Free A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke Page B

know that most of it was a narcissistic vanity, but at a certain age you’re given the luxury of no longer having to be an apologist for yourself. Sometimes it feels good to be over a half-centuryold and to still be a player, a bit scarred perhaps, but still out there on the mound, messing them up with sliders and spitters when your fastball won’t hum anymore. I had a round scar the diameter of a cigar on both sides of my left shoulder, where a psychopath had cored a hole right below my collarbone with a .38 round; a pungi-stick scar on my stomach that looked like a flattened gray worm; and a spray of raised welts across my thigh, like Indian arrowheads wedged under the tissue, a lover’s kiss from a bouncing Betty that lighted me on a night trail in Vietnam with such a heated brilliance that I believed my soul left my breast and I could look down and count my bones inside my skin.
    But I was all right, I thought. I no longer had dreams about the murder of my wife Annie, and the nocturnal film strips from Vietnam had become less and less distinct, as though the flattening elephant grass under the whirling helicopter blades, the grunts piling out of the Hueys and racing for the cover of the banyan trees, their pots clamped on their heads with one hand, the thump of mortars in a ville across the rice paddy, were all now part of someone else’s experience, not really mine anymore or maybe I had finally come to realize that I was only a small part of an army made up of blacks and slum kids and poor-whites from cotton-gin and lumber towns who had a collective cross dropped on them that no one should have to bear. But at least I knew now that it wasn’t mine to bear alone anymore, and so maybe I didn’t have to bear it at all.
    As always in my moments of self-indulgent reverie I had failed to notice an aluminum pot that was sitting in the middle of the redwood table. It was filled with shelled shrimp and an okra and tomato roux, and a red line of ants went from a crack in the table, up one side of the pot and down inside. I picked it up, took a spade from the tool shed, cleaned out the spoiled food in the vegetable garden by the coulee, and buried it.
    The doctors at Baylor in Houston and the specialist we used in Lafayette had tried to explain in their best way (and, like most physicians, they were inept with language, even though the compassion was obviously there in their voices) that there was no one answer for lupus. The steroids and medicines that we used to control it, to alleviate its symptoms, to knock it into remission, to protect the connective tissue and the kidneys, were hard to put into perfect balance, and sometimes an imbalance caused moments of hallucination, even temporary periods of psychosis.
    I had seen her sway once to music that was not there and had dismissed it; then on a second occasion she told me that perhaps in fact dead people had called me up on the phone when I was having delirium tremens years ago, because just minutes earlier the phone had rung and she had picked up the receiver and had heard the voice of her dead sister.
    An hour later she was fine and laughing at her own imagination.
    Tomorrow I would call the specialist in Lafayetteand make another appointment. It was dusk now, and the purple air was thick with birds. I walked down to the dock to help Batist close up. He wore cutoff Levi’s, a tank top, and canvas boat shoes with no socks. His black body looked so hard and muscular you could break barrel slats across it. He was in the back of the bait shop, flinging cases of Jax and Dixie beer into a stack against the wall, an unlit cigar shoved back in his jaw like a stick.
    I seined some dead shiners out of the bait tank, then began restocking one of the coolers with long-necked bottles of beer.
    â€œSomet’ing wrong, Dave?” he asked.
    â€œNo, not really.”
    I could feel his eyes on me.
    â€œToo much work at the office, I suppose,” I