He leaned back in his chair. He shook his head as though in bewilderment. “Best of everything to you.”
“Want to translate that?”
“You’re an honorable man. But others have to pay your tab.”
I have to say, the cut went deep. “Anything else?”
He didn’t answer. When I opened the door to leave, he was standing at the window, a hand on his hip, staring at the park, his shirt pinched inside his suspenders.
“I never popped a cap on somebody who didn’t ask for it,” I said. “Even in a free-fire zone.”
“Ooh-rah,” he said without turning around.
AT ONE TIME St. Mary Parish was a fiefdom ruled by an oligarchical family who owned everything and everyone in the parish, bar none. In the 1970s, when a group of activist Catholic nuns tried to organize the cane workers, they found themselves at mortal risk in an area that was more than ninety percent Catholic. Enforcement of the law was situational. Every public servant knew which ring to kiss. The people at the bottom of the pile were not necessarily abused, but they weren’t necessarily protected from abuse, either.
Sexual exploitation is not a subject most police departments like to deal with. But it’s often there. A cop picks up a hippie runaway hitchhiking. Maybe she’s holding, maybe she’s got a warrant on her, maybe she’s sixteen and her teeth are chattering. It’s twilight. She’s in the backseat, wrists cuffed behind her, trying to see where they’re going as the cop swings around on the shoulder and heads down a two-lane away from town. The cop has already dropped his badge inside his pocket so she won’t get his number.
His name was Jude McVane. Before he was a deputy sheriff, he was a chaser in a navy brig, a hack in a women’s prison, and a collector for a loan company. He had big hands and smelled of manly odors and was good at his paperwork because he did as little of it as possible. There were never any complaints about him. But his colleagues did not hang out with him after work hours, particularly those who were protective of their wives’ sensibilities.
At sunrise Thursday, he was driving his cruiser on a two-lane back road that followed the curves along Bayou Teche. The primroses were blooming on the edge of the cane fields, the sun spangling inside the tunnel of live oaks. He passed two antebellum homes built in the early nineteenth century, then crossed the drawbridge and turned in to a trailer village that belonged in Bangladesh. He stopped in front of a trailer occupied by a young black single mother. Without speaking, she exited the trailer, locked the door behind her, and got into the back of the cruiser.
“Good morning, sunshine,” McVane said.
She looked wanly out the window. He drove out of the trailer park and back across the drawbridge and past a closed sugar refinery. Then he hooked back in to the confines
of the refinery on a dirt road and parked in the shade of a rusted-out tin shed.
“Nobody does it like you,” he said, getting in back.
When she was finished, she walked away from the cruiser and cleared her mouth and spat.
“I always heard it tastes like watermelon rind,” he said.
She refused to speak. He drove her back to her home and watched her get out and go inside. He shifted into gear and drove out of the trailer park and back over the Teche and headed toward Franklin. A solitary figure was walking around the edge of the road, dragging a wheeled case behind him, a beach bag hanging from his shoulder. McVane pulled alongside and rolled down the passenger window. “Where you going, partner?”
The man wore red tennis shoes and khakis that probably came from Target and a green T-shirt with Bugs Bunny eating a carrot on the front. “I’m touring the countryside. I got off the bus at the wrong place.”
“Where are you from?”
“New Or-yuns, originally. My name is Chester. Sometimes people call me Smiley.”
“Chester what?”
“Wimple. What’s yours?”
“Get in.”
“Why?”
“I’ll take you where you’re going.”
Chester leaned his head in the window and sniffed. “There’s been a woman in here.”
“Get in the cruiser, please.”
“I like walking.”
“I guess it’s going to be one of those days,” McVane said.