A Stained White Radiance Read Free Page B

Dave.”
    â€œI see. If you get tired of it, call me at the office or at home.”
    â€œTired of what?”
    â€œJerking yourself around, being clever with people who’re trying to help you. I’ll see you around, Weldon.”
    I left him standing in his driveway, a faint grin on his mouth, a piece of cartilage as thick as a biscuit in his jaw, his big, square hands open and loose at his sides.
    B ACK AT THE OFFICE I asked the dispatcher where Garrett, the new man, was.
    â€œHe went to pick up a prisoner in St. Martinville. You want me to call him?” he said.
    â€œAsk him to drop by my office when he has a chance. It’s nothing urgent.” I kept my face empty of meaning. “Tell me, what kind of beef did he have with Internal Affairs in Houston?”
    â€œActually it was his partner who had the beef.Maybe you read about it. The partner left Garrett in the car and marched a Mexican kid under the bridge on Buffalo Bayou and played Russian roulette with him. Except he miscalculated where the round was in the cylinder and blew the kid’s brains all over a concrete piling. Garrett got pissed off because he was under investigation, cussed out a captain, and quit the department. It’s too bad, because they cleared him later. So I guess he’s starting all over. Did something happen out there at the Sonniers’?”
    â€œNo, I just wanted to compare notes with him.”
    â€œSay, you have an interesting phone message in your box.”
    I raised my eyebrows and waited.
    â€œLyle Sonnier,” he said, and grinned broadly.
    On my way back to my office cubicle I took the small pile of morning letters, memos, and messages from my mailbox, sat down at my desk, and began turning over each item in the stack one at a time on the desk blotter. I couldn’t say exactly why I didn’t want to deal with Lyle. Maybe it was a little bit of guilt, a little intellectual dishonesty. Earlier that morning I had been willing to be humorous with Garrett about Lyle, but I knew in reality that there was nothing funny about him. If you flipped through the late-night cable channels on TV and saw him in his metallic-gray silk suit and gold necktie, his wavy hair conked in the shape of a cake, his voice ranting and his arms flailing in the air before an enrapt audience of blacks and blue-collar whites, you might dismiss him as anotherreligious huckster or fundamentalist fanatic whom the rural South produces with unerring predictability generation after generation.
    Except I remembered Lyle when he was an eighteen-year-old tunnel rat in my platoon who would crawl naked to the waist down a hole with a flashlight in one hand, a .45 automatic in the other, and a rope tied around his ankle as his lifeline. I also remembered the day he squeezed into an opening that was so narrow his pants were almost scraped off his buttocks; then, as the rope uncoiled and disappeared into the hillside with him, we heard a whoomph under the ground, and a red cloud of cordite-laced dust erupted from the hole. When we pulled him back out by his ankle, his arms were still extended straight out in front of him, his hair and face webbed with blood, and two fingers of his right hand were gone as though they had been lopped off with a barber’s razor.
    People in New Iberia who knew Lyle usually spoke of him as a flimflam man who preyed on the fear and stupidity of his followers, or they thought of him as an entertaining borderline psychotic who had probably cooked his head with drugs. I didn’t know what the truth was about Lyle, but I always suspected that in that one-hundredth of a second between the time he snapped the tripwire with his outstretched flashlight or army .45 and the instant when the inside of his head roared with white light and sound and the skin of his face felt like it was painted with burning tallow, he thought he saw with a third eye into all the baseless fears, thevortex of mysteries, the