that, unsatiated, could cause him to wake in the middle of the night and sit in a square of moonlight as though he were on an airless plateau that echoed with the cries of animals. Sometimes he smiled to himself and fantasized about telling the prison psychologist what he really felt inside, the pleasure that climbed through the tendons in his arm when he clasped a shank that had been ground from a piece of angle iron on an emery wheel in the shop, the intimacy of that last moment when he looked into the eyes of the hit. The dam that seemed to break in his loins was like water splitting the bottom of a paper bag.
But prison shrinks were not people you confided in, at least if you were put together like Swede Boxleiter and ever wanted to make the street again.
In my dream he rose from his crouched position, reached up and touched the moon, as though to despoil it, but instead wiped away the red skein from one corner with his fingertip and exposed a brilliant white cup of light.
I sat up in bed, the window fan spinning its shadows on my skin, and remembered where I had seen him.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I went to the city library on East Main Street and dug out the old Life magazine in which Megan's photos of a black rapist's death inside a storm drain had launched her career. Opposite the full-page shot of the black man reaching out futilely for the sunlight was the group photo of five uniformed cops staring down at his body. In the foreground was Swede Boxleiter, holding a Red Delicious apple with a white divot bitten out of it, his smile a thin worm of private pleasure stitched across his face.
BUT I WASN'T GOING to take on the Flynns' problems, I told myself, or worry about a genetic misfit in the Colorado pen.
I was still telling myself that late that night when Mout' Broussard, New Iberia's legendary shoeshine man and Cool Breeze's father, called the bait shop and told me his son had just escaped from the parish prison.
* * *
THREE
CAJUNS OFTEN HAVE TROUBLE WITH the th sound in English, and as a result they drop the h or pronounce the t as a d. Hence, the town's collectively owned shoeshine man, Mouth Broussard, was always referred to as Mout'. For decades he operated his shoeshine stand under the colonnade in front of the old Frederic Hotel, a wonderful two-story stucco building with Italian marble columns inside, a ballroom, a saloon with a railed mahogany bar, potted palms and slot and racehorse machines in the lobby, and an elevator that looked like a polished brass birdcage.
Mout' was built like a haystack and never worked without a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth. He wore an oversized gray smock, the pockets stuffed with brushes and buffing rags ribbed with black and oxblood stains. The drawers under the two elevated chairs on the stand were loaded with bottles of liquid polish, cans of wax and saddle soap, toothbrushes and steel dental picks he used to clean the welts and stitches around the edges of the shoe. He could pop his buffing rags with a speed and rhythm that never failed to command a silent respect from everyone who watched.
Mout' caught all the traffic walking from the Southern Pacific passenger station to the hotel, shined all the shoes that were set out in the corridors at night, and guaranteed you could see your face in the buffed point of your shoe or boot or your money would be returned. He shined the shoes of the entire cast of the 1929 film production of Evangeline; he shined the shoes of Harry James's orchestra and of U.S. Senator Huey Long just before Long was assassinated.
"Where is Cool Breeze now, Mout'?" I said into the phone.
"You t'ink I'm gonna tell you that?"
"Then why'd you call?"
"Cool Breeze say they gonna kill him."
"Who is?"
"That white man run the jail. He sent a nigger try to joog him in the ear with a wire."
"I'll be over in the morning."
"The morning? Why, t'ank you, suh."
"Breeze went down his own road a long time ago, Mout'."