Dixie City Jam

chapter twenty

At home the next day, I sat in the cool shade of the gallery and listened to Clete Purcel talk about his latest encounter with the Calucci brothers. The cane along the bayou's banks looked dry and yellow in the wind, and hawks were gliding high above the marsh against a ceramic blue sky. I had the same peculiar sense of removal that I had experienced after I was wounded seriously in Vietnam. I felt that the world was moving past me at its own pace, with its own design, one that had little to do with me, and that now I was a spectator who listened to interesting stories told by other people.

'You remember how we used to do it when the greaseballs thought they could take us over the hurdles, I mean when they got the mistaken idea they were equal members of the human race and not something that should have run down their mother's leg?' he said. 'We'd show up in the middle of their lawn parties, have their limos towed in, roust them on nickel-and-dime beefs in public, flush their broads out of town, use a snitch to rat-fuck 'em with the Chicago Outfit, hey, you remember the time we blew up Julio Segura's shit in the backseat of his car? They had to wash him out with a hose, what a day that was.'

Clete ripped the tab on a can of beer, drank the foam, and smiled at me. His face was pink with a fresh sunburn, and the corners of his eyes crinkled with white lines.

'So that's what I did, big mon,' he said. 'I started following Max and Bobo all over town. Bars, restaurants, a couple of massage parlors they own, three fuck pads, black slum property, dig this, they've actually got a guy fronting a bail bonds office for them in Metairie, an escort service, a PCB incinerator out on the river. Dave, these two guys get up in the morning and go across Jefferson and Orleans parishes like a disease, it's impressive.

'The problem is, I've got a convertible now, and it's a little hard to be inconspicuous. After a while Max and Bobo are doing big yawns when they see me and I'm starting to feel like part of the scenery while the neighbourhood dogs hose down my tires. So yesterday, when the Caluccis and all their gumballs go to lunch at Mama Lido's, I decide it's time to shift it on up into overdrive and I get a table out on the terrace, three feet behind one of Max's broads.

'It was perfect timing, the ultimate New Orleans lowlife geek-out. Guess who shows up first? Tommy Blue Eyes and his main punch, what's her name, Charlotte, with her ta-tas sticking out of her sundress like a couple of muskmelons, and of course the Caluccis' hired help are winking at each other and squeezing their floppers under the table while Tommy's trying to act big-shit and order Italian dishes like he knows what he's doing, except he sounds like he's got Q-tips shoved up his nose.

'Then Tommy's Indian zombie pulls up in front of the restaurant with Mrs. Lonighan in the passenger's seat. Have you ever seen her? Think of a fire hydrant with bow legs. She charges out onto the terrace, her glasses on crooked, spittle flying from her mouth, shouting about Tommy and the punch leaving a used rubber under her bed, and when the maître d' tries to calm her down, she squirts a bottle of seltzer water in his face.

'Naturally, the Caluccis and the other greaseballs and their broads are loving all this. Tommy's face is getting redder and redder, his punch is using a little brush to powder her ta-tas, and the Indian is standing there like a lobotomy case who needs a spear in his hand and a bone in his nose. Then Mrs. Lonighan storms out of the place, gets in her car without the Indian, and drives across the curb into a bunch of garbage cans down the street.

'So Tommy tries to blow it all off by talking about how the Jews are taking over legalized gambling in Louisiana. Then he starts telling these anti-Semitic jokes that have got people at the other tables staring with their mouths open, you know, stuff like "This Nazi officer told these Jewish concentration camps inmates, 'I got good news and bad news for you guys. The good news is you're going to Paris. The bad news is you're going as soap."'

'Anyway, the greaseballs are roaring at Tommy's jokes, and I'm wondering why I'm letting these guys act like I've used up my potential and I'm not a factor in their day anymore. So I lean over and tap Tommy on the shoulder with a celery stick and say, "Hey, Tommy, too bad you left your peter cheater lying around for Miz Bobalouba to step on. You ought to get you a fuck pad in the Pontalba like Max and Bobo here."

'The whole place goes quiet except for the sound of the Indian slurping up his squids. I'm thinking, Ah, show time. Wrong. Bobo calls the maître d' and has me thrown out. Can you dig it? Here's a collection of people that would turn the stomach of a proctologist, but I get eighty-sixed out on the street, right in front of a busload of Japanese tourists who are on their way back from the battleground at Chalmette.

'I'm thinking. What's wrong with this picture? I was humping it outside Chu Lai while Max and Bobo were boosting cars and doing hundred-buck hits for the Giacano family. Plus I look back at the terrace and the maître d' is picking up my silverware and changing the tablecloth like some guy with herpes on his hands had been eating there.

'I look down the street and some guys are taking a break from pouring a concrete foundation for a house. You remember that story you told me about how this mob guy in Panama City got even with his wife for giving a blow job to a judge behind a nightclub?

'The guy in charge of the cement truck is a union deadbeat and a part-time bouncer in the Quarter I went bail for about two years ago. I say, "Mitch, you mind if I drive your truck around the block, play a joke on a friend?" He says, "Yeah, we were just going to have a beer and a shot across the street if somebody'd stand the first round." I say, "Why don't you let me do that, Mitch? I think I have a tab there." He goes, "I was just telling my friends here you're that kind of guy, Purcel."

'I pull the truck right up to Max's Caddy convertible. It's gleaming with a new wax job, the top's down, the dashboard's made of mahogany, the seats are purple leather and soft as warm butter. I get out of the truck, clank that feeder chute over the driver's door, and let 'er rip. Streak, it was beautiful. The cement splatters all over the dashboard and the windows, covers the floors, oozes up over the seats, and hangs in big gray curtains over the doors. Even with the mixer roaring I could hear people yelling and going crazy out on the terrace. In the meantime, the Japanese have piled back off the bus in these navy blue business suits that look like umpire uniforms, laughing and applauding and snapping their Nikons because they think a movie is being made and this is all part of the tour, and while Max and Bobo are trying to fight their way through the crowd, the springs on the Caddy collapse, the tires pop off the rims, the cement breaks out the front windows and crushes the hood down on the engine. You remember that character called "The Heap" in the comic books? That's what the Caddy looked like, two headlights staring out of this big, gray pile of wet cement-.'

'Have you lost your mind?' I said.

'What's wrong?'

'You're going to end up in the bag or get your P.I. license pulled. Why do you keep clowning around with these guys? It doesn't get the score changed.'

'They loan-sharked the Caddy out of a builder in Baton Rouge. The last thing Max wants is a police report filed on it. Lighten up, noble mon. You've been around the local Rotary too much.'

Then I saw his eyes look into mine and his expression change. I looked away.

'You really spit in Buchalter's face?' he said.

'It wasn't a verbal moment.'

'I'm proud of you, mon.'

His eyes kept wandering over my face.

'Will you cut it out, Clete?'

'What?'

'Staring at me. I'm all right. Both the guys with Buchalter are fuckups and aren't going to be hard to find. Particularly the cockney. We've got the feds in on it now, too.'

He made tiny prints with the ball of his index finger in the moisture and salt on top of his beer can.

'You think Buchalter's some kind of Nazi superman?' I said. 'He's not. He's a psychotic freak, just like dozens of others we sent up the road.'

'NOPD and the sheriff's office in Lafourche Parish probably haven't gotten hold of your boss yet. But they will.'

'What are you talking about?'

'You're right. Those two were fuckups. That's why they're off the board now.'

The sunlight seemed to harden and grow cold on the garden.

As best as I could reconstruct it, this is how Clete (and later a Lafourche sheriff's deputy) told me the story:

The previous night, out in a wetlands area southwest of New Orleans, a man who had been gigging frogs emerged terrified from the woods, his face whipped by branches and undergrowth, and waved down a parish sheriffs car with his shirt. It had started to rain, and ground fog was blowing out of the trees.

'They's a man got some other men tied up on the mudflat. Somebody got to get down there. He's fixin' to-' he said.

'Slow down, podna. It's gonna be all right. He's fixin' to what?' the deputy said.

'He's got one of them lil chain saws. Back yonder, right by the marsh.'

The deputy was young and only eight months with his department. He radioed his dispatcher, then made a U-turn in the middle of the highway and bounced down an abandoned board road that wound through thickly spaced trees and mounds of briar bushes webbed with dead morning glory vines. Sheets of stagnant water and mud splashed across his windshield, and an old road plank splintered under one wheel and whanged and clattered against his oil pan. But in the distance, through the blowing mist and the black silhouette of tree trunks, he could see a brilliant white chemical flame burning against the darkness. Then he heard the surge of a chain saw, and a second later, even louder than the erratic, laboring throb and shriek of the saw and the roar of his car engine, the sustained and unrelieved scream of a man that rose into the sky like fingernails scraping on slate.

The deputy snapped a tie-rod and spun out into a tangle of willow and cypress trees fifty yards before the road dead-ended at the marsh. He pulled his twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, sawed off at the pump and loaded with double-ought buckshot, from the clip on the dashboard and began running with it at port arms through the undergrowth.

In a clearing by the swamp's edge, next to a parked pickup truck with a camper shell in the bed, a Coleman lantern hissed on the ground like a phosphorous flare. The deputy could see the shadow of a huge man moving about on the far side of the truck. On the ground, partly obscured by the truck's tires, were the shapes of two prone men, their arms pinioned behind them, their faces bloodless and iridescent in the soft rain and the hissing light of the lantern.

The chain saw was idling on a piece of cardboard now. Then the deputy saw the large man bending over the shapes on the ground, a bouquet of roses scattered about his booted feet, pulling, working at something with his hands. The water and trees in the swamp were black, the shadows in the clearing changing constantly with the frenetic movements of the man, whose hands the deputy now knew were laboring at something tribal and dark, far beyond the moral ken of a youthful law officer, a glimpse into a time before the creation of light in the world, hands as broad as skillets, popping with cartilage, scarlet to the wrist, the fingers wet with the lump of heart muscle that they lifted from a man's chest cavity.

The deputy vomited on a tree, then tried to step into the clearing with his shotgun aimed at the man who had suddenly raised erect, a rain hat tied under his chin, a disjointed and maniacal stare in his eyes.

He wanted to yell Down on your face, hands on your head, or any other of the dramatic verbal commands that always reduce television criminals to instant prisoners, but the words hung like pieces of wet newspaper in his throat and died in the heavy air, and he tripped over a tangle of morning glory vines as though he were stumbling about in a dream.

Then the large man was running into the marsh, his legs ripping through islands of lily pads, water splashing to his waist, his shoulders humped, when the deputy let off the first round and sent a shower of sparks out into the dark. At first the deputy thought he had missed, had fired high, and he jacked another shell into the chamber, aimed at the base of the running man's spine, and pulled the trigger. Then he fired twice more and saw the man's shirt jump, heard the slugs whunk into his back.

But the running man crashed and tunneled through the flooded cypress and willows and was gone. The deputy's fifth shot peeled away through the trees like marbles rattling down a long wooden chute. He would swear later that he saw a half dozen rents in the shirt of the fleeing man. He would also get off duty that night and get so drunk in a Lockport bar that his own sheriff would have to drive him home.

'The pickup truck was boosted in Lafitte that morning,' Clete said. 'The guy with the silver beard was Jody Hatcher. He was a four-time loser, including one time down as an accessory in the rape of a child. The guy named Freddy is a blank. The feds think he might be a guy who dynamited a synagogue in Portland, but they're not sure… Streak, look at the bright side. There're two less of these guys on the planet. I tell you something else. They made a real balloon payment when they checked out. The M.E. said there was a look frozen in their eyes even he had trouble dealing with.'

Batist was cranking an engine out on the bayou. The wind was wrinkling the water and ruffling the cane in the sunlight.

'None of it makes any sense,' I said.

'It does to me. Buchalter doesn't leave loose ends.'

'Why does he go to the trouble of using the vigilante's MO?'

'Maybe he likes roses. Maybe he has shit for brains.'

'Maybe we're not dealing with Buchalter, either. What's this stuff about the deputy planting double-ought bucks in his back?'

'Maybe the guy doesn't want to admit he was so scared he couldn't hit a billboard with bird shot.'

I stood up to go inside. A pain spread out of my loins into my abdomen.

'You beat Buchalter, Streak. That's all that counts,' Clete said. 'I don't think I could have cut it. I'd have rolled over.'

'No, you wouldn't.'

He crushed his empty beer can in his hand.

'Let me take y'all to supper tonight,' he said.

'That sounds very copacetic,' I said.

'My second day in Vietnam a hard-nosed gunny gave me some advice about fear and memory and all that stuff: "Never think about it before you do it, never think about it after it's over."'

'No kidding?' I said, with the screen half opened.

'I tried,' he answered, and held up his palms and made half-moons of his eyebrows.