Dixie City Jam

chapter twenty-eight

The word death is never abstract. I think of my father high up on the night tower, out on the salt, when the wellhead blew and all the casing came out of the hole, the water and oil and sand geysering upward through the lights just before a spark flew from metal surface and ignited a flame that melted the steel spars into licorice; I think of his silent form, still in hobnailed boots and hard hat, undulating in the groundswell deep under the gulf, his hand and sightless face beckoning.

Death is the smell that rises green and putrescent from a body bag popped open in a tropical mortuary; the luminescent pustules that cover the skin of VC disinterred from a nighttime bog of mud and excrement when the 105's come in short; the purple mushrooms that grow as thick and knotted as tumors among gum trees, where the boys in butternut brown ran futilely with aching breasts under a rain of airbursts that painted their clothes with torn rose petals.

But there are other kinds of endings that serve equally well for relocating your life into a dead zone where there seems to be neither wind nor sound, certainly not joy, or even, after a while, the capacity to feel.

You learn that the opposite of love is not hate but an attempt at surrogate love, which becomes a feast of poisonous flowers. You learn to make love out of need, in the dark, with the eyes closed, and to justify it to yourself, with a kiss only at the end. You learn that that old human enemy, ennui, can become as tangible and ubiquitous a presence in your life as a series of gray dawns from which the sun never breaks free.

I wasn't going to let it happen.

Bootsie and I met at a dance on Spanish Lake in the summer of '57. It was the summer that Hurricane Audrey killed over five hundred people in Louisiana, but I'll always remember the season for the twilight softness of its evenings, the fish fries on Bayou Teche and crab boils out on Cypremort Point, the purple and pink magic of each sunrise, the four-o'clocks that Bootsie would string in her hair like drops of blood, and the rainy afternoon we lost our virginity together on the cushions in my father's boathouse while the sun's refraction off the water spangled our bodies with brown light.

It was the summer that Jimmy Clanton's 'Just a Dream' played on every jukebox in southern Louisiana. I believed that death happened only to other people, and that the season would never end. But it did, and by my own hand. Even at age nineteen I had learned how to turn whiskey into a weapon that could undo everything good in my life.

'What're you thinking about, bubba?' Bootsie said behind me.

'Oh, just one thing and another.' I stopped cleaning the spinning reel that I had taken apart on top of the picnic table. The air was wet and close, the willows dripping with water along the coulee.

'I called you twice through the window and you didn't hear me.'

'Sorry. What's up?'

'Nothing much. What's up with you?'

I turned around and looked at her. She wore a pair of white shorts and a T-shirt that was too small for her, which exposed her navel and her tapered, brown stomach.

'Isn't anything up with you?' she asked, and rested one knee on the bench, her arms on my shoulders, and leaned her weight into my back.

'What are you doing?' I said.

'Ummm,' she answered, and her hand moved down my chest.

I reached behind me and held the backs of her thighs and arched my neck and head between her breasts. She widened her legs and drew me tightly against her.

'Let's go inside,' she said, her voice husky and close to my ear.

'Alafair'll be home in a half hour.'

'A half hour will do just fine,' she said.

She drew the curtains in the bedroom, undressed completely, and pulled back the bedspread. Her skin was flushed and hot when I touched her.

'Are you okay, Boots?'

She pressed me down on the pillows and got on top of me, then cupped my sex with both hands and put it inside her. Her mouth opened silently, then her eyes became veiled and unfocused and she propped herself on her arms above me and adjusted her weight so that I was deep inside her, lost now in a place where breath and the heart's blood and the thin sheen of sweat on our bodies all became one. The only sound I could hear was a moist click in her throat when she swallowed, and the wind arching a thick, rain-slick oak limb against the window.

She came before I did, her breasts and nipples hard between her stiffened arms, her mouth wide, her hair curled damply on her cheeks. Then I felt it build and crest inside me, my loins dissolving like a hot ember burning through parchment. A sound unlike my own voice rose from my throat, and I pulled her close against me, my face buried in her hair, my mouth pressed like a hungry child's against her ear, while outside mockingbirds lifted clattering into the lavender sky.

I had believed that my will alone could solve the problem in our lives. As I lay beside her on top of the sheets, I realized that, as usual, I was wrong. But at a moment like that, who cares where gifts come from?

At five the next morning Clete Purcel knocked on my back screen. He wore canvas boat shoes without socks, a pair of baggy safari shorts covered with snap-button pockets, his porkpie hat, and a sleeveless purple and gold Mike the Tiger jersey wash-faded to the thinness of cheesecloth. His face was unshaved and bright with fresh sunburn.

'You're not going to dime me, are you, Streak?'

'What do I know about warrants in Orleans Parish?' I stepped outside into the blue coolness of the morning and eased the screen shut behind me. 'Bootsie and Alf are still asleep. Let's walk down to the dock.'

We went down the slope through the deep shadow of the trees, stepping over the trip wire I had strung for Buchalter. Clete kept cracking his knuckles, as though they were big walnut shells. His eyes were red and irritated along the rims, as though he were hungover, but I could smell no alcohol on him.

'You look like you're getting a lot of sun,' I said.

'Why not? Life in the Quarter was turning me into a fat slug, anyway.'

Inside the shop I poured coffee and hot milk for both of us, and we took it out on one of the spool tables by the water. He unsnapped a pocket on his shorts and unfolded a nautical chart on the table.

'Can you show me where that sub is?' His eyes looked at the chart and not at me.

'What are you up to?'

'What do you care?'

'You look wired, Clete. What's wrong?'

'I've got a warrant on me, my business is in the toilet, Nate Baxter's trained shitheads'll probably try to smoke me on sight, and you ask what's wrong?'

I smoothed the chart flat with my palm. The marsh was emerald green after last night's rain, and the cypress knees along the bayous were grained and dark and shining with water from a passing boat's wake.

'Don't get in any deeper,' I said.

'In for a penny, in for a pound. You going to show me where it is or not?' He lit an unfiltered cigarette and flicked the match hard into the air.

I took a mechanical pencil from my shirt pocket and made three marks on the chart.

'These are the places where either I saw it or Hippo's friend pinged it. You can see the pattern. There's probably a trench that bleeds back off the continental shelf. A guy with a depth finder could set up a zigzag pattern and probably locate it. Unless it drops off the shelf and only gets blown back in by a storm.'

He stared down at the chart, his hat cocked over one eye.

'What are you going to do?' I asked.

'Maybe I should remodel it with some C-4.'

'Is the preacher mixed up in this?'

'Not yet. But he was sure beautiful on the radio last night, you know, that call-in show where the geek in the street gets to express his opinion. Brother Oswald is telling people the Beast is about to rise from the sea.' He looked at me and tried to smile. 'Maybe he's talking about my ex.'

'What are you hiding from me, partner?'

He arched his cigarette out on the bayou and watched it hiss in the water and float downstream.

'I've got to quit this. My lungs feel like they've got battery acid in them,' he said.

'What's the gig, Clete?'

'I got to boogie, noble mon,' he said.

'Eat some breakfast.'

'Got to make it happen, Streak. Like you used to say, miles before I sleep and all that stuff. Hang loose.'

'How's Martina?'

He walked toward his convertible without answering, then turned, winked, and gave me the thumbs-up sign.

Just before noon, Ben Motley called me at the office.

'We got the trowel,' he said.

'Go on…'

'The blade was clean, but there was dried blood in a crack between the handle and the shaft. The lab says it's human.'

'What else?'

'Two types. One match. With a guy who had his heart taken out against the wall of the St. Louis Cemetery.'

'Why not two matches?'

'You're assuming we've found all the victims.'

'Where's Manuel?'

'In custody… This one doesn't make me feel too good, Robicheaux. The guy's got strained carrots for brains. The interpreter says he speaks some Indian dialect from down in the fucking Amazon.'

'You think it's too easy?'

'I think maybe we're talking patsy here. Hey, Lonighan's a prick but he was genuinely upset, like in a personal way, when he found out we were charging the kid with murder. Does that sound like Tommy Bobalouba to you?'

Not bad, Mots, I thought.

'Have you had any contact with Clete Purcel?' I said.

'Who?'

'He found a videotape on South American Indians, a documentary of some kind, in Max Calucci's house.'

'There's static on the line. I couldn't hear what you said. You got me? I didn't fucking hear that, Robicheaux.'

'Lonighan borrowed two hundred thou for his casino from the Calucci brothers. I have a feeling he was paying the debt by helping them set up the brown scag trade in the projects.'

'You tell Purcel he tries to put turds in the punch bowl on this one, he won't have to worry about Nate Baxter. I'll send his butt to Angola myself.'

'Rough words, Mots.'

'What you don't understand is Purcel doesn't take a guy down because the guy broke the law. He takes him down because he doesn't like the guy. That's why he'll never carry a shield again.'

'How do you think the case against the Indian is going to stand up?'

'Circumstantial evidence, a retard on the stand, a defense attorney who lets the jury know the retard is a grunt for a rich gangster who actually drowned somebody with a fire hose and got away with it. Take a guess how the jury might vote.'

'Thanks for all the good news.'

'It's not all bad. The word on the street is Lonighan's dying.'

'For some reason that doesn't fill me with joy, partner.'

'Lonighan's mixed up with the Caluccis and the dope trade in the projects. Those black kids we bust all the time, they weren't addicts when they came out of their mamas' womb. Believe it or not, even those dead dealers had families, Robicheaux.'

Why argue with charity? I eased the receiver down in the cradle and stared out i the window at the palm trees rattling in the wind. The bottom of the sky looked green over the gulf.

What was Clete Purcel doing?

I went home for lunch. When I came back the sheriff stopped me at the watercooler.

'The FBI just relayed some stuff to us from Interpol. They've got a fix on the woman,' he said.

'What?'

'Read it. It's on your desk. I thought stuff like that only went on in the Barker family.' He walked away and left me staring after him.

The statement from Interpol consisted of four paragraphs. There was nothing statistical or demonstrable about the information in them. As with all the other documents in the case, it was as though the writer were trying to describe an elusive presence that had been mirrored only briefly in the eyes of others.

But the images he used weren't those of the ordinary technical writer; they remained in the memory like splinters under the skin.

Two undercover antiterrorist agents in Berlin believed that the man known as William Buchalter and Willie Schwert and other variations operated inside a half dozen neo-Nazi groups with a half sister named Marie. A skinhead in a beer garden told a story of an initiation into a select inner group known in England and the United States as the Sword. A kidnapped Turkish laborer had knelt trembling on the dirt floor of a potato cellar, his wrists wired behind him, a burlap sack pulled over his face, while the initiates pledged their lives to the new movement. Then the woman named Marie had set the kidnapped man on fire.

I opened and closed my mouth, as though my ears were popping from cabin pressure in an airplane, and continued to read. The details in the last paragraph gave another dimension to the sweaty, hoarse voices that I had heard over the telephone.

The sheriff stood in my doorway with a coffee cup in his hand.

'You think that's our phony nun?' he said.

'Yeah, I do.'

'You believe that stuff at the end of the page?'

'They're perverse people. Why should anything they do be a surprise?'

'Did you know Ma Barker and one of her sons were incestuous? They committed suicide by machine-gunning each other. They were even buried together in the same casket, to keep the tradition intact. That's a fact.'

'Interesting stuff,' I said.

'You've got to have some fun with it or you go crazy. I got to tell you that?'

'No, you're right.'

He walked over and squeezed me on the shoulder. I could smell his leather gunbelt and pipe tobacco in his clothes.

'You sleeping all right at night?' he said.

'You bet.'

He grunted under his breath.

'That's funny, I don't. Well, maybe we'll drop that pair in their own box. Who knows?' he said.

He walked his fingernails across my desk and went back out the door.

The best lead on Buchalter, the only one, really, was still music.

Brother Oswald Flat, I thought.

I got his telephone number from long-distance information.

'Didn't you say you played with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys?' I asked.

'What about hit?'

'Did you ever have any connection with jazz or blues musicians?'

'Son, I like you. I really do. But a conversation with you is like trying to teach someone the recipe for ice water.'

'I'm afraid I'm not following you.'

'That's the point. You never do.'

'I'll try to listen carefully, sir, if you can be patient with me.'

'Music's one club. Hit's like belonging to the church. Hit don't matter which room you're in, long as you're in the building. You with me?'

'You know some jazz musicians?'

'I'll have a go at hit from a different angle,' he said. 'I used to record gospel at Sam Phillip's studio in Memphis. You know who else recorded in that same studio? Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Lee Swaggert. You want me to go on?'

'I think Will Buchalter has some kind of involvement with historical jazz or blues. But I don't know what it is.'

The phone was silent.

'Reverend?'

'Why didn't you spit hit out?'

This time I didn't answer. His voice had changed when he spoke again.

'I won't interrupt you or insult you again,' he said.

I recounted the most recent late-night phone call, with Beiderbecke's 'In a Mist' playing in the background; Buchalter's knowledge of early Benny Goodman and the proper way to handle old seventy-eights; the Bunk Johnson record that someone had left playing on my phonograph.

'You impress me, son. You know,' Oswald Flat said.

Again, I was silent.

'An evil man cain't love music,' he said. 'He's interested in hit for some other reason.'

'I think you're right.'

'There's a band plays on Royal Street. I mean, out in the street, when the cops put the barricades up and close off the traffic. They got a piano on a truck, a Chinese kid playing harmonica, some horns, a colored, I mean a black, man on slide guitar. The black man comes to my church sometimes. But he don't live in New Orleans. He's in Morgan City.'

'Yes?'

'If I call and see if he's home, can you meet me there in a couple of hours?'

'I think you'd better clarify yourself.'

'That's all you get. Holler till your face looks like an eggplant.'

'This is part of a police investigation, Reverend. You don't write the rules.'

'He's been in the penitentiary. He won't talk to you unless I'm there. You want my he'p or not?'

The black man's name was Jesse Viator, and he lived in a dented green trailer set up on concrete blocks thirty feet from the bayou's edge. He had only three teeth in his mouth, and they protruded from his gums like the hooked teeth in the mouth of a barracuda. We sat on old movie theater seats that he had propped up on railroad ties in his small, tidy backyard. A shrimp boat passed with its lights on, and near the far bank swallows were swooping above an oil barge that had rusted into a flooded shell.

Jesse Viator was not comfortable in the presence of a police officer.

'You remember that man you told me about, the one wanted you to record, the fellow you said bothered you the way he looked at you?' Brother Oswald said.

'Yeah, dude was up to no good,' he said.

'Why did you think that?' I asked. I smiled.

'Some people got their sign hanging out,' he answered. He pulled at the soft flesh under his chin and looked out at the bayou.

'Why was he up to no good, Jesse?' I said.

'Dude didn't say nothing mean. He was polite. But it was like there was heat in his face,' Viator said. 'Like a dry pan been setting on the gas burner.'

I showed him the composite drawing of Buchalter. He held it in the light from his trailer and studied it. His grizzled pate shone like tan wax.

'You do them composites with a machine, right? So a lot of them look alike,' he said.

'Who's the worst guy you ever met inside?' I said.

'They only get so bad. Then they all about the same. They end up in Camp J.'

'The guy I'm looking for is worse than anybody in Camp J. Do you believe me when I say that?'

He took the drawing back from my hand and tilted it to catch the light from the trailer. He tapped on the edges of the face. 'What's that?' he said.

'You tell me,' I said.

'Dude had dirt in his skin, what d' you call 'em, blackheads or something, made him look like he was wearing a mask around his eyes. Look, it was t'ree, four mont's back. I stopped thinking about it.'

'Tell him the rest of hit, Jesse,' Oswald Flat said.

'There ain't no rest,' he said. 'Dude say he give me a hundred dollars to record. I tole him I ain't interested. That's it. I don't want to talk about it no more.'

'Are you scared of this man?' I said, and kept my eyes on his.

He took a breath that was between anger and exasperation.

'You know the feeling that dude give me? It was like when a guy get made a slave up at Angola. When somebody turn out a kid, rape him, then tell him, Haul your lil ass down the Walk. In a half hour come back with ten dollars. In another half hour, I want ten dollars more, then I want ten dollars more after that, or the next thing go in your mouth got a sharp point on it and it don't come out. That's what that dude's eyes made me think of.'

He became morose and sullen and would say little more. The moon was up, and road dust and a sheen of diesel oil floated on the dead current close under the willows. The air was cool and humid and smelled of bait shrimp someone had left in a bucket. I asked the reverend to wait for me out front.

'What'd you fall for, Jesse?' I said.

'Guy tried to joog me at a dance. I didn't want to, but I put him down. Lawyer tole me to plea to manslaughter.'

'You have a family?'

'My wife's at the Charity. She got heart trouble. Our two daughters is growed up and married, in California.'

'The man I want molested my wife. I'll show you what he does when he gets his hands on people.' I stood up from my chair.

'What you doing, man? Hey, you taking off your-'

'Buchalter used an electrical generator on me, Jesse. That's where he attached the terminals. It's quite an experience.'

He propped his hands on his thighs, twisted in his chair, and focused his eyes on a cane pole that was stuck deep in the roots of a cypress tree.

'Man, I'm serious, I don't want no more to do with this,' he said.

'You had this guy made from the jump. You've got to help me, Jesse.'

He wiped at his face as though insects were in his eyes.

'Dude comes up to me on Royal, right after the gig, offers me a hundred bucks to play a half hour of my slide at his studio. I say, A hundred bucks don't cut making a tape. He says it's a demo, he's gonna offer it around, he's doing me a favor, usually a guy's got to pay for his own demo.

'I'm looking into that cat's face, I'm thinking he ain't ever gonna use the word nigger, he ain't gonna call me boon or tree climber or spear chucker, that ain't his way. He got that lil smile playing around the corner of his mouth, just like them guys in the AB look at you up at the farm. They'll hoe next to you in the soybean row, won't say nothing to you, chopping all the time like their mind is full of cool thoughts. That night you go in the shower and that same dude waiting for you with a shank in his hand.'

'You've got to give me something, Jesse.'

'He say his studio was one hour away. One hour there, one hour back. He winked at me when he said it.'

'I think you're holding back on me.' I kept my eyes locked on his.

'I ain't. He called once, man, right here at the trailer. I tole him I still ain't interested. It sound like he was outdoors, pay phone maybe. I could hear waves flopping, like on a beach.'

'He never mentioned a place? How about Grand Isle?'

'Not unless they moved Grand Isle over to Miss'sippi.'

'I'm not with you.'

'That day on Royal. I didn't pay the car no mind, but the plates was from Miss'sippi. That good enough? 'Cause that's all there is.'

I gave him my business card and picked up my coat from the chair. He looked out into space while his hand closed and opened on the card. Then he pressed it back into my palm.

'My wife deserve a trip after all the sickness she been having. I think we going out to visit our children in California. Be gone quite a while. You understand what I'm saying?'

The next afternoon, which was Friday afternoon, Ben Motley called me from New Orleans.

'Max Calucci dropped the charges against Purcel for destroying his house,' he said.

'Quite a change of heart.'

'What's your take on it?'

'He probably started sweating marbles when he heard Lonighan's Indian was in custody. That is, if he's mixed up in the vigilante killings. The last thing he needs now is legal involvement with the prosecutor's office. What's the insurance carrier, State Farm, going to do?'

'They're out of luck if they want to put it on Purcel. The witnesses now say they don't remember what the guy on the grader looked like. But they're sure it wasn't Purcel. I left a message on his recorder, but he didn't call back.'

'He's holed up in a fish camp someplace.'

'I went by his office. A secretary, a temp, was in there. She said he retrieved the message off the machine. Why doesn't he answer his calls?'

'I don't know, he's a little irresponsible sometimes. What's the status on Manuel Ruiz?'

'No bond. We're holding him for the INS. By the way, tell Purcel it's all right he doesn't call me back. Since he's already got such good friends in the department. Like Nate Baxter.'

I left a message for Clete at both his office and his apartment.

That evening I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did three sets of dead lifts, bench presses, and curls in the backyard. My neighbor was burning a pile of dried honeysuckle, and the air was hazy and sweet with the smoke.

Tie it down, think, I told myself. What were the ongoing connections in the Buchalter case?

Music, and now geography.

Two of Buchalter's hired meltdowns, Jack Pelley and Charles Sitwell, had been in the rock 'n' roll band in the Block at Angola. Buchalter evidently prowled stores that handled old records, like Jimmie Ryan's, and had tried to make a studio recording of the slide guitarist Jesse Viator.

He had been driving a car with Mississippi plates, had access to a studio an hour from New Orleans, and had made a telephone call within earshot of a beach.

The German skinhead who had been run down by his friends out on the salt had been diving from a cabin cruiser he and his friends had stolen from a berth in Biloxi.

Hippo Bimstine's friends had broken up a meeting of a hate group with baseball bats and expropriated their Nazi film footage in a cinder-block house north of Pascagoula.

I lowered the bar to my thighs, then curled it into my chest, released it slowly again, pausing in midair as the muscles in my arms burned and filled with blood. The air felt as cool as a knife blade in my lungs.

Maybe the circle was starting to tighten on Will Buchalter.

Before we went to bed, Bootsie and I ate a piece of pie at the kitchen table.

'Is something bothering you?' she said.

'I thought Clete might call.'

'Clete has his own way of doing things.'

'You're right about that.'

That night the wind blew hard out of the south, and I could hear our rental boats knocking against the pilings in the dock. Then it began to rain, and in my sleep I heard another sound, a distant one, metal striking methodically against metal, one pinging blow after another, muffled by the envelope of water it had to travel through.

In my dream I saw a group of Nazi sailors huddled in a half-flooded compartment, salt water pinwheeling through the leaks above their heads, their faces white with terror in the dimming light while they breathed their own stink and the coldness crept above their loins and one man kept whanging a wrench against the bulkhead.

I woke from the dream, my chest laboring for air. Through the clicking of the rain in the trees, I could still hear the rhythmic twang of metal hitting against metal. I slipped on my loafers and khakis, pulled a raincoat over my head, and, with a flashlight in my hand, ran from the back door to the collapsed barn by my duck pond. A sheet of corrugated tin roofing, purple with rust, was swinging from a broken beam against the remains of my father's old hay baler.

I pulled the broken beam and sheet of tin loose from the pile and threw them out into the field.

But I couldn't shake the dream. Why? What did I care about the fate of Nazis drowned fifty years ago?

The dream was not about submariners. Someone close to me was in trouble, maybe because of information I had given him, and I was trying to deny that simple fact.

Where was Clete Purcel?