Cadillac Jukebox

  I could see the black marble crypt and the piked iron fence that surrounded it at the top of the slope, the silhouette of a state trooper who was looking in the opposite direction, a roan gelding tossing its head and backing out of spiderwebs that were spread between two persimmon trunks.

  Part of the coulee had caved in, and the runoff had washed over the side and eroded a clutch of wide rivulets in the shape of a splayed hand, down the embankment to the bayou’s edge. I pushed the paddle hard into the silt and watched the trees, the palmettos, a dock and boathouse, and the pine-needle-covered, hoof-scarred floor of the woods drift past me.

  Then I saw it, in the same way your eye recognizes mortality in a rain forest when birds lift suddenly off the canopy or the wind shifts and you smell an odor that has always lived like a dark thought on the edge of your consciousness.

  But in truth it wasn’t much—a series of dimples on the slope, grass that was greener than it should have been, a spray of mushrooms with poisonous skirts. Maybe my contention with the LaRoses had broached the confines of obsession. I slipped one of the oar locks, tied a handkerchief through it, and tossed it up on the bank.

  Then I drifted sideways with the current into the silence of the next bend, yanked the starter rope, and felt the engine’s roar reverberate through my palm like an earache.

  * * *

  At sunset I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did a mile and a half to the drawbridge, waved at the bridge tender, and turned back toward home, the air like a cool flame on my skin. Ahead of me I saw a Buick pull to the side of the road and park, the front window roll down, then the door open halfway. Jerry Joe remained seated, his arms propped in the window as though he were leaning on a bar, a can of Budweiser in one hand, a pint of whiskey in the other. He looked showered and fresh, and he wore a white suit with an open-collar lavender shirt. A flat cardboard box lay on the leather seat next to him.

  “You gonna bust me for an open container?” he said.

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “I’m sorry about getting in your face yesterday.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You remember my mother?”

  “Sure.”

  “She used to make me go to confession all the time. I hated it. She was a real coonass, you know, and she’d say, ‘You feel guilty about you done something to somebody, Jerry Joe, you gonna try to pretend you don’t know that person no more ’cause he gonna make you remember who you are and the bad thing you done, or maybe you’re gonna try to hurt him, you. So that’s why you gotta go to confess, you.’ ”

  He tilted the bottle and threaded a thin stream of bourbon into the opening of his beer can. Then he drank from the can, the color in his eyes deepening.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “People like Karyn and Buford reinvent themselves. It’s like my mother said. They don’t want mirrors around to remind them of what they used to be.”

  “What can I do for you, partner?”

  “I ain’t lily white. I’ve been mixed up with the LaRose family a long time. But the deal going down now . . . I don’t know . . . It ain’t just the money . . . It bothers me.”

  “Tell somebody about it, Jerry Joe. Like your mom said.” I tried to smile.

  He reached around behind him and picked up the cardboard box from the seat. “I brought you something belongs to you. It was still buried behind the old house.”

  I rested the box on the window and lifted the top. The hand crank to our old phonograph lay in the middle of a crinkled sheet of white wrapping paper. The metal was deformed and bulbous with rust, and the wood handle had been eaten by groundwater.

  “So I returned your property and I got no reason to be mad at you,” he said. He was smiling now. He closed his car door and started his engine.

  “Stay on that old-time R&B,” I said.

  “I never been off it.”

  I walked the rest of the way home. The sun was gone now and the air was damp and cold, and the last fireflies of the season traced their smoky red patterns in the shadows.

  CHAPTER

  23

  When your stitches are popping loose and your elevator has already plummeted past any reasonable bottom and the best your day offers is seeds and stems at sunrise to flatten the kinks on a street dealer’s speedball that can turn your heart into a firecracker, you might end up in a piece of geography as follows:

  A few blocks off Canal, the building was once a bordello that housed both mulatto and white women; then in a more moral era, when the downtown brothels were closed by the authorities and the girls started working out of taxicabs instead, the building was partitioned into apartments and studios for artists, and finally it became simply a “hotel,” with no name other than that, the neon letters emblazoned vertically on a tin sign above a picture glass window that looked in upon a row of attached theater seats. Old people seemingly numbed by the calamity that had placed them in these surroundings stared vacantly through the glass at the sidewalk.

  The Mexican man had climbed the fire escape onto the peaked roof, then had glided out among the stars. He hit the courtyard with such an impact that he split a flagstone like it was slate.

  The corridor was dark and smelled of the stained paper bags filled with garbage that stood by each door like sentinels. Clete opened the dead man’s room with a passkey.

  “A Vietnamese boat lady owns the place. She found the guy’s pay stub and thought I could get his back rent from the state,” he said.

  Most of the plaster was gone from the walls. A mattress was rolled on an iron bed frame, and a pile of trash paper, green wine bottles, and frozen TV dinner containers was swept neatly into one corner. A flattened plastic wallet and a cardboard suitcase and a guitar with twelve tuning pegs and no strings lay on top of a plank table. The sound hole on the guitar was inlaid with green and pink mollusk shell, and the wood below the hole had been cut with scratches that looked like cat’s whiskers.

  “What was he on?” I said.

  “A couple of the wetbrains say he was cooking brown skag with ups. The speed is supposed to give it legs. The mamasan found the wallet under the bed.”

  It contained no money, only a detached stub from a pay voucher for ninety-six dollars, with Buford LaRose’s name and New Iberia address printed in the upper left-hand corner, and a Catholic holy card depicting a small statue of Christ’s mother, with rays of gold and blue light emanating from it. Underneath the statue was the caption La Virgin de Zapopan.

  I unsnapped the suitcase. His shirts and trousers and underwear were all rolled into tight balls. A pair of boots were folded at the tops in one comer. The toes were pointed and threadbare around the welt, the heels almost flat, the leather worn as smooth and soft as felt in a slipper. Under the boots, wrapped in a towel, was a solitary roweled spur, the cusp scrolled with winged serpents.

  “It looks like the guy had another kind of life at one time,” Clete said.

  “Does NOPD know he worked for Buford LaRose?”

  “The mamasan called them and got the big yawn. They’ve got New Orleans cops pulling armed robberies. Who’s got time for a roof flyer down here in Shitsville?”

  “Dock Green says a kid’s buried on the LaRose property.”

  “You try for a warrant?”

  “The judge said insufficient grounds. He seemed to think I had personal motivations as well.”

  “You’re going about it the wrong way, Streak. Squeeze somebody close to LaRose.”

  “Who?”

  “That old guy, the poet, the fuckhead left over from the sixties, he was working his scam out at Tulane last night. He’s doing a repeat performance up on St. Charles this afternoon.”

  He drummed the square tips of his fingers on the face of the guitar.

  “No grand displays, Clete,” I said.

  “Me?”

  * * *

  Clay Mason’s poetry reading was in a reception hall above a restaurant in the Garden District. From the second-story Fr
ench doors you could look down upon a sidewalk cafe, the oaks along the avenue, the iron streetcars out on the neutral ground, a K&B drugstore on the corner whose green and purple neon hung like colored smoke in the rain.

  Clete and I sat on folding chairs in the back of the hall. We were lucky to get seats at all. College kids dressed in Seattle grunge lined the walls.

  “Can you believe anybody going for this guy’s shuck today?” Clete said.

  “It’s in.”

  “Why?”

  “They missed all the fun.”

  In reality, I probably knew a better answer. But it sounded like a weary one, even to myself, and I left it unsaid. Presidents who had never heard a shot fired in anger vicariously revised the inadequacy of their own lives by precipitating suffering in the lives of others, and they were lauded for it. Clay Mason well understood the nature of public memory and had simply waited for his time and a new generation of intellectual cannon fodder to come round again.

  His pretentiousness, his feigned old man’s humility and irreverence toward the totems, were almost embarrassing. He had been an academic for years, but he denigrated universities and academics. He spoke of his own career in self-effacing terms but gave the impression he had known the most famous writers of his time. In his eccentric western clothes, a Stetson hat cocked on his white head, a burning cigarette cupped in his small hand, he became the egalitarian spokesman for the Wobblies, the railroad hobos of Woody Guthrie and Hart Crane, the miners killed at Ludlow, Colorado, the girls whose bodies were incinerated like bolts of cloth in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

  His poems were full of southwestern mesas and peyote cactus, ponies that drank out of blood-red rivers, fields blown with bluebonnets and poppies, hot winds that smelled of burning hemp.

  His words seemed to challenge all convention and caution, even his own death, which one poem described in terms of a chemical rainbow rising from the ashes of his soul.

  The audience loved it.

  Clete craned forward in his seat.

  “Check it out by the door, big mon,” he said.

  Karyn LaRose was dressed in a pale blue suit and white hose, with a white scarf about her neck, her legs crossed, listening attentively to Clay Mason. The horn-rimmed glasses she wore only added to her look of composure and feminine confidence. Two state troopers stood within five feet of her, their hands folded behind them, as though they were at parade rest.

  “Why do I feel like a starving man looking at a plate of baked Alaska?” Clete said. “You think I could interest her in some private security?”

  A middle-aged woman in front of us turned and said, “Would you kindly be quiet?”

  “Sorry,” Clete said, his face suddenly blank.

  After Clay Mason finished reading his last poem, the audience rose to its feet and applauded and then applauded some more. Clete and I worked our way to the front of the hall, where a cash drink bar was open and a buffet was being set up.

  “Watch out for the Smokies. It looks like they’re working on their new chevrons,” Clete said.

  Clay Mason stood with a group by Karyn’s chair, his weight resting on his cane. When he saw me, the parchment lines in his pixie face seem to deepen, then he smiled quickly and extended his hand out of the crowd. It felt like a twig in mine.

  “I’m flattered by your presence, sir,” he said.

  “It’s more business than pleasure. A Mexican kid who worked for Buford took a dive off a flophouse roof,” I said.

  “Yeah, definitely bad shit. They had to put the guy’s brains back in his head with a trowel,” Clete said.

  I gave Clete a hard stare, but it didn’t register.

  “I’m sorry to hear about this,” Clay Mason said.

  On the edge of my vision I could see Karyn LaRose seated not more than two feet from us.

  “What’s happening, Karyn?” I said, without looking at her.

  “You gentlemen wouldn’t contrive to turn a skunk loose at a church social, would you?” Clay Mason said, a smile wrinkling at the corner of his mouth.

  I took the pay stub from my shirt pocket and looked at it. “The guy’s name was Fernando Spinoza. You know him?” I asked.

  “No, can’t say that I do,” Clay Mason said.

  “How about you, Karyn?” I asked.

  The redness in her cheeks looked like arrow-points. But her eyes were clear with purpose and she didn’t hesitate in her response.

  “This man is a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” she said to the two troopers. “He’s annoyed me and my husband in every way he can. It’s my belief he has no other reason for being here.”

  “Is that right, sir?” one of the troopers said, his eyes slightly askance, rising slightly on the balls of his feet, his hands still folded behind him.

  “I’m here because of a kid who had to be blotted off a flagstone,” I said.

  “You have some kind of jurisdiction in New Orleans? How about y’all get something to eat over at the buffet table?” the trooper said. His face was lumpy, not unpleasant or hostile or dumb, just lumpy and obsequious.

  “Here’s today’s flash, buddy,” Clete said. “This old guy you’re a doorman for, he popped his own wife. Shot an apple off her head at a party with a forty-four Magnum down in Taco Ticoville. Except he was stinking drunk and left her hair all over the wallpaper. Maybe we should be telling that to these dumb kids who listen to his bullshit.”

  The conversation around us died as though someone had pulled the plug on a record player. I looked over at Clete and was never prouder of him.

  * * *

  But our moment with Clay Mason wasn’t over. Outside, we saw him walk from under the blue canvas awning at the front entrance of the restaurant toward a waiting limo, Karyn LaRose at his side, leaning on his cane, negotiating the peaked sidewalk where the roots of oak trees had wedged up the concrete. A small misshaped black and brown mongrel dog, with raised hair like pig bristles, came out of nowhere and began barking at Mason, its teeth bared and its nails clicking on the pavement, advancing and retreating as fear and hostility moved it. Mason continued toward the limo, his gaze fixed ahead of him. Then, without missing a step, he suddenly raised his cane in the air and whipped it across the dog’s back with such force that the animal ran yipping in pain through the traffic as though its spine had been broken.

  * * *

  The next evening, at sunset, I drove my truck up the state road that paralleled Bayou Teche and parked in a grove across the water from Buford’s plantation. Through my Japanese field glasses I could see the current flowing under his dock and boathouse, the arched iron shutters on the smithy, the horses in his fields, the poplars that flattened in the wind against the side of his house. Then I moved the field glasses along the bank, where I had thrown the oar lock tied with my handkerchief. The oar lock was gone, and someone had beveled out a plateau on the slope and had poured a concrete pad and begun construction of a gazebo there.

  I propped my elbows on the hood of my truck and moved the glasses through the trees, and in the sun’s afterglow, which was like firelight on the trunks, I saw first one state trooper, then a second, then a third, all of them with scoped and leather-slung bolt-action rifles. Each trooper sat on a chair in the shadows, much like hunters positioning themselves in a deer stand.

  I heard a boot crack a twig behind me.

  “Hep you with something?” a trooper asked.

  He was big and gray, close to retirement age, his stomach protruding like a sack of gravel over his belt.

  I opened my badge holder.

  “On the job,” I said.

  “Still ain’t too good to be here. Know what I mean?” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  “This morning they found workboot prints on the mudbank. Like boots a convict might wear.”

  “I see.”

  “If he comes in, they don’t want him spooked out,” the trooper said. We looked at each other in the silence. There was a sm
ile in his eyes.

  “It looks like they know their work,” I said.

  “Put it like you want. Crown comes here, he’s gonna have to kill his next nigger down in hell.”

  * * *

  The backyard was dim with mist when I fixed breakfast in the kitchen the next morning. I heard Bootsie walk into the kitchen behind me. The window over the sink was open halfway and the radio was playing on the windowsill.

  “Are you listening to the radio?” she said.

  “Yeah, I just clicked it on.”

  “Alafair’s still asleep.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I’ll turn it off.”

  “No, just turn it down.”

  “All right,” I said. I walked to the sink and turned down the volume knob. I looked out the window at the yard until I was sure my face was empty of expression, then I sat down again and we ate in silence.

  We were both happy when the phone rang on the wall.

  “You have the news on?” the sheriff asked.

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t call so early but I thought it’d be better if you heard it from me . . .”

  “What is it, skipper?”

  “Short Boy Jerry. NOPD found his car by the Desire welfare project a half hour ago . . . He was beaten to death . . .”

  I felt a tick jump in my throat. I pressed my thumb hard under my ear to clear a fluttering sound, like a wounded butterfly, out of my hearing. I saw Bootsie looking at me, saw her put down her coffee cup gently and her face grow small.

  “You there, podna?” the sheriff said.

  “Who did it?”

  “NOPD thinks a gang of black pukes. I’ll tell you up front, Dave, he went out hard.”

  “I need the plane,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  24

  The sun was pale, almost white, like a sliver of ice hidden behind clouds above Lake Pontchartrain, when Clete Purcel met me at the New Orleans airport and drove us back down I-10 toward the city.