CHAPTER 8
In the morning I ran the name of Marvin Oates, the Bible salesman, through the NCIC computer.
But the sheet I got back contained no surprises. Besides his arrest on a bad check charge, he had been picked up for nothing more serious than petty theft and failure to appear, panhandling in New Orleans, and causing a disturbance at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles. "
"You know a guy named Marvin Oates?" I asked Helen.
She was gazing out my office window, her hands in her back pockets.
"His mother was a drunk who used to drift in and out of town?" she asked.
"I'm not sure."
"She was from Mississippi or Alabama. They used to live by the train tracks. What about him?"
"He was trying to sell door-to-door out by my house. I didn't like the way he looked at Alafair."
"Get used to it."
"Pardon?"
"Your daughter's beautiful. What do you expect?"
She laughed to herself as she walked out the door.
I waited five minutes, then went down the corridor to her office.
"You ever hear of an overseer on Poinciana Island by the name of Legion?" I asked.
"No. Who is he?" she replied.
"This character Oates says 'Legion' is the name of a demon in the New Testament. Oates believes people of color are descended from the lost tribe of Ham. Think Oates might be unusual in any way?"
She brushed at her nose with a Kleenex and went back to reading an open file on her desk.
"Take a ride with me down to Baldwin," I said.
"What for?"
"I thought I might check out a guy from my boyhood."
We drove south on the four-lane, through sugarcane acreage that had been created out of the alluvial flood-plain of Bayou Teche. The sky was sealed with clouds that had the bright sheen of silk or steam but offered no rain, and I could see cracks in the baked rows of the cane fields and dust devils spinning across the road and breaking apart on the asphalt. The air smelled like salt and the odor a streetcar gives off when it scotches across an electrical connection. Up ahead was the gray outline of an abandoned sugar mill.
When we are injured emotionally or systematically humiliated or made to feel base about ourselves in our youth, we are seldom given the opportunity later to confront our persecutors on equal terms and to show them up for the cowards they are. So we often create a surrogate scenario in which the vices of our tormentors, the fears that fed their cruelty, the self-loathing that drove them to hurt the innocent, eventually consume them and make them worthy of pity and in effect drive them from our lives.
But sometimes the dark fate that should have been theirs just does not shake properly out of the box.
Helen pulled off the road and stopped at a small grocery store in front of a cluster of shacks. In the distance the rectangular tin outline of the sugar mill was silhouetted against the sky. On the side of the grocery was a crude porte cochere and under it sat a thin, black-haired man in a blood-smeared butcher's apron, peeling potatoes and onions into a stainless-steel cauldron that was boiling on a grated butane burner that rested on the ground. Close by, a gunnysack crackling with live crawfish lay on top of a wood worktable.
I opened my badge holder. "I was looking for a fellow by the name of Legion," I said.
"Legion Guidry?" the man said. He dropped the peeled onions and potatoes into the cauldron and dumped a bowl of artichokes and husked yellow corn on top of them.
"I only know him by the name Legion," I said.
"He don't come in here," the man said.
"Where's he live?" I asked.
The man shook his head and didn't reply. He turned his back on me and began cutting open a box of seasoning.
"Sir, I asked you a question," I said.
"He works at the casino. Go ax up there. He don't come in here," the man replied. He raised his finger for added emphasis.
Helen and I drove to the casino on the Indian reservation, a garish obscenity of a building that had been constructed in what was once a rural Indian slum overgrown with persimmons and gum trees and swamp maples. Now the poor whites and blacks, the trusting and the naive, the working-class pensioners and the welfare recipients and those who signed their names with an X, crowded the gaming tables inside an air-conditioned, hermetically sealed, sunless environment, where cigarette smoke clung to the skin like damp cellophane. Collectively they managed to feed enormous sums of money into an apparatus that funneled most of it to Las Vegas and Chicago, all with the blessing of the State of Louisiana and the United States government.
A St. Alary Parish deputy sheriff, directing traffic in the casino parking lot, told us where we could find the man named Legion. The man who had once lived in my childhood dreams was down the road, under a picnic shelter, eating a barbecue sandwich on top of a paper towel that he had spread neatly on the table to catch his crumbs. He wore a starched gray uniform, with dark blue flaps on the pockets, and a polished brass name tag on his shirt, with his title, Head of Security, under the engraved letters of his name. His hair was still black, with white streaks in it, his face creased vertically with furrows like those in dried fruit. A crude caricature of a naked woman was tattooed with blue ink on the underside of each of his forearms. I looked at him a long time without speaking.
"Can I hep you wit' somet'ing?" he said.
"You were an overseer at Poinciana Island?" I asked.
He folded the paper towel around his sandwich and pitched it toward the trash barrel. It struck the side of the barrel and fell apart on the ground.
"Who want to know?" he asked.
I opened my badge holder in my palm.
"I used to be. A long time ago," he said.
"You rape a black woman by the name of Ladice Hulin?" I asked.
He put an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth and lit it and exhaled the smoke across the tops of his cupped fingers. Then he removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue and looked at it.
"That bitch still spreadin' them rumor, huh?" he said.
"Let me run something else by you, Legion. That's the name you go by, right? Legion? No first name, no last name?" I said.
"I know you?" he asked.
"Yeah, you do. My brother and I walked up on you and some other white trash while y'all were copulating in an automobile. You opened a knife on me. I was twelve years old."
His eyes shifted on mine and stayed there. "You're a goddamn liar," he said.
"I see," I said. I looked at my feet and thought about the mindless animus in his stare, the arrogance and stupidity and insult in his words, the ignorance that he and his kind used like a weapon against their adversaries. I heard Helen shift her weight on the gravel. "What I wanted to run by you, Legion, is the fact there's no statute of limitations on a homicide. Nor on complicity in a homicide. You getting my drift on this?"
"No."
"Julian LaSalle's wife was locked in her room the night she burned to death. That's called negligent homicide. You removed the key from the deadbolt and inserted it on the inside of the door in order to protect Mr. Julian. Then you blackmailed him."
He stood up from the picnic table and put his pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
"You t’ink I care what some nigger done tole you?" He cleared his throat and spat a glob of phlegm two inches from my shoe. A trace of splatter, like strands of cobweb, clung to the cuff of my trouser leg.
"How old are you, sir?" I asked.
"Seventy-four."
"I'm going to stick it to you. For all the black women you molested and raped, for all the defenseless people you humiliated and degraded. That's a promise, partner." He lifted his chin and rubbed the whiskers on his throat, the cast in his green eyes as ancient and devoid of moral light as those in a prehistoric, scale-covered creature breaking from the egg.