Cadillac Jukebox

CHAPTER 37

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING I sat at the kitchen table and looked at a photograph in the Daily Iberian of Buford and Karyn dancing together at the country club. They looked like people who would live forever.

Bootsie paused behind me, her palm resting on my shoulder.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"Jerry Joe Plumb…No journalist will ever mention his name in association with theirs, but he paid their dues for them. "

"He paid his own, too, Dave."

"Maybe."

The window was open and a balmy wind blew from my neighbor’s pasture and swelled the curtains over the sink. I filled a cup with coffee and hot milk and walked outside in the sunshine. Alafair sat at the redwood picnic table, playing with Tripod in her lap and listening to the tape she had made of the records on Jerry Joe’s jukebox. She flipped Tripod on his back and bounced him gently up and down by pulling his tail while he pushed at her forearm with his paws.

"Thanks for all the presents. It’s a great Christmas, " she said.

"Thanks for everything you gave me, too, " I said.

"Can Tripod have some more eggnog ice cream? "

"Sure."

"Those creeps are gone, aren’t they? "

"Yeah, the worst of the lot are. The rest get it somewhere down the road. We just don’t see it."

I thought perhaps I might have to explain my remarks, but I didn’t. She actually lived through more than I had in her young life, and her comprehension of the world was oftentimes far better than mine.

She went inside the house with Tripod under her arm, then came back out on the step.

"I forgot. We ate it all," she said.

"There’s some in the freezer down at the shop. I’ll get it," I said.

I walked down the slope through the leaves drifting out of the oak and pecan branches overhead. I had strung Christmas lights around the bait shop’s windows and hung wreaths fashioned from pine boughs and holly and red ribbon on the weathered cypress walls, and Alafair had glued a Santa Claus made from satin wrapping paper to the door. The bayou was empty of boats, and the sound of my shoes was so loud on the dock that it echoed off the water and sent a cloud of robins clattering out of the trees.

I had gotten the ice cream from the game freezer and was about to lock up again when I saw Dock Green park a black Lincoln by the boat ramp and walk toward me.

"It’s Christmas. We’re closed," I said.

"LaRose has got my wife up at his house," he said.

"I don’t believe that’s true. Even if it is, she’s a big girl and can make her own choices."

"I can give you that guy, diced and fried."

"Not interested."

"It ain’t right."

He sat down at a spool table and stared out at the bayou. His neck was as stiff as a chunk of sewer pipe. A muscle jumped in his cheek.

"I think you were involved with Jerry Joe’s death. I just can’t prove it. But I don’t have to talk to you, either. So how about getting out of here?" I said.

He rubbed the heel of his hand in one eye.

"I never killed nobody. I need Persephone back. It ain’t right he can steal my wife, pull a gun on me, I can’t do nothing about it…I told Seph this is how it'd be if we messed with people was born with money… They take, they don't give," he said.

Then I realized he was drunk.

"Get a motel room or go back to your camp, Dock. I'll get somebody to drive you," I said.

He rose to his feet, as though from a trance, and said, more to the wind than to me, "He controls things above the ground, but he don't hear the voices that's down in the earth… They can call me a geek, it don't matter, her and me are forever."

I went back into the shop and called for a cruiser. When I came outside again, he was gone.

That night Alafair and Bootsie and I went out to eat, then drove down East Main, through the corridor of live oaks, looking at the lights and decorations on the nineteenth-century homes along Bayou Teche. We passed the city hall and library, the flood-lit grotto, which contained a statue of Christ's mother, where the home of George Washington Cable had once stood, the darkened grounds and bamboo border around the Shadows, and in the center of town the iron-and-wood drawbridge over the Teche.

I drove past the old Southern Pacific station and up the St. Martinville road, and, without thinking, like a backward glance at absolved guilt, I let my eyes linger on the abandoned frame house where Karyn LaRose had grown up. The garage that had contained her father's boxes of gumballs and plastic monster teeth and vampire fingernails still stood at the front of the property, the doors padlocked, and I wondered when she drove past it if she ever saw the little girl who used to play there in the yard, her hands sticky with the rainbow seepage from the gum that mildewed and ran through the cracks inside.

"Look, up the road, y'all, it's a fire," Alafair said.

Beyond the next curve you could see the reddish orange bloom in the sky, the smoke that trailed back across the moon. We pulled to the side of the road for a firetruck to pass.

"Dave, it's Buford and Karyn's house," Bootsie said.

We came around the curve, and across the cleared acreage the house looked like it was lit from within by molten metal. Only one pump truck had arrived, and the firemen were pulling a hose from the truck toward the front porch.

I stopped on the opposite side of the road and ran toward the truck. I could already feel the heat from the house against my skin.

"Is anybody in there?" I said. The faces of the firemen looked like yellow tallow in the light from the flames.

"Somebody was at the window upstairs but they couldn't make it out," a lieutenant said. "You're from the sheriff's department, aren't you?"

"Right."

"There's a trail of gasoline from the back of the house out to the stables. What the hell kind of security did y'all have out here?"

"Buford worried about Aaron Crown, not Dock Green," I said.

"Who?" he said.

Another pump truck came up the road, but the heat had punched holes in the roof now, the poplars against the side wall were wrapped with fire, and the glow through the collapsing shingles bloomed in an ever-widening circumference, defining everything in red-black shapes that was Buford's-the brick stables and tack rooms, the fields that had already been harrowed for next year's planting, the company store with the barrels of pecans on each side of the front doors, the stark and leafless tree that his ancestors in the Knights of the White Camellia had used to lynch members of the carpetbag government, the horses with Mexican brands that spooked and thudded through the rolling hardwoods as though they had never been bridled or broken.

Then I saw Buford come through the front door, a water-soaked blanket held in a cone over his head.

He tore the blanket away and flung it aside, as though the blanket itself contained the heat that had scalded his body. He smelled like ashes and charcoal and scorched hair, and smoke rose in dirty strings from his clothes.

"Where is she?" he said, staring wild-eyed at the firemen in his yard.

"Who? Who else is in there?" a fireman said.

"Where is she, Dave?"

"I don't know, Buford," I replied.

"She was on the stairs, right next to me…"

"She didn't make it out, partner," I said.

I reached out to take his arm in my hand. I felt the smooth hardness of his triceps brush my palm, then he was gone, running toward the rectangle of flame beyond the Greek pillars on the front porch. A fireman in a canvas coat and a big hat tried to tackle him and hit hard and empty-armed against the brick walkway.

Buford went up the steps, his arms in front of his face, wavering for just a moment in the heat that withered his skin and chewed apart the interior of his house, then he crossed his forearms over his eyes and went through the flames and disappeared inside.

I heard a fireman yell, "Pour it on him, pour it on him, pour it on him, goddamn it!"

The pressurized spray of water caromed off the doorway and dissected the vortex of fire that was dissolving the stairway, filling the chandeliers with music, eating the floor away, blowing windows out into the yard.

Then we saw them, just for a moment, like two featureless black silhouettes caught inside a furnace, joined at the hip, their hands stretched outward, as though they were offering a silent testimony about the meaning of their own lives before they stepped backward into the burning lake that had become their new province.