Our caravan of six cruisers and a jail van slowed and turned into the motor court drive, passing a cottage at the entrance that had been converted into a barbershop, complete with a striped barber pole. At the end of the drive I saw Clete's lavender Cadillac convertible parked across from Zerelda Calucci's cottage.
In a dry, brittle place inside my head I could hear a persistent humming sound, like an electrical short buzzing in the rain, the same sound I'd heard when I came home from Iberia General, wired to the eyes on painkillers.
Helen parked the cruiser and looked at me. My walking cane and two sawed-down Remington pump twelve-gauge shotguns were propped on the seat between us.
"You got something eating you?" she asked.
"This is a dumb move. You don't 'front Joe Zeroski."
"Maybe you should tell the skipper."
"I already did. Waste of time," I said.
"Try to enjoy it. Come on, Streak, time to rock 'n' roll, lock and load," she said, opening her door.
I got out on the driveway with my cane in one hand and a shotgun propped over my shoulder with the other. The sheriff, three plainclothes, and at least ten uniformed sheriffs deputies and a dozen city policemen were walking toward me. The wind had started to gust and leaves from the oaks spun in circles on the drive.
"You got a second, Skipper?" I said.
"What is it?" he asked, his eyes fixed on the cottages at the end of the row. A bullhorn hung from his right hand.
"Let me talk with Joe."
"No."
"That's it?"
"Get with the program, Dave."
My gaze went through the crowd of police officers and focused on a man with ash-blond hair in jeans and a sports coat and a golf shirt and a white straw hat coned up on the sides who was getting out of a cruiser, his face filled with expectation, like a kid entering an amusement park.
"What's that guy doing here?" I asked.
"Which guy?" the sheriff said.
"Marvin Oates. He's got a sheet. What's he doing here?"
"He's a criminal justice student. We're letting them ride with us. Dave, I think maybe you should go sit down, take it easy a while, maybe go up to the barbershop and get a haircut. We'll pick you up on the way out," the sheriff said.
His words hung in the silence like the sound of a slap. He and everyone around him walked past me toward the end of the motor court as though I were not there. I could hear dead leaves blowing in a vortex around me.
Helen looked over her shoulder, then walked back toward me. Her shirtsleeves were rolled in cuffs, her arms pumped. She squeezed my wrist.
"He just found out his wife has cancer. He's not himself, bwana," she said.
"This is a mistake."
"Forget I said anything."
She followed the others, her shotgun held in two hands, canted at an upward angle, her jeans tight on her rump, her handcuffs drawn through the back of her belt.
A moment later the sheriff was on the bullhorn, his voice echoing off the trees and cottages. But I couldn't hear his words. My ears were ringing now, my scalp cold in the wind. Joe Zeroski came out of his cottage, barechested, wearing sweatpants and a pair of snow-white tennis shoes, a piece of fried chicken in his hand, his face like that of a man who might have been working in front of a blast furnace.
"What is this?" he said.
"Tell all your people to get out here," the sheriff said.
"I don't got to tell them. They go where I go. I asked you what this is. We got the Mickey Mouse show here?" Joe said.
"You kidnapped a bunch of black men. They won't file charges on you, but I know what you did. Here's the search warrant if you care to look at it, Mr. Zeroski," the sheriff said.
"Wipe your ass with it," Joe replied.
Uniformed deputies and city police were now pulling Joe's people out of their cottages, lining them up, pushing them into search positions against trees and cars.
"Turn around and place your hands on that tree, please," the sheriff said to Joe.
Nests of veins rippled through Joe's chest and shoulders; rose petals of color bloomed in his throat. He threw his chicken bone into the bushes.
"Somebody beat my daughter so bad her face didn't look human. But you're out here, knocking around blue-collar guys ain't done you nothing. You know why that is? Because I bother you. You can't do nothing about the degenerates you got in this town, so you lean on people you think are easy. Hey, you're as old as I am. I look easy to you?" Joe said.
Joe saw two uniformed deputies shove a man with a leviathan stomach and melancholy face and jowls like a St. Bernard's over a car fender. "Hey, that's Frankie Dogs they're rousting," Joe said. "You know who Frankie Dogs is? Even in a shithole like this they got to know who that is. Hey, you get your fucking hands off me."
But two deputies already had Joe against the tree and were feeling inside his thighs.
Just then a city cop escorted Clete Purcel and Zerelda Calucci out of Zerelda's cottage. It was all moving fast now.
"What do you want to do with him?" the city cop asked, indicating Clete.
"He goes down with the rest," the sheriff replied.
Clete and Zerelda propped their arms against the side of Clete's Cadillac, waiting to be searched. Clete looked at me over his shoulder, then raised his eyebrows and looked away and watched a tugboat passing on the bayou, his sandy hair blowing in the wind.
Cletus, Cletus, I thought.
Joe Zeroski began to fight with the deputies who were shaking him down. A half-dozen cops swarmed him, including the city cop who had been about to search Clete and Zerelda.
Marvin Oates was standing right behind Zerelda now, his face transfixed, a strange, almost ethereal light in his eyes. He stepped closer to her, as though drawing near a presence from another world, leaves crackling under the soles of his shoes. He leaned down toward her shoulders, perhaps trying to breathe in the heat from her body or the perfume in her hair. Then his hands slid down the muscles in her back, under her arms and on her sides. I saw her body jerk, as though she were being sexually violated, but Oates whispered something in her ear and his hand went to her blue jeans pocket and came away with a small bag, which he pushed up into his coat sleeve.
I headed toward him with my cane, the shotgun still propped on my shoulder.
"What do you think you're doing?" I asked.
His face drained.
"Trying to hep out," he replied.
"You're not a police officer. You don't have the right to put your hand on anybody here. You understand that?" I said.
"You're right, sir. I dint have no bidness coming here. I'm just a simple student at the university. You ain't gonna have no trouble with the likes of me," he said.
He hurried through the trees toward the bayou, pushing through bamboo and underbrush, his sports coat tearing on a thorn bush.
"Come back here," I said.
But he was gone. I limped down to the bank and amid a tangle of morning glory vines saw a Ziploc bag that was fat with a greenish-brown substance inside. I poked at the bag with my cane, then picked it up and shook out the marijuana inside it and put the bag in my pocket.
When I got back up to the driveway, Joe Zeroski and all of his men were hooked up on a long wrist chain, and so were Clete and Zerelda.
"How about some slack on Purcel, Skipper?" I said.
"Let him sit in his own mess for a change," the sheriff replied.
"Earlier today you made a remark about the women who were raped on the LaSalles' plantation. You said maybe they should have gotten jobs somewhere else. I believe that's the filthiest fucking thing I've ever heard you say, sir," I said.
I pumped open the breech on my shotgun and threw the shotgun in the backseat of the sheriff's cruiser. Then I hooked my walking cane on the limb of a persimmon tree, like a misplaced Christmas ornament, and limped unassisted toward the front of the motor court.