Stanga snapped his fingers. “RoboCop sent you, didn’t he? You got an office up on Main in New Iberia. You’re RoboCop’s windup for the jobs he cain’t do hisself or he’s already fucked up. Let me line it out for you, man. I ain’t involved no more in certain kinds of enterprises. I don’t know what you t’ink you heard me say to that lady back there, but I’m totally into new kinds of endeavors . . . Are you listening to me? I don’t like talking to somebody’s back.”
Clete turned around slowly. “I’m all ears.”
“What you heard me talking about is the St. Jude Project. It’s an outreach program to he’p people nobody else cares about. That’s what I’m doing these days, not pimping off people, not committing no homicides or whatever it is you t’ink I’m doing. Are you hearing me loud and clear on this?”
“St. Jude, the patron of the hopeless?”
“Hey, big breakt’rew. Let your brain keep doing those push-ups, you getting there, man. We done here?”
“No. You signed the paperwork on two of my bail skips. So under the the law, you’re my collateral. Turn around and place your hands on the tree trunk.”
Stanga shook his head in exasperation, the pixielike quality gone from his face, his expression almost genuine, devoid of guile or theatrics. “You making a big fool out of yourself, man. Busting me ain’t gonna he’p no dead girls, ain’t gonna get no money back for them Jews, ain’t gonna make you look better in front of all these people. Grow up. I don’t sell nothing to nobody they don’t want. How you t’ink I stayed in bidness all these years? ’Cause I was selling stuff people didn’t have no use for?”
“Turn around.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyt’ing you want, man. Big pile of white whale shit go in a black man’s club and blow his nose on people, bust some cat with recreational flake, make the world safe, and maybe get your fat ass on COPS ! All of y’all are a joke, man.”
“You better shut your mouth.”
“Gets to you, don’t it? Well, that’s the way it ought to be. If you didn’t have people like me around, you’d be on welfare. Look around you, man. Are all these people worried about me, or are they worried about you? Who brings the grief into their lives? Go ax them. There wasn’t no problem here till you come out that back door.”
Clete turned Stanga around and pushed him against the tree, trying to suppress the dangerous urge that had bloomed in his chest. When Stanga turned to face him again, Clete stiff-armed him between the shoulders. Then he kicked Stanga’s feet apart and started patting him down, his face expressionless, trying to ignore the attention he was drawing from up the slope.
“What we’re talking about here is hypocrisy, man,” Stanga said over his shoulder. “I can smell weed on your clothes and cooze on your skin. Tell me you ain’t had your dick in a black woman. Tell me you ain’t been on a pad for them New Orleans dagos. You cain’t see past your stomach to tie your shoes, but you t’ink a mail-order badge give you the right to knock around people ain’t got no choice except to take it. I wouldn’t let you clean my toilet, man, I wouldn’t let you pick up the dog shit on my lawn.”
Clete’s right hand trembled as he pulled his handcuffs free from behind his back.
“Take out your cell-phone cameras,” Stanga called to the crowd that was gathering up the slope. “Check out what this guy is doing. Y’all seen it. I ain’t done nothing.”
“Shut up,” Clete said.
“Fuck you, man. I was in an adult prison when I was fifteen years old. Anyt’ing you can do to me has already been done, magnified by ten.”
Then Herman Stanga, his wrists still uncuffed, turned and spat full in Clete’s face.
Later, Clete would not be exactly sure what he did next. He would remember a string of spittle clinging to his face and hair. He would remember Herman Stanga’s fingers reaching for his eyes; he would remember the sour surge of whiskey and beer into his mouth and nose. He would remember grabbing Stanga from the back, lifting him high in the air, and smashing him into the tree trunk. He knew he fitted his hand around the back of Stanga’s neck and he knew he drove Stanga’s face into the bark of the tree. Those things were predictable and not unseemly or uncalled for. But the events that followed were different, even for Clete.
He felt a whoosh of heat on his skin as though someone had opened a furnace door next to his head. His heart was as hard and big as a muskmelon in his chest, hammering against his ribs, bursting with adrenaline, his strength almost superhuman. One hand was hooked through the back of Stanga’s belt, the other wrapped deep into the man’s neck. He drove Stanga’s head and face again and again into the tree trunk while people in the background screamed. Stanga’s body felt as light as a scarecrow’s in Clete’s hands, the arms flopping like rags with each blow.
When Clete dropped him to the ground, Stanga was still conscious, his face trembling with shock, his nose streaming blood, the split on his forehead ridged up like an orange starfish.
The images and sounds Clete saw and heard as he stumbled up the slope toward the street would remain with him for the rest of his life. The witnesses who had gathered on the slope had been transformed into a group of villagers in an Asian country that no one talked about anymore. Their throats were filled with lamentation and pleas for mercy, their eyes wide with terror, their fingers knitted desperately in front of them.
Clete could smell a stench like stagnant water and duck shit and inflammable liquid bursting alight and straw and animal hair burning. He wiped Stanga’s spittle off his face with his sleeve and pushed through the crowd, stumbling off balance, a man out of place and time, with no moat or castle to which he could return.
CHAPTER
3
I GOT THE PHONE call from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department at 11:46 P.M. Clete had been barreling down the two-lane toward the Iberia Parish line when he hit the roadblock. Rather than think it through and let the situation decompress and play out of its own accord, he swung the Caddy onto a dirt road and tried to escape through a sugarcane field. The upshot was a blown tire, forty feet of barbed-wire fence tangled under his car frame, and a half-dozen Brahmas headed for Texas. The deputy who had called me was a fellow member of A.A. whom I saw occasionally at different meetings in the area. Her name was Emma Poche, and, like me, she had once been with the NOPD and had left the department under the same circumstances, ninety proof and trailing clouds of odium. Even today I had trepidation about Emma and believed she was perhaps one of those driven creatures who, regardless of 12-step membership, lived one drink and one click away from the Big Exit.
She lowered her voice and told me she was subbing as a night screw and that her call was unauthorized.
“I can’t understand you. Clete’s drunk?” I said.
“Who knows?” she replied.
“Say again?”