A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

hang up, how bad did you and Lyle hurt your father’s friend?”
    â€œWhat? What did you say?”
    â€œYou heard me.”
    â€œYeah, I did. You listen to me, Dave. You stay out of my goddamn family’s history. It doesn’t have anything to do with this. You understand that? Are we clear on that?”
    â€œCall back when you have something of value to tell me, Weldon,” I said, and softly replaced the receiver in the telephone cradle. I suspected that I left him with knives turning in his chest. But Weldon was one of those who became interested in the cathedral only after you barred its entrance to him.
    S UNDAY NIGHT IT rained again and Bootsie, Alafair, and I drove to New Iberia and had dinner at Del’s on East Main, then went to a movie. Later, it stopped raining, and the moon rose over the freshly plowed sugarcane fields in a sky that looked like black ink wash. I was restless and couldn’t concentrate on the book I was reading or the movie that Bootsie was watching on television, andI told Bootsie that I was going back into town to drop off some overdue bills at the post office. Then I drove out to Weldon’s place.
    Why? I can’t say, really—except that I suspected he was involved in something that went way beyond the confines of Iberia Parish. Over the years I had seen all the dark players get to southern Louisiana in one form or another: the oil and chemical companies who drained and polluted the wetlands; the developers who could turn sugarcane acreage and pecan orchards into miles of tract homes and shopping malls that had the aesthetic qualities of a sewer works; and the Mafia, who operated out of New Orleans and brought us prostitution, slot machines, control of at least two big labor unions, and finally narcotics.
    They hunted on the game reserve. They came into an area where large numbers of the people were poor and illiterate, where many were unable to speak English and the politicians were traditionally inept or corrupt, and they took everything that was best from the Cajun world in which I had grown up, treated it cynically and with contempt, and left us with oil sludge in the oyster beds, Levittown, and the abiding knowledge that we had done virtually nothing to stop them.
    I parked my truck on the blacktop in front of Weldon’s house and looked at his flood lamps in the mist, the lighted chandelier that he had left on in the living room, the lawn that sloped away toward Bayou Teche, his boathouse, and the dark line of cypress trees along the bank. The shooterhad probably come before dawn, maybe in a boat, and had crouched behind the brick retaining wall until he saw Weldon enter the dining room. So the shooter knew something about the layout of Weldon’s house and property, I thought, and maybe about Weldon’s habits as well; perhaps he even knew Weldon and had been in his house. If not, the person who hired the shooter was probably on familiar terms with Weldon.
    It wasn’t a profound theory, nor was it that helpful. I drove back home with the heat lightning flickering whitely over the southern horizon, then lay in the dark beside Bootsie and tried to fall asleep. Why did I preoccupy myself with Weldon’s troubles, I asked myself? The answer was not long in coming. I rubbed my hand lightly over the curve of Bootsie’s back, kissed the smooth grain of her skin, stroked the short-cropped stiff hair on her neck, and wondered in awe at how the flush of health in her complexion could be so successful a part of nature’s masquerade. I had fantasies in which we changed the blood in her whole vascular system and rinsed disease out of her body; saw faith and prayer drive the red wolf from her like an exorcised incubus; or simply awoke one fine morning to discover that a new drug as miraculous as penicillin or the polio vaccine had been invented, and that all our cares and worries about Bootsie had been illusionary and ultimately