Purple Cane Road

'No, it's not. Not if you have faith.'

There was nothing for it. I said good-bye and walked outside into the world of wind and green lawns and sunlight on the skin and trees bending against the sky. It wasn't an experience I took for granted.

When I got home that evening Clete Purcel was leaning on the rail at the end of my dock, eating from a paper sack filled with hog cracklings, brushing the crumbs off his hands into the bayou. The sun was red behind the oaks and pecan trees in my yard, and the swamp was full of shadows and carrion birds drifting above the tops of the dead cypress.

I walked down the dock and leaned against the rail next to him.

'The moon's rising. You want to try some surface lures?' I said.

'I got a call from Zipper Clum today. He says a shit-load of heat just came down on his head and we're responsible for it.' He pulled a crackling out of the sack and inserted it in his mouth with his thumb and forefinger.

'Gable sicced some cops on him?'

'They rousted him and put him in a holding cell with a bunch of Aryan Brotherhood types. Zipper left a couple of teeth on the cement.'

'Tell him to give us something and we'll help him.'

'The guy's a bottom-feeder, Dave. His enemy's his mouth. He shoots it off, but he doesn't have anything to give up.'

'Life's rough.'

'Yeah, that's what I told him.' Clete tore the tab on a beer can and leaned his elbows on the handrail. The wind rippled the bamboo and willow trees along the bayou's edge. 'Zipper thinks he might get popped. I say good riddance, but I don't like to be the guy who set him up. Look, the guy's conwise. If he's wetting his pants, it's for a reason. Are you listening to me?'

'Yeah,' I said abstractly.

'You stuck a broom up Jim Gable's ass. He plans to be head of the state police. You remember that black family that got wiped out with shotguns about ten years back? Out by.the Desire Project? The husband was snitching off some narcs and they wasted him and his wife and kid. I heard Gable ordered the clip on the husband and it got out of control.'

'Let me tell Bootsie I'm home and we'll put a boat in the water,' I said.

Clete finished his cracklings and wadded up the sack and popped it with the flat of his hand into a trash barrel.

'I've always wondered what it was like to have a conversation with a wood post,' he said.

At that time the governor of the state was a six-foot-six populist by the name of Belmont Pugh. He had grown up in a family of sharecroppers in a small town on the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge, feckless, illiterate people who sold pecans off the tailgates of pickup trucks and pulled corn and picked cotton for a living and were generally referred to as poor white trash. But even though the Pughs had occupied a stratum below that of Negroes in their community, they had never been drawn to the Ku Klux Klan, nor were they known to have ever been resentful and mean-spirited toward people of color.

I had known Belmont through his cousin Dixie Lee Pugh at SLI when we were all students there during the late 1950s. Dixie Lee went on to become the most famous white blues singer of his generation, second only to Elvis as a rock 'n' roll star. Belmont learned to play piano in the same Negro juke joint that Dixie Lee did, but he got hit with a bolt of religion and turned to preaching as a career rather than music. He exorcised demons and handled snakes and drank poisons in front of electrified rural congregations all over Louisiana. He baptized Negroes and poor whites by immersion in bayous so thick with mud they could clog a sewer main, while cottonmouth moccasins and alligators with hooded eyes watched from among the lily pads.

But the donations he received from church people were small ones and he made his living by selling detergent, brooms, and scrub brushes out of his automobile. Occasionally he would stop by New Iberia and ask me to have lunch with him at Provost's Bar. He had attended college only one year, but he was proud of what he called his 'self-betterment program.' He read a library book thirty minutes before breakfast each morning and thirty minutes before going to bed. He learned one new word from a thesaurus each day, and to improve what he called his 'intellectual thinking skills,' he did his business math in his head. He performed one good deed a day for somebody else, and, in his words, 'as a man on his way up, one good deed for my own self.'

To save money he slept in his car, ate fifty-cent lunches in poolrooms, and sometimes bathed and shaved with a garden hose behind a church house fifteen minutes before his sermon.

Then Belmont discovered the carnival world of Louisiana politics, in the way a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realize that life held more promise than he had ever dreamed.

Newspeople called Belmont the most mesmerizing southern orator since Huey Long.

During his run for his second term as governor, the opposition spread rumors that Belmont was not only a drunk but that his mulatto mistress, whom he had stashed over in Vicksburg, had borne him twins. Time magazine said he was finished. Fundamentalist preachers, once his colleagues, denounced him from every pulpit in the state. Belmont appeared on a nationally telecast religious show and tried to rinse his sins in public. His contrition was a flop.

He held a July Fourth political rally and barbecue in Baton Rouge. The beer, the corn on the cob, the chicken, and the links were free, paid for, some said, by casino interests in Chicago and Las Vegas. Belmont climbed up onto a flatbed truck while his string band belted out 'The Orange Blossom Special.' He played harmonica into the microphone, his face reddening, sweat leaking out of his Stetson hat. When the song ended, the applause was no more than a ripple, while the audience waited to hear what Belmont Pugh had to say about his misdeeds.

He wore shined oxblood cowboy boots, a white suit, a blue shirt, and a flowered necktie. He was too tall to speak comfortably into the microphone, and he removed it from the stand and held it in his huge hand.

His face was solemn, his voice unctuous.

'I know y'all heered a lot of stories about your governor,' he said. 'I won't try to fool you. They grieve me deeply. I'm talking heartfelt pain.'

He paused, taking a breath. Then his knees bent slightly, as though he were gathering a huge volume of air in his lower parts.

'But I'm here to tell y'all right now… That anytime, anywhere, anybody…' He shook his head from side to side for emphasis, his voice wadding in his throat as though he were about to strangle on his own emotions. 'I mean anybody sets a trap for Belmont Pugh with whiskey and women…' His body was squatted now, his face breaking into a grin as wide as an ax blade. 'Then by God they'll catch him every time!' he shouted.

The audience went wild.

The price of domestic oil rose the same week and the economy bloomed. Belmont was reelected by a landslide…

Late the next afternoon I looked through the screen window of the bait shop and saw Belmont 's black Chrysler park by the boat ramp and Belmont walk down the dock toward the shop. His aides had started to follow him but he waved them off with his Stetson hat, then began slapping the hat against his thigh, as though pounding dust off his clothes. His brow was furrowed, his eyes deep in his face. He blew out his breath and punched and shaped the crown of his hat with his fist and fitted it back on his head just before entering the shop, his easy smile back in place.

Fifteen minutes later we were a mile down the bayou, the outboard pulled into a cove of cypress and willow trees. Belmont sat on the bow and flipped his lure toward the edge of the lily pads and retrieved it slowly through the dark water. He had a lean face and long teeth and pale eyes and graying hair that hung over his ears. His Stetson, which he wore virtually everywhere, was shapeless and stained with sweat and wrapped with a silver cord around the crown.

'You a student of Scripture, Dave?' he asked.

'Not really.'

'The Old Testament says Moses killed maybe two hundred people when he come down off Mount Sinai with