DR07 - Dixie City Jam

'We were all kids. It was an accident. What's the matter with you, what kind of guy you think I am? Why you doing this?'

  'Are you going to help me out?'

  'Get off my property.'

  'All right,' I said, and stood up to go. Then I saw Zoot Bergeron jogging up the drive in black gym shorts, a red bandanna tied around his forehead. I looked down at Tommy Lonighan.

  'I've got a deal for you,' I said. 'You put Buchalter in my custody, you'll probably never see me again. But if he comes back around my house, I'm going to punch your ticket.'

  'Yeah?' he said, the rims of his nostrils whitening. 'That's what you're gonna do? You can't bust the right people, you can't protect your own wife, you need somebody to wipe your ass for you, you come around making threats, telling me I killed a child, I'm about to take your fucking head off, Dave, you got that?'

  'We'll see who walks out of the smoke, Tommy,' I said, and walked across the sun-spangled, blue-green lawn toward my truck. I didn't look back.

  Zoot slowed from his jog, his sleek chest rising and falling, his sweat-soaked gym shorts twisted around his loins.

  'What are you doing here, partner?' I asked.

  'Mr. Tommy give me a job around his yard, let me work out wit' him.'

  'You're staying here?'

  'I did last night.'

  'Why?' He didn't answer, and I said it again, 'Why's that, Zoot?'

  'She got a man at the house.' His eyes avoided mine. 'A white man she goes out wit' sometimes. I come over here and Mr. Tommy let me stay.'

  'I don't want to tell you what to do, Zoot, but I think Tommy Lonighan is a gangster and a racist prick who you ought to avoid like anthrax.'

  Then, too late, I saw the alarm in Zoot's eyes as they focused on something behind me.

  Tommy Lonighan was moving fast when he hit me between the shoulder blades and drove me into the side of my truck. Before I could turn, he had ripped my .45 loose from my belt holster. He clenched it at an upward angle in front of me, his neck corded with veins, his nostrils flaring, and pulled back the slide, feeding a hollow-point round into the chamber. I could hear the gravel crunch under the soles of his shoes.

  'Don't be a dumb guy, Tommy,' I said.

  'You think you can punch my buttons, make me ashamed of myself in front of people?'

  'Give me the piece, Tommy.'

  'You want it? Then you got it, cocksucker.'

  He jammed the butt into my palm, but he didn't let go. He wrapped both his hands around mine, tightening his fingers until they were white with bone, and pointed the .45's barrel into his sternum. His blue eyes were round and threaded with light; his breath stank of the pieces of meat wedged in his teeth.

  'You talk war record, you talk Purple Hearts, you got the balls for this?' he said.

  The hammer was cocked, the safety off, but I was able to keep my fingers frozen outside the trigger housing.

  'Step back, Tommy.'

  His breath labored in his chest; there was a knot of color like a red rose in his throat.

  'I didn't kill no kid back there in the Channel,' he said. 'It was an accident. Everybody knows it but that mockie. He won't let go of it.'

  For just a moment the focus in his eyes seemed to turn inward, and his words seemed directed almost at himself rather than at me. I felt the power go out of his grip.

  I flipped up the safety on the slide, jerked the .45 loose from his grasp, and whipped the barrel across his nose. He stood flat-footed, his fists balled at his sides, his eyes the same color as the sky, a solitary string of blood dripping from his right nostril. I started to hit him again.

  But his face broke, just like a lamp shade being burned in the center by a heat source from within. One eye seemed to knot, as though someone had put a finger in it; his mouth became a crimped, tight line, downturned at the corners, and the flesh in one cheek suddenly filled with wrinkles and began to tremble. He turned and walked into his house, his back straight, his arms dead at his sides, his eyes hidden from view.

  I stared openmouthed after him, my weapon hanging loosely from my hand like an object of shame.

  * * *

  chapter fifteen

  I had always wanted to believe that I had brought the violence in my life with me when I came back from Vietnam. But one of the most violent moments in my life, or at least the most indefensible, came at the end of my first marriage and not because I was a police officer or a war veteran.

  My first wife was a beautiful, dark-haired girl from Martinique who loved thoroughbred horses and racetrack betting as much as I, but she also developed a love for clubhouse society and men who didn't daily mortgage their tomorrows with Beam straight up and a Jax draft on the side.

  We were at an afternoon lawn party on Lake Pontchartrain. The sky was storm-streaked, the water out on the lake slate green and capping, the sailboats from the yacht club dipping hard in the swells. I remember standing at the drinks table, next to my wife, while a black waiter in a white butler's jacket was shaking a silver drink mixer. Then my wife's current lover, a geologist from Houston, was next to her, chatting with her, idly stroking the down on her forearm as though I were not there.

  I could hear the palm fronds rattling overhead, a jazz combo playing on the terrace, the words of my wife and her lover disappearing like bubbles in the wind. He was an athlete and mountain climber and had the profile and rugged good looks of a gladiator. Then I remember a sound like Popsicle sticks breaking and a wave of red-black color erupting behind my eyes.

  When they pulled me off him, he was strangling on his own tongue.

  Later, I pretended that he had deserved it, and that my wife had deserved to be shamed and humiliated in front of her friends. But I was deceiving myself, as was my way in those days when I sincerely believed that I could experience no worse fate in this world than to be deprived of charcoal-filtered whiskey and the amber radiance with which it animated and filled my life. I had simply made my wife and her lover pay for events that had occurred many years earlier.

  My father, whose name was Aldous, who was also called Big Al in the oil field, where he worked as a derrick man up on the monkey board, was a huge, dark, grinning Cajun with fists the size of cantaloupes. He loved to fight in bars, sometimes taking on three or four adversaries at once. Oil field roughnecks would break their hands on his head; bouncers would splinter chairs across his back; but no one ever hurt Big Al except my mother, who worked in a laundry with Negro women to support us while he was in the parish jail.

  When he went back to Marsh Island for the muskrat season, a man named Mack, a bouree dealer from Morgan City who wore a fedora, zoot slacks, suspenders, French cuffs, and two-tone shoes, began to come by the house and take her for rides in his Ford coupe.

  One day in late fall I came home early from school. There was no sound in the house. Then I walked past my parents' bedroom door. My mother was naked, on all fours, pointed toward the head of the bed, and Mack was about to mount her. He had a thin, white face, oiled black hair parted in the center, and a pencil mustache. He looked at me with the momentary interest that he might show a hangnail, then entered my mother.

  I sat on a sawhorse in the barn until it was almost dusk. The air was raw, and leaves were blowing across the dirt yard. Then Mack was standing in the barn door, his silhouette etched with the sun's last red light, a bottle of beer in his left hand. I heard him tilt it up and drink from it.

  'What you t'ink you seen?' he said.

  I looked at my shoes.

  'I ax you a question. Don't be pretend you ain't heard me,' he said.

  'I didn't see anything.'

  'You was where you didn't have no bidness. What we gonna do 'bout that?' He held out his right hand. I thought he was going to place it on my shoulder. Instead, he put the backs of his fingers under my nose. 'You smell that? Me and yo' mama been fuckin', boy. It ain't the first time, neither.'

  My eyes were full of water, my face hot and small under his stare.

  'You can tell yo' daddy
'bout this if you want, but you gotta tell on her, too.' He drank out of the beer bottle again and waited. 'What's you gonna do, you? Sit there and cry?'

  'I'm not going to do anything.'

  'That's good,' he said. ''Cause you do, I'm gonna be back.'

  Then he was gone, out of the red light, and down the dirt lane to his car. The pecan and oak trees around the house were black-green and coated with dust; the dry coldness of the air felt like a windburn against the skin. I hid when my mother called me from the back porch. Behind the barn, I sat in the weeds and watched our two roosters peck a blind hen to death. They mounted her with their talons, their wings aflutter with triumph, and drove their beaks deep into her pinioned neck. I watched them do it for a long time, until my mother found me and took me back inside the kitchen and, while she fixed our supper, told me that Mack had helped her find a good job as a waitress at a beer garden in Morgan City.

  The day after my trouble with Tommy Lonighan, I received a phone call from Clete Purcel at my office.

  'I hear you pistol-whipped Tommy Bobalouba,' he said.

  'Who told you that?'

  'A couple of the Caluccis' lowlifes were talking about it in the Golden Star this morning.'

  'Ah, the Caluccis again.'

  'That's what I was trying to tell you, mon. They're going across tribal lines.'

  'Who were these two guys?'

  'Nickel-and-dime gumballs. Were you trying to sweat Tommy about that sub?'

  'Yeah, but I didn't get anywhere.'

  'Dave, maybe there's another way to get Buchalter out of the woodwork. What if you can find that sub again, you mark it, then you tell The Times-Picayune and every salvage company in town about it?'

  'It's a thought.'

  'By the way, congratulations on getting Lonighan's attention. Somebody should have mopped up the floor with that guy a long time ago… Why the silence?'

  'I shouldn't have hit him.'

  'Why not?'

  'He's a tormented man. The guy's got a furnace in his head.'

  'I'm weeping on my desk, Dave. Oh, that's great, mon. Tommy Lonighan, the tormented man…' He was laughing loudly now. 'Did you see the body of the guy Tommy drowned with the fire hose? It looked like the Michelin Man. Tommy shoved the nozzle down the guy's mouth. Tommy, the tormented man, oh Dave, that's beautiful…'

  I went home early that evening, with plans to take Bootsie and Alafair to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge for crawfish. When the deputy who was on guard by the drive saw my truck approaching, he started his engine and headed back toward New Iberia. At the head of the drive, close by the house, was a two-door white Toyota that I didn't recognize.

  I walked down to the end of the dock, where Alafair was skipping stones across the water into a cypress stump.

  'Want to go eat some crawfish, Alf?' I said.

  'I don't care,' she said. Her face was sullen. She whipped another stone across the bayou.

  'What's wrong, little guy?'

  'I told you I don't like 'little guy' anymore, Dave.'

  'All right. Now, what's wrong, Alf?'

  'Nothing. Bootsie says she's sick. That's all.'

  '"Says" she's sick?'

  'She's been in her room all afternoon. With the door shut. She says she's sick. I told you.' She propped one hand against a post and brushed dried fish scales off the planks into the water with her tennis shoe.

  'Tell me the rest of it, Alf.'

  Her eyes followed a cottonmouth moccasin that was swimming across the bayou into a flooded cane brake.

  'She put an empty whiskey bottle in the garbage can out back,' she said. 'She wrapped it up in a paper bag so nobody would see it. Then the sister went and got her some beer.'

  'What?'

  'There's a sister up there. She went down to the four corners and bought Bootsie a six-pack of beer. Why didn't Bootsie just get it out of the bait shop if she wanted some beer?'

  'Let's go find out.'

  'I don't want to.'

  'You want to go to Mulate's later?'

  'No. I don't like the way Bootsie is. I don't like that sister, either. What's she doing here, Dave?'

  I rubbed the top of her head and walked up the slope through the deep shade of the trees and the drone of the cicadas. There was no sound or movement in the front of the house, and the door to Bootsie's and my bedroom was closed. I went on through the hallway into the kitchen. Sister Marie Guilbeaux was rinsing glasses and two plates in the sink.

  'Oh!' she said, her shoulders twitching suddenly when she heard me behind her. She turned, and her face colored. 'Oh, my heavens, you gave me a start.'

  I continued to stare at her.

  'Oh, this is embarrassing,' she said. 'I hope you understand what's, why I—'

  'I'm afraid I don't.'

  'Of course… you couldn't. I called earlier, but you weren't here.'

  'I was at my office.'

  'I tried there. You had already left.'

  'No, I was there until a half hour ago.' I could see a half dozen empty beer cans in the yellow trash basket. 'No one called.'

  'I did. A man, a dispatcher, took a message.'

  'I see. Where's Bootsie, Sister?'

  'Asleep. She's not feeling well.' Her face was filled with perplexity. 'I know this looks peculiar.'

  'A little.'

  'I teach part-time at an elementary school in Lafayette. We're having a program on safety. You were so courteous at the hospital and over the phone I thought you might be willing to visit our class.'

  'I'm a little tied up right now.'

  'Yes, Bootsie told me.'

  'Can you tell me why you bought beer for my wife, Sister?'

  Her face was pink. 'Mr. Robicheaux, I wandered into somebody's personal situation and I've obviously mishandled it.'

  'Just tell me what's happened here, please.'

  'Your wife was going to drive to the store for some beer. I didn't think she should be driving. I told her I'd go for her.'

  'Why didn't you just get it from the bait shop? We own it.'

  'She didn't want me to.'

  'I see. Is there anything else I can help you with?'

  'No… I apologize. I don't know what else to say. I'll go now. Please excuse my coming here.'

  Then she was out the back door, walking fast toward her car, her green eyes shiny with embarrassment. I caught up with her just as she was opening her car door.

  'Sister, there's something going on here you don't understand,' I said. 'My wife has a problem because of some events that occurred at our house. But when a person is drunk or has had too much to drink and wants you to give him more, you don't do it.'

  'Then I guess I've learned a lesson today.'

  'Come see us again.'

  'That's kind of you.' My hand was resting on the windowsill. She placed hers lightly on top of mine and looked directly into my eyes. A shaft of sunlight fell through the tree on her reddish gold hair. I removed my hand from under hers and walked back into the house.

  I opened the bedroom door and looked in on Bootsie. The blinds were drawn, and she was sleeping with her clothes on and her head under the pillow. While I fixed supper I tried to concentrate on Alafair's conversation from the table about something that Tripod had done, but my thoughts were like birds clattering about in a cage, and I found myself absently touching the top of my right hand.

  You're imagining it, I thought. It was an innocent gesture. Some of them are just socially inept.

  But my energies were too dissipated to worry about Sister Marie Guilbeaux. I knew that beyond our closed bedroom door, my wife had taken up residence in that special piece of geography where the snakes hang in fat loops from the trees and a tiger with electrified stripes lights your way to his lair.

  It rained that night, and through the screen window I could smell the trees and an odor from the marsh like fish spawning. As I fell asleep, I wondered again about the Nazi submarine and Buchalter's obsession with it. When I was a child in Catholic school, we were
taught that evil eventually consumes itself, like fire that must destroy its own source. Was the submarine an underwater mausoleum or historical shrine from which Buchalter and his kind believed they could renew and empower their demented and misanthropic vision? Did they hate the present-day world so much that they would seek the company of drowned men who had reveled in setting afire the seas, in machine-gunning clusters of oil-streaked merchant sailors who had bobbed like helpless corks in the swell?

  It rained all night. The air in the bedroom was cool and damp, and in my sleep I thought I could smell salt in the wind. I dreamed of black-clad submariners, their white skin layered with deodorant, their unkempt beards like charcoal smeared on their faces. They guided a long, gleaming torpedo into a waiting tube, touching its hard sides like a farewell caress. The torpedo burst from beneath the bow, its propeller spinning, its steel skin rippling with moonlight just below the surface. The men in black dungarees stood motionless in the battery-lighted interior of their ship, their eyes lifted expectantly, their breasts aching with an unspoken and collective wish that made them wet their lips and nudge their groins against the cool, cylindrical side of another torpedo.

  The explosion against the hull of the freighter on the horizon, the screech of girders and rent metal, the avalanche of salt water into the hold, the secondary explosion of boilers that blew the bridge into sticks and heated the hatches into searing iron rectangles that would scorch a human hand into a stump, even the final geysering descent beneath the waves and the grinding of the keel against the sand—it all filtered through the darkness outside the sub with the softness of an old Vienna waltz swelling and dissipating in the mist.

  It must have been two or three in the morning when I felt the coldness in the room. In my sleep I reached for the bedspread at the foot of the bed and pulled it up over Bootsie and me. I thought wind was blowing through the house, when there should have been none, then I realized that my pillow was damp from the mist that was blowing through the window fan, which was turned off.

  I sat up in bed. The doors to both the closet and the bathroom were open, and the night-light in the bathroom had either burned out or been turned off. From the back porch I could hear the screen door puffing open and falling back upon the jamb in the wind. I reached under the bed and picked up the .45.