DR07 - Dixie City Jam (28 page)

Back in my office I tore my unfinished
report in half and
dropped it in the wastebasket. There were two ways to think about the
sheriffs behavior, neither of which was consoling:

1.
Semper fi
, Mac, you're on your own.

Which was too severe an indictment of the sheriff.
But—

2. No application of force or firepower has so far been
successful. Since we've concluded that we don't understand what we're
dealing with, use more force and firepower.

Yes, that was more like it. It was old and familiar logic. If
you feel like a reviled and excoriated white sojourner in, a slum area,
break the bones of a drunk black motorist with steel batons. If you
cannot deal with the indigenous population of a Third World country,
turn their rain forests into smoking gray wasteland with napalm and
Agent Orange.

But my cynicism was cheap, born out of the same impotence in
trying to deal with evil that had caused the sheriff to make me a
present of his Colt Industries urban-Americana meatcutter.

My desk was covered with fax sheets from the National Crime
Information Center in Washington, D.C., and photocopied files from NOPD
that had been sent to me by Ben Motley. The people in those combined
pages could have been players in almost any city in the United States.
They were uniquely American, ingrained in our economy, constantly
threading their way in and out of lives, always floating about on the
periphery of our vision. But nothing that we've attempted so far has
been successful in dealing with them. In fact, I'm not even sure how to
define them.

1. Max and Bobo Calucci: In popular literature their kind are
portrayed as twentieth-century Chaucerian buffoons, venial and humorous
con men whose greatest moral offense is their mismatched wardrobe, or
charismatic representatives of wealthy New York crime families whose
palatial compounds are always alive with wedding receptions and garden
parties. The familial code of the last group is sawed out of medieval
romance, their dalliance with evil of Faustian and tragic proportions.

Maybe they are indeed these things. But the ones I have known,
with one or two exceptions, all possessed a single common
characteristic that is unforgettable. Their eyes are dead. No, that's
not quite correct. There's a light there, like a wet lucifer match
flaring behind black glass, but no matter how hard you try to interpret
the thought working behind it, you cannot be sure if the person is
thinking about taking your life or having his car washed.

I once spent three hours interviewing a celebrity mafioso who
lives today in the federal witness protection program. Two-thirds of
his stomach had been surgically removed because of ulcers, and his
flesh was like wrinkled putty on his bones, his breath rancid from the
saliva-soaked cigar that rarely left his mouth. But his recall of his
five decades inside the Outfit was encyclopedic. As he endlessly
recounted conversations with other members of the mob, the subject was
always the same—money: how much had been made from a score,
how much
had been pieced off to whom, how much laundered, how much delivered in
a suitcase for a labor official's life.

Thirty years ago, in the living room of a friend, he had
wrapped piano wire around the throat of an informer and pulled until he
virtually razored the man's head off his shoulders.

Then I said something that my situation or job did not require.

'The man you killed, he had once been your friend, hadn't he?'

'Yeah, that's right.'

'Did that bother you?'

'It's just one of them things. What're you gonna do?' He
shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows as though an impossible
situation had been arbitrarily imposed upon him.

Then I posed one more question to him, one that elicited a
nonresponse that has always stayed with me.

'You've told the feds everything about your life, Vince. Did
you ever feel like indicating to God you regret some of this bullshit,
that you'd like it out of your life?'

His eyes cut sideways at me for only a moment. Through the
cigar smoke they looked made from splinters of green and black glass,
watery, red-rimmed as a lizard's, lighted with an old secret, or
perhaps fear, that would never shake loose from his throat.

I clicked off my recorder, said good-bye, and walked out of
the room. Later, he told an FBI agent that he never wanted me, in his
presence again.

2. Tommy Bobalouba: Like Max and Bobo, he operated on the
edges of the respectable world and constantly tried to identify himself
with an ethnic heritage that somehow was supposed to give his illegal
enterprises the mantle of cultural and moral legitimacy. The reality
was that Tommy and the Caluccis both represented a mind-numbing level
of public vulgarity that sickened and embarrassed most other Irish and
Italians in New Orleans.

Tommy had been kicked out of his yacht club for copulating in
the swimming pool at 4:00 A.M. with a cocktail waitress. At the Rex
Ball during Mardi Gras he told the mayor's wife that his radiation
treatments for prostate cancer caused his phallus to glow in the dark.
After wheedling an invitation to a dinner for the New Orleans
Historical Association, he politely refused the asparagus by saying to
the hostess, 'Thank you, anyway, ma'am, but it always makes my urine
smell.'

3. We'll call the third player Malcolm, a composite of any
number of black male kids raised in New Orleans's welfare projects.
Caseworkers and sociologists have written reams on Malcolm. Racist
demagogues love Malcolm because he's the means by which they inculcate
fear into the electorate. Liberals are far more compassionate and
ascribe his problems to his environment. They're probably correct in
their assessment. The problem, however, is that Malcolm is dangerous.
He's often immensely unlikable, too.

A full-blown crack addict has the future of a lighted candle
affixed to the surface of a woodstove. Within a short period of time he
will be consumed by the unbanked fires burning inside him or those that
lick daily at his skin from the outside. In the meantime he drifts into
a world of moral psychosis where shooting a British tourist in the face
for her purse or accidentally killing a neighborhood child has the
significance of biting off a hangnail.

I knew a kid from New Iberia whose name
was
Malcolm. He had an arm like a black whip and could field a ball in deep
center and fire it on one hop into home plate with the mean, flat
trajectory of a BB. At age seventeen he moved with Iris mother into the
Desire Project in New Orleans, a complex of welfare apartments where
the steady din is unrelieved, like the twenty-four-hour noise in a city
prison—toilets flushing, plumbing pipes vibrating in walls,
irrational people yelling at each other, radios and television sets
blaring behind broken windows. The laws of ordinary society seem the
stuff of comic books. Instead, what amounts to the failure of all
charity, joy, and decency becomes the surrogate for normalcy: gang
rape, child molestation, incest, terrorization of the elderly,
beatings and knifings that turn the victims into bloody facsimiles of
human beings, fourteen-year-old girls who'll wink at you and proudly
say, 'I be sellin' out of my pants, baby,' or perhaps a high school
sophomore who clicks his MAC-10 on up to heavy-metal rock 'n' roll and
shreds his peers into dog food.

In a year's time Malcolm smoked, hyped, snorted, bonged,
dropped, or huffed the whole street dealer's menu—bazooka,
Afghan
skunk, rock, crank, brown scag, and angel dust. His mother brought him
back to New Iberia for a Christmas visit. Malcolm borrowed a car and
went to a convenience store for some eggnog. Then he changed his mind
and decided he didn't need any eggnog. Instead, he sodomized and
executed the eighteen-year-old college girl who ran the night register.
He maintained at his trial that he was loaded on speed and angel dust
and had no memory of even entering the convenience store. I was a
witness at his electrocution, and I'm convinced to this day that even
while they strapped and buckled his arms and legs to the oak chair,
fitted the leather gag across his mouth, and dropped the black cloth
over his face, even up to the moment the electrician closed the
circuits and arched a bolt of lightning through his body that cooked
his brains and exploded his insides, Malcolm did not believe these
people, whom he had never seen before or harmed in any way, would
actually take his life for a crime which he believed himself incapable
of committing.

That evening I sat at the kitchen
table with a nautical chart
of the Louisiana coast spread out before me.

Through the open bedroom door I heard Bootsie turn on the
shower water. Recently she had made a regular habit of taking long
showers in the afternoon, washing the cigarette smoke from a lounge out
of her hair, holding her face in the spray until her skin was ruddy and
the appearance of clarity came back into her eyes. I had not spoken to
her yet about the DWI she had almost received the previous day.

I flattened and smoothed the nautical chart with my hand and
penciled X's at the locations where I had sighted the German U-boat
when I was in college and on my boat with Batist. Then I made a third X
where Hippo Bimstine's friend, the charter-boat skipper, had pinged it
with his sonar. The three X's were all within two miles of each other,
on a rough southwest-northeastwardly drift line that could coincide
with the influences of both the tide and the currents of the
Mississippi's alluvial fan. If there was a trench along that line,
tilting downward with the bevel of the continental shelf, then the
movements of the sub had a certain degree of predictability.

But I couldn't concentrate on the chart. I stared out the back
window at the tractor shed by the edge of the coulee. The door yawned
open, and the late sun's red light shone like streaks of fire through
the cracks in the far wall. I called Clete at his apartment in New
Orleans and told him about the break-in of last night, the
linen-covered butcher block, the offering of bourbon, the crystal
goblet half-filled with burgundy and rimmed with lipstick and moonlight.

'So?' he said when I had finished.

'It's not your ordinary B and E, Clete.'

'It's Buchalter or his trained buttwipes, Streak.'

'Why the blue rose on a china plate?'

'To mess up your head.'

'You don't think it has anything to do with the vigilante?'

'Everybody in New Orleans knows the vigilante's MO now. Why
should Buchalter be any different?'

'Why a woman's lipstick on the glass?'

'He's probably got a broad working with him. Sometimes they
dig leather and swastikas.'

I blew out my breath and looked wanly through the screen at
the fireflies lighting in the purple haze above the coulee.

'You got framed once on a murder beef, Dave. But you turned it
around on them, with nobody to help you,' Clete said. 'I've got a
feeling something else is bothering you besides some guy with rut for
brains opening bottles in your tractor shed.'

I could still hear the shower water running in the bathroom.

'Dave?'

'Yes.'

'You want me to come over there?'

'No, that's all right. Thanks for your time, Clete. I'll call
you in a couple of days.'

'Before you go, there's something I wanted to mention. It
sounds a little zonk, though.'

'Zonk?'

'Yeah, deeply strange. Brother Oswald told me he was in the
merch when World War II broke out.' He paused a moment. 'Maybe it's
just coincidence.'

'Come on, Clete, get the peanut brittle out of your mouth.'

'He says he was a seventeen-year-old seaman on an oil tanker
sailing out of New Orleans in nineteen forty-two. Guess what? A pigboat
nailed them just south of Grand Isle.'

A solitary drop of perspiration slid down the side of my rib
cage. Through the back screen I could see black storm clouds, like
thick curds of smoke, twisting from the earth's rim against the molten
red ball of setting sun.

'He says while the tanker was burning, the sub came to the
surface and rammed and machine-gunned the lifeboats. He was floating
around in the waves for a couple of days before a shrimper fished him
out… It's kind of weird, isn't it, I mean the guy showing up
about the same time as Buchalter?'

'Yeah, it is.'

'Probably doesn't mean anything, though, does it? I
mean… What do you think?'

'Like somebody told me yesterday, I'm firing in the hole on
this one, Clete.'

After I hung up I walked into the bedroom. Through the shower
door I could see Bootsie rinsing herself under the flow of water. She
held her hair behind her neck with both hands and turned in a slow
circle, her buttocks brushing against the steamed glass, while the
water streamed down her breasts and sides. I wanted to close the
curtains and latch the bedroom door, rub her dry with a towel, walk her
to our bed, put heir nipples in my mouth, kiss her lean, supple
stomach, then feel my own quivering energies enter and lose themselves
in hers, as though my desperate love could overcome the asp that she
had taken to her breast.

Then I heard her open the medicine cabinet and unsnap the cap
on a plastic vial. Her face jumped when she saw me in the mirror.

'Oh, Dave, you almost gave me a coronary,' she said. Her hand
closed on the vial. I took it from her and read the typed words on the
label.

'Where'd you get these, Boots?'

'Dr. Bienville,' she said.

'Dr. Bienville is a script doctor and should be in prison.'

'It's just a sedative. Don't make a big thing out of it.'

'They're downers. If you drink with them, they can kill you.'
I shook the pills into the toilet bowl, then cracked the vial in the
palm of my hand and dropped it in the wastebasket. Her eyes were
blinking rapidly as she watched me push down the handle on the toilet.
She started to speak, but I didn't let her.