her ears filling with the sounds of seagulls that turned in circles above the sugarcane.
'Where's Callie?' the taller of the two officers said.
'She gone to Morgan City with a colored man. She ain't coming back,' Mae answered.
'Would you step out here, please? Don't be afraid,' the officer said.
'People call me Mae Guillory. But my married name is Robicheaux,' she said.
'We know that, ma'am. You saw something we think you don't understand. We want to explain what happened there on the bayou,' he said.
She ran her tongue over her lips to speak, then said nothing, her desire to respect herself as great as her desire to live, her pulse so thunderous she thought a vein would burst in her throat.
'Ladrine Theriot tried to kill a constable. So the constable had to shoot him. It was the constable. You saw it, didn't you?' the officer said. Then he began to speak very slowly, his eyes lingering on hers with each word, waiting for the moment of assent that had not come. 'The constable shot Ladrine Theriot. That's what you saw. There was no mistake about what happened… Okay?'
She stepped off the tiny gallery into the yard, as though she were in a dream, not making conscious choices now, stepping into the green light that seemed to radiate out of the fields into the sky.
'Ladrine was a good man. He wasn't like his brother, no. He done right by people. Y'all killed him,' she said.
'Yeah. Because we had to… Isn't that right?' he said.
'My name's Mae Robicheaux. My boy fought in Vietnam. My husband was Big Aldous Robicheaux. Nobody in the oil field mess with Big Aldous.'
'We'll take you to where Ladrine died and explain how it happened. Get in the car, ma'am.'
'I know what y'all gonna do. I ain't afraid of y'all no more. My boy gonna find you. You gonna see, you. You gonna run and hide when you see my boy.'
'You are one ignorant bitch, aren't you?' the officer said, and knocked her to the ground.
He unbuttoned his raincoat and exposed his holstered gun. He placed his fists on his hips, his jaw flexing, his raincoat flapping in the wind. Then a decision worked its way into his eyes, and he exhaled air through his nose, like a man resigning himself to a world that he both disdained and served.
'Help me with this,' he said to the other officer. Mae's face was white and round when the two officers leaned out of the greenness of the evening, out of the creaking and wheeling of land-blown gulls, and fitted their hands on her with the mercy of giant crabs.
22
THE NEXT DAY the Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Department faxed me all their file material on the shooting death of Ladrine Theriot in 1967. The crime scene report was filled with misspellings and elliptical sentences but gave the shooter's name as one Bobby Cale, a part-time constable, barroom bouncer, and collector for a finance agency.
I called the sheriff in Lafourche.
'The shooter wasn't the constable,' I said.
'Says who?' he replied.
'A woman by the name of Mae Guillory saw it happen.'
'You wired up about something?'
When I didn't reply, he said, 'Look, I read that file. The constable tried to serve a bench warrant on Ladrine Theriot and Theriot pulled a gun. Why would the constable take responsibility for a shooting he didn't do?'
'Because he was told to. Two other cops were there. They put a throw-down on the body.'
'I couldn't tell you. I was ten years old when all this happened. You guys running short of open cases in New Iberia?'
'Where's Bobby Cale now?'
'If you're up to it, I'll give you directions to his place. Or you can get them from the Department of Health and Hospitals.'
'What do you mean 'if I'm up to it'?'
'Maybe his sins are what got a fence post kicked up his ass. Check it out. Ask yourself if you'd like to trade places with him,' the Lafourche Parish sheriff said.
I DROVE MY PICKUP truck to Morgan City, then down deep into Terrebonne Parish, toward the Gulf, almost to Point au Fer. The sky was gray and roiling with clouds and I could smell salt spray on the wind. I went down a dirt road full of sinkholes, between thickly canopied woods that were hung with air vines, dotted with palmettos, and drifting with gray leaves. The road ended at a sunless, tin-roofed cypress cabin that was streaked black with rainwater. A man sat in a chair on the front porch, his stomach popping out of his shirt like a crushed white cake, a guitar laid flat on his lap.
When I got out of the truck, the man leaned forward and picked up a straw hat from the porch swing and fitted it low on his head. In the shade his skin had the bloodless discoloration that an albino's might if he bathed in blue ink. He wore steel picks on the fingers of his right hand and the sawed-off, machine-buffed neck of a glass bottle on the index finger of his left. He slid the bottle neck up and down the strings of the guitar and sang, 'I'm going where the water tastes like cherry wine, 'cause the Georgia water tastes like turpentine.'
A mulatto or Indian woman who was shaped like a duck, with Hottentot buttocks and elephantine legs, was hanging wash in back. She turned and looked at me with the flat stare of a frying pan, then spit in the weeds and walked heavily to the privy and went inside and closed the door behind her by fitting a hand through a hole in a board.
'She ain't rude. She's just blind. Preacher tole me once everybody's got somebody,' the man on the porch said. He picked up a burning cigarette from the porch railing and raised it to his mouth. His hand was withered, the fingers crimped together like the dried paw of an animal.
'You Bobby Cale?' I asked.
He pushed his hat up on his forehead and lifted his face, turning it at a slight angle, as though to feel the breeze.
'I look like I might be somebody else?' he said.
'No, sir.'
'I was in Carville fifteen years. That was back in the days when people like me was walled off from the rest of y'all. I run off and lived in Nevada. Wandered in the desert and ate grasshoppers and didn't take my meds and convinced myself I was John the Baptizer come back in modern times. I scared the hell out of people who turned up the wrong dirt road.'
I started to open my badge.
'I know who you are. I know why you're here, too. It won't do you no good,' he said.
'You didn't shoot Ladrine Theriot,' I said.
'The paperwork says otherwise.'
'The two other cops there had on uniforms. They wore black slickers. They made you take their heat because they were from another parish and out of their jurisdiction.'
He threw his cigarette out into the yard and looked into space. His nose was eaten away, the skin of his face drawn back on the bone, the cheeks creased with lines like whiskers on a cat.
'You know a whole lot for a man wasn't there,' he said.
'There was a witness. She used the name Mae Guillory,' I said.
'Everybody's got at least one night in his life that he wants to carry on a shovel to a deep hole in a woods and bury under a ton of dirt. Then for good measure burn the woods down on top of it. I wish I was a drunkard and could just get up and say I probably dreamed it all. I don't remember no witness.'
'The two other cops killed her. Except a hooker saw them do it.'
His eyes held on me for a long time. They were green, uncomplicated, and still seemed to belong inside the round, redneck face of an overweight constable from thirty years ago.
