'You cut up Anthony Pollock. I can't prove it, and it didn't happen in our jurisdiction, but you're an iceman.'
'If I did it in a uniform, you'd be introducing me at the Kiwanis Club. I hear you adopted your kid and treated her real good. That's a righteous deed, man. But the rest of your routine is comedy. A guy with your brains ought to be above it.'
He walked down the slope to the dirt road and his parked car. When he was out of the shade he stopped and turned around. His granny glasses were like ground diamonds in the sunlight.
'How many people did it take to crucify Megan and Cisco's old man and cover it up for almost forty years? I'm an iceman? Watch out one of your neighbors don't tack you up with a nail gun,' he yelled up the slope while two fishermen unhitching a boat trailer stared at him openmouthed.
I RAKED AND BURNED leaves that afternoon and tried not to think about Swede Boxleiter. But in his impaired way he had put his thumb on a truth about human behavior that eludes people who are considered normal. I remembered a story of years ago about a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in a small Mississippi town not far from the Pearl River. One afternoon he whistled at a white woman on the street. Nothing was said to him, but that night two Klansmen kidnapped him from the home of his relatives, shot and killed him, and wrapped his body in a net of bricks and wire and sank it in the river.
Everyone in town knew who had done it. Two local lawyers, respectable men not associated with the Klan, volunteered to defend the killers. The jury took twenty minutes to set them free. The foreman said the verdict took that long because the jury had stopped deliberations to send out for soda pop.
It's a story out of another era, one marked by shame and collective fear, but its point is not about racial injustice but instead the fate of those who bear Cain's mark.
A year after the boy's death a reporter from a national magazine visited the town by the Pearl River to learn the fate of the killers. At first they had been avoided, passed by on the street, treated at grocery or hardware counters as though they had no first or last names, then their businesses failed-one owned a filling station, the other a fertilizer yard-and their debts were called. Both men left town, and when asked their whereabouts old neighbors would only shake their heads as though the killers were part of a vague and decaying memory.
The town that had been complicit in the murder ostracized those who had committed it. But no one had been ostracized in St. Mary Parish. Why? What was the difference in the accounts of the black teenager's murder and Jack Flynn's, both of which seemed collective in nature?
Answer: The killers in Mississippi were white trash and economically dispensable.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON I FOUND Archer Terrebonne on his side patio, disassembling a spinning reel on a glass table top. He wore slippers and white slacks and a purple shirt that was embroidered with his initials on the pocket. Overhead, two palm trees with trunks that were as gray and smooth as elephant hide creaked against a hard-blue sky. Terrebonne glanced up at me, then resumed his concentration, but not in an unpleasant way.
'Sorry to bother you on Sunday, but I suspect you're quite busy during the week,' I said.
'It's no bother. Pull up a chair. I wanted to thank you for the help you gave my daughter.'
You didn't do wide end runs around Archer Terrebonne.
'It's wonderful to see her fresh and bright in the morning, unharried by all the difficulties she's had, all the nights in hospitals and calls from policemen,' he said.
'I have a problem, Mr. Terrebonne. A man named Harpo Scruggs is running all over our turf and we can't get a net over him.'
'Scruggs? Oh yes, quite a character. I thought he was dead.'
'His uncle was a guy named Harpo Delahoussey. He did security work at y'all's cannery, the one that burned.'
'Yes, I remember.'
'We think Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a black man named Willie Broussard and almost drowned Jack Flynn's daughter.'
He set down the tiny screwdriver and the exposed brass mechanisms of the spinning reel. The tips of his delicate fingers were bright with machine oil. The wind blew his white-gold hair on his forehead.
'But you use the father's name, not the daughter's. What inference should I gather from that, sir? My family has a certain degree of wealth and hence we should feel guilt over Jack Flynn's death?'
'Why do you think he was killed?'
'That's your province, Mr. Robicheaux, not mine. But I don't think Jack Flynn was a proletarian idealist. I think he was a resentful, envious troublemaker who couldn't get over the fact his family lost their money through their own mismanagement. Castle Irish don't do well when their diet is changed to boiled cabbage.'
'He fought Franco's fascists in Spain. That's a peculiar way to show envy.'
'What's your purpose here?'
'Your daughter is haunted by something in the past she can't tell anybody about. It's connected to the Hanged Man in the Tarot. I wonder if it's Jack Flynn's death that bothers her.'
He curled the tips of his fingers against his palm, as though trying to rub the machinist's oil off them, looking at them idly.
'She killed her cousin when she was fifteen. Or at least that's what she's convinced herself,' he said. He saw my expression change, my lips start to form a word. 'We had a cabin in Durango at the foot of a mountain. They found the key to my gun case and started shooting across a snowfield. The avalanche buried her cousin in an arroyo. When they dug her out the next day, her body was frozen upright in the shape of a cross.'
'I didn't know that, sir.'
'You do now. I'm going in to eat directly. Would you care to join us?'
When I walked to my truck I felt like a man who had made an obscene remark in the midst of a polite gathering. I sat behind the steering wheel and stared at the front of the Terrebonne home. It was encased in shadow now, the curtains drawn on all the windows. What historical secrets, what private unhappiness did it hold? I wondered if I would ever know. The late sun hung like a shattered red flame in the pine trees.
TWENTY
I REMEMBER A CHRISTMAS DAWN five years after I came home from Vietnam. I greeted it in an all-night bar built of slat wood, the floor raised off the dirt with cinder blocks. I walked down the wood steps into a deserted parking area, my face numb with alcohol, and stood in the silence and looked at a solitary live oak hung with Spanish moss, the cattle acreage that was gray with winter, the hollow dome of sky that possessed no color at all, and suddenly I felt the vastness of the world and all the promise it could hold for those who were still its children and had not severed their ties with the rest of the human family.
Monday morning I visited Megan at her brother's house and saw a look in her eyes that I suspected had been in mine on that Christmas morning years ago.
Had her attackers held her underwater a few seconds more, her body would have conceded what her will would not: Her lungs and mouth and nose would have tried to draw oxygen out of water and her chest and throat would have filled with cement. In that moment she knew the heartbreaking twilight-infused beauty that the earth can offer, that we waste as easily as we tear pages from a calendar, but neither would she ever forget or forgive the fact that her reprieve came from the same hands that did Indian burns on her skin and twisted her face down into the silt.
She was living in the guest cottage at the back of Cisco's house, and the French doors were open and the four-o'clocks planted as borders around the trees were dull red in the shade.
'What's that?' she said.
I lay a paper sack and the hard-edged metal objects inside it on her breakfast table.
'A nine-millimeter Beretta. I've made arrangements for somebody to give you instruction at the firing range,' I said.
She slipped the pistol and the unattached magazine out of the sack and pulled back the slide and looked at the
