Cadillac Jukebox

  The light out in the trees was gone. The air was gray with mist, the bayou dimpled by the rolling backs of gars.

  “Who are you?” I called.

  It was quiet, as though the person in the trees was considering my question, then I heard a paddle or an oar dipping into water, raking alongside a wood gunnel.

  “Tell me who you are!” I called. I waited. Nothing. My words sounded like those of a fool trapped by his own fears.

  I unlocked the bait shop and turned on the flood lamps, then unchained an outboard by the end of the concrete ramp, set one knee on the seat, and shoved out into the bayou. I cranked the engine and went thirty yards downstream and turned into a cut that led back into a dead bay surrounded by cypress and willows. The air was cold and thick with fog, and when I shut off the engine I heard a bass flop its tail in the shallows. Nutrias perched on every exposed surface, their eyes as red as sapphires in the glow of my flashlight.

  Then, at the edge of the bay, I saw the path a boat had cut in the layer of algae floating between two stumps. I shined my light deep into the trees and saw a moving shape, the shadow of a hunched man, a flash of dirty gold water flicked backward as a pirogue disappeared beyond a mudbank that was overgrown with palmettos.

  “Aaron?” I asked the darkness.

  But no one responded.

  I tried to remember the images in my mind’s eye—the breadth of the shoulders, a hand pulling aside a limb, a neck that seemed to go from the jaws into the collarbones without taper. But the reality was I had seen nothing clearly except a man seated low in a pirogue and—

  A glistening, thin object in the stern. It was metal, I thought. A chain perhaps. The barrel of a rifle.

  My flannel shirt was sour with sweat. I could hear my heart beating in the silence of the trees.

  * * *

  I came home for lunch that day. Alafair was at school and Bootsie was gone. There was no note on the corkboard where we left messages for one another. I fixed a ham and onion sandwich and a glass of iced tea and heated a bowl of dirty rice and ate at the kitchen table. Batist called from the bait shop.

  “Dave, there’s a bunch of black mens here drinking beer and using bad language out on the dock,” he said.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “One’s got a knife instead of a hook on his hand.”

  “A what?”

  “Come see, ’cause I’m fixing to run ’em down the road.”

  I walked down the slope through the trees. A new Dodge Caravan was parked by the concrete boat ramp, and five black men stood on the end of the dock, their shirtsleeves rolled in the warm air, drinking can beer while Jimmy Ray Dixon gutted a two-foot yellow catfish he had gill-hung from a nail on a light post.

  A curved and fine-pointed knife blade, honed to the blue thinness of a barber’s razor, was screwed into a metal and leather cup that fitted over the stump of Jimmy Ray’s left wrist. He drew the blade’s edge around the catfish’s gills, then cut a neat line down both sides of the dorsal fin and stripped the skin back with a pair of pliers in his right hand. He sliced the belly from the apex of the V where the gills met to the anus and let the guts fall out of the cavity like a sack of blue and red jelly.

  The tops of his canvas shoes were speckled with blood. He was grinning.

  “I bought it from a man caught it in a hoop net at Henderson,” he said.

  “Y’all want to rent a boat?”

  “I hear the fishing here ain’t any good.”

  “It’s not good anywhere now. The water’s too cool.”

  “I got a problem with a couple of people bothering me. I think you behind it,” he said.

  “You want to lose the audience?” I said.

  “Y’all give me a minute,” he said to the other men. They were dressed in tropical shirts, old slacks, shoes they didn’t care about. But they weren’t men who fished. Their hands squeezed their own sex, almost with fondness; their eyes followed a black woman walking on the road; they whispered to one another, even though their conversation was devoid of content.

  They started to go inside the shop.

  “It’s closed,” I said.

  “Hey, Jim, we ain’t here to steal your watermelons,” Jimmy Ray said.

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me a racial name,” I said.

  “Y’all open the cooler. I’ll be along,” he said to his friends. He watched them drift in a cluster down the dock toward the van.

  “Here’s what it is,” he said. “That cracker Cramer, yeah, you got it, white dude from Homicide, smells like deodorant, is down at my pool hall, axing if I know why Jerry the Glide was in the neighborhood when somebody broke all his sticks.”

  Not bad, Cramer, I thought.

  “Then your friend, Purcel, hears from this pipehead street chicken Mookie Zerrang’s got permission to burn his kite, so he blames me. I ain’t got time for this, Jack.”

  “Why was Jerry Joe in your neighborhood?”

  “It ain’t my neighborhood, I got a bidness there. I don’t go in there at night, either.” He brushed the sack of fish guts off the dock with his shoe and watched it float away in the current. “Why you got to put your hand in this shit, man?”

  “You know how it is, a guy’s got to do something for kicks.”

  “I hear it’s ’cause you was fucking some prime cut married to the wrong dude. That’s your choice, man, but I don’t like you using my brother to do whatever you doing. Give my fish to the old man in there,” he said, and started to walk away.

  I walked after him and touched his back with the ball of my finger. I could feel his wingbone through the cloth of his shirt, see the dark grain of his whiskers along the edge of his jaw, smell the faint odor of sweat and talcum in his skin.

  “Don’t use profanity around my home, please,” I said.

  “You worried about language round your home? Man put a bullet in mine and killed my brother. That’s the difference between us. Don’t let it be lost on you, Chuck.”

  He got in the front passenger’s seat of the van, slid a metal sheath over the knife blade attached to his stump, then unscrewed the blade and drank from a bottle of Carta Blanca, his throat working smoothly until the bottle was empty. The bottle made a dull, tinkling sound when it landed in the weeds by the roadside.

  * * *

  The next day I got the warrant to search the grounds of the LaRose plantation. Helen Soileau parked the cruiser in the driveway, and I got out and knocked on the front door.

  Karyn was barefoot and wore only a pair of shorts and a halter, with a thick towel around her neck, when she opened the door. In the soft afternoon light her tan took on the dark tint of burnt honey. The momentary surprise went out of her face, and she leaned an arm against the doorjamb and brushed back her hair with her fingers.

  “What are we here for today?” she said.

  “Here’s the warrant. We’ll be looking at some things back on the bayou.”

  “How did you—” she began, then stopped.

  “All I had to do was tell the judge the state police warned me off y’all’s property. He seemed upset about people intruding on his jurisdiction.”

  “Then you should scurry on with your little errand, whatever in God’s name it is.”

  “Does Jerry Joe’s death bother you at all?”

  Her mouth grew small with anger.

  “There’re days when I wish I was a man, Dave. I’d honestly love to beat the living shit out of you.” The door clicked shut.

  Helen and I walked through the coolness of the porte cochere into the backyard. The camellias were in bloom and the backyard was filled with a smoky gold light. I could see Karyn inside the glassed-in rear corner of the house, touching her toes in a crisscross motion, her thighs spread, the back of her neck slick with a necklace of sweat.

  “You ever read anything about the Roman Coliseum? When gladiators fought on lakes of burning oil, that kind of stuff?” Helen said.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

/>   “I have a feeling Karyn LaRose was in the audience.”

  We walked past the stables and through the hardwoods to the sloping bank of the Teche. A heavyset black state trooper sat in a folding chair, back among the trees, eating cracklings from a jar. His scoped rifle was propped against a pine trunk. He glanced at my badge holder hanging from my coat pocket and nodded.

  “Crown hasn’t tried to get through your perimeter, huh?” I said, and smiled.

  “You ax me, he’s been spooked out,” he answered.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Man’s smart. See the mosquitoes I been swatting all day?”

  “They’re bad after a rain,” I said.

  “They’re bad in these trees anytime. Man don’t see nobody out yonder on the bank, he knows what’s waiting for him inside the woods. That, or somebody done tole him.”

  “You take it easy,” I said.

  Helen and I walked along the bank toward the spot where I had thrown the oar lock. I could feel her eyes on me, watching.

  “You’re damn quiet,” she said.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be.”

  “Dave?”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m getting a bad sense here.”

  “What’s that?” I said, my eyes focused on the gazebo that two carpenters were hammering and sawing on around the bayou’s bend.

  “What that trooper said. Did you warn Crown?”

  “We don’t execute people in Iberia Parish. We want the man in custody, not in a box.”

  “We didn’t have this conversation, Streak.”

  The carpenters were on all fours atop the gazebo’s round, peaked roof, their nail bags swinging from their stomachs.

  “That’s quite a foundation. Y’all always pour a concrete pad under a gazebo?” I said.

  “High water will rot it out if you don’t,” one man answered.

  “What did y’all do with the dirt you excavated?”

  “Some guy hauled it off for topsoil.”

  “Which guy?”

  “Some guy work for Mr. LaRose, I guess.”

  “Y’all did the excavation?”

  “No, sir. Mr. LaRose done that hisself. He got his own backhoe.”

  “I see. Y’all doin’ all right?”

  “Yes, sir. Anyt’ing wrong?”

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  I walked down on the grassy bank, which was crisscrossed with the deep prints of cleated tires and dozer tracks. A fan of mud and torn divots of grass lay humped among the cattails at the bayou’s edge. I poked at it with a stick and watched it cloud and drift away in the current.

  “You want to bag some of it?” Helen said.

  “It’s a waste of time. Buford beat us to it.”

  “It was a long shot,” Helen said. “You’ve got to consider the source, too, Dave. Dock Green’s nuts.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s just different.”

  “That’s a new word for it.”

  I didn’t say anything. We walked up the slope and through the trees toward the house. The air was filled with gold shafts of light inside the trees, and you could smell the water in the coulee and the fecund odor of wet fern and the exposed root systems that trailed in the current like torn cobweb.

  “Can I get out of line a minute?” Helen said.

  I looked at her and waited. She kept walking up the incline, her face straight ahead, her shoulders slightly bent, her masculine arms taut-looking with muscle.

  “The homicides you’re worried about took place out of our jurisdiction. The Indian guy who tried to mess you over with the machete is dead. We don’t have a crime connected with the LaRoses to investigate in Iberia Parish, Dave,” she said.

  “They’re both dirty.”

  “So is the planet,” she said.

  We took a shorter route back and exited the woods by a cleared field and passed the brick stables and an adjacent railed lot where a solitary bay gelding stood like a piece of stained redwood in a column of dust-laden sunlight. The brand on his flank was shaped in the form of a rose, burned deep into the hair like calcified ringworm.

  “They sure leave their mark on everything, don’t they?” I said.

  “What should they use, spray cans? Give it a break,” Helen said.

  “I’ll tell them we’re leaving now,” I said.

  “Don’t do it, Dave.”

  “I’ll see you in the car, Helen.”

  She continued on through the field toward the driveway. I walked through the backyard toward the porte cochere, then glanced through a screen of bamboo into the glassed-in rear of the house where Karyn had been doing her aerobic exercises. We stared into each other’s face with a look of mutual and surprised intimacy that went beyond the moment, beyond my ability to define or guard against, that went back into a deliberately forgotten image of two people looking nakedly upon each other’s faces during intercourse.

  I had caught her unawares in front of a small marble-topped bar with a champagne glass and a silver ice bucket containing a green bottle of Cold Duck on it. But Karyn was not one to be undone by an unexpected encounter with an adversary. With her eyes fastened on my face, a pout on her mouth like an adolescent girl, she unhooked her halter and let it drop from her breasts and unbuttoned her shorts and pushed them and her panties down over her thighs and knees and stepped out of them. Then she pulled the pins from her platinum hair and shook it out on her shoulders and put the glass of Cold Duck to her mouth, her eyes fixed on mine, as empty as death.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Jimmy Ray Dixon was one of those in-your-face people who insult and demean others with such confidence that you always assume they have nothing to hide themselves.

  It’s a good ruse. Just like offering a lie when no one has challenged your integrity. For example, lying about how you lost a hand in Vietnam.

  After Jimmy Ray and his entourage had left the dock, I’d called a friend at the Veterans Administration in New Orleans.

  The following day, when I got back to the department from the LaRose plantation, my friend called and read me everything he had pulled out of the computer on Jimmy Ray Dixon.

  He didn’t lose a hand clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy outside Pinkville. A gang of Chinese thieves, his business partners in selling stolen PX liquor on the Saigon black market, cut it off.

  A cross-referenced CID report also indicated Jimmy Ray may have been involved in smuggling heroin home in GI coffins.

  So he lied about his war record, I thought. But who wouldn’t, with a file like that?

  That was not what had bothered me.

  At the dock Jimmy Ray had said somebody had shot into his home and had killed his brother.

  His home.

  I went to the public library and the morgue at the Daily Iberian and began searching every piece of microfilm I could find on the assassination of Ely Dixon.

  Only one story, in Newsweek magazine, mentioned the fact that Ely was killed in a two-bedroom house he rented for fifty dollars a month from his brother, Jimmy Ray, to whom the article referred as a disabled Vietnam war veteran.

  I drove back to the department and went into the sheriff’s office.

  “What if the wrong man was killed?” I said.

  “I have a feeling my interest is about to wane quickly,” he said.

  “It was the sixties. Church bombings in Birmingham and Bogalusa, civil rights workers lynched in Mississippi. Everybody assumed Ely Dixon was the target.”

  “You’re trying to figure out the motivation on a homicide that’s twenty-eight years old? Who cares? The victim doesn’t. He’s dead just the same.”

  He could barely contain the impatience and annoyance in his voice. He turned his swivel chair sideways so he wouldn’t have to look directly at me when he spoke.

  “I like you a lot, Dave, but, damn it, you don’t listen. Leave the LaRoses alone. Let Aaron Crown fall in his own shit.”

  “I told Helen we don’t
execute people in Iberia Parish.”

  “Don’t be deluded. That’s because the electric chair doesn’t travel anymore.”

  He began fiddling with a file folder, then he put it in his desk drawer and rose from his chair and looked out the window until he heard me close the door behind me.

  * * *

  Batist went home sick with a cold that evening, and before supper Alafair and I drove down to his house with a pot of soup. His wife had died the previous year, and he lived with his three bird dogs and eight cats on a dirt road in an unpainted wood house with a sagging gallery and a peaked corrugated roof, a truck garden in a side lot and a smokehouse in back. The sparse grass in his yard was raked clean, his compost pile snugged in by chicken wire, his crab traps stacked next to a huge iron pot in the backyard where he cooked cracklings in the fall.

  Over the years, in early spring, when he broke the thatched hardpan on his garden, his single-tree plow had furrowed back bits of square nails, the rusted shell of a wagon spring, .58 caliber minié balls, a corroded tin of percussion caps, a molded boot, a brass buckle embossed with the letters CSA, the remains from a Confederate encampment that had probably been overrun by federals in 1863.

  I first met Batist when I was a little boy and he was a teenager, a blacksmith’s helper in a rambling, red barnlike structure on a green lot out on West Main. Batist worked for a frail, very elderly man named Mr. Antoine, one of the last surviving Confederate veterans in the state of Louisiana. Every day Mr. Antoine sat in the wideidoors of his smithy, to catch the breeze, in red suspenders and straw hat, the skin under his throat distended like an inverted cock’s comb.

  Anyone who wished could drop by and listen to his stories about what he called “the War.”

  Few did.

  But I’ll never forget one he told me and Batist.

  It was during Jubal Early’s last assault on the federals before the surrender at Appomattox. A fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama was the only unwounded survivor of his outfit. Rather than surrender or run, he tied a Confederate battle flag to an empty musket and mounted a horse and charged the union line. He rode two hundred yards through a bullet-cropped cornfield littered with southern dead, his colors raised above his head all the while, his eyes fixed on the stone wall ahead of him where five thousand federals waited and looked at him in disbelief.