Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“I don’t got my glasses, me. Can you make out what it says?” she said.

The bartender dried his hands again and picked up the sheet of paper and held it under the light. “ ‘Dear Mae, I’m taking my boat out. Don’t come back to the club no more. Sorry I couldn’t call but you don’t have no phone. Love, Ladrine,’ ” the bartender read, and handed the sheet of paper back to her.

The bartender’s wrists were deep in the sink now, and she could see only his shining pate when he spoke again.

“I’d listen to him, Mae,” he said.

“Somet’ing’s happened?”

“Some men from New Orleans was here. Know the way us little people get by? What you see, what you hear, you do this wit’,” he said, and made a twisting motion with his fingers in front of his lips, as though turning a key in a lock.

“You tole them where Ladrine was at?”

“I ain’t in this,” he said, and walked down the duckboards to the opposite end of the bar.

She drove in the rain to Ladrine’s boat shed on the bayou. A pale yellow cusp of western sun hung on the horizon, then died, and the fields were suddenly dark. But a light attached to a pole over the shed was burning brightly, illuminating four or five cars that were parked in a semicircle around the shed, like arrows pointed at a target.

The state highway was no more than fifty yards away, and cars and trucks were passing on it with regularity. Inside the warmth and dryness of those trucks and cars were ordinary people, just like her. They weren’t criminals. They knew their only friends were their own kind. The ones who were lucky had jobs in the mill and hence were paid the minimum wage of one dollar and twenty-five cents an hour. The others worked for virtually nothing in the cane fields. But the highway was a tunnel of rain and darkness, and whatever happened out there by the bayou had nothing to do with those inside the tunnel. Their ability to see was selective, the fate of a friend and neighbor never registering on the periphery of their vision. That was the detail she would not be able to forget.

The planks in the board road that led to the boat shed were splintered and broken and half underwater, and Mae’s car started to stall out when her front wheels sank into a flooded depression and steam hissed off her engine block. She put her car in reverse and backed up toward the highway, then cut the engine and lights and got out and walked down the incline, still dressed in her purple suit, the rain sliding like glass across the cone of light that shone down from the pole above the shed.

She could see them through the slats in the shed and the back door that yawed open above a mud-streaked wood pallet: Ladrine and two men in suits and two police officers in black slickers, the same officers who had tried to extort money from Ladrine; and a local constable, a big, overweight man who wore blue jeans, a cowboy hat, and a khaki shirt with an American flag sewn on the sleeve.

Ladrine had on strap overalls without a shirt or shoes, and his bare shoulders glowed like ivory in the damp air. He was shaking his head and arguing, when he seemed to look beyond the circle of heads around him and see Mae out in the darkness.

Then he called out, “I ain’t gonna talk to y’all no more. I’m going home. I’m gonna fix dinner. I’m gonna call up my grandkids. I’m gonna work in my garden tomorrow. I’m gonna do all them t’ings.”

He began to retreat in the opposite direction, inching backwards along the catwalk, stepping quickly out of the shed’s far side into the darkness, then running along the mud bank, his bare feet slapping like flapjacks along the water’s edge.

Someone turned on a large flashlight, and one of the raincoated police officers squatted in a shooter’s position under the shed, the arms extended in a two-handed grip, and fired twice with a nickel-plated revolver.

Ladrine’s head jerked upward, then he toppled forward, his left ha

nd twisted palm-outward in the center of his back, as though he had pulled a muscle while running.

The group of five under the shed walked out into the rain, the flashlight’s beam growing in circumference as they neared Ladrine. He had gone into convulsions, his wrists shaking uncontrollably, as though electricity were coursing through his body.

The shooter fired a third time, and Ladrine’s chest seemed to deflate, almost like a balloon, his chin tilting back, his mouth parting, as though he wanted to drink the sky.

The other raincoated officer leaned over with a handkerchief-wrapped pistol in his hand and placed it in Ladrine’s palm and wrapped Ladrine’s fingers around the grips and steel frame and inside the trigger guard. The officer motioned for the others to step back, then depressed the trigger and fired a solitary round into the bayou just as a bolt of lightning struck in a sugarcane field on the opposite side of the highway.

That’s when they saw her running for her car.

She drove twenty miles up the highway, in the storm, her car shaking in the wind. They had not tried to follow her, but her heart continued to pound in her chest, her breath catching spasmodically in her throat as though she had been crying. The quarters where she lived loomed up out of the green-black thrashing of the cane in the fields, and she saw lights in two of the cabins. She wanted to pull off the road, pack her suitcase and few belongings and retrieve the seventy dollars she kept hidden in the binder of a scrapbook, then try to make it to New Orleans or Morgan City.

But there was no telephone in the quarters and no guarantee the people who had shot Ladrine would not show up before she could get back on the road again.

She drove on in the rain, even though she had only three dollars in her purse and less than a quarter tank of gasoline. She would stop in the next filling station on the highway and use all her money to buy gasoline. If necessary she could sleep in the car and go without food, but every ounce of fuel she put in the tank bought distance between her and the people who had killed Ladrine.

Then she rounded a curve and realized all her decisions and plans and attempts at control were the stuff of vanity. Either high winds or a tornado had knocked down telephone and power poles as far as she could see, and they lay solidly in her path, extending like footbridges across the asphalt and the rain-swollen ditches.

She drove back to the quarters and sat on the side of her bed the rest of the night. Perhaps the next day the highway would be cleared and she could drive to Morgan City and tell someone what she had seen. If she could just stay awake and not be undone by her fear and the sounds of the wind that were like fists thumping against the walls and doors of her cabin.

The morning broke cold and gray, and in her half-sleep she heard trucks out on the highway. When she looked through the window she saw people in the trucks, with furniture, mattresses, house pets, and farm animals in back.

She stripped the clothes off the hangers in the closet and stuffed them in her suitcase, pushed her dress shoes in the corners of the suitcase, pulled the seventy dollars from the binder of the scrapbook and lay it on top of her clothes. She hefted up the suitcase and ran outside into the dirt yard, her car keys already in her hand.

She stopped and stared stupidly at her car. It was tilted sideways on the frame. The right front and back tires were crushed down on the steel rims, the air stems cut in half.