The Convict and Other Stories

But I couldn’t just give up. It was a beautiful gold-green morning, with a cool breeze riffling the bayou and the cypress trees, and I could smell the four-o’clocks that were still open in the damp shade. It was a day for boiling crawfish, for zydeco music and barbecue and baseball; it wasn’t a day for surrendering to the likes of Klaus or some government and newspaper guys who didn’t take me seriously.

My daddy, who trapped every winter at Marsh Island, used to say, “Son, if it ain’t moving, don’t poke it. But if it starts snapping at you, wait till it opens up real wide, then spit in its mouth.”

I figured Klaus started snapping at me the first time he put his manicured, slender hand on top of Amanda’s forearm at the Petroleum Club cocktail party in Lafayette. It was just a touch, a rub of the hair, a light gesture that an older, fatherly man could get away with. Except for his eyes. They sliced through tissue and bone, linkage and organ.

I’d read in the Daily Iberian that a large garden party was planned for Klaus that afternoon in New Orleans. Yes, I thought, and I put a city map, my field glasses, a thermos bottle of water, and two ham-and-onion sandwiches wrapped in wax paper into my canvas flight bag and filled up at the gas dock. Within an hour I was lifting above the long, flat expanses of dead cypress and salt marsh into the blue summer sky, the wonderful smell off the Gulf, the wind currents that the great pelicans ride on high above the spreading coastline of Louisiana.

A friend of mine owned an aerial sign service outside of New Orleans, and I’d already called him to set up the letters on a big black-and-yellow tow and to string the pickup wire across the strip, so all I had to do was come in low with my hook down, snag the tow, and juice it back into that shimmering blue-white sky that always pulls on me a little like eternity.

I could feel the heavy canvas drag of the sign behind me as I flew across Canal and followed the streetcar tracks down St. Charles Avenue. The street was thickly lined with oak trees, and palm trees grew on the esplanade and groups of black people waited in the shade on each corner for the streetcar. I saw Audubon Park and the old stone buildings of Tulane University ahead, and I veered toward Magazine, which separated the colored slums from the Garden District, and passed right over a lawn party that was in progress between two beautiful, white-pillared, iron-scrolled homes that were surrounded with oak and mimosa trees. It was like a fortress of wealth down there. Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, waiters carried trays of drinks around the clipped lawn, swimmers dived into an emerald pool with barbecue pits smoking on the flagstones. Two blocks away on the other side of Magazine were several square miles of paintless, dilapidated shacks on dreary, narrow streets that had always been set aside for New Orleans’s Negroes. That had to be Klaus’s crowd down there on that lawn.

So I went in for a closer look, several hundred feet under the FAA minimum. Sure enough, Klaus looked up at me from a deck chair where he was lying in a bikini and shades while a blond gal rubbed oil on his chest. I made a slow turn so that the sign arched around the party like an angry yellow jacket: HELLO TO LT. KLAUS STROESSNER, DACHAU CLASS OF ’44.

I kept it up for twenty minutes. They started moving around down there like ants on a burning log. They carried their drinks and paper dinner plates into the trees, but I flushed them out with a power dive that almost clipped some bricks out of a chimney. They tried to hide under the veranda and I circled wide so that my engine sounded like I was headed out toward the Mississippi. Then I flattened her out and roared in full throttle like I was on a strafing run and blitzed the sign through the treetops and showered the lawn and pool with leaves and broken twigs.

I almost didn’t hear the police helicopter whipping through the air on my starboard wing. But that was all right—I’d gotten my message across. And to make sure I did, I pulled back on the stick, wobbled over them one more time, released the hook, and floated the sign down on the rooftops and lawns like a gutted snake.

I spent two days in the New Orleans jail before I could make bail. The Times-Picayuneran a story about an ex-convict pilot “with a known drinking history” who had buzzed the Garden District. The Daily Iberian wrote that not only had I been in Angola but I had an irregular work record and federal authorities thought I’d done time in Latin America. People around town weren’t going out of their way to be seen with me that week.

I figured Klaus had won again. I’d dropped the dime on him with the feds and the wire service, plastered his name and his crime all over the sky, and ended up in the lock with a good chance of my license being yanked. Maybe the Catholic brothers were wrong when they taught us the bad guys lost the war.

But a couple of Klaus’s friends blew it for their man. When I boxed Golden Gloves at New Iberia High, I learned to swallow my blood, to never show the other guy I was bleeding behind my mouthpiece. Klaus should have boxed.

Two of them caught me outside the colored beer joint. They didn’t touch me; they just stood real close to me while my back hit up against my truck door. One of them had the kind of bad breath that comes from rotted teeth.

“You been telling some lies about a friend of ours,” he said. “Do it again and we’ll feed you into your own propeller.”

I smiled with the happiness of a man who knows the world might turn out right after all.

“Hey, I can understand you guys worrying over your friend, but you really shouldn’t be here,” I said. “Those three black dudes behind you are my friends, but the one with the barber’s razor is hard to control sometimes.”

We learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot more damage shooting from behind a tree than charging uphill into a howitzer. My tree was the telephone.

“Hello, my name is Klaus Stroessner,” I said into the receiver, my feet propped up on the sunny deck rail of my houseboat, “and I’d like my utilities turned off for the next three months. Now, my brother-in-law will probably call you up and tell you he’s me and try to get you to turn them on again, but if you do I’m not paying one cent on the bill. The fact is, I’ll sue you for helping him occupy my house.”

Then I called a wrecker service and had Klaus’s Cadillac towed to a garage 110 miles away in Lake Charles, told a fertilizer company to spread a dump-truck-load of fresh cow manure on his lawn, informed the parish health office he had AIDS disease, ran an ad with his phone number in a newspaper for sexual degenerates.

“Have you lost your mind? What are you doing?” Amanda said from the kitchen door. She was dressed to go to town. Her designer jeans looked sewn to her skin. Her breasts were huge against her yellow silk cowboy shirt.

“I’ve got an errand or two at the post office,” I said. “Stay here till I get back.”

“Marcel, when did you think you could start talking to me like this?”

“Make some chicken-and-mayonnaise sandwiches and put some Cold Duck in the icebox. I’ll be back in an hour. Turn on the window fan in the bedroom.”

I left her there with her lips parted, her tongue barely touching her teeth, her blue eyes caught with a curious pause.

In town I bought a box of envelopes, a package of writing paper, and a pair of skintight rubber gloves. I wrote the letter in the typing room of the public library, then dropped it, still using the gloves, from my truck window into the mailbox outside the old redbrick post office on Main Street. It was a perfect south Louisiana summer morning. The sun was shining through the moss-hung oaks overhead, the wind smelled of rain and flowers, and the lawns in front of the nineteenth-century homes along Main were filled with yellow hibiscus and flaming azaleas.

As an afterthought, I went inside the post office, filled out a change-of-address card, and had Klaus’s mail forwarded to general delivery in Nome, Alaska.

A light, warm rain was denting the bayou when I got back to the houseboat. I parked my pickup under the cypress, undressed on the bank, and walked naked into the kitchen. Amanda dropped the jar of mayonnaise to the floor.

“I’m calling the sheriff’s office, Marcel,” she said.

“Good idea,” I said, and jerked the telephone out of the wall and handed it to her. Then I loaded her across my shoulder and carried her into the bedroom. The window fan hummed with a wet light from the bayou.

“I’ll file charges. They’ll send you back to Angola,” she said.