Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

good-bye and walked outside into the world of wind and green lawns and sunlight on the skin and trees bending against the sky. It wasn’t an experience I took for granted.
     
    WHEN I GOT HOME that evening Clete Purcel was leaning on the rail at the end of my dock, eating from a paper sack filled with hog cracklings, brushing the crumbs off his hands into the bayou. The sun was red behind the oaks and pecan trees in my yard, and the swamp was full of shadows and carrion birds drifting above the tops of the dead cypress.
    I walked down the dock and leaned against the rail next to him.
    “The moon’s rising. You want to try some surface lures?” I said.
    “I got a call from Zipper Clum today. He says a shit-load of heat just came down on his head and we’re responsible for it.” He pulled a crackling out of the sack and inserted it in his mouth with his thumb and forefinger.
    “Gable sicced some cops on him?”
    “They rousted him and put him in a holding cell with a bunch of Aryan Brotherhood types. Zipper left a couple of teeth on the cement.”
    “Tell him to give us something and we’ll help him.”
    “The guy’s a bottom-feeder, Dave. His enemy’s his mouth. He shoots it off, but he doesn’t have anything to give up.”
    “Life’s rough.”
    “Yeah, that’s what I told him.” Clete tore the tab on a beer can and leaned his elbows on the handrail. The wind rippled the bamboo and willow trees along the bayou’s edge. “Zipper thinks he might get popped. I say good riddance, but I don’t like to be the guy who set him up. Look, the guy’s conwise. If he’s wetting his pants, it’s for a reason. Are you listening to me?”
    “Yeah,” I said abstractly.
    “You stuck a broom up Jim Gable’s ass. He plans to be head of the state police. You remember that black family that got wiped out with shotguns about ten years back? Out by .the Desire Project? The husband was snitching off some narcs and they wasted him and his wife and kid. I heard Gable ordered the clip on the husband and it got out of control.”
    “Let me tell Bootsie I’m home and we’ll put a boat in the water,” I said.
    Clete finished his cracklings and wadded up the sack and popped it with the flat of his hand into a trash barrel.
    “I’ve always wondered what it was like to have a conversation with a wood post,” he said.
     
    AT THAT TIME THE GOVERNOR of the state was a six-foot-sixpopulist by the name of Belmont Pugh. He had grown up in a family of sharecroppers in a small town on the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge, feckless, illiterate people who sold pecans off the tailgates of pickup trucks and pulled corn and picked cotton for a living and were generally referred to as poor white trash. But even though the Pughs had occupied a stratum below that of Negroes in their community, they had never been drawn to the Ku Klux Klan, nor were they known to have ever been resentful and mean-spirited toward people of color.
    I had known Belmont through his cousin Dixie Lee Pugh at SLI when we were all students there during the late 1950s. Dixie Lee went on to become the most famous white blues singer of his generation, second only to Elvis as a rock ‘n’ roll star. Belmont learned to play piano in the same Negro juke joint that Dixie Lee did, but he got hit with a bolt of religion and turned to preaching as a career rather than music. He exorcised demons and handled snakes and drank poisons in front of electrified rural congregations all over Louisiana. He baptized Negroes and poor whites by immersion in bayous so thick with mud they could clog a sewer main, while cottonmouth moccasins and alligators with hooded eyes watched from among the lily pads.
    But the donations he received from church people were small ones and he made his living by selling detergent, brooms, and scrub brushes out of his automobile. Occasionally he would stop by New Iberia and ask me to have lunch with him at Provost’s Bar. He had attended college