Sunset Limited by James Lee Burke Page A

willed Batist a plot of land and a small cypress home on the bayou, and over the years Batist had truck farmed there, augmented his income by trapping and fishing with my father, buried two wives, and raised five children, all of whom graduated from high school. He was illiterate and sometimes contentious, and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans in one direction and Lake Charles in the other, but I never knew a more loyal or decent person.
    We started the fire in the barbecue pit, which was fashioned from a split oil drum with handles and hinges welded on it, laid out our chickens and sausage links on the grill for our midday customers, and closed down the lid to let the meat smoke for at least three hours.
    Batist wore a pair of bell-bottomed dungarees and a white T-shirt with the sleeves razored off. His upper arms bunched like cantaloupes when he moved a spool table to hose down the dock under it.
    “I forgot to tell you. That fella Cool Breeze was by here last night,” he said.
    “What did he want?”
    “I ain’t ax him.”
    I expected him to say more but he didn’t. He didn’t like people of color who had jail records, primarily because he believed they were used by whites as an excuse to treat all black people unfairly.
    “Does he want me to call him?” I asked.
    “I know that story about his wife, Dave. Maybe it wasn’t all his fault, but he sat by while them white men ruined that po’ girl. I feel sorry for him, me, but when a man got a grief like that against hisself, there ain’t nothing you can do for him.”
    I looked up Mout’s name in the telephone book and dialed the number. While the phone rang Batist lit a cigar and opened the screen on the window and flicked the match into the water.
    “No one home,” I said after I hung up.
    “I ain’t gonna say no more.”
    He drew in on his cigar, his face turned into the breeze that blew through the screen.
     
    BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR AND I went to Mass, then I dropped them off at home and drove to Cisco Flynn’s house on the Loreauville road. He answered the door in a terry-cloth bathrobe that he wore over a pair of scarlet gym shorts.
    “Too early?” I said.
    “No, I was about to do a workout. Come in,” he said, opening the door wide. “Look, if you’re here to apologize about that stuff on the set—”
    “I’m not.”
    “Oh.”
    “The sheriff wants to know why the city of New Iberia is hosting a mainline con like your friend Boxleiter.”
    We were in the living room now, by the collection of photographs that had made Megan famous.
    “You were never in a state home, Dave. How would you like to be seven years old and forced to get up out of bed in the middle of the night and suck somebody’s cock? Think you could handle that?”
    “I think your friend is a depraved and violent man.”
    ” He’s violent? Y’all put him in the hospital over a drop of sweat.”
    Through the French doors I could see two dark-skinned people sitting at a glass table under a tree in the back yard. The man was big, slightly overweight, with a space between his front teeth and a ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades. The woman wore shorts and a tank top and had brownish-red hair that reminded me of tumbleweed. They were pouring orange juice into glasses from a clear pitcher. A yellow candle stub was melted to the table.
    “Something bothered me the last time I was here. These photos that were in Life magazine? Y’all caught the kill from inside the drainpipe, just as the bullet hit the black guy in the neck?”
    “That’s right.”
    “What were you doing in the pipe? How’d you know the guy was coming out at that particular place?”
    “We made an arrangement to meet him, that’s all.”
    “How’d the cops know he was going to be there?”
    “I told you. He raped a high school girl. They had an all-points out on him.”
    “Somehow that doesn’t hang together for me,” I said.
    “You think we set it up? We were inside the