Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 28

The man in the floppy hat and black rubber big-button raincoat came at sunset, from a great distance, where at first he was just a speck on the horizon, walking across my neighbor's burned sugarcane acreage, ash powdering around his boots, the treeline etched with fire behind him. He could have been a fieldhand looking for a calf stuck in the coulee, a tenant fanner shortcutting home from his rental acreage, or perhaps a hobo who had swung down from a S.P. freight, except for the purpose in his gait, the set of his jaw, the switch in his gloved hand that he whipped against his leg. When clouds covered the sun and lightning struck in the field, the man in the raincoat never broke stride. My neighbor's cows swirled like water out of his path.

Batist had been watching television in the living room. He went back into the kitchen to refill his coffee cup, burned his lips with the first sip, then poured it into the saucer and blew on it while he looked out the kitchen window at the ash lifting in the fields, the rain slanting like glass across the sun's last spark in the west.

The window was open and he heard horses running on the sod and cattle lowing in the coulee, and only when he squinted his eyes did he see the hatted and coated shape of the man who whipped the switch methodically against his leg.

Batist rubbed his eyes, went back into the living room for his glasses, returned to the window and saw a milky cloud of rain and dust rising out of the field and no hatted man in a black coat but a solitary Angus heifer standing in our yard.

Batist stepped out into the yard, into the sulfurous smell blowing out of the fields, then walked to the duck pond and down the fence line until he saw the fence post that had been wedged sideways in the hole and the three strands of barbed wire that had been stomped out of the staples into the ground.

"Somebody out here?" he called.

The wind was like a watery insect in his ears.

He latched the screen door behind him, walked to the front of the house and stepped out on the gallery, looked into the yard and the leaves spinning in vortexes between the tree trunks, the shadows of overhead limbs thrashing on the ground. Down by the bayou, one of our rental boats clanked against its chain, thumping against the pilings on the dock.

He thought about his dogleg twenty gauge down in the bait shop. The bait shop looked small and distant and empty in the rain, and he wished he had turned on the string of electric lights over the dock, then felt foolish and embarrassed at his own thoughts.

He stood in the center of the living room, the wind seeming to breathe through the front and back screens, filling the house with a cool dampness that he couldn't distinguish from the sheen of sweat on his skin.

He pulled aside a curtain and looked across the driveway at the neighbor's house. The gallery was lighted and a green wreath and pinecones wrapped with scarlet ribbon hung on the front door; a Christmas tree, a blue spruce shimmering with tinsel, stood in a window. A sprinkler fanned back and forth in the rain, fountaining off the tree trunks in the yard.

He picked up the phone and started to dial a number, then realized he wasn't even certain about whom he was dialing. He set the receiver back in the cradle, ashamed of the feeling in his chest, the way his hands felt stiff and useless at his sides.

He wiped his face on his sleeve, smelled a sour odor rising from his armpit, then stood hesitantly at the front door again. In his mind's eye he saw himself walking down to the bait shop and returning up the slope with a shotgun like a man who finally concedes that his fears have always been larger than his courage. He unlatched the screen and pushed it open with the flat of his hand and breathed the coolness of the mist blowing under the gallery eaves, then stepped back inside and blew out his breath.

Batist never heard the intruder in the black rubber raincoat, not until he cinched his arm under Batist's throat and squeezed as though he were about to burst a walnut. He wrenched Batist's head back into his own, drawing Batist's body into his loins, a belt buckle that was as hard-edged as a stove grate, impaling him against his chest, his unshaved jaw biting like emery paper into the back of Batist's neck.

The intruder's floppy hat fell to the floor. He seemed to pause and look at it, as he would at a distraction from the linear and familiar course of things and the foregone conclusion that had already been decided for him and his victim.

From the corner of his eye Batist saw a gold-tipped canine tooth that the intruder licked with the bottom of his tongue. Then the arm snapped tight under Batist's chin again, and through the front screen Batist saw the world as a place where trees torn from their roots floated upside down in the rain.

"I'm fixing to pinch off your pipe for good, old man. That mean you don't get no more air. You'll just gurgle on the floor like a dog been run over across the t'roat… Where Robicheaux at?" the intruder said.

When Batist woke up, he was on his side, in the middle of the living room floor, his knees drawn up before him. The house was quiet, and he could see rain blowing through the screen, wetting the cypress planks in the floor, and he thought the hatted man in the rubber coat was gone.

Then he felt the intruder's gloved hand close on the bottom of his chin and tilt his face toward him, as though the intruder were arranging the anatomical parts on a store dummy.

"You went to sleep on me, old man. That's 'cause I shut off the big vein that goes up to your brain," the intruder said. He was squatted on his haunches, sipping from a half-pint bottle of apricot brandy. His eyes were turquoise, the scalp above his ears shaved bare, the color of putty.

"You best get out of here, nigger, while you still can," Batist said.

The intruder drank from the bottle, let the brandy roll on his tongue, settle in his teeth, as though he were trying to kill an abscess in his gum.

Batist raised himself into a sitting position, waiting for the intruder to react. But he didn't. He sipped again from the brandy, nestled one buttock more comfortably against the heel of his boot. His shirt and the top of his coat were unbuttoned, and a necklace of blue shark's teeth was tattooed across his collarbones and around his upper chest. Cupped in his right hand was a banana knife, hooked at the tip, the edge filed into a long silver thread.

"Fishing any good here?" he asked.

He reached out with one finger and touched Batist on the end of his nose, then tilted the brandy again, his eyes closing with the pleasure the liquor gave him.

Batist drove the bottle into the intruder's mouth with the flat of his hand, shattering the glass against the teeth, bursting the lips into a torn purple flower.

The intruder's face stiffened with shock, glistened with droplets of brandy and saliva and blood. But instead of reeling from the room in pain and rage, he rose to his feet and his right foot exploded against the side of Batist's head. He cleaned bits of glass out of his mouth with his fingers, spitting, as though there were peanut brittle on his tongue, his gashed lips finally reforming into a smile.

He bent over, the hooked point of the banana knife an inch from Batist's eye. He started to speak, then paused, pressed his mouth against his palm, looked at it, and wiped his hand on his raincoat.

"Now you made me work for free. You ain't got nowhere to go for a while, do you?" he said, and thumbed the buttons loose on his coat.