Free Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke Page B

from his canteen. He’s barechested and sweaty, and his pot is strung with rubber spiders. Say goodbye to Shitsville, Lieutenant, he says. You’re going back alive in ‘65. I smell the foulness of my wounds, the dried urine in my pants, as I watch the geographic history of my last ten months sweep by under us: the burnt-out ville where the ash rises and powders in the hot wind; a ditch that gapes like a ragged incision in the earth, where we pinned them down and then broiled them alive with Zippo-tracks; the ruptured dike and dried-out and baked rice paddy still pocked with mortar rounds where they locked down on us from both flanks and marched it right through us like a firestorm. Hey, Lieutenant, don’t touch yourself there, the medic is saying. I mean it, it’s a mess down there. You can’t lose no more blood. You want I should tie your hands? They got refrigeration at the aid station. Plasma. Hey, hold his goddamn wrists. He’s torn it open.
    “That’s an ice bag you feel down there,” the doctor was saying. He was a gray, thick-bodied man who wore rimless glasses, greens, and a T-shirt. “It’ll take the swelling down quite a bit. It looks like you slept well. That shot I gave you is pretty strong stuff. Did you have dreams?”
    I could tell from the sunlight on the oak trees outside that it was late afternoon. The wisteria and blooming myrtle on the hospital lawn moved in the breeze. The drawbridge was up over Bayou Teche, and the two-deck pleasure boat was going through, its paddle wheel streaming water and light.
    My mouth was dry, and the inside of my lip felt as though it were filled with wire.
    “I had to put stitches in your scalp and six in your mouth. Don’t eat any peanut brittle for a while,” he said, and smiled.
    “Where’s Annie?” I asked thickly.
    “I sent her for a cup of coffee. She’ll be back in a minute. The colored man’s outside, too. He’s a big fellow, isn’t he? How far did he carry you?”
    I had to wet the row of stiches inside my lip before I could talk again.
    “About five hundred yards, up to the four-corners. How bad am I down below, Doc?”
    “You’re not ruptured, if that’s what you mean. Keep it in your pajamas a couple of nights and you’ll be all right. Where’d you get those scars around your thighs?”
    “In the service.”
    “I thought I recognised the handiwork. It looks like some of it is still in there.”
    “I set off metal detectors at the airport sometimes.”
    “Well, we’re going to keep you with us tonight, but you can go home in the morning. You want to talk with the sheriff now, or later?”
    I hadn’t seen the other man, who was sitting in a leather chair in the corner. He wore a brown departmental uniform, held his lacquered campaign hat on his knee, and leaned forward deferentially. He used to own a dry-cleaning business in town before someone talked him into running for sheriff. The rural cops had changed a lot in the last twenty years. When I was a boy the sheriff wore a blue suit with a vest and a big railroad watch and chain and carried a heavy revolver in his coat pocket. He was not bothered by the bordellos on Railroad Avenue and the slot machines all over Iberia Parish, nor was he greatly troubled when white kids went nigger-knocking on Saturday nights. He’d tip his John B. Stetson hat to a white lady on Main, and talk to an elderly Negro woman as though she were a post. This one was president of the Downtown Merchants Association.
    “You know who they were, Dave?” he said. He had the soft, downturned lines in his face of most Acadian men in their late middle age. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red veins.
    “A white guy named Eddie Keats. He owns some bars in Lafayette and New Orleans. The other guy is black. His name’s Toot.” I swallowed from the water glass on the table. “Maybe he’s a Haitian. You know anybody like that around here?”
    “No.”
    “You know Eddie Keats?”
    “No. But we can cut a