Jolie Blon’s Bounce

After school hours we drove up the Teche to the little town of Loreauville. The pecan trees were in new leaf; a priest was watering his flowers in front of the Catholic church; kids were playing softball in a schoolyard. The moderate-size brick grocery that advertised itself as a supermarket, the saloon on the corner by the town's only traffic signal, the humped dark green shapes of the oaks along the bayou were out of a Norman Rockwell world of years ago. Down the main thoroughfare was an independently owned drive-in hamburger joint, the parking lot sprinkled with teenagers.

In their midst was Amanda's boyfriend, whose name was Roland Chatlin, in starched khakis and a green and white Tulane T-shirt, bouncing a golf ball off the side of the building. When Helen and I approached him, he was drinking a soda pop and talking to a friend and, amazingly, seemed not to recognize us. All the kids in the parking lot were white.

'Remember us?' I asked.

'Oh, yeah, you,' he said, chewing gum, his eyes lighting now.

'Step over here, please,' I said.

'Sure,' he replied, blowing out his breath, slipping his hands into his pockets.

'Your inability to help us is causing us all kinds of problems, Roland. You tell us two black guys in ski masks murdered Amanda, but that's as far as we get,' I said.

'Sir?' he said.

'You've got no idea who they were. You can't tell us what their voices sounded like. You can't even tell us how tall they were. I've got the feeling maybe you don't want us to catch them,' I said.

'Look at us, not at the ground,' Helen said. 'Your hands were tied with nothing but your shirt. You could have gotten loose if you'd wanted to, couldn't you? But you were too scared. Maybe you even begged. Maybe you told these guys their identity was safe. When people fear for their lives, they do all kinds of things they're ashamed of later, Roland. But it was pretty hard to just lie there and listen to them rape your girl, wasn't it?' I said.

'Maybe it's time to get it off your chest, kid,' Helen said.

'Have you ever seen Tee Bobby Hulin play in a local club?' I asked.

'Yes, sir. I mean, I don't remember.'

He had dark hair and light skin, arms without muscular definition, narrow hips, and a feminine mouth. Involuntarily he felt for a religious medal through the cloth of his shirt.

'Out at the crime scene you called them niggers. You don't care for black people, Roland?' I said.

'I was mad when I said that.'

'I don't blame you. Which guy shot her?' I said.

'I don't know. I didn't think they were gonna-'

'They weren't gonna what?' I said.

'Nothing. You got me mixed up. That's why you're here. My daddy says I don't have to talk to y'all anymore.'

Then his face darkened, as though the politeness toward adults that was mandatory in his world had been replaced by other instincts.

'They shove people around at school. They take the little kids' lunch money. They carry guns in their cars. Why don't you go after them?' he said vaguely, sweeping his hand at the air.

'Hear this, Roland,' Helen said. 'If you know who these guys are and you're lying to us, I'm going to find the shotgun that killed Amanda and jam it up your ass and pull the trigger myself. Tell that to your old man.'

Two nights later the air was cool and dry, and the cypress trees in the swamp bloomed with heat lightning. Clete came into the bait shop as I was closing up. I smelled him before I saw him.

He helped himself to a water glass off a wall shelf and sat down heavily at the counter and unscrewed the cap from a pint bottle of bourbon wrapped in a brown-paper sack. A noxious fog, an odor of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and beer sweat, begin to fill the shop like a living presence. Clete poured four fingers of whiskey in his glass and drank it slowly, watching me turn the electric fan on an overhead shelf in his direction. The lid of his left eye was swollen, a bruise like a small blue mouse in the crow's-feet at the corner.

'You got a reason for trying to blow me out the door?' he asked.

'Nope. How you doin', Cletus?'

'Joe Zeroski is back in town. At my motor court with Zerelda Calucci and half the greaseballs in New Orleans. Last night I'm trying to take a nap and this collection of shitbags are cooking sausages on a hibachi ten feet from my window and playing a Tony Bennett tape loud enough to be heard in Palermo. So I make the mistake of talking to them like they're human beings, asking them politely to dial it down a few notches so I can get some sleep.

'What do I get? Nothing, like I'm not there. I go, 'Look, just face your stereo the other way, okay?' One guy says, 'Hey, Purcel, I got your ten-inch frank right here. You want it with mustard?' and grabs his flopper while the other greaseballs laugh.

'So I go back inside, take a shower, put on fresh clothes, comb my hair, give these assholes every chance to go somewhere else. When I go outside, they're still there, except now Zerelda Calucci is sitting at the picnic table with them, the tops of her ta-tas sticking out like beach balls, her shorts rolled up so tight they almost split when she crosses her legs.

'So I walk over and ask her out for a late dinner, figuring that ought to put the lasagna through the fan if nothing else won't. She sits there, scraping the label off a beer bottle with her thumbnail, rolling it into little balls, then goes, 'I don't mind.'

'I try to use the wet dream of the Mafia to provoke these guys, and instead she agrees to have dinner with me. The greaseballs know better than to say dick about it, either. I put on my sports coat and back my convertible around to pick her up. Except here comes Perry LaSalle in his Gazelle. Zerelda gets this look on her face like she's creaming in her pants and I'm back in my room, watching TV, dinner date canceled, LaSalle and Zerelda over in her room, blinds drawn.'

He finished his glass of whiskey and opened a can of beer and broke a raw egg in the glass and poured the beer on top of it. He took a drink and stared out the window into the darkness, an unfocused light in his eyes.

'So good riddance,' I said.

'I did some checking on that dude. You know why he didn't finish at the Jesuit seminary? He couldn't keep it in his pants.'

'What are you talking about, Clete?'

'He belongs to Sexaholics Anonymous. The guy's a gash hound. Why is it everybody in this town has some kind of problem? I don't know why I keep coming over here.'

I turned off the outside floodlamps, and the bayou went dark and the tops of the cypresses were green and ruffling in the moonlight.

'Where'd you get die mouse?' I asked.

'I got up at four in the morning and walked into a door,' he replied.

At the office the next morning I glanced at the state news section of the Times Picayune and saw an Associated Press article describing the homicide of a waitress outside Franklin, Louisiana. Her name was Ruby Gravano, a member of that group of marginal miscreants I had known for years in New Orleans, what I called the walking wounded, whose criminal deeds became a kind of incremental suicide, as though they were doing penance for sins committed in a previous incarnation. The body had been found by a roadside, not far from the banks of Bayou Teche, the clothes torn off her back. The article described her injuries as massive, which usually meant the details could not be published in a family newspaper.

I started out my door toward Helen's office and almost collided into Clete Purcel. He was dressed in a tan suit and a powder-blue shirt with a rolled collar and a tie with a horse painted on it and shined cordovan loafers. His cheeks were shiny with aftershave lotion.

'Have a cup of coffee with me. I'm a little wired right now,' he said.

'Got a lot of work to do, Cletus,' I said.

'Fill me in on this Shanahan broad.'