Chapter One
Growing up during the 1940s in New Iberia, downon the Gulf Coast, I never doubted how the worldworked. At dawn the antebellum homes along EastMain loomed out of the mists, their columnedporches and garden walkways and second-storyverandas soaked with dew, the chimneys and slateroofs softly molded by the canopy of live oaksthat arched over the entire street.
The stacks of sunken U.S. Navy ships laysideways in Pearl Harbor and service stars hunginside front windows all over New Iberia. But onEast Main, in the false dawn, the air was heavywith the smell of night-blooming flowers andlichen on damp stone and the fecund odor ofBayou Teche, and even though a gold service starmay have hung in a window of a grand mansion,indicating the death of a serviceman in thefamily, the year could have been mistaken for1861 rather than 1942.
Even when the sun broke above the horizon andthe ice wagons and the milk delivery came downthe street on iron-rimmed wheels and the Negrohelp began reporting for work at theiremployers' back doors, the light was neverharsh, never superheated or smelling of tarroads and dust as it was in other neighborhoods.Instead it filtered through Spanish moss andbamboo and philodendron that dripped with beadsof moisture as big as marbles, so that even inthe midst of summer the morning came to thosewho lived here with a blue softness that dailytold them the earth was a grand place, itsdesign vouchsafed in heaven and not to bequestioned.
Down the street was the old Frederic Hotel, alovely pink building with marble columns andpotted palms inside, a ballroom, an elevatorthat looked like a brass birdcage, and a saloonwith wood-bladed fans and an elevated,scrolled-iron shoeshine chair and a long,hand-carved mahogany bar. Amid the palm frondsand the blue and gray swirls of color in themarble columns were the slot and racehorsemachines, ringing with light, their dullpewterlike coin trays offering silent promise tothe glad at heart.
Farther down Main were Hopkins and RailroadAvenues, like ancillary conduits into part ofthe town's history and geography that people didnot talk about publicly. When I went to theicehouse on Saturday afternoons with my father,I would look furtively down Railroad at the rowsof paintless cribs on each side of the traintracks and at the blowsy women who sat on thestoops, hung over, their knees apart under theirloose cotton dresses, perhaps dipping beer outof a bucket two Negro boys carried on a broomhandle from Hattie Fontenot's bar.
I came to learn early on that no venal ormeretricious enterprise existed without acommunity's consent. I thought I understood thenature of evil. I learned at age twelve I didnot.
My half brother, who was fifteen months youngerthan I, was named Jimmie Robicheaux. His motherwas a prostitute in Abbeville, but he and I wereraised together, largely by our father, known asBig Aldous, who was a trapper and commercialfisherman and offshore derrick man. As childrenJimmie and I were inseparable. On summerevenings we used to go to the lighted ball gamesat City Park and slip into the serving lines atbarbecues and crab boils at the open-airpavilions. Our larceny was of an innocent kind,I suppose, and we were quite proud of ourselveswhen we thought we had outsmarted the adultworld.
On a hot August night, with lightning ripplingthrough the thunderheads over the Gulf ofMexico, Jimmie and I were walking through acluster of oak trees on the edge of the parkwhen we saw an old Ford automobile with twocouples inside, one in the front seat, one inthe back. We heard a woman moan, then her voicemount in volume and intensity. We staredopenmouthed as we saw the woman's top half archbackward, her naked breasts lit by the glow froma picnic pavilion, her mouth wide with orgasm.
We started to change direction, but the womanwas laughing now, her face sweaty and bright atthe open window.
"Hey, boy, you know what we been doin'? It makemy pussy feel so good. Hey, come here, you. Webeen fuckin', boy," she said.
It should have been over, a bad encounter withwhite trash, probably drunk, caught in barnyardcopulation. But the real moment was justbeginning. The man behind the steering wheel lita cigarette, his face flaring like paste in theflame, then stepped out on the gravel. Therewere tattoos, like dark blue smears, inside hisforearms. He used two fingers to lift the bladeout of a pocketknife.
"You like to look t'rew people's windows?" heasked.
"No, sir," I said.
"They're just kids, Legion," the woman in backsaid, putting on her shirt.
"Maybe that's what they gonna always be," theman said.
I had thought his words were intended simply tofrighten us. But I could see his face clearlynow, the hair combed back like black pitch, thenarrow white face with vertical lines in it, theeyes that could look upon a child as the sourceof his rage against the universe.
Then Jimmie and I were running in the darkness,our hearts pounding, forever changed by theknowledge that the world contains pockets ofevil that are as dark as the inside of a leatherbag.
Because my father was out of town, we ran allthe way to the icehouse on Railroad Avenue,behind which was the lit and neatly tended houseof Ciro Shanahan, the only man my father everspoke of with total admiration and trust.
Later in life I would learn why my father hadsuch great respect for his friend. Ciro Shanahanwas one of those rare individuals who wouldsuffer in silence and let the world do himsevere injury in order to protect those whom heloved.
On a spring night in 1931, Ciro and my fathercut their boat engines south of Point Au Fer andstared at the black-green outline of theLouisiana coast in the moonlight. The waves werecapping, the wind blowing hard, puffing andsnapping the tarp that was stretched over thecases of Mexican whiskey and Cuban rum that myfather and Ciro had off-loaded from a trawlerten miles out. My father looked through hisfield glasses and watched two searchlightssweeping the tops of the waves to the south.Then he rested the glasses on top of the smallpilothouse that was built out of raw pine on thestern of the boat and wiped the salt spray offhis face with his sleeve and studied thecoastline. The running lights of three vesselspitched in the swells between himself and thesafety of the shore.
"Moon's up. I done tole you, bad night to doit," he said.
"We done it before. We still here, ain't we?"Ciro said.
"Them boats off the bow? That's state men,Ciro," my father said.
"We don't know that," Ciro said.
"We can go east. Hide the load at Grand Chenierand come back for it later. You listen, you.Don't nobody make a living in jail," my fathersaid.
Ciro was short, built like a dockworker, withred hair and green eyes and a small, down-hookedIrish mouth. He wore a canvas coat and a fedorathat was tied onto his head with a scarf. It wasunseasonably cold and his face was windburnedand knotted with thought inside his scarf.
"The man got his trucks up there, Aldous. Ipromised we was coming in tonight. Ain't rightto leave them people waiting," he said.
"Sitting in an empty truck ain't gonna putnobody in Angola," my father said.
Ciro's eyes drifted off from my father's andlooked out at the southern horizon.
"It don't matter now. Here come the Coast Guard.Hang on," he said.
The boat Ciro and my father owned together waslong and narrow, like a World War I torpedovessel, and had been built to service offshoredrilling rigs, with no wasted space on board.The pilothouse sat like a matchbox on the stern,and even when the deck was stacked with drillpipe the big Chrysler engines could powerthrough twelve-foot seas. When Ciro pushed thethrottle forward, the screws scoured a troughacross the swell and the bow arched out of thewater and burst a wave into a horsetail sprayacross the moon.
But the searchlights on the Coast Guard cutterwere unrelenting. They dissected my father'sboat, burned red circles into his eyes, turnedthe waves a sandy green and robbed them of alltheir mystery, illuminating the bait fish andstingrays that toppled out of the crests. Theboat's hull pounded across the water, the liquorbottles shaking violently under the tarp, thesearchlights spearing through the pilothousewindows far out into the darkness. All the whilethe moored boats that lay between my father andthe safety of the coastline waited, their cabinwindows glowing now, their engines silent.
My father leaned close to Ciro's ear. "You goingright into them agents," he said.
"Mr. Julian taken care of them people," Cirosaid.
"Mr. Julian taken care of Mr. Julian," my fathersaid.
"I don't want to hear it, Aldous."
Suddenly the boats of the state liquor agentscame to life, lurching out over the waves, theirown searchlights now vectoring Ciro and myfather. Ciro swung the wheel hard to starboard,veering around a sandbar, moving over shallowwater, the bow hammering against the outgoingtide.
Up ahead was the mouth of the Atchafalaya River.My father watched the coastline draw nearer, themoss straightening on the dead cypress trunks,the flooded willows and gum trees and sawgrassdenting and swaying in the wind. The tarp on thecases of whiskey and rum tore loose and flappedback against the pilothouse, blocking any viewout the front window. My father cut the otherropes on the tarp and peeled it off the stackedcases of liquor and heaved it over the gunnel.When he looked at the shore again, he saw aseries of sandbars ridging out of the bay likethe backs of misplaced whales.
"Oh, Ciro, what you gone and did?" he said.
The boat rocketed between two sandbars, just assomeone began firing an automatic weapon inshort bursts from one of the state boats.Whiskey and rum and broken glass fountained inthe air, then a tracer round landed on the decklike a phosphorus match and a huge handkerchiefof flame enveloped the pilothouse.
But Ciro never cut the throttle, neverconsidered giving up. The glass in the windowsblackened and snapped in half; blue and yellowand red fire streamed off the deck into thewater.
"Head into them leafs!" my father yelled, andpointed at a cove whose surface was layered withdead leaves.
The boat's bow crashed into the trees, settingthe canopy aflame. Then my father and Ciro wereoverboard, splashing through the swamp, theirbodies marbled with firelight.
They ran and trudged and stumbled for two milesthrough chest-deep water, sloughs, air vines,and sand bogs that were black with insectsfeeding off cows or wild animals that hadsuffocated or starved in them.
Three hours later the two of them sat on a drylevee and watched the light go out of the skyand the moon fade into a thin white wafer.Ciro's left ankle was the size of a cantaloupe.
"I'm gonna get my car. Then we ain't touchingthe liquor bidness again," my father said.
"We ain't got a boat to touch it wit'," Cirosaid.
"T'ank you for telling me that. The next time Iwork for Mr. Julian LaSalle, go buy a gun andshoot me."
"He paid my daughter's hospital bills. You toohard on people, Aldous," Ciro said.
"He gonna pay for our boat?"
My father walked five miles to the grove ofswamp maples where he had parked his automobile.When he returned to pick Ciro up, the sky wasblue, the wildflowers blooming along the levee,the air bright with the smell of salt. He camearound a stand of willows and stared through thewindshield at the scene he had blundered into.
Three men in fedora hats and ill-fitting suits,two of them carrying Browning automatic rifles,were escorting Ciro in wrist manacles to theback of a caged wagon, one with iron plates inthe floor. The wagon was hooked to the back of astate truck and two Negroes who worked forJulian LaSalle were already sitting inside it.
My father shoved his transmission in reverse andbacked all the way down the levee until he hit aboard road that led through the swamp. As hesplashed through the flooded dips in the roadand mud splattered over his windshield, he triednot to think of Ciro limping in manacles towardthe jail wagon. He hit a deer, a doe, and sawher carom off the fender into a tree, her bodybroken. But my father did not slow down until hewas in Morgan City, where he entered the back ofa Negro cafi and bought a glass of whiskey thathe drank with both hands.
Then he put his big head down on his arms andfell asleep and dreamed of birds trapped insidethe foliage of burning trees.
Continues...
Excerpted from Jolie Blon's Bounceby James Lee Burke Copyright © 2002 by James Lee Burke. Excerpted by permission.
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