Dixie City Jam

chapter five

I slept on Clete's couch that night, and in the morning I called Nate Baxter at his office and asked about the other homicides that involved mutilation.

Nate had never been a good liar.

'Mutilation? How do you think most homicides are committed? By beating the person to death with dandelions?'

'You know what I'm talking about.'

'Yeah, I do. You got to somebody under my supervision.'

'Your office is a sieve, Nate.'

'No, there's only one broad I smell in this. Nothing racial meant. Stay out of the investigation, Robicheaux. You blew your career in New Orleans because you were a lush. You won't change that by sticking your nose up that broad's cheeks.'

He hung up.

I got back home just before lunch. The air was already hot and breathless and dense with humidity, and I put on my tennis shoes and running shorts, jogged three miles along the dirt road by the bayou, then did three sets of arm curls, dead lifts, and military presses with my barbells in the backyard. My chest was singing with blood when I turned on the cold water in the shower.

I didn't hear Bootsie open the bathroom door.

'Do you have a second?'

'Sure,' I said, and twisted the shower handle off.

'I acted badly. I'm sorry,' she said.

'About what?'

'About Batist. About the money. I worry about it sometimes. Too much, I guess.'

'What if I had a wife who didn't?'

I eased the water back on, then through the frosted glass I saw her undressing in muted silhouette. She opened the door, stepped inside with me, and slipped her arms around my neck, her face uplifted, her eyes closed against the spray of the shower over my shoulders.

I held her against me and kissed her hair. Her body was covered with tan, the tops of her breasts powdered with freckles. Her skin was smooth and warm and seemed to radiate health and well-being through my palms, the way a rose petal does to the tips of your fingers, but the reality was otherwise. Lupus, the red wolf, lived in her blood and waited only for a slip in her medication to resume feeding on her organs and connective tissue. And if the wolf was not loosed by an imbalance in the combinations of medicine that she took, another even more insidious enemy was-temporary psychosis that was like an excursion onto an airless piece of moonscape where only she lived.

She was supposed to avoid the sun, too. But I had long since given up trying to take her out of the garden or force her back into the shade of the cabin when we were out on the salt. I had come to feel, as many people do when they live with a stricken wife or husband, that the tyranny of love can be as destructive as that of disease.

We made love in the bedroom, our bodies still damp and cool from the shower, while the window fan drew the breeze across the sheets. She moved her stomach in a circular motion on top of me, her arms propped against the mattress; then I saw her eyes close and her face become soft and remote. Her thighs tensed, and she bent forward suddenly, her mouth opening, and I felt her heat spread across my loins just as something crested and burst inside me like water edging over a dam and cascading in a white arc through a dark streambed.

She was one of those rare people for whom making love did not end with a particular act. She lay beside me and touched the white patch in my hair, my mustache, the rubbery scar high up on my chest from a.38 round, the spray of lead gray welts along my right thigh where a bouncing Betty had painted me with light on a night trail outside a pitiful Third World village stinking of duck shit and unburied water buffalo.

Then I felt her hand rest in the center of my chest.

'Dave, there was a man outside this morning,' she said.

'Which man?'

'He was out by the road, looking through the trees at the gallery. When I opened the screen, he walked back down the road.'

'What did he look like?'

'I couldn't see his face. He had on a blue shirt and a hat.'

'Maybe he was just lost.'

'Our number and name are on the mailbox by the road. Why would he be looking up at the gallery?'

'I'll ask Batist if he saw anyone unusual hanging around the front.'

She got up from the bed and began dressing by the back window. The curtains, which had the texture of gauze and were printed with tiny pink flowers, ruffled across the arch of her back as she stepped into her panties.

'Why are you looking at me like that?' she said.

'Because without exaggeration I can say that you're one of the most beautiful women on earth.'

When she smiled her eyes closed and opened in a way that made my heart drop.

Later, I went down to the dock to help Batist clean up the tables after the lunch crowd had left. Parked by the boat ramp, pinging with heat, was a flatbed truck with huge cone-shaped loudspeakers welded all over the cab's roof. On the doors, hand-painted in a flowing calligraphy, were the words Rev. Oswald Flat Ministries.

I remembered the name from years ago when he had broadcast his faith-healing show from Station XERF, one of the most powerful radio transmitters in the Western Hemisphere, located across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, in old Mexico so that the renters of its airtime were not governed by FCC restrictions. Sandwiched between ads for tulip bulbs, bat guano, baby chicks, aphrodisiacs, and memberships in every society from the Invisible Empire to the Black Muslims, were sermons by Brother Oswald, as he was called, that were ranting, breathless pieces of Appalachian eloquence. Sometimes he would become virtually hysterical, gasping as though he had emphysema, then he would snort air through his nostrils and begin another fifteen-minute roller-coaster monologue that would build with such roaring, unstoppable intensity that the technicians would end his sermon for him by superimposing a prerecorded ad.

He and his wife, a woman in a print cotton dress with rings of fat under her chin, were eating barbecue at the only table in the bait shop when I opened the screen door. It must have been ninety degrees in the shop, even with the window fans on, but Oswald Flat wore a long-sleeve denim work shirt buttoned at the wrists and a cork sun helmet that leaked sweat out of the band down the sides of his head. His eyes were pale behind his rimless glasses, the color of water flowing over gravel, liquid-looking in the heat, the back of his neck and hands burned the deep hue of chewing tobacco.

'That's Dave yonder,' Batist said to him from behind the counter, seemingly relieved. He picked up a can of soda pop and went outside to drink it at one of the telephone-spool tables under the awning that shaded the dock.

Flat's eyes went up and down my body. His wife began eating a Moon Pie, chewing with her mouth or open while she stared idly out the window at the bayou.

'Looks like you're a hard man to grab holt of,' he said.

'Not really. I was up at the house.'

'Don't like to bother a man in his home.'

'What could I do for you, sir?'

'I belong to the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans.

I make no apology for hit. The town's a commode. But I don't like what got done to your colored boy.'

'Boy?'

His southern mountain accent grated like piano wire drawn through a hole punched in a tin can. He took a toothpick from his shirt pocket, worked it into a back tooth, and measured me again with his bemused, pale eyes.

'You one of them kind gets his nose up in the air about words he don't like?' he said.

'Batist is older than I am, Reverend. People hereabouts don't call him a boy.'

'He probably ain't gonna get much older if you don't take the beeswax out of your ears. There's something bad going on out yonder. I don't like hit.' He waved his hand vaguely at the eastern horizon.

'You mean the vigilante?'

'Maybe. Maybe something a whole lot bigger than that.'

'I don't follow you.'

'Things falling apart at the center. I think it's got to do with the Antichrist.'

'The Antichrist?'

'You got woodpecker holes in your head or something?'

'I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'There's signs and such, the way birds fly around in a dead sky right before a storm. You had a president with the numbers in his name.' He puffed out both his cheeks. 'I can tell you're thinking, son. I can smell the wood burning.'

'What numbers?'

'Ronald Wilson Reagan. Six-six-six. The Book of Revelation says hit, you'll know him by the numbers in his name. I think that time's on us.'

'Could I get y'all anything else?'

'Does somebody have to hit you upside the head with a two-by-four to get your attention?' he said.

'Stop talking to the man like that, Os,' his wife said, opening another Moon Pie, her gaze fixed indolently on the willows bending in the breeze.

'That colored fellow out yonder's innocent,' he said to me. 'These murders, I don't care if hit's dope dealers being killed or not, they ain't done by somebody on the side of justice. People can pretend that's the case, but hit ain't so. And that bothers me profoundly. God's honest truth, son. That's all I come here to tell you.'

'Do you know something about the murders, Reverend?'

'You'll be the first to hear about hit when I do.' His face was dilated and discolored in the heat, as though it had been slowly poached in warm water.

After he and his wife drove away in their flatbed truck, the exact nature of their mission still a mystery to me, I called up to the house.

'Hey, Boots, I'm going to Lafayette to talk to a lawyer, then I have to pick up some ice for the coolers,' I said. 'By the way, that man in the blue shirt you saw… I think he was just in the shop. He's a fundamentalist radio preacher. I guess he's trying to do a good deed of some kind.'

'Why was he staring up at the house?'

'You've got me. He's probably just one of those guys who left his grits on the stove too long. Anyway, he seems harmless enough.'

If I had only mentioned his name or the fact that he was with his wife, or that he was elderly, or that he was a southern mountain transplant. Any one of those things would have made all the difference.