DR07 - Dixie City Jam (12 page)

His eyes became unfocused, then he looked over at the jukebox
as though he had just noticed it.

'I ain't got one. Why you ax that?' he said.

'No reason. Your mother's a tough lady. Stop worrying about
her.'

'Easy for you to say. You ain't there when she come home,
always telling me—'

'Telling you what?'

'I ain't nothing but a big drink of water, I gotta be a
man
,
I gotta stop slouching around like somebody pulled my backbone outta my
skin.' He rolled up a paper napkin in his palm and dropped it in his
plate. 'It ain't her fault. They get on her case where she works, then
she just
got
to get on mine. But I'm tired of it.'

For the first time I noticed how long and narrow his hands
were. Even his nails were long, almost like a girl's.

'You feel like putting your trunks back on?' I said.

'What for?'

'Take a walk with me to the drugstore, then we'll head back to
the gym and talk about clocks and bombsights.'

'What?'

'Gome on, I'm over the hill. You—dump me on my
butt, Zoot.'

We went into the drugstore on the corner, and I bought a
rubber ball, just a little smaller than the palm of my hand, and
dropped it in the pocket of my slacks. Then we crossed the street to
the gym, and Zoot put on his trunks again and met me in an alcove with
padded mats on the floor and a huge ventilator fan bolted into the
wire-mesh windows. I hung my shirt on a rack of dumbbells and slipped
on a pair of sixteen-ounce gloves that were almost as big as couch
pillows.

Advice is always cheap, and the cheapest kind is the sort we
offer people who have to enter dangerous situations for which they are
seriously unprepared or ill-equipped. I probably knew a hundred
one-liners that a cut-man or a trainer had told me in the corner of a
Golden Gloves ring while he worked my mouthpiece from my teeth and
squeezed a sponge into my eyes ('Swallow your blood, kid. Don't never
let him see you're hurt… He butts you again in the clench,
thumb him in the eye… He's telegraphing. When he drops his
right shoulder, click off his light').

But very few people appreciate the amount of courage that it
takes to stand toe-to-toe with a superior opponent who systematically
goes about breaking the cartilage in your nose, splitting your eyebrows
against the bone, and turning your mouth into something that looks like
a torn tomato, while the audience stands on chairs and roars its
approval of your pain and humiliation.

'Let's try to keep two simple concepts in mind,' I said. 'Move
in a circle with the clock. You got that? Circle him till he thinks
you're a shark. Always to the left, just like you're moving with the
clock.'

'All right…' He started circling with me, his gym
shoes shuffling on the canvas pad, the skin around his temples taut
with expectation, his eyes watching my fists.

'Then you look him right in the eye. Except in your mind
you're
seeing his face in a bombsight… Don't look at my hands, look
at my face. His face is right in the crosshairs, you understand me,
because you know it's just a matter of time till you bust him open with
your left, maybe make him duck and come up without his guard, and then
pull the trigger and bust him with your right.'

He circled and squinted at me above his gloves with his puffed
left eye.

'Hit me,' I said.

His jabs were like spastic jerks, ill-timed, fearful, almost
pathetic.

'I said hit me, Zoot!'

His left came out and socked into my gloves.

'Hit
me
, not the glove,' I said. 'You're
starting to piss me off.'

'What?'

'I said you're pissing me off. Do you have some problem with
your hearing?' I could see the verbal injury in his eyes. I flipped a
left jab at his head and drove my right straight into his guard. Then I
did it again. His head snapped back with the weight of the blow, then
he caught his balance and hunched his shoulders again. I saw him lower
his right slightly and a glint form in one eye like a rifleman peering
down iron sights.

His left missed me and scraped past my ear, but he had forced
me to duck sideways, and when he unloaded his right he snapped his
shoulder into it, the sweat leaping off his face, and caught me
squarely across the jaw.

I lowered my gloves and grinned at him.

'That one was a beaut,' I said, and started pulling off my
gloves.

'You quitting?'

'I told you, I'm over the hill for it. Besides, I have to get
back to New Iberia.'

'Go three with me.'

I reached in my slacks, took out the rubber ball I had bought
at the drugstore, and tossed it to him.

'Squeeze that in each hand five hundred times a day. Do
that
,
and keep working on that right cross, and you'll be able to tear off
your opponent's head and spit in it, Zoot.'

When I walked toward the exit, I looked back and saw him
shadowboxing in front of the ventilator fan, his right hand working the
rubber ball, his head ducking and weaving in front of the spinning fan
blades. Advice might be cheap, but there is nothing facile about the
faith of those to whom we give it. I wished Zoot lots of luck. He was
probably going to need a pile of it.

I was almost out the front door of the
gym when Tommy Lonighan
came out of his office and shook my hand like a greeter at a casino.
His muscular thighs bulged out of a pair of cut-off gray sweat trunks.
His light blue eyes and pink face were radiant with goodwill.

'I saw you working out with Zoot,' he said.

'He's a good kid. I hope he does all right here, Tommy.'

'I'm a bad influence?'

'He shouldn't be going up against pros.'

'He got in the ring with that white kid, the one with the
dragon tattooed on his belly?'

'Yes.'

'No kidding? That's not bad for a kid whose mother was
probably knocked up by a marshmallow.'

'You know how to say it, Tommy.'

'Step into my office,' he answered, smiling. 'I want to talk.'

'I'm on my way out of town.'

'I'll buy you a beer. You want a pastrami sandwich? I got your
pastrami sandwich. Forget about the other night. I had too much to
drink. Come on, don't be a hard-ass.'

'What's on your mind?'

'On
my
mind? Somebody hurts your wife,
and the next thing I know you're beating up people in my fucking
driveway. Hey, it's all right. The Caluccis are scum. I just want to
talk.'

I went inside his glassed-in office and sat down in front of
his desk. The walls were covered with old prizefight posters and
newspaper clippings about fighters that Lonighan had owned or managed.
Above a shelf filled with boxing trophies was an autographed photograph
of President Reagan, with two crossed American flags tucked behind the
frame.

'How did you know about my wife, Tommy?' I said.

'Because Clete Purcel's been all over town, threatening to jam
a chain saw up the butt of anybody with information who doesn't pass it
on.' He took a long-necked bottle of beer out of a cooler by his feet,
wiped off the ice, set the cap on the edge of his desk, and popped it
off with the heel of his hand. He offered it to me.

'No, thanks.'

He poured it into a schooner, took a deep drink, and wiped the
corners of his mouth with the back of his wrist.

'Let me cut to it, Tommy,' I said. 'You're right, a man came
to our house and harmed my wife. It was right after you tried to
discourage me from working for Hippo Bimstine.'

'I got a hard time believing this, Dave. You think that's how
I operate, I got to send degenerates around to hurt the wives of people
I respect?'

'You tell me.' I looked directly into his eyes. The cast in
them reminded me of light trapped inside blue water. They remained
locked on mine, as though wheels were turning over in his brain. Then
he looked out the window with a self-amused expression on his face and
picked up a sandwich from a paper plate in front of him.

'Is there a private joke you want to share with me, Tommy?'

'Dave, you insulted me at your table, in front of people, then
you beat the shit out of a guy with a shovel in my driveway. Then you
come to my place of business and tell me I'm sending perverts over to
New Iberia to bother your family. What did I do to deserve this? I
offered you a fucking business situation. You don't see the humor in
that?'

'I remember a line a journalist for
The Picayune
used about you once, Tommy. I never forgot it.'

'Yeah?'

'You're a mean man in a knife fight.'

'Oh yeah, I always liked that one.' He leaned forward on his
elbows. His curly white hair hung across his forehead. 'I want that
fucking sub. Anything the mockie's paying you, I'll double.'

'See you around, Tommy.'

'I don't get you. You act like I got jock odor or something.
But it doesn't bother you to do business with a fanatic who gets people
fired from their jobs.'

'I don't follow you.'

'Your buddy, bubble butt…
Bimstine
,
Dave. He belongs to the Jewish Defense Organization. They don't like
somebody, they rat-fuck him where he works.'

'I wouldn't know. I don't like the way you talk about him,
though.'

'Excuse me?'

'You take cheap shots, Tommy.'

'Like maybe I'm un-American, an anti-Semite or something?'

'Read it like you want.'

'I was sixteen years old at Heartbreak Ridge. I love this
country. You saying I don't—' He stopped and smiled. 'You and
me might have to forget we're mature people.'

'You don't know anybody named Will Buchalter?'

'This the guy hurt your wife?'

I didn't answer and stared straight into his face. He set his
sandwich on his plate, removed a wisp of lettuce from his lip, then
took a sip of beer from his schooner and brought his eyes back to mine.

'What can I say? I'm fighting with cancer of the prostate,' he
said. 'You want to know what's on my mind? Dying. You know what else is
on my mind? Dying broke. I don't know any guy named Buchalter.'

'I'm sorry to hear about your health problem, Tommy.'

'Save it. That sweaty pile of gorilla shit you call a friend
is trying to break me. We get casino gambling in New Orleans, he's
gonna own it all. I got to take a piss. Which I do with my eyes closed
because half the time there's blood in the bowl. You want a beer,
they're in the cooler.'

He opened a small closet that had a toilet inside and, without
closing the door, began urinating loudly into the water while he flexed
his knees and passed gas like it was a visceral art form.

How do you read a man like Tommy Lonighan?

Heartbreak Ridge, Irish bigotry, right-wing patriotism,
morbidity that he used like a weapon, speech and mood patterns
that had the volatility of tinfoil baking in a microwave.

The day a person like Lonighan makes sense to you is probably
the day you should seriously reexamine your relationship to the rest
of the human gene pool.

And on that note I waved good-bye and left before he had
finished shaking himself and thumbing his gray sweat trunks back over
his genitalia.

I stopped by Clete's office on St. Ann
to see if he had found
out anything about the man who called himself Will Buchalter.

'If the guy's local, he's low-profile,' Clete said. 'Like
below street level. I think I talked to every dirtbag and right-wing
crazoid in town. Have you ever been to any of these survivalist shops?
I think we ought to round up some of their clientele while there's
still time.'

He started to take a cigarette out of a pack on his desk;
instead, he put a mint on his tongue and smiled at me with his eyes.

'How about hookers?' I said. ,

'The ones I know say he doesn't sound like any of their Johns.
I don't think he's from around here, Streak. A guy like this earns
people's attention.'

'Thanks for trying, Clete.'

'Hang on. You've got two messages,' he said, taking his feet
off his desk and looking at two memo slips by his telephone. 'That
black sergeant, Ben Motley, you remember him, he always had his fly
unzipped when he was in Vice, he wants you to call him about some dude
who electrocuted himself in custody last night—'

'What?'

'Hang on, mon. I got a similar message from this character
Reverend Oswald Flat. Isn't that the guy who was out at your bait shop?
He's got a voice like somebody twanging on a bobby pin.'

'That's the guy.'

'Well, he called Bootsie and she told him to call here. NOPD
picked up some wild man in the Garden District, can you dig this, a
forty-year-old guy with tattoos on his head, wearing black leather in
August. The autopsy showed he'd been shooting up with speed and paint
thinner. How about that for a new combo?'

'What's the connection?'

'He had a silenced .22 Ruger automatic on him and Hippo
Bimstine's address in his pocket. We'd better go talk to Motley and
this guy with a mouthful of collard greens.'

'We?'

'Let's be serious a minute, Dave. I think you're fucking with
some very bad guys. I don't know who they are, why they're interested
in this submarine, or what the connections are between this citizens
committee and dope dealers in the projects having their hearts cut out.
But I'll bet my ass politics doesn't have diddle-shit to do with it.'

'I think this time it might.'

'Anyway, I'm backing your action, Jackson, whether you like it
or not.' He leaned back in his swivel chair, grinned, and drummed on
his stomach with his knuckles like a zoo creature at play.

I called Motley and told him that
Clete and I would meet him
at his office.

'You don't need to bring Purcel,' he said.

'Yeah, I do.'