Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

blue slacks and a starched white shirt, with a gold badge hung on the pocket. Her hair was blond and natural but for some reason it had always looked like a wig when she wore it long. So now she had it cut short and tapered on the sides and back, and it gave her an attractive appearance that for the first time in her life caused men to turn and look at her. “You’re asking for your job back? Over these two characters coming to your house?” she said.
    “The income wouldn’t hurt,” I said.
    Helen’s eyes had a way of becoming lid-less when she asked questions of people. “Did you ever consider that maybe these two deputies were telling the truth? That they think you’re doing P.I. work for the defense in a homicide? That they’re just inept and not very bright?”
    “How many redneck cops stop by your house to feed your cat?”
    She pulled at an earlobe. “Yeah, that is a little weird,” she said. “But the real reason you want your shield back is to start looking into this disappearance in Galveston, right?”
    “Maybe.”  
    She tapped the arms of her chair with her palms and made clucking sounds with her tongue. “Love you. Streak, but the answer is no.”
    I cleared my throat and looked out the window. Across the street I could see the mist blowing off the crypts in the cemetery, and the dull red texture of the bricks through the cracked places in the plaster. Someone was honking a horn angrily at the intersection, like an idiot railing at a television set. “Mind giving me an explanation?” I said.
    She leaned forward in her chair. “Yeah, I do mind, and that’s because I’m your friend,” she said.
    I didn’t try to sort out the meaning in her words. “Run those two cops for me.”
    “Why?”
    “They’re dirty.”
    She clicked her teeth together. “I forgot what it was like when you were around,” she said.
    “Would you clarify that?”
    “Not in your dreams,” she replied.
     
    The church where I attended Mass was on the outskirts of Jeanerette, down the bayou, in St. Mary Parish. Most of the parishioners were people of color and desperately poor. But it was a fine church to attend, built on a green bend of the bayou by an oak-shaded graveyard, and the people in the church had a simplicity and dignity about them that belied the hardship and struggle that characterized their lives.
    That evening I drove down the bayou to attend a meeting of our church-annex committee. The back road to Jeanerette is like a geographical odyssey through Louisiana’s history and the disparities that make it less than real and difficult to categorize. The pastureland is emerald green in spring and summer, dotted with cattle and clumps of oak and gum trees, the early sugar cane waving in the richest alluvial soil in America. At sunset, Bayou Teche is high and dark from the spring rains; the air smells of gardenia and magnolia; and antebellum homes glow among the trees with a soft electrical whiteness that makes one wonder if perhaps the Confederacy should not have won the War Between the States after all.
    But inside that perfect bucolic moment, there is another reality at work, one that doesn’t stand examination in the harsh light of day. The rain ditches along that same road are strewn with bottles, beer cans, and raw garbage. Under the bayou’s rain-dented surface lie discarded paint and motor-oil cans, containers of industrial solvents, rubber tires, and construction debris that will never biologically degrade.
    Across the drawbridge from two of the most lovely historical homes in Louisiana is a trailer slum that probably has no equivalent outside the Third World. The juxtaposition seems almost contrived, like a set in a Marxist documentary meant to discredit capitalistic societies.
    But as I drive this road in the sunset, I try not to dwell upon the problems of the era in which we live. I try to remember the Louisiana of my youth and to convince myself that we can rehabilitate the land and ourselves