“Yeah, the writer,” Helen said.
“Who says I was?”
“A half-dozen people,” she lied.
He opened his hands in disbelief. “What would I be doing wit’ a writer? That’s like axing me if I’m hanging out with the IRS.”
“Maybe you were doing some work for the St. Jude Project.”
“Yeah, I he’p out the St. Jude, but I don’t know this writer. If you say I know him, then write that in my file. But I don’t know him, and I don’t know nothing about him except I seen him signing books at Books Along the Teche, and I’m tired of y’all getting in my face about this.”
“Here’s our problem, Herman,” she said. “No matter what avenue we take into this investigation, your name comes up.”
“What investigation? All them crimes, if there ever was any crimes, was in Jeff Davis Parish. But RoboCop and his friend Dumbo the flying beer barrel been trying to find a reason to drag their shit into my life.”
“We had a body dumped in our parish, and we think the victim was connected to the homicides in Jeff Davis, Herman,” Helen said, sitting on the corner of the table, her hands folded on one thigh. “If you’re not involved in this, you have a good idea who is. Most people around here have one of two attitudes about you. A lot of them just laugh when your name is mentioned, like you’re a funny hobgoblin that got loose from Railroad Avenue. Others say you’re not at fault for what you are, that you never had a father and your mother had to turn tricks in a shack behind Broussard’s bar and you grew up a raggedy-ass little boy who had to carry out the whores’ pails from the back of the cathouses on Hopkins. But I always thought you were a smart man. I don’t like what you do for a living, but there’s no denying you’re intelligent. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a smart man, aren’t you, Herman? I knew your mother well. You were born premature, out in the hallway at Charity Hospital. I remember your mother’s words: ‘He wasn’t no bigger than a squirrel.’”
Herman Stanga’s face looked feverish, the skin moist, his eyelids stitched to his forehead. “Y’all t’ink you run t’ings. Y’all ain’t nothing but a bunch of ants running around on a wet log, pretending y’all in charge, when the people that’s running t’ings wouldn’t let y’all squat on their commodes. But I got you, Robo Man. Your peckerwood friend is going to Angola. When he gets in there, he’s gonna be the gift that keeps on giving. And Lady Hermaphrodite here is gonna keep using you to wipe her ass while I’m laughing at the bunch of y’all. I fucked you good, man, and you can t’ink about that all the way to your grave.”
Helen got up from the table and stood at the window, her back to us. She was silent a long time, the heel of her hand resting on the windowsill, her fingers tapping without sound on the wood. In the distance, I heard the whine of the speedboat fading, disappearing around a bend in the bayou. Without turning around, Helen said, “Make sure he gets back to his car all right.”
CHAPTER
7
WHEN HERMAN STANGA returned home from St. Martinville, the night sky was smoky with stars and moon glow, the underwater lights burning beneath the surface of his swimming pool, the wind ruffling the canopy of the trees along the bayou. While he undressed down to his white silk boxer shorts at his wet bar, kicking his trousers onto the rug, he called the home of his lawyer. The lawyer’s message machine clicked on.
“Monroe, it’s me. Pick up the phone,” Herman said. “I got an update for you. I know you’re there, man, so stop pretending you ain’t. Dave Robicheaux ran me in this afternoon. He was talking in the car about niggers selling out niggers during the Civil War or some shit. He put me in a room wit’ Amazon Woman. She was trying to make me admit I knew somet’ing about them girls that was killed in Jeff Davis Parish. She was calling my mother a whore. She didn’t have a lot of nice t’ings to say about you, either. I’m telling you, Monroe, if I find out you’re home and deliberately ain’t picking up, your ass is grass. A couple of photos Doreen took of you wit’ her sister are gonna be on the Internet. I’ll be up late. Call me. I ain’t just blowing gas here.”
Herman slipped his feet into a pair of flip-flops and chopped up two white lines on a mirror, rolled a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill into a tube, and vacuumed up each line. He used the remote to turn on his giant flat-screen TV and flipped from channel to channel before he became bored and irritated and clicked off the set. He wiped the residue off the mirror with his finger and rubbed his gums with it and licked his finger clean.
The night was alive with sound. Leaves puffed out of the trees on the bayou. The neighbors’ kids were playing tag in the dark. In the center of it all, his swimming pool glowed with an electrified blue clarity that seemed to answer all the mysteries about life and death, at least as far as Herman ever thought about them. He opened the sliding glass door and let in the night air and the smell of the flowers. Maybe he should relax and have Doreen over for a swim. Her sister, too. But Herman’s spring was wound too tight to think very long about the recreational end of his profession.
He hit the speed dial on his cordless phone and got Monroe’s message machine again. “Don’t make me drive over there, Monroe,” he said. “They messed wit’ the wrong nigger. I’m gonna stick it to them, and you’re gonna he’p me do it. You hearing me on this? You pull your dick out of wherever it is and pick up that phone! My tolerance for your lazy-ass behavior is wearing thin.”
He opened his Sub-Zero freezer and took out a gallon container of French-vanilla ice cream and began digging chunks from it with a butcher knife, clunking each rock-hard piece into a bowl. His hand was wet and slick, his thumb hooked over the top of the knife handle, the coke singing in his blood, his ears thundering with the Herman Stanga national anthem, the latter a musical composition of angry self-righteousness that could blow windows out of buildings. Then he felt his hand slip and a sensation like an icicle slicing through his palm. The butcher knife clattered to the bottom of the sink in a rain of blood drops. He grabbed a dish towel and twisted it around his hand and cradled his arm against his chest. He picked up the phone and punched in 911 with his thumb, then thought about the consequences of his call and hung up. Coke on his wet bar, coke in his bedroom, coke in his bloodstream, paramedics and cops stomping around in his house with no need for a warrant because he had made the 911 call voluntarily. No way, offay. He sat down in a chair and stared at the towel cinched around his hand. The bleeding had stopped. Give it a few minutes and he could drive himself to Iberia General, he told himself.
Time to coolerate his emotions, put things into perspective, and send another snow-white marching band up his nose. His hand was numb, the bloodstained towel a testimony to the dominion he could exert not only over pain but over the issuance of blood from a knife wound. Herman had taken control of the night. He was back in Chez Stanga, his Dobermans protecting him, his presence in the neighborhood a constant source of unhappiness to his neighbors, his power to upset and depress them always at the tips of his fingers.
He removed the cover from a silver cigarette box where he kept a small cake of virgin coke, the high-grade stuff the Colombians in Miami reserved for themselves. Herman’s supplier said it lit the rain forests like summer heat lightning and cleansed the souls of unbaptized pagans. Right. That was why they all looked like overweight tomato pickers and thought the good life was hanging at the dog track and eating nachos and chili with their fingers. He lifted the spoon to one nostril and snarfed up the virgin flake and felt the hit all the way down to the soles of his feet, like an orgasm that had no erogenous boundaries.
But whether he was coked to the eyes or not, Herman’s source of agitation would not go away. The problem was not his lawyer, nor the wetbrain detective who had run him in, or even that bucket of whale sperm Purcel. It was the hermaphrodite Amazon Woman and the things she had said about his mother and about him and the shack where he had grown up in New Iberia’s old red-light district. How did she know Herman’s mother had turned tricks behind Broussard’s bar? How did she know his job had been to carry out the whores’ pails to the rain ditch early Sunday mornings? Did his mother tell the dyke that, or was it common knowledge? Which was worse? Did his mother really say he looked like a squirrel when he was born in a hallway at Charity Hospital in Lafayette? His own mother said that of him?
How had Amazon Woman described him? A raggedy colored boy? That was what he’d been, his knees and feet filmed with dust, lice nits in his hair, stink in his clothes, and skid marks in his underwear when a health official at the school made him pull down his pants to be checked for ringworm.
Herman tried to think of the words he should have said to the dyke, something that would have hurt her and made her feel ashamed and guilty about what she was. Words that would have made her feel like he felt, not only now but secretly every day of his life since he was a little boy.
The cut in his hand began to throb. Through the open sliding doors, he could hear the sounds of children playing tag in the dark and music from the lawn party down the bayou. But something was wrong. His Dobermans were easily agitated by music, sirens, or the noise of airplanes and usually made howling sounds when they heard them. In fact, when children were about, the Dobermans ran against their chains, sometimes almost snapping their necks.
Herman got up from the divan and opened the front door and looked outside. Except for the glistening piles of dog feces, the yard was empty. But the dogs had long chains and could have been around the side of the house. He started to walk outside and check, then hesitated and instead closed and deadbolted the door. He went back through the kitchen and through the wet bar area and looked out at the pool and at the shadows the potted orchid and bottlebrush trees made on the flagstones. The wind gusted across the pool, wrinkling the water, smudging the brilliance of the underwater lamps, sending a peculiar chill through Herman’s body. He realized he was still wearing only his silk shorts, that either the night had turned cooler or his air-conditioning was set too low and the ceiling duct was blowing directly on his head and shoulders.
He thought he saw a shadow move between one of the banana trees and the brick wall that separated him from the neighbors’ property. Were the neighbors’ kids in his yard again? They knew better than that. “Get out of there!” he shouted into the darkness.
Then the moon came out from behind a cloud, and the shadows by the wall disappeared and all he saw were flowers in his beds and the paleness of the moon glow on the banana fronds. He cradled his wounded hand against his stomach and went back to the wet bar. The pain in his hand had come back with a vengeance,
and his heart was tripping as though it were tilted against a sharp object. He took a pitcher of orange juice from the refrigerator and drank directly from it, his breath coming short. His system felt poisoned. Was it the high-octane coke? Did one of the Colombians put a chemical surprise in his stash? Or was the odor rising from his armpits the old familiar stench of fear that his swagger and rebop and cynicism at the expense of others had tried to mask for a lifetime?
He sat down on one of the elevated stools at the wet bar and hit the speed dial on his cordless. Monroe’s message machine kicked on, but this time, before the recording finished, Monroe picked up and started talking. “I was cutting the grass. I was just gonna call you,” he said.