A Stained White Radiance Read Free

followers—Klansmen,American Nazis, members of the Aryan Nation? You think they’re all-right guys, too?”
    â€œI don’t take Bobby seriously.”
    â€œA lot of people do.”
    â€œThat’s their problem. Bobby has about six inches of dong and two of brain. If the press left him alone, he’d be selling debit insurance.”
    â€œI’ve heard another story about you, Weldon, maybe a more serious one.”
    â€œDave, I don’t want to offend you. I’m sorry you had to come out here. I’m sorry my wife is wired all the time and sees rubber faces leering in the window. I appreciate the job you have to do, but I don’t know who put a hole in my glass. That’s the truth, and I have to go to work.”
    â€œI’ve heard you’re broke.”
    â€œWhat else is new? That’s the independent oil business. It’s either dusters or gushers.”
    â€œDo you owe somebody money?”
    I saw the cartilage work behind his jaws.
    â€œI’m getting a little on edge here, Dave.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œI’m sorry about that.”
    â€œI drilled my first well with spit and junkyard scrap. I didn’t get a goddamn bit of help from anybody either. No loans, no credit, just me, four nigras, an alcoholic driller from Texas, and a lot of ass-busting work.” He pointed his finger at me. “I’ve kept it together for twenty years, too, podna. I don’t go begging money from anybody, and I’ll tell you something else, too. Somebody leans onme, somebody fires a rifle into my house, I square it personally.”
    â€œI hope you don’t. I’d hate to see you in trouble, Weldon. I’d like to talk with your wife now, please.”
    He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and dropped the heavy metal lighter indifferently on the gleaming wood surface of his dining-room table.
    â€œYeah, sure,” he said. “Just take it a little bit easy. She’s having a reaction to her medication or something. It affects her blood pressure.”
    His wife was a pale, small-boned, ash-blonde woman, whose milk-white skin was lined with blue veins. She wore a pink silk house robe, and she had brushed her hair back over her neck and had put on fresh makeup. She should have been pretty, but she always had a startled look in her blue eyes, as though she heard invisible doors slamming around her. The breakfast room was domed and glassed-in, filled with sunlight and hanging fern and philodendron plants, and the view of the bayou, the oaks and the bamboo, the trellises erupting with purple wisteria, was a magnificent one. But her face seemed to register none of it. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, the pupils shrunken to small black dots, her skin so tight that you thought perhaps someone was twisting the back of her hair in a knot. I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in the same home that had produced a man like Bobby Earl.
    She had been christened Bama. Her accent wassoft, pleasant to listen to, more Mississippi than Louisiana, but in it you heard a tremolo, as though a nerve ending were pulled loose and fluttering inside her.
    She said she had been in bed when she heard the shot and the glass break. But she hadn’t seen anything.
    â€œWhat about this prowler you reported, Mrs. Sonnier? Do you have any idea who he might have been?” I smiled at her.
    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œYou never saw him before?”
    â€œNo. He was horrible.”
    I saw Weldon raise his eyes toward the ceiling, then turn away and look out at the bayou.
    â€œHow do you mean?” I asked.
    â€œHe must have been in a fire,” she said. “His ears were little stubs. His face was like red rubber, like a big red inner-tube patch.”
    Weldon turned back toward me.
    â€œYou’ve got all that on file down at your office, haven’t you, Dave?” he said. “There’s not any