Cadillac Jukebox

  Clete looked at me, then lit a cigarette.

  “Hey, don’t smoke in here, man,” Jimmy Ray said.

  “Adios” Clete said to me and went out the door and closed it behind him.

  “Have any of these documentary movie people been to see you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I told them the right man’s in jail. I told them that was his rifle lying out under the tree. I told them Crown was in the KKK. They turned the camera off while I was still talking.” He glanced at the dial on his watch, which was turned around on the bottom of his wrist. “I don’t mean you no rudeness, but I got a bidness to run.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “I ain’t give you no help. Hey, man, me and my brother Ely wasn’t nothing alike. He believed in y’all. Thought a great day was coming. You know what make us all equal?” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, splayed it open with his thumb, and picked a fifty-dollar bill out of it with his metal hook. “Right here, man,” he said, wagging the bill on the desk blotter.

  * * *

  Late the next day, after we ate supper, I helped Bootsie wash and put away the dishes. The sun had burned into a red ember inside a bank of maroon-colored clouds above the treeline that bordered my neighbor’s cane field, and through the screen I could smell rain and ozone in the south. Alafair called from the bait shop, where she was helping Batist close up.

  “Dave, there’s a man in a boat who keeps coming back by the dock,” she said.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “It’s like he’s trying to see through the windows.”

  “Is Batist there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put him on, would you?”

  When Batist came on the line, I said, “Who’s the man in the boat?”

  “A guy puts earrings.”

  As was Batist’s way, he translated French literally into English, in this case using the word put for wear.

  “Is he bothering y’all?” I said.

  “He ain’t gonna bother me. I’m fixing to lock up.”

  “What’s the problem, then?”

  “They ain’t one, long as he’s gone when I go out the do’.”

  “I’ll be down.”

  The air was heavy and wet-smelling and crisscrossed with birds when I walked down the slope toward the dock, the sky over the swamp the color of scorched tin. Batist and Alafair had collapsed the Cinzano umbrellas set in the center of the spool tables and turned on the string of overhead lights. The surface of the bayou was ruffling in the wind, and against the cypress and willows on the far side I could see a man sitting in an outboard, dressed in a dark blue shirt and a white straw hat.

  I walked to the end of the dock and leaned against the railing.

  “Can I help you with something?” I asked.

  He didn’t reply. His face was shadowed, but I could see the glint of his gold earrings in the light from the dock. I went inside the bait shop.

  “Turn on the flood lamps, Alf,” I said.

  When she hit the toggle switch, the light bloomed across the water with the brilliance of a pistol flare. That’s when I saw his eyes.

  “Go on up to the house, Alafair,” I said.

  “You know him?” she said.

  “No, but we’re going to send him on his way just the same. Now, do what I ask you, okay?”

  “I don’t see why I—”

  “Come on, Alf.”

  She lifted her face, her best pout in place, and went out the screen door and let it slam behind her.

  Batist was heating a pot of coffee on the small butane stove behind the counter. He bent down and looked out the window at the bayou again, a cigar in the center of his mouth.

  “What you want to do with that fella, Dave?” he said.

  “See who he is.”

  I went outside again and propped my hands on the dock railing. The flood lamps mounted on the roof of the bait shop burned away the shadows from around the man in the boat. His hair was long, like a nineteenth-century Indian’s, his cheeks unshaved, the skin dark and grained as though it had been rubbed with black pepper. His arms were wrapped with scarlet tattoos, but like none I had ever seen before. Unlike jailhouse art, the ink ran in strings down the arms, webbed in bright fantails, as though all of his veins had been superimposed on the skin’s surface.

  But it was the eyes that caught and impaled you. They were hunter’s eyes, chemical green, rimmed with a quivering energy, as though he heard the sounds of hidden adversaries in the wind.

  “What’s your business here, podna?” I asked.

  He seemed to think on it. One hand opened and closed on an oar.

  “I ain’t eat today,” he said. The accent was vaguely Spanish, the tone flat, disconnected from the primitive set of the jaw.

  Batist joined me at the rail with a cup of coffee in his hand.

  “Come inside,” I said.

  Batist’s eyes fixed on mine.

  The man didn’t start his engine. Instead, he used one oar to row across the bayou to the concrete ramp. He stepped into the water, ankle-deep, lifted the bow with one hand and pulled the boat up until it was snug on the ramp. Then he reached behind him and lifted out a stiff bedroll that was tied tightly with leather thongs.

  His work boots were loud on the dock as he walked toward us, his Levi’s high on his hips, notched under his rib cage with a wide leather belt and brass buckle.

  “You oughtn’t to ax him in, Dave. This is our place,” Batist said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, it surely ain’t.”

  The man let his eyes slide over our faces as he entered the bait shop. I followed him inside and for the first time smelled his odor, like charcoal, and kerosene, unwashed hair, mud gone sour with stagnant water. He waited expectantly at the counter, his bedroll tucked under his arm. His back was as straight as a sword.

  I fixed him two chili dogs on a paper plate and set them in front of him with a glass of water. He sat on the stool and ate with a spoon, gripping the handle with his fist, mopping the beans and sauce and ground meat with a slice of bread. Batist came inside and began loading the beer cooler behind the counter.

  “Where you from?” I said.

  “El Paso.”

  “Where’d you get the boat?”

  He thought about it. “I found it two weeks back. It was sunk. I cleaned it up pretty good.” He stopped eating and watched me.

  “It’s a nice boat,” I said.

  His face twitched and his eyes were empty again, the jawbones chewing.

  “You got a rest room?” he asked.

  “It’s in the back, behind those empty pop cases.”

  “How much your razor blades?” he said to Batist.

  “This ain’t no drug sto’. What you after, man?” Batist said.

  The man wiped his mouth with the flats of his fingers. The lines around his eyes were stretched flat.

  Batist leaned on his arms, his biceps flexing like rolls of metal washers.

  “Don’t be giving me no truck,” he said.

  I eased along the counter until the man’s eyes left Batist and fixed on me.

  “I’m a police officer. Do you need directions to get somewhere?” I said.

  “I got a camp out there. That’s where I come from. I can find it even in the dark,” he said.

  With one hand he clenched his bedroll, which seemed to have tent sticks inside it, and walked past the lunch meat coolers to the small rest room in back.

  “Dave, let me ax you somet’ing. You got to bring a ’gator in your hog lot to learn ’gators eat pigs?” Batist said.

  Ten minutes passed. I could hear the man splashing water behind the rest room door. Batist had gone back out on the dock and was chaining up the rental boats for the night. I walked past the cooler and tapped with one knuckle on the bolted door.

  “We’re closing up, podna. You have to come out,” I said.

  He jerked open the door, his face streaming water. His dark blue
shirt was unbuttoned, and on his chest I could see the same scarlet network of lines that was tattooed on his arms. The pupils in his eyes looked broken, like India ink dropped on green silk.

  “I’d appreciate your cleaning up the water and paper towels you’ve left on the floor. Then I’d like to have a talk with you,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. I turned and walked back up front.

  I went behind the counter and started to stock the candy shelves for tomorrow, then I stopped and called the dispatcher at the department.

  “I think I’ve got a meltdown in the shop. He might have a stolen boat, too,” I said.

  “The governor in town?”

  “Lose the routine, Wally.”

  “You hurt my feelings . . . You want a cruiser, Dave?”

  I didn’t have the chance to answer. The man in the white straw hat came from behind me, his hand inserted in the end of his bedroll. I looked at his face and dropped the phone and fell clattering against the shelves and butane stove as he flung the bedroll and the sheath loose from the machete and ripped it through the air, an inch from my chest.

  The honed blade sliced through the telephone cord and sunk into the counter’s hardwood edge. He leaned over and swung again, the blade whanging off the shelves, dissecting cartons of worms and dirt, exploding a jar of pickled sausage.

  Batist’s coffee pot was scorched black and boiling on the butane fire. The handle felt like a heated wire across my bare palm. I threw the coffee, the top, and the grinds in the man’s face, saw the shock in his eyes, his mouth drop open, the pain rise out of his throat like a broken bubble.

  Then I grabbed the tattooed wrist that held the machete and pressed the bottom of the pot down on his forearm.

  He flung the machete from his hand as though the injury had come from it rather than the coffee pot. I thought I was home free. I wasn’t.

  He hit me harder than I’d ever been struck by a fist in my life, the kind of blow that fills your nose with needles, drives the eye deep into the socket.

  I got to my feet and tried to follow him out on the dock. One side of my face was already numb and throbbing, as though someone had held dry ice against it. The man in the white straw hat had leaped off the dock onto the concrete ramp and mounted the bow of his boat with one knee and was pushing it out into the current, his body haloed with humidity and electric light.

  Batist came out of the tin shed in the willows where we stored our outboard motors, looked up at me, then at the fleeing man.

  “Batist, no!” I said.

  Batist and I both stood motionless while the man jerked the engine into a roar with one flick of the forearm, then furrowed a long yellow trough around the bend into the darkness.

  I used the phone at the house to call the department again, then walked back down to the dock. The moon was veiled over the swamp; lightning forked out of a black sky in the south.

  “How come you ain’t want me to stop him, Dave?” Batist said.

  “He’s deranged. I think it’s PCP,” I said. But he didn’t understand. “It’s called angel dust. People get high on it and bust up brick walls with their bare hands.”

  “He knowed who you was, Dave. He didn’t have no interest in coming in till he seen you . . . This started wit’ that old man from the penitentiary.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That guard, the one you call Cap’n, the one probably been killing niggers up at that prison farm for fifty years. I tole you not to have his kind in our shop. You let his grief get on your front porch, it don’t stop there, no. It’s gonna come in your house. But you don’t never listen.”

  He pulled his folded cap out of his back pocket, popped it open, and fitted it on his head. He walked down the dock to his truck without saying good night. The tin roof on the bait shop creaked and pinged against the joists in the wind gusting out of the south.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Monday morning the sky was blue, the breeze warm off the Gulf when I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana campus in Lafayette to talk with Buford LaRose. Classes had just let out for the noon hour, and the pale green quadrangle and colonnaded brick walkways were filled with students on their way to lunch. But Buford LaRose was not in his office in the English department, nor in the glassed-in campus restaurant that was built above a cypress lake behind old Burke Hall.

  I called his office at the Oil Center, where he kept a part-time therapy practice, and was told by the receptionist I could find him at Red Lerille’s Health and Racquet Club off Johnson Street.

  “Are you sure? We were supposed to go to lunch,” I said.

  “Dr. LaRose always goes to the gym on Mondays,” she answered.

  Red’s was a city-block-long complex of heated swimming pools, racquet ball and clay tennis courts, boxing and basketball gyms, indoor and outdoor running tracks, and cavernous air-conditioned rooms filled with hundreds of dumbbells and weight benches and exercise machines.

  I looked for Buford a half hour before I glanced through the narrow glass window in the door of the men’s steam room and saw him reading a soggy newspaper, naked, on the yellow tile stoop.

  I borrowed a lock from the pro shop, undressed, and walked into the steam room and sat beside him.

  His face jerked when he looked up from his paper. Then he smiled, almost fondly.

  “You have a funny way of keeping appointments,” I said.

  “You didn’t get my message?”

  “No.”

  “I waited for you. I didn’t think you were coming,” he said.

  “That’s peculiar. I was on time.”

  “Not by my watch,” he said, and smiled again.

  “I wanted to tell you again I was sorry for my remarks at your party.”

  “You went to a lot of trouble to do something that’s unnecessary.”

  The thermostat kicked on and filled the air with fresh clouds of steam. I could feel the heat in the tiles climb through my thighs and back. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with my hand.

  “Your jaw’s bruised,” he said.

  “We had a visitor at the bait shop this weekend. NOPD thinks he’s a Mexican carnival worker who got loose from a detox center.”

  He nodded, gazed without interest at the tile wall in front of us, pushed down on the stoop with the heels of his hands and worked the muscles in his back, his brown, hard body leaking sweat at every pore. I watched the side of his face, the handsome profile, the intelligent eyes that seemed never to cloud with passion.

  “You have Ph.D. degrees in both English and psychology, Buford?” I said.

  “I received double credits in some areas, so it’s not such a big deal.”

  “It’s impressive.”

  “Why are you here, Dave?”

  “I have a feeling I may have stuck my arm in the garbage grinder. You know how it is, you stick one finger in, then you’re up to your elbow in the pipe.”

  “We’re back to our same subject, I see,” he said.

  Other men walked back and forth in the steam, swinging their arms, breathing deeply.

  “How do you know Aaron Crown’s daughter?” I asked.

  “Who says I do?”

  “She does.”

  “She grew up in New Iberia. If she says she knows me, fine . . . Dave, you have no idea what you’re tampering with, how you may be used to undo everything you believe in.”

  “Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  “This is hardly the place, sir.”

  We showered, then went into an enclosed, empty area off to one side of the main locker room to dress. He dried himself with a towel, put on a pair of black nylon bikini underwear and flipflops, and began combing his hair in the mirror. The muscles in his back and sides looked like tea-colored water rippling over stone.

  “I’ve got some serious trouble, Dave. These New York film people want to make a case for Aaron Crown’s innocence. They can blow my candidacy right into the toilet,” he said.
br />   “You think they have a vested interest?”

  “Yeah, making money . . . Wake up, buddy. The whole goddamn country is bashing liberals. These guys ride the tide. A white man unjustly convicted of killing a black civil rights leader? A story like that is made in heaven.”

  I put on my shirt and tucked it in my slacks, then sat on the bench and slipped on my loafers.

  “Nothing to say?” Buford asked.

  “Your explanations are too simple. The name Mingo Bloomberg keeps surfacing in the middle of my mind.”

  “This New Orleans mobster?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ve got a fund-raiser in Shreveport at six. Come on the plane with me,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Take leave from your department. Work for me.”

  “Not interested.”

  “Dave, I’m running for governor while I teach school. I have no machine and little money. The other side does. Now these sonsofbitches from New York come down here and try to cripple the one chance we’ve had for decent government in decades. What in God’s name is wrong with you, man?”

  * * *

  Maybe Buford was right, I thought as I drove down the old highway through Broussard into New Iberia. I sometimes saw design where there was none, and I had maintained a long and profound distrust of all forms of authority, even the one I served, and the LaRose family had been vested with wealth and power since antebellum days.

  But maybe it was also time to have another talk with Mingo Bloomberg, provided I could find him.

  As irony would have it, I found a message from Mingo’s lawyer in my mailbox when I got back to the department. Mingo would not be hard to find, after all. He was in New Orleans City Prison and wanted to see me.

  * * *

  Late Tuesday morning I was at the barred entrance to a long corridor of individual cells where snitches and the violent and the incorrigible were kept in twenty-three-hour lockdown. The turnkey opened Mingo’s cell, cuffed him to a waist chain, and led him down the corridor toward me. While a second turnkey worked the levers to slide back the door on the lockdown area, I could see handheld mirrors extended from bars all the way down the series of cells, each reflecting a set of disembodied eyes.