I gazed out the window at the lengthening shadows. He studied my face.
'What's the matter, Dave?'
'It's nothing.'
'You bothered because we want to bounce a baseball buddy out of town?'
'No, not really.'
'Did you ever hear that story about what he did to Didi Giacano's cousin? Supposedly he hung him from his colon by a meat hook.'
'I've heard that same story about a half-dozen wiseguys in Orleans and Jefferson parishes. It's an old N.O.P.D. heirloom.'
'Probably just bad press, huh?'
'I always tried to think of Julie as nine-tenths thespian,' I said.
'Yeah, and gorilla shit tastes like chocolate ice cream. Dave, you're a laugh a minute.'
Chapter 3
Julie Balboni looked just like his father, who had owned most of the slot and racehorse machines in Iberia Parish during the 1940s and, with an Assyrian family, had run the gambling and prostitution in the Underpass area of Lafayette. Julie was already huge, six and a half feet tall, when he was in the eleventh grade, thick across the hips and tapered at both ends like a fat banana, with tiny ankles and size-seven feet and a head as big as a buffalo's. A year later he filled out in serious proportions. That was also the year he was arrested for burglarizing a liquor store. His father walked him out into the woods at gunpoint and whipped the skin off his back with the nozzle end of a garden hose.
His hair grew on his head like black snakes, and because a physician had injured a nerve in his face when he was delivered, the corner of his mouth would sometimes droop involuntarily and give him a lewd or leering expression that repelled most girls. He farted in class, belched during the pledge of allegiance, combed his dandruff out on top of the desk, and addressed anyone he didn't like by gathering up his scrotum and telling them to bite. We walked around him in the halls and the locker room. His teachers were secretly relieved when his mother and father did not show up on parents' night.
His other nickname was Julie the Bone, although it wasn't used to his face, because he went regularly to Mabel White's Negro brothel in Crowley and the Negro cribs on Hopkins Avenue in New Iberia.
But Julie had two uncontested talents. He was both a great kick boxer and a great baseball catcher. His ankles twisted too easily for him to play football; he was too fat to run track; but with one flick of a thick thigh he could leave a kick-box opponent heaving blood, and behind the plate he could steal the ball out of the batter's swing or vacuum a wild pitch out of the dust and zip the ball to third base like a BB.
In my last time out as a high school pitcher, I was going into the bottom of the ninth against Abbeville with a shutout almost in my pocket. It was a soft, pink evening, with the smell of flowers and freshly cut grass in the air. Graduation was only three weeks away, and we all felt that we were painted with magic and that the spring season had been created as a song especially for us. Innocence, a lock on the future, the surge of victory in the loins, the confirmation of a girl's kiss among the dusky oak trees, like a strawberry bursting against the roof of the mouth, were all most assuredly our due.
We even felt an acceptance and camaraderie toward Baby Feet. Imminent graduation and the laurels of a winning season seemed to have melted away the differences in our backgrounds and experience.
Then their pitcher, a beanballer who used his elbows, knees, and spikes in a slide, hit a double and stole third base. Baby Feet called time and jogged out to the mound, sweat leaking out of his inverted cap. He rubbed up a new ball for me.
'Put it in the dirt. I'm gonna let that cocksucker have his chance,' he said.
'I don't know if that's smart, Feet,' I said.
'I've called a shutout for you so far, haven't I? Do what I tell you.'
On the next pitch I glanced at the runner, then fired low and outside, into the dirt. Baby Feet vacuumed it up, then spun around, throwing dust in the air like an elephant, and raced toward the backstop as though the ball had gotten past him.
The runner charged from third. Suddenly Baby Feet reappeared at the plate, the ball never having left his hand, his mask still on his face. The runner realized that he had stepped into it and he tried to bust up Baby Feet in the slide by throwing one spiked shoe up in Feet's face. Baby Feet caught the runner's spikes in his mask, tagged him across the head with the ball, then, when it was completely unnecessary at that point, razored his own spikes into the boy's ankle and twisted.
The players on the field, the coaches, the people in the stands, stared numbly at home plate. Baby Feet calmly scraped his spikes clean in the sand, then knelt and tightened the strap on a shin guard, his face cool and detached as he squinted up at the flag snapping on a metal pole behind the backstop.
It wasn't hard to find him at the Holiday Inn. He and his entourage were the only people in and around the swimming pool. Their tanned bodies glistened as though they had rubbed them with melted butter. They wore wraparound sunglasses that were as black as a blind man's, reclined luxuriously on deck chairs, their genitalia sculpted against their bikinis, or floated on rubber mattresses, tropical drinks in holders at their sides, a glaze of suntan oil emanating from the points of their fingers and toes.
A woman came out the sliding door of a room with her two children, walked them to the wading pool, then obviously realized the nature of the company she was keeping; she looked around distractedly, as though she heard invisible birds cawing at her, and returned quickly to her room with her children's hands firmly in hers.
Julie the Bone hadn't changed a great deal since I had last seen him seven years ago in New Orleans. His eyes, which were like black marbles, were set a little more deeply in his face; his wild tangle of hair was flecked in places with gray; but his barrel chest and his washtub of a stomach still seemed to have the tone and texture of whale hide. When you looked at the ridges of scar tissue under the hair on his shoulders and back where his father had beaten him, at the nests of tendons and veins in his neck, and the white protrusion of knuckles in his huge hands, you had the feeling that nothing short of a wrecking ball, swung by a cable from a great height, could adequately deal with this man if he should choose to destroy everything in his immediate environment.
He raised himself on one elbow from his reclining chair, pushed his sunglasses up on his hair, and squinted through the haze at me as I approached him. Two of his men sat next to him at a glass table under an umbrella, playing cards with a woman with bleached hair and skin that was so tan it looked like folds of soft leather. Both men put down their cards and got to their feet, and one of them, who looked as though he were hammered together from boilerplate, stepped directly into my path. His hair was orange and gray, flattened in damp curls on his head, and there were pachuco crosses tattooed on the backs of his hands. I opened my seersucker coat so he could see the badge clipped to my belt. But recognition was already working in his face.
'What's happening, Cholo?' I said.
'Hey, lieutenant, how you doin'?' he said, then turned to Baby Feet. 'Hey, Julie, it's Lieutenant Robicheaux. From the First District in New Orleans. You remember him when-'
'Yeah, I know who it is, Cholo,' Baby Feet said, smiling and nodding at me. 'What you up to, Dave? Somebody knock a pop fly over the swimming-pool wall?'
'I was just in the neighborhood. I heard you were back in town for a short visit.'
'No kidding?'
'That's a fact.'
'You were probably in the barbershop and somebody said, 'The Bone's in town,' and you thought, 'Boy, that's great news. I'll just go say hello to ole Feet.' '
'You're a famous man, Julie. Word gets around.'
'And I'm just here for a short visit, right?'
'Yeah, that's the word.'
His eyes moved up and down my body. He smiled to himself and took a sip from a tall glass wrapped in a napkin, with shaved ice, fruit, and a tiny paper umbrella in it.
