Sunset Limited

SIX

WITH REGULARITY POLITICIANS TALK about what they call the war against drugs. I have the sense few of them know anything about it. But the person who suffers the attrition for the drug trade is real, with the same soft marmalade-like system of lungs and heart and viscera inherited from a fish as the rest of us.

In this case her name was Ruby Gravano and she lived in a low-rent hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, between Lee Circle and Canal, not far from the French Quarter. The narrow front entrance was framed by bare lightbulbs, like the entrance to a 1920s movie theater. But quaint similarities ended there. The interior was superheated and breathless, unlighted except for the glare from the airshaft at the end of the hallways. For some reason the walls had been painted firehouse red with black trim, and now, in the semi-darkness, they had the dirty glow of a dying furnace.

Ruby Gravano sat in a stuffed chair surrounded by the litter of her life: splayed tabloid magazines, pizza cartons, used Kleenex, a coffee cup with a dead roach inside, a half-constructed model of a spaceship that had been stuck back in the box and stepped on.

Ruby Gravano's hair was long and black and made her thin face and body look fuller than they were. She wore shorts that were too big for her and exposed her underwear, and foundation on her thighs and forearms, and false fingernails and false eyelashes and a bruise like a fresh tattoo on her left cheek.

"Dave won't jam you up on this, Ruby. We just want a string that'll lead back to these two guys. They're bad dudes, not the kind you want in your life, not the kind you want other girls to get mixed up with. You can help a lot of people here," Clete said.

"We did them in a motel on Airline Highway. They had a pickup truck with a shell on it. Full of guns and camping gear and shit. They smelled like mosquito repellent. They always wore their hats. I've seen hogs eat with better table ma

"Why'd you think they might be cops?" I asked.

"Who else carries mug shots around?"

"Beg your pardon?" I said.

"The guy I did, he was undressing and he finds these two mug shots in his shirt pocket. So he burns them in an ashtray and that's when his friend says something about capping two brothers."

"Wait a minute. You were all in the same room?" Clete said.

"They didn't want to pay for two rooms. Besides, they wanted to trade off. Co

"Because she blew town," Clete said.

She sniffed and wiped her nose with her wrist. "Look, I'm not feeling too good. Y'all got what you need?" she said.

"Did they use a credit card to pay for the room?" I asked.

"It's a trick pad. My manager pays the owner. Look, believe it or not, I got another life besides this shit. How about it?"

She tried to look boldly into my face, but her eyes broke and she picked up the crushed model of a spaceship from its box on the floor and held it in her lap and studied it resentfully.

"Who hit you, Ruby?" I asked.

"A guy."

"You have a kid?"

"A little boy. He's nine. I bought him this, but it got rough in here last night."

"These cops, duffers, whatever they were, they had to have names," I said.

"Not real ones."

"What do you mean?"

"The one who burned the pictures, the other guy called him Harpo. I go, 'Like that guy in old TV movies who's a dummy and is always honking a horn?' The guy called Harpo goes, 'That's right, darlin', and right now I'm go

She tried to fit the plastic parts of the model back together. Her right cheek was pinched while she tried to focus, and the bruise on it knotted together like a cluster of blue grapes. "I can't fix this. I should have put it up in the closet. He's coming over with my aunt," she said. She pushed hard on a plastic part and it slid sharply across the back of her hand.

"How old a man was Harpo?" I asked.

"Like sixty, when they start acting like they're your father and Robert Redford at the same time. He has hair all over his back… I got to go to the bathroom. I'm go

"Where'd you buy it?" I asked.

"K amp;B's. Or maybe at the Jackson Brewery, you know, that mall that used to be the Jax brewery… No, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Brewery." She bit a hangnail.

Clete and I drove to a K amp;B drugstore up St. Charles. It was raining, and the wind blew the mist out of the trees that arched over the streetcar tracks. The green-and-purple neon on the drugstore looked like scrolled candy in the rain.

"Harpo was the name of the cop who took Cool Breeze Broussard's wife away from him," I said.

"That was twenty years ago. It can't be the same guy, can it?"

"No, it's unlikely."

"I think all these people deserve each other, Streak."

"So why are we buying a toy for Ruby Gravano's son?"

"I seldom take my own advice. Sound like anybody else you know, big mon?"

ON WEDNESDAY I DROVE a cruiser down the old bayou road toward Jeanerette and Lila Terrebo

Why?

Maybe because the past is never really dead, at least not as long as you deny its existence. Maybe because I knew that somehow the death of Cisco and Megan Fly

The barn was still there, two hundred yards from the Teche, hemmed in by banana trees and blackberry bushes. The roof was cratered with a huge hole, the walls leaning in on themselves, the red paint nothing more than thin strips that hadn't yet been weathered away by wind and sun.

I walked through the blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn. The nail holes were sealed over with dust from the cane fields and water expansion in the wood, but I could still feel their edges with the tips of my fingers and, in my mind's eye, see the outline of the man whose tormented face and broken body and blood-creased brow greeted my father and me on that fiery dawn in 1956.

No grass grew around the area where Jack Fly

I drove back up the bayou to the Terrebo

Her father, Archer Terrebo