Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 30

The account of Aaron Crown's escape from the state police is my re-creation of the story as it was related to me by a St. Martin Parish deputy in the waiting room down the hall from Batist's room at Iberia General. Clete Purcel and I watched the deputy get into the elevator and look back at us blank-faced while the doors closed behind him.

"What are you thinking?" Clete asked.

"It's no accident Mookie Zerrang came to my house the same night Crown was set up for a whack."

Clete leaned forward in his chair and rubbed one hand on the other, picked at a callus, his green eyes filled with thought. He had driven from New Orleans in two and a half hours, steam rising from the hood of his Cadillac like vapor off dry ice when he pulled under the electric arc lamps in the hospital parking lot.

"Zerrang's got to go off-planet, Streak," he said.

"He will."

"It won't happen. Not unless you or I do it. This guy's juice is heavy-voltage, mon."

I didn't answer.

"You know I'm right. When they deal it down and dirty, we take it back to them under a black flag," he said.

"Wrong discussion, wrong place."

"There's a geek in Jefferson Parish. A real sicko. Even the wiseguys cross the street when they see him coming. But he owes five large to Nig. I can square the debt. Mookie Zerrang will be walking on stumps… Are you listening?"

I went to the cold drink machine, then put my change back in my pocket and kept on walking to the nurses' station.

"I have to talk to my friend," I said.

"Sorry, not until the doctor comes back," the nurse said. She smiled and did not mean to be impolite.

"I apologize, then," I said, and went past her and into Batist's room.

He was turned on his side, facing the opposite wall, his back layered with bandages. The intruder had used a type of ASP, a steel bludgeon, sold in police supply stores, that telescopes out of a handle. The one used by the intruder was modified with an extension that operated like a spring or whip, with a steel ball the size of a small marble attached to the tip. The paramedics had to cut away Batist's overalls and T-shirt with scissors and peel the cloth off his skin like cobweb.

His head jerked on the pillow when he heard me behind him.

"It's okay, partner," I said, and walked around the foot of the bed.

His right eye was swollen shut, his nose broken and X-ed with tape.

"I ain't felt a lot of it, Dave. He hit me upside the head first, 'cause I raised up and caught him another one in the mout'," he said.

I sat down on a chair by his bedside.

"I promise we'll get this guy," I said.

"It ain't your fault, no."

"I helped set up Aaron Crown, Batist. I didn't know it, but I was giving somebody permission to wipe me off the slate, too."

"Who been doing all this, Dave? What we done to them?"

"They're right up there on the Teche. Buford and Karyn LaRose."

His eyes closed and opened as though he were on the edge of sleep or looking at a thought inside his mind.

"It ain't their way," he said.

"Why?"

"Their kind don't never see bad t'ings, Dave. Any black folk on a plantation tell you that. The white folk up in the big house don't ever want to know what happen out in the field or down in the quarters. They got people to take care of that for them."

The nurse and the doctor came through the door and looked at us silently.

"You going to be all right for a while?" I said.

"Sure. They been treating me good," Batist said.

"I'm sorry for this," I said.

He moved his fingers slightly on the sheet and patted the top of my hand as my father might have done.

Clete followed me home and went to sleep in our guest room. I lay in the dark next to Bootsie, with my arm over my eyes, and heard rainwater ticking out of the trees into the beds of leaves that tapered away from the tree trunks. I tried to organize my thoughts, then gave it up and fell asleep when the stars were still out. I didn't wake until after sunrise. The room, the morning itself, seemed empty and stark, devoid of memory, as it used to be when I'd wake from alcoholic blackouts. Then the events of the previous night came back like a slap.

Batist's first reaction when he had seen me in the hospital had been to prevent me from worrying about his pain. He'd had no thought of himself, no desire for revenge, no sense of recrimination toward me or the circumstances that placed him in the path of a sadist like Mookie Zerrang.

I spent ten months in Vietnam and never saw a deliberate atrocity, at least not one committed by Americans. Maybe that was because most of my tour was over before the war really warmed up. I saw a ville after the local chieftain had called in the 105's on his own people, and I saw some Kit Carsons bind the wrists of captured Viet Cong and wrap towels around their faces and pour water onto the cloth a canteen at a time until they were willing to trade their own families for a teaspoon of air. Someone always had an explanation for these moments, one that allowed you to push the images out of your mind temporarily. It was the unnecessary cruelty, the kind that was not even recognized as such, that hung in the mind like an unhealed lesion.

A mental picture postcard that I could never find a proper postage stamp for: The mamasan is probably over seventy. Her dugs are withered, her skin as shriveled as a dried apple's. She and her granddaughter clean hooches for a bunch of marines, wash their clothes, burn the shit barrels at the latrine. Two enlisted men fashion a sign from cardboard and hang it around her neck and pose sweaty and barechested with her while a third marine snaps their photo with a Polaroid camera. The sign says miss north Dakota. If the mamasan comprehends the nature of the insult, it does not show in the cracked parchment of her face. The marines are grinning broadly in the photo.

Voltaire wrote about the cruelty he saw in his neighbor who was the torturer at the Bastille. He described the impulse as insatiable, possessing all the characteristics of both lust and addiction to a drug. Had he not been hired by the state, the neighbor would have paid to continue his tasks in those stone rooms beneath the streets of Paris.

Mookie Zerrang was not simply a hit man on somebody's payroll. He was one of those who operated on the edges of the human family, waiting for the halt and the lame or those who had no voice, his eyes smiling with anticipation when he knew his moment was at hand.

I couldn't swallow my food at breakfast. I went into the living room and finished cleaning the spot on the floor where we had found Batist. I stuffed the throw rug he had lain on and the paper towels I had used to scrub the cypress planks into a vinyl garbage bag

"I'm going down to the bait shop," I said to Bootsie.

"Close it up for today," she replied.

"It's Saturday. There might be a few customers by."

"No, you want to make a private phone call. Do it here. I'll leave," she said.

"We didn't get much sleep, Boots. It's not a day to hurt each other."

"Tell it to yourself."

There was nothing for it. I unlocked the bait shop and dialed Buford LaRose's home number.

"Hello?" Karyn said.

"Where's Buford?"

"In the shower."

"Put him on the phone."

"Leave him alone, Dave. Go away from us."

"Maybe I should catch him another time. Would the inauguration ball be okay?"

"It's by invitation. You won't be attending…" She paused, as though she were enjoying a sliver of ice on her tongue. "By the way, since you're a conservationist, you'll enjoy this. I talked to someone about the swamp area around your bait shop being turned into a wilderness preserve. Of course, that will mean commercial property like yours will be acquired by the state or federal government. Oh, Buford's toweling off now. Have a nice day, Dave."

She set the phone down on a table and called out in a lilting voice, "Guess who?"

I heard Buford scrape the receiver up in his hand.

"Don't tell me," he said.

"Shut up, Buford-"

"No, this time you shut up, Dave. Aaron Crown didn't do what he was told. He was supposed to throw his rifle in the water. Instead, he flashed a soda can or something in a window and a trooper started shooting. I tried to stop it."

"You were there?"

"Yes, of course."

"I think you're lying," I said. But his explanation was disarming.

"It's what happened. Check it out."

"The black man who works for me was almost beaten to death last night."

"I'm sorry. But what does that have to do with me?"

I felt my anger and confidence wane. I rubbed at one eye with the heel of my hand and saw concentric circles of red light receding into my brain. My hands felt cold and thick and I could smell my own odor. I started to speak but the words wouldn't come.

"Dave, are you okay?" he said. His voice was odd, marked with sympathy.

I hung up and sat at the counter and rested my forearms on the counter, my head bent forward, and felt a wave of exhaustion and a sense of personal impotence wash through me like the first stages of amoebic dysentery. Through the window I heard Bootsie's car back into the road, then I saw her and Alafair drive away through the long corridor of oaks toward town. A small metallic mirror hung on a post behind the counter. The miniature face of the man reflected inside it did not look like someone I knew.