Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

wants me in front of a grand jury. She say I gonna stay in the system, too, till they done wit’ me.”
    I looked at the electrical cord he had used for a tourniquet, the proud flesh that had turned the color of fish scale around the fang marks, the drainage that had left viscous green tailings on his shirt. “I tell you what, I’ll dress those wounds, hang your arm in a sling, then we’ll get a breath of fresh air,” I said.
    “You cut that cord loose, the poison gonna hit my heart.”
    “You’re working on gangrene now, partner.”
    I saw him swallow. The whites of his eyes looked painted with iodine.
    “You’re jail-wise, Breeze. You knew the Feds would take you over the hurdles. Why’d you want to stick it to Alex Guidry?”
    This is the story he told me while I used a rubber suction cup to draw a mixture of venom and infection from his forearm. As I listened on one knee, kneading the puncture wounds, feeling the pain in his body flicker like a candle flame under his skin, I could only wonder again at the white race’s naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.
     
    TWENTY YEARS AGO, DOWN the Teche, he owned a dirt-road store knocked together from scrap boards, tin stripped off a condemned rice mill, and Montgomery Ward brick that had dried out and crusted and pulled loose from the joists like a scab. He also had a pretty young wife named Ida, who cooked in a cafe and picked tabasco peppers on a corporate farm. After a day in the field her hands swelled as though they had been stung by bumblebees and she had to soak them in milk to relieve the burning in her skin.
    On a winter afternoon two white men pulled up on the bib of oyster shell that served as a parking lot in front of the gallery, and the older man, who had jowls like a bulldog’s and smoked a cigar in the center of his mouth, asked for a quart of moonshine.
    “Don’t tell me you ain’t got it, boy. I know the man from Miss’sippi sells it to you.”
    “I got Jax on ice. I got warm beer, too. I can sell you soda pop. I ain’t got no whiskey.”
    “That a fact? I’m gonna walk back out the door, then come back in. One of them jars you got in that box behind the motor oil better be on the counter or I’m gonna redecorate your store.”
    Cool Breeze shook his head.
    “I know who y’all are. I done paid already. Why y’all giving me this truck?” he said.
    The younger white man opened the screen door and came inside the store. His name was Alex Guidry, and he wore a corduroy suit and cowboy hat and western boots, with pointed, mirror-bright toes. The older man picked up a paper bag of deep-fried cracklings from the counter. The grease in the cracklings made dark stains in the paper. He threw the bag to the younger man and said to Cool Breeze, “You on parole for check writing now. That liquor will get you a double nickel. Your woman yonder, what’s her name, Ida? She’s a cook, ain’t she?”
     
    THE MAN WITH BULLDOG jowls was named Harpo Delahoussey, and he ran a ramshackle nightclub for redbones (people who are part French, black, and Indian) by a rendering plant on an oxbow off the Atchafalaya River. When the incinerators were fired up at the plant, the smoke from the stacks filled the nearby woods and dirt roads with a stench like hair and chicken entrails burned in a skillet. The clapboard nightclub didn’t lock its doors from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night; the parking lot (layered with thousands of flattened beer cans) became a maze of gas-guzzlers and pickup trucks; and the club’s windows rattled and shook with the reverberations of rub board and thimbles, accordion, drums, dancing feet, and electric guitars whose feedback screeched like fingernails on slate.
    At the back, in a small kitchen, Ida Broussard sliced potatoes for french fries while caldrons of red beans and rice and robin gumbo boiled on the stove, a bandanna knotted across her forehead to keep the sweat out of her eyes.
    But