He smelled of testosterone and shaving cream and the cigarette he kept balanced on the lavatory while he combed Lucky Tiger into his hair in front of the mirror, a towel wrapped around his hips. He saw me watching him in the mirror and he turned and cocked his fists like a prizefighter’s.
He and my mother boarded the Sunset Limited in 1946 and went out to Hollywood. On the platform she hugged me against her and kept patting me on the head and back as though her hands could convey meaning her words could not.
“I’m gonna send for you. I promise, Davy. You gonna see movie stars and swim in the ocean and go on rollercoaster rides out over the water, you. It ain’t like here, no. It don’t never rain and people got all the money they want,” she said.
When she returned to New Iberia on the bus, the ticket purchased with money my father had to wire a priest, she showed me postcards of Angel’s Flight and Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the beach at Malibu, as though these were magic places that had defined her experience in California rather than a garage apartment by a downtown freeway where Hank had left her one morning with the icebox empty and the rent unpaid.
But it was a thin, small-boned bouree dealer named Mack who took her away from us permanently. He owned a car and wore a fedora and two-tone shoes and had a moustache that looked like it had been drawn above his lip with grease pencil. I hated Mack more than any of the others. He feared my father and was cruel in the way all cowards are. He knew how to inflict injury deep into the bone, and he always had an explanation to mask the nature of his real agenda, like a man who tickles a child incessantly and says he means no harm.
My calico cat gave birth to her litter in the barn, but Mack found them before I did. He put them in a paper sack and weighted the sack with a rock and sank it in the coulee, pushing me away with his palm, then raising a cautionary finger at my face.
“Don’t touch me again, no, ’cause I’m gonna hit you,” he said. “Them kittens gonna grow up and kill the chicks, just like their mama been doin’. You gonna buy more chickens, you? You gonna put food on the table, you?”
He and my mother drove away one summer’s day in a rooster tail of dust to Morgan City, where Mack got her a job at a beer garden. I didn’t see her again until many years later, when I was in high school and I went to a roadhouse on the Breaux Bridge Highway with some other boys. It was a ramshackle gambling and pickup place, where the patrons fought over whores with bottles and knives in the parking lot. She was dancing with a drunk by the jukebox, her stomach pressed into his loins. Her face was tilted up into his, as though she were intrigued by his words. Then she saw me looking at her from the bar, saw my hand lift from my side to wave at her, and she smiled back at me briefly, her eyes shiny and indolent with alcohol, a vague recognition swimming into her face and disappearing as quickly as it came.
I never saw her again.
Monday morning the sheriff called me into his office. He wore a striped, black suit with a purple-and-white-striped snap-button shirt and a hand-tooled belt and half-topped boots. The windowsill behind his head was lined with potted plants that glowed in the thinly slatted light through the blinds. He had run a dry-cleaning business before he was elected sheriff and was probably more Rotarian than lawman; but he had been in the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir and no one questioned his level of integrity or courage or the dues he had paid and never spoke about (except, to my knowledge, on one occasion, when he’d had a coronary and thought he was dying and he told me of pink airbursts high above the snow on the hills and Chinese bugles blowing in the darkness and winds that could swell fingers into purple balloons).
His stomach hung over his belt and his cheeks were often flushed from hypertension, but his erect posture, either sitting or standing, always gave him the appearance of a much greater level of health than he actually possessed.
“I just got off the phone with the East Baton Rouge sheriff’s office,” he said, looking down at a yellow legal pad by his elbow. “They say a couple of black lowlifes were thrown off a roof east of town last night.”
“Oh?”
“One of them has a broken arm, the other a concussion. The only reason they’re alive is they crashed through the top of an oak tree.”
I nodded, as though unsure of his larger meaning.
“The two lowlifes say Clete Purcel is the guy who made them airborne. You know anything about this?” the sheriff said.
“Clete’s methods are direct sometimes.”
“What’s most interesting is one of them took down the license number of your truck.” The sheriff’s eyes dropped to his legal pad. “Let’s see, I jotted down a quote from the East Baton Rouge sheriff. ‘Who told your homicide investigator he could come into my parish with an animal like Clete Purcel and do business with a baseball bat?’ I didn’t quite have an answer for him.”
“You remember my mother?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied, his eyes shifting off mine, going empty now.
“A pimp named Zipper Clum was on that roof. He told me he saw my mother killed. Back in 1966 or ’67. He wasn’t sure of the year. It wasn’t an important moment in his career.”
The sheriff leaned back in his chair and lowered his eyes and rubbed the cleft in his chin with two fingers.
“I’d like to believe you trusted me enough to tell me that up front,” he said.
“People like Zipper Clum lie a lot. He claims two cops drowned her in a mud puddle. They shot somebody and put a throw-down on the corpse. My mother saw it. At least that’s what Clum says.”
He tore the top page off his legal pad and crumpled it up slowly and dropped it in the wastebasket.
“You want some help on this?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life,” the sheriff said.
“He also said he never took his own advice.”
The sheriff rose from his swivel chair and began watering his plants with a hand-painted teakettle. I closed the door softly behind me.