Robicheaux: A Novel by Burke James Lee

Author:Burke, James Lee [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2018-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

AT ONE TIME St. Mary Parish was a fiefdom ruled by an oligarchical family who owned everything and everyone in the parish, bar none. In the 1970s, when a group of activist Catholic nuns tried to organize the cane workers, they found themselves at mortal risk in an area that was more than ninety percent Catholic. Enforcement of the law was situational. Every public servant knew which ring to kiss. The people at the bottom of the pile were not necessarily abused, but they weren’t necessarily protected from abuse, either.

Sexual exploitation is not a subject most police departments like to deal with. But it’s often there. A cop picks up a hippie runaway hitchhiking. Maybe she’s holding, maybe she’s got a warrant on her, maybe she’s sixteen and her teeth are chattering. It’s twilight. She’s in the backseat, wrists cuffed behind her, trying to see where they’re going as the cop swings around on the shoulder and heads down a two-lane away from town. The cop has already dropped his badge inside his pocket so she won’t get his number.

His name was Jude McVane. Before he was a deputy sheriff, he was a chaser in a navy brig, a hack in a women’s prison, and a collector for a loan company. He had big hands and smelled of manly odors and was good at his paperwork because he did as little of it as possible. There were never any complaints about him. But his colleagues did not hang out with him after work hours, particularly those who were protective of their wives’ sensibilities.

At sunrise Thursday, he was driving his cruiser on a two-lane back road that followed the curves along Bayou Teche. The primroses were blooming on the edge of the cane fields, the sun spangling inside the tunnel of live oaks. He passed two antebellum homes built in the early nineteenth century, then crossed the drawbridge and turned in to a trailer village that belonged in Bangladesh. He stopped in front of a trailer occupied by a young black single mother. Without speaking, she exited the trailer, locked the door behind her, and got into the back of the cruiser.

“Good morning, sunshine,” McVane said.

She looked wanly out the window. He drove out of the trailer park and back across the drawbridge and past a closed sugar refinery. Then he hooked back in to the confines of the refinery on a dirt road and parked in the shade of a rusted-out tin shed.

“Nobody does it like you,” he said, getting in back.

When she was finished, she walked away from the cruiser and cleared her mouth and spat.

“I always heard it tastes like watermelon rind,” he said.

She refused to speak. He drove her back to her home and watched her get out and go inside. He shifted into gear and drove out of the trailer park and back over the Teche and headed toward Franklin. A solitary figure was walking around the edge of the road, dragging a wheeled case behind him, a beach bag hanging from his shoulder.

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