'I've got to get out of this situation. I need some help. I don't know anybody else to ask.'
After I hung up I drove over to Tee Neg's pool hall on Main Street. The interior had changed little since the 1940s.
A long mahogany bar with a brass rail and cuspidors ran the length of the room, and on it were gallon jars of cracklings (which are called graton in southern Louisiana), hard-boiled eggs, and pickled hogs' feet. Wood-bladed fans hun from the ceiling; green sawdust was scattered on the floor; and the pool tables were lighted by tin-shaded lamps. In the back, under the blackboards that gave ball scores from all around the country, old men played dominoes and bourse at the felt tables, and a black man in a porter's apron shined shoes on a scrolled-iron elevated stand. The air was thick and close with the smell of gumbo, boiled crawfish, draft beer, whiskey, dirty-rice dressing, chewing tobacco, cigarette smoke, and talcum from the pool tables. During football season illegal betting cards littered the mahogany bar and the floor, and on Saturday night, after all the scores were in, Tee Neg (which means 'Little Negro' in Cajun French) put oilcloth over the pool tables and served free robin gumbo and dirty rice.
I saw Weldon shooting pool by himself at a table in back.
He wore a pair of work boots, clean khakis, and a denim shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his tan biceps.
He rifled the nine ball into the side pocket.
'You shouldn't ever hit a side-pocket shot hard,' I said.
'Scared money never wins,' he said, sat at a table with his cue balanced against his thigh, knocked back a jigger of neat whiskey, and chased it with draft beer. He wiped at the corner of his mouth with his wrist. 'You want a beer or a cold drink or something?'
'No thanks. What can I do to help you, Weldon?'
He scratched at his brow.
'I want to give it up, but I don't want to do any time,' he said.
'Not many people do.'
'What I mean is, I can't do time. I've got a problem with tight places. Like if I get in one, I hear popsickle sticks snapping inside my head.'
He motioned his empty jigger at the bar.
'Maybe your fears are getting ahead of you,' I said.
'You don't understand. I had some trouble over there.'
'here?'
'In Laos.' He waited until the barman had brought him another shot and a fresh draft chaser. He tipped the whiskey into the beer and watched it balloon in a brown cloud off the bottom of the glass. 'We operated a kind of flying taxi service for some of the local warlords. We were also transporting some of their home-grown organic. Eventually it got processed into heroin in Hong Kong. For all I know, GIs in Saigon ended up shooting it in their arms. Not too good, huh?'
'Go on.'
'I got sick of it. On one trip I told this colonel, this halfChinese character named Liu, that I wasn't going to load his dope. I pushed him off the plane and took off down the runway. Big mistake. They shot the shit out of us, killed my copilot and two of my kickers. I got out of the wreck with another guy, and we ran through jungle for two hours. Then the other guy, this Vietnamese kid, said he was going to head for a village on the border. I told him I thought NVA were there, but he took off anyway. I never found out what happened to him, but Liu's lice heads caught me an hour later. They marched me on a rope for three days to a camp in the mountains, and I spent the next eighty-three days in a bamboo cage just big enough to crawl around in.
'I lived in my own stink, I ate rice with worms in it, and I wedged my head through the bamboo to lick rainwater out of the mud. At night the lice heads would get drunk — on hot beer and break the bottles against my cage. Then one morning I smelled this funny odor. It was blowing in the smoke from the campfire. It smelled like burned hair or cowhide then, when the wind flattened out the smoke, I saw a dozen human heads on pikes around the fire. I don't want to tell you what their faces looked like.
'Liu's buttholes probably wanted to ransom me, but at the same time they were afraid of our guys because they'd shot up the plane and killed three of my crew. So I figured eventually they'd get tired of busting bottles on my cage and pissing on me through the bars, and my head was going to be curing in the smoke with those others.
'I used to wake with fear in the morning that was unbelievable. I'd pray at night that I would die in my sleep. Then one day some other guys came into the camp, guys who knew I was money on the hoof and who wanted to make some toady points with the CIA. They bought me for a case of Budweiser and six cartons of cigarettes.'
He drank from his boilermaker, his eyes glazed faintly with shame.
'It's a funny experience to have,' he said. 'It makes you wonder about your worth.'
'Cut it loose, Weldon.'
'What?'
'We already paid our dues. Why run the same old tape over and over again?'
'I volunteered for Air America. I can't blame that on somebody else.'
'You didn't volunteer to be a heroin mule.'
He pulled the cellophane off a cigar and rubbed it between his fingers until it was a small ball.
'If you were going to cut a deal with the feds, who would you go to?'
'It depends on what you did.'
'We're talking about guns and dope.'
'You mean you got into it again?'
'Yes and no.'
I looked at him quietly. He made a series of wet rings on the table with his jigger.
'The guns and the dope didn't get delivered, but I burned some guys for one hundred and eighty grand,' he said.
His eyes flicked away from mine.
'This is straight? You actually ripped off some traffickers for that kind of money?' I said.
'Yeah, I guess it was sort of a first for them.'
'One of the guys you burned is right there in the city jail, isn't he?'
'Maybe, maybe not.'
'There's no maybe about it. My advice is you should talk to the DEA or to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I know a pretty good agent in Lafayette.'
'That's about all you can suggest, huh? No magic answers.'
'You won't confide in me. I'm at a loss to help you.'
'If I did confide in you, I'd probably be under arrest.'
He smiled wanly and started to drink from his glass, then set it back down.
'I'll give what you said some thought, Dave.'
'No, I doubt that, Weldon. You'll go your own way until you beat your head into jelly.'
'I wish I always knew what was going on inside other people. It'd be a great asset in the oil business.'
Before I drove back to the office I walked across the drawbridge over the Teche and watched the current running through the pilings and the backs of the garfish breaking the water in the sunlight. The air was hot, the sky bright with haze, the humidity so intense that my eyes burned with salt and my skin felt like insects were crawling on it. Even under the trees by the old brick firehouse in the park, the air felt close and moist, like steam rising off a stove.
Weldon had his problems, but I had mine, too. This case went far beyond Iberia Parish, and it appeared to involve people and power and politics of a kind that our small lawenforcement agencies were hardly adequate to deal with.
Once again, I felt like the outside world was having its way with us, that it had found something vulnerable or weak or perhaps even desirous in us that allowed the venal and the meretricious to leave us with less of ourselves, less of a way of life that had been as sweet in the mouth as peeled sug gills arcane, as poignant and heartbreaking in its passing as the words to 'La Johe Blonde' on Tee Neg's jukebox: Jolie blonde, gardez done c'est t'as fait.
Ta Was quit-te pour t'en aller, Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.
Jolie blonde, pretty girl, Flower of my heart I'll love you forever, My jolie blonde.
Still, Joey Gouza was in the city of New Iberia's custody, and if the prosecutor's office had its way he would
