Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

I looked beyond him, out on the dock, where his friends were drinking can beer under the canvas awning. One of them was a small, sun-browned, mustached man with no chin and an oiled pate and the snubbed nose of a hawk.

“That’s Sookie Motrie out there. I hear he’s the money behind video poker at the tracks,” I said.

“It’s all a trade-off. People want money for schools but don’t like taxes. I say use the devil’s money against him. So a guy like Sookie gets to be a player.”

When I didn’t reply, he said, “A lot of folks think Earl K. Long was just an ignorant redneck. But Earl did good things people don’t know about. A whole bunch of Negro women graduated from a new nursing program and found out right quick they couldn’t get jobs nowhere. So Earl hears about it and says he wants a tour of the state hospital. He pumps hands all over the building, sticks his head in operating rooms, flushes toilets, then gets all the hospital’s administrators in one room and locks the door.

“He says, ‘I just seen a shameful spectacle here. Y’all got white nurses hand-waiting on nigra patients, carrying out their bedpans and I don’t know what all, and I ain’t gonna stand for it. You either hire nigra nurses in those wards or every damn one of you is gonna be out of a job.’

“The next week the state hospital had two dozen black nurses on staff.”

“Makes a good story,” I said.

“Stories are all the human race has got, Dave. You just got to find the one you like and stay with it,” he replied.

“Are you going to execute Letty Labiche?”

He replaced his hat on his head and walked down the slope to rejoin his entourage, jiggling his hands in the air like a minstrel man.

14

Farther to the south of us, in the working-class community of Grand Bois, a young attorney, two years out of law school, filed suit on behalf of the local residents against a large oil corporation. The locals were by and large Cajuns and Houma Indians, uneducated, semiskilled, poor, without political power, and bewildered by the legal apparatus, the perfect community to target as the open-pit depository of oil sludge trucked in from a petroleum treatment plant in Alabama.

Company officials didn’t argue with the contention the pits contained benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and arsenic. They didn’t have to. Years ago, during a time of gas shortages, the U.S. Congress had granted the oil industry blanket exemptions from the regulations that govern most toxic wastes. Secondly, the state of Louisiana does not define oil waste as hazardous material.

The state, the oil corporation, and the community of Grand Bois were now in court, and Connie Deshotel’s office was taking depositions from the people in Grand Bois who claimed their children were afflicted with vertigo, red eyes, skin rashes, and diarrhea that was so severe they had to keep buckets in their automobiles.

Two of those Grand Bois families had moved to New Iberia and were now living up on the bayou road, not far from Passion Labiche’s nightclub. On Monday Helen Soileau was assigned to drive Connie Deshotel and her assistant out to their homes.

Later she told me of Connie Deshotel’s bizarre behavior, although she could offer no explanation as to its cause.

It had rained hard that morning, then the sun had become a white orb in the center of a windless sky, evaporating the water out of the fields, creating a superheated dome of humidity that made you feel like ants were crawling inside your clothes.

The air-conditioning unit in the cruiser began clanking, then gasped once and gave out. Conn

ie Deshotel had removed her white suit coat and folded it on her lap, trying to keep her composure while her male assistant talked without stop in the backseat. Her armpits were ringed with sweat and a hostile light was growing in her eyes.

Her assistant paused a moment in his monologue, then cracked a mint between his molars and began again.

“Why don’t the people of Grand Bois move to a place where there’s no oil industry? Get jobs as whalers in Japan. Could it be they’ve done scut work all their lives in the oil industry and couldn’t fix ice water without a diagram?” he said.

He took the silence in the cruiser as indication his point was not understood.

“The Houma Indians have a problem with oil waste. But they want to build casinos and addict their own people to gambling. I think the whole bunch is ripe for a hydrogen bomb,” he said.

“I don’t want to add to your irritability, Malcolm, but would you please shut up?” Connie said.

“Y’all want something cool to drink?” Helen asked.

“Yes, please,” Connie said.

They pulled into Passion’s nightclub just as a storm cloud covered the sun and the landscape dropped into shadow. Inside, electric fans vibrated on the four corners of the dance floor, and an ancient air-conditioning unit inserted in a sawed-out hole in the back wall blew a stream of refrigerated coolness across the bar.

Connie sat on a barstool and closed her eyes in the wind stream.

Helen whistled through the door that gave onto the café side of the building.

“Hey, Passion, you’ve got some customers in here,” she called.