Dixie City Jam

chapter twenty-one

On Saturday morning, when I walked down to the dock, I noticed a pickup truck with a David Duke sticker parked by the shell boat ramp. Inside the bait shop, Alafair and Batist were working behind the counter and two fishermen were eating chilli dogs with forks and drinking bottled beer at one of the tables. Batist did little more than nod when I said good morning.

'What's wrong with him?' I asked Alafair while we were pulling the canvas awning out on the wires over the spool tables.

'Batist made a mistake with those men's change,' she answered. 'One man said, the one with the big face, he said, "Louisiana's got fifteen percent unemployment, and this place hires something like that to run the cash register."'

I went back through the screen door. The two men, both dressed in the khaki clothes of heavy equipment operators, were sharing a smoked sausage now and drinking their beer. I picked up the cash register receipt from their table, flattened it on the counter, added up the price of the beer and sausage and sales tax, rang open the cash drawer, and placed four one-dollar bills and thirty-six cents in coins on their table.

'This table's closed,' I said, and picked up their beer bottles and the paper shell with the sliced sausage in it.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' the larger of the two men said. His head looked like granite, and his closely cropped hair was lightly oiled and shaved neatly on his neck.

'You were rude to my employee. I don't want your business.'

'Just hold on a minute, there.'

'End of discussion, gentlemen.'

'Well then… well… well then… Fuck you, then.'

After they were gone, I wiped off their table. Then, before I realized it, Batist had walked down the dock, gotten into his truck, and driven south toward the four corners and his house.

Oh boy.

'Watch the store, Alf. I'll be back in about twenty minutes,' I said.

'Why'd Batist leave?'

'He has his own way of doing things.'

He lived in a rambling, paintless house that had been built on to randomly by three generations of his family. The tin roof was orange with rust, the dirt yard strewn with chicken coops, tractor and car parts. On the sagging gallery were stacks of collapsible crab traps and an old washing machine that he had turned into a barbecue pit. His small farm had once been part of a plantation where Federal and Confederate troops had fought a furious battle during General Banks's invasion of southwestern Louisiana. Through the pines on the far side of the coulee which bordered Batist's property, you could see the broken shell and old brick pillars and chimneys of a burned-out antebellum home that the Federals first looted and then fired as they pushed a retreating contingent of Louisiana's boys in butternut brown northward into New Iberia. Every spring, when Batist cracked apart the matted soil in his truck patch with a singletree plow, minie balls, shards of broken china, and rusted pieces of canister would peel loose from the earth and slide back off the polished point of the share like the contents of a fecund and moldy envelope mailed from the year 1863.

I found him in his backyard, raking leaves onto a compost pile that was enclosed with chicken wire. The dappled sunlight through the oak branches overhead slid back and forth across his body like a network of yellow dimes.

'If you're going to take off early, I'd appreciate your telling me first,' I said.

'When I tole you you gotta t'row people out the shop 'cause of me?'

'Those were low-rent white people, Batist. I don't want them on my dock. That's my choice.'

'If a white man got to look out for a black man, then ain't nothin' changed.'

'This is what you're not understanding, partner. We don't let those kind of people insult Alafair, Bootsie, you, or me. It doesn't have anything to do with your race.'

He stopped work and propped his hands on the wood shaft of the rake. His wash-faded denim shirt was split like cheesecloth in back.

'Who you tellin' this to? Somebody just got off the train from up Nort'?' he said.

'Next time I'll keep my hand out of it. How's that?'

'Get mad if you want. T'rowin' them white men out ain't solvin' nothin'. It's about money, Dave. It's always about money. The white man need the nigger to work cheap. That ain't no mystery to black people. It's white folk don't figure it out, no.'

'I need you to help close up tonight,' I said.

'I'm gonna be there. Hey, you runnin' round in circles lookin' for this man been killin' dope dealers, this man who hurt you so bad the ot'er day, it don't have nothin' to do with no vigilante. When somebody killin' black people, it don't matter if up in a tree, or breakin' in a jail and hangin' a man on a beam, they can say it's 'cause he raped a white woman, or he killed a white man, or he done some ot'er t'ing. But it's over money. It means the black man stay down at the bottom of the pile. The dumbest nigger in Lou'sana know that.'

His eyes lingered indulgently on mine. He squeezed the rake handle, and his callused palm made a soft grating sound like leather rubbing against wood.

Monday morning I returned to work. The first telephone call I received was from Lucinda Bergeron.

'Fart, Barf, and Itch are no help on Will Buchalter,' she said. 'I don't understand it. Is the guy made out of air?'

'He didn't seem like it to me.'

'Then why doesn't he show up in the system?'

'You can't throw an electronic net over every psychopath in the country.'

'Somebody has to know who this guy is. Being around him must be like getting up in the morning and biting into a shit sandwich for breakfast.'

Too much time around squad rooms, Lucinda, I thought.

'How's Zoot doing?' I said.

'He's fine, thank you.'

'What's the problem?'

'He said you thought he should join "the Crotch." That's swinging-dick talk, isn't it? Quite a vocabulary you guys have.'

'How about your own?' I said.

'I'm not the one encouraging a seventeen-year-old boy to drop out of school.'

'He wanted me to talk to you about joining the Corps. He can get a GED there. I don't think it's the worst alternative in the world.'

'He can forget about it.'

'You do him a disservice. Why'd you call, Lucinda?'

Her anger seemed almost to rise from the perforations in the telephone receiver.

'That's a good question. When I figure it out, I'll tell you.' Then she made that sound again, like she had just broken a fingernail. A moment later, she said, 'We're operating a sting out of a motel dump by Ursulines and Claiborne. You want in on it?'

'What for?'

'We're going to roll over some dealers from the Iberville Project.'

'You think they're going to tell you something about the vigilante?'

'They're the bunch most likely to undergo open-heart surgery these days.'

'You think this will lead you back to Buchalter?'

'Who knows? Maybe there's more than one guy killing black dope dealers.'

'Lucinda, listen to me on this one. Buchalter doesn't have any interest in you or Zoot. Don't make it personal. Don't bring this guy into your life.'

'That sounds strange coming from you.'

'Read it any way you want. Zoot and I were lucky. The time to go home is after you hit the daily double.'

'You want in on the sting or not?'

'What's the address?'

I talked with the sheriff, arranged to have a deputy stay at the house until I returned sometime that evening, then signed out of the office and went home to change into street clothes. Bootsie's car was gone, and Alafair was at school. I used the Memo button on our telephone answering machine to leave Bootsie a recorded message. I gave her both Lucinda Bergeron's and Ben Motley's extension numbers, and, in case she couldn't reach me any other way, I left the name and address of the motel off Claiborne where the sting was being set up.

It seemed a simple enough plan.

On the way back down the dirt road, on the other side of the drawbridge, I saw the flatbed truck, with the conical loudspeakers welded on the roof, of the Reverend Oswald Flat, banging in the ruts and coming toward me in a cloud of dust. Crates of machinery or equipment of some kind were boomed down on the truck bed.

Oswald Flat recognized my pickup and clanked to a halt in the middle of the road. His pale eyes, which had the strange, nondescript color of water running over a pebbled streambed, stared at me from behind his large, rimless glasses. His wife sat next to him, eating pork rinds out of a brown bag.

'Where you running off to now?' he said.

'To New Orleans. I'm in a bit of a hurry, too.'

'Yeah, I can tell you're about to spot your drawers over something.'

'Today's not the day for it, Reverend.'

'Oh, I know that. I wouldn't want to hold you back from the next mess you're about to get yourself into. But my conscience requires that I talk to you, whether you like hit or not. Evidently you got the thinking powers of a turnip, son. Now, just stop wee-weeing in your britches a minute and pull onto the side of the road.'

'Os, I told you to stop talking to the man like he's a mo-ron,' his wife said, dabbing at the rings of fat under her chin with a handkerchief.

I parked in a wide spot and walked back toward his truck. Through the slats in one of the crates fastened to the flatbed with boomer chains I could see the round brass helmet, with glass windows and wing nuts, and the rubber and canvas folds of an ancient diving suit.

'I hate even to ask what you're doing with that,' I said.

'Bought hit at a shipyard outside Lake Charles-air hoses, compressor, weighted shoes, cutting torch, stuff I don't even know the name of. Now I got to get aholt of a boat.'

'You're going to try to find that sub?'

He smiled and didn't answer.

'Do you know what's in it?' I asked.

'I'd bet on a lot of Nazis ready for a breath of fresh air.'

'I think you're going to get hurt.'

'Hit's something they want. So I'll do everything I can to make sure they don't get hit.'

'Don't do this, sir.'

'I cain't fault you. You mean well. But you still don't get hit. You ain't chasing one man, or even a bunch of men. Hit's something wants to take over the earth and blot out the sun. Hit's evil on a scale the likes of ordinary people cain't imagine.'

His eyes searched in mine like those of a man who would never find words to adequately explain the enigmas that to him had the bright, clear shape of a dream.

'You lost your son to forces you couldn't control, Reverend,' I said. 'I lost my wife Annie in a similar way. I was full of anger, and after a while I came to believe the whole earth was a dark place.'

He was already shaking his head before I could finish.

'I was on a tanker got torpedoed. Right out yonder,' he said, and pointed toward the southern horizon. 'There ain't no way to describe hit for somebody ain't been there. Holding on to the life jacket of a man whose face is burnt off… Boilers blowing apart under the water… Men crawling around on the hull like ants just before she slips to the bottom… Somebody screaming out there inside an island of flaming oil. You don't never want to hear a sound like that, Mr. Robicheaux.'

'Sometimes you have to let things go, partner.'

'They got to make people afraid. That's the plan. Make 'em afraid of the coloreds, the dope addicts, the homeless, the homosexuals, hit don't matter. When they got enough people afraid, that's when they'll move.'

'Who?'

'The Book of Revelation says the Beast will come from the sea. In the Bible the sea means politics.'

'I think you're a decent man. But don't go down after that sub with this junk.'

'Just leave things alone… Don't be messin'… Let the law handle hit… You put me in mind of a woodpecker tapping away on a metal light pole.' He pursed his lips and began to whistle, then opened the door to the truck cab and reached behind the seat. 'Tell me what you make of this?'

'An iron rose.'

'Hit was probably tore off a tomb or a gate. But this morning hit was on my front porch. The stem was stuck through the heart on a valentine card.'

It was heavy in my palm, the iron black with age, the edges of the petals thin and serrated with rust.

'Have you given somebody reason to be upset with you?' I said.

'I been working down in the Desire Project for the last week.'

'You know how to pick them.'

'Jesus didn't spend a lot of time with bankers and the fellows at the Chamber of Commerce.'

I placed the iron rose back in his hand.

'Good luck to you, Reverend. Call me if I can help with anything,' I said.

I left him there, a good man out of sync with the world, the era, even the vocabulary of his countrymen. But I doubted if anyone would ever be able to accuse the Reverend Oswald Flat of mediocrity. His kind ended on crosses, forever the excoriated enemies of the obsequious. To him my words of caution bordered on insult and my most reasoned argument had the viability of a moth attempting to mold and shape a flame.

A narcotics sting sounds interesting. It's not. It usually involves what's called rolling over the most marginal players in the street trade-hypes, hookers, and part-time mules, and any of their demented friends and terrified family members who are unlucky enough to get nailed with them. As a rule, the mules, or couriers, are dumb and inept and spend lifetimes seeking out authority figures in the form of probation officers and social workers. In the normal world most of them couldn't make sandwiches without an instruction manual. They are almost always users themselves, dress as though they're color-blind, speak in slow motion, and wonder why cops can easily pick them out of a crowd at a shopping mall.

They scheme and labor on a daily basis at the bottom of the food chain. When they're busted in a sting, their choices are immediate and severe-they either roll over and give up somebody else, or they go straight to jail, sweat out withdrawal over a toilet bowl in a holding cell, then meditate upon their mistakes while hoeing soybeans for several years at Angola.

Shitsville in the street trade is when you're spiking six balloons a day and suddenly you're in custody and the Man can snap his fingers and turn you into a Judas Iscariot or a trembling bowl of Jell-O.

'You telling me you want to ride the beef, Albert?' the plainclothes says to the frightened black man, who sits on the edge of the motel bed, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his thin forearms lined with the infected tracks and gray scar tissue of his addiction.

'If I give you Bobby, he'll fuck me up, man,' Albert answers. 'Cat's got a blade. He did a guy in Houston with it.'

The plainclothes, a heavy, choleric man in a sweaty, long-sleeve white shirt, reaches out and taps Albert sharply on the cheek with his hand.

'Are you stupid, Albert?' he says. 'You're already fucked up. You're taking Bobby's fall. Bobby has kicked a two-by-four up your ass. Look at me, you stupid shit. Bobby told me your old lady whores for lepers. He laughs at both of you behind your back. He's got you copping his joint and you're too fucking dumb to know it.'

'He told you my old-'

'You want to go back to Angola? You want to get turned out again, made into a galboy, that's what you're telling me, Albert? You like those swinging dicks to turn you out? I heard they tore up your insides last time.'

'You gotta he'p me on this. I cain't go down again, man.'

'Get him out of my sight,' the plainclothes says to another cop.

'You gotta keep my name out of it, okay? The cat tole me to meet him in a pizza joint out in Metairie. He's gonna be there in an hour.'

'You got to make him take you to his stash, Albert. That's the only deal you get. Bobby goes down, you walk. Otherwise, your next high is going to be on nutmeg and coffee. Is it true that stuff can give you a hard-on like a chunk of radiator pipe?'

Albert trembles like a dog trying to pass broken glass; Albert vomits in his lap; Albert makes the plainclothes turn away in disgust.

What's it all worth?

You've got me.

The people at the top usually skate. They buy defense attorneys who used to be prosecutors for the U.S. Justice Department. A million-dollar bond is simply factored into the overhead.

Albert goes to jail, or into a diversion program, or into the graveyard. And nobody, except Albert, particularly cares which one, since Albert doesn't even qualify as a footnote.

In an adjoining room Lucinda and I questioned seven individuals-five of them black, two white-about the vigilante. But these were people who long ago had accepted the sleepy embrace of the succubus or incubus that had insinuated itself into their lives through a tied-off, swollen vein. Their concept of mortality did not extend past the next five minutes of their day. They shot up with one another's syringes, used the public health clinic as a temporary means to knock their venereal diseases into remission, looked upon AIDS as just another way of dying, and daily accepted the knowledge that a vengeful supplier could give them a hot shot that would transform their hearts into kettledrums.

Their beef was with the narcs. Their angst was centered on their own metabolism and the fact that they were about to rat out their friends. Why bargain with a couple of homicide investigators who could offer them nothing? They turned to stone.

Then one of those terrible moments happened, the kind that you dream about, that you hope will never occur in your career, that will always somehow be the misfortune of someone else. Later, you'll attribute it to bad judgment, callousness, inhumanity, bad luck, or simple stupidity, like a safety-minded fool righteously padlocking fire exits, but it remains forever as the moment that left you with the mark of Cain.

The plainclothes who had been interrogating Albert decided to tighten and tamp down the dials a little more and whipped Albert repeatedly across his nappy head with a fedora, yelling at him simultaneously, until another cop stopped it and walked him outside for a cigarette. When they came back in, the plainclothes's face was still flushed and his armpits were.gray with sweat. The thermostat switch was broken, and the room was hot and dry with the electric heat from the wall panels. The plainclothes ripped off his tie, kneaded the thick folds in the back of his neck, then hung his shoulder holster on the back of a wood chair.

Albert was shirtless, his lap soiled with vomit, his face wringing wet. His shoulders trembled, and his teeth clicked in his mouth. He begged to go to the toilet.

The plainclothes walked him into the bathroom, unlocked one cuff, then snipped it on a water pipe and closed the door.

Albert was strung out, delusional, popping loose seam and joint. His body was foul with its own fluids; his pitiful attempt at integrity had been robbed from him; his new identity was that of snitch and street rat. With luck he'd be out of town before his friend Bobby made bail.

But Albert was jail-wise and had been underestimated.

He feverishly lathered his wrist with soap and pulled his thin hand through the cuff like it was bread dough. The plainclothes stared with disbelief as Albert came through the bathroom door and tore the.38 out of the shoulder holster that hung on the chair back, his hand shaking, his eyes blood-flecked and bulging with fear, sweat streaming down his chest.

The plainclothes's face looked like a large, round, white clock that had run out of time.

'Put it down, Albert!' Lucinda shouted, pointing her nickel-plated.357 Magnum straight out with both hands from the doorway.

The plainclothes's chest was heaving; he clutched at his left breast, and his breath rose from his throat like bubbles bursting from an underwater air hose. Lucinda's feet were spread, her midriff winking above her Clorox-faded Levi's. Albert's eyes were half-dollars, his clenched right hand trembling as though it were painted with electricity.

'You don't want to do this, Albert,' she said, fitted her thumb over the knurled spur of the hammer, and cocked it back. The notched grooves and the cylinder locked into place with a sound like a dry stick snapping. 'We can all walk out of this. You'll go downtown. Nobody'll hurt you. I give you my word. Lower the gun, Albert… Wait… Don't do it, don't let those thoughts get in your head… Albert!'

But it was too late. A facsimile of a man, with the soft bones of a child and muscles like jelly, with lint in his navel and a snake feeding at his heart, was imploding inside and looking for his executioner. He gripped the pistol with both hands, squeezed his eyes shut, turned toward Lucinda, and lowered his head between his extended arms as he tightened his finger inside the trigger housing.

She fired only once. The round caught him in the crown of the skull and knocked him back against the wall as though he had been struck by an automobile.

The air was bitter with the smell of gunpowder, dry heat, and a hint of nicotine and copulation in the bed clothing. My ears were ringing from the explosion, then I saw the plainclothes pointing at the red horsetails on the wallpaper while he giggled and wheezed uncontrollably, his left hand clawing at his collar as though it were a garrote about his neck.

Three hours later, after the paperwork, the questions, the suspension from active duty, the surrender of her weapon to Nate Baxter, I drove her home. Or almost home.

'Stop at the corner,' she said.

'What for?'

'I want a drink.'

'Bad day to feed the dragon,' I said.

'Drop me off and I can walk.'

'Lucinda, this is what happens. Tonight, you'll finally fall asleep. You'll have troubling dreams, but not exactly about the shooting. It's like your soul has a headache and can't allow itself to remember something. Then you'll wake up in the morning, and for a few moments it'll all be gone. Then, boom, it'll wash over you like the sun just died in the sky. But each day it gets better, and eventually you come to understand there's no way it could have worked out differently.'

Her eyes had the unnatural sheen of an exhausted person who just bit into some black speed.

'Are you coming in or not?' she said when I pulled to the curb in front of an old wood-front bar with a colonnade on Magazine.

'I guess not.'

'See you around, sport,' she said as she slammed the door and walked into the bar, the tip of a white handkerchief sticking out of the back pocket of her Levi's, her bare ankles chafing against the tops of her dusty tennis shoes.

Bad situation in which to leave a distraught lady, I thought, and followed her inside.

It was dark and cool inside and smelled of the green sawdust on the floor and a caldron of shrimp the black bartender was boiling on a gas stove behind the counter. I used a pay phone by the empty pool table to call home. It was the second time I had called that afternoon and gotten no answer. I left another message.

Lucinda drank a whiskey sour in two swallows. Her eyes widened, then she let out her breath slowly, almost erotically, and ordered another.

'Join me?' she asked.

'No thanks.'

She drank from the glass.

'How many times has it happened to you?' she said.

'Who cares?'

'I don't know if I can go back out there again.'

'When they deal the play and refuse the alternatives, you shut down their game.'

'How many times did you do it? Can't you answer a simple question?' she said.

'Five.'

'God.'

I felt a constriction, like a fish bone, in my throat.

'Who'd you rather have out there, people who do the best they can or a lot of cops cloned from somebody like Nate Baxter or that blimp in the motel room?'

She finished her drink and motioned to the bartender, who refilled her glass from a chrome shaker fogged with moisture. She flattened her hands on the bar top and stared at the tops of her fingers.

'I busted Albert four years ago,' she said. 'For stealing a can of Vienna sausage out of a Winn-Dixie. He lived in the Iberville Project with his grandmother. He cried when I put him in the holding cell. His P.O. sent him up the road.'

'A lot of people wrote that guy's script, but you weren't one of them, Lucinda. Sometimes we just end up being the punctuation mark,' I said, slid the whiskey glass away from the ends of her fingers, and turned her toward the door and the mauve-colored dusk that was gathering outside in the trees.

I drove her to her house and walked with her up on the gallery. The latticework was thick and dark with trumpet vine, and fireflies were lighting in the shadows. The lightbulb above our heads swarmed with bugs in the cool air. She paused with her keys in her hand.

'Do you want me to call later?' I said.

'I'll be all right.'

'Is Zoot here?'

'He plays basketball tonight.'

'It might be good if you ask somebody to come over.'

Her face looked up into mine. Her mouth was red; her breath was soft with the smell of bourbon.

'I'll call when I get back to New Iberia,' I said.

Her face looked wan, empty, her gaze already starting to focus inward on a memory that would hang in the unconscious like a sleeping bat.

'It's going to be all right,' I said, and placed one hand on her shoulder. I could feel the bone through the cloth of her blouse.

But nothing was going to be all right. She lowered her head and exhaled. Then I realized what she was looking at. On the tip of her tennis shoe was a red curlicue of dried blood.

'Why did it have to be a pathetic and frightened little man like Albert?' she said. She swayed slightly on her feet, and her eyes closed, and I saw the tears squeeze out from under the lashes.

I put my arms around her shoulders and patted her softly on the back. Her forehead was pressed against my chest; I could feel the thickness of her hair against my cheek, the thin and fragile quality of her body inside my arms, the brush of her stomach against my loins. On the neighbor's lawn the iron head of a broken garden sprinkler was rearing erratically with the hose's pressure and dripping water into the grass.

I took the door key from her fingers. It felt stiff and hard in my hand.

'I have to go back-home now, Lucinda,' I said. 'Where can we get hold of Zoot?'

Then I turned and saw the car parked at the curb, a two-door white Toyota. The car of Sister Marie Guilbeaux, whose small hands were as white as porcelain and resting patiently on the steering wheel. In the passenger seat sat Bootsie, her face disbelieving, stunned, hurt in a way that no one can mask, as though all the certainties in her life had proved to be as transitory as a photographic negative from one's youth dissolving on top of a hot coal.