DR07 - Dixie City Jam (30 page)

A redheaded, crew-cut, porcine man in a black Grateful Dead
T-shirt, with white skin, a furrowed neck, and deep-set, lime green
eyes, sat forward on a folding chair, pumping his chubby arms furiously
on the handles of the generator. Then he stopped and stared at one of
his palms.

'I got a blister on me hand,' he said.

'Ease it up, Will. You're gonna lose him again,' the man with
the silver beard said.

'It ain't Will's fault. All the sod's got to do is flap 'is
fouking 'ole for us,' the man at the generator said.

'Electricity's funny, Will. It settles in a place like water.
Maybe it's his heart next,' the man with the beard said.

Will Buchalter was shirtless, booted in hobnails. His upper
torso tapered down inside his olive, military-style dungarees like the
carved trunk of a hardwood tree. His armpits were shaved and powdered,
and, just above his rib cage, there were strips of sinew that wrinkled
and fanned back like pieces of knotted cord from the sides of his
breasts. He sat with one muscular buttock propped on a battered desk,
his legs crossed, his face bemused, lost in thought under the brim of
his Panama hat.

'What about it, Dave?' he asked.

My head hung forward, the sweat and water streaming out of my
hair.

'Answer the man, you dumb fouk,' the porcine man in the black
T-shirt said, and lifted my chin erect with a wood baton. His skin was
as white as milk.

'Don't hurt his face again, Freddy,' Buchalter said.

'I say leave off with the technology, Will,' the man called
Freddy answered. 'I say consider 'is nails. I could play a lovely tune
with 'em.'

Will Buchalter squatted down in front of me and pushed his hat
to the back of his head. A bright line of gold hair grew out of his
pants into his navel.

'You've got stainless-steel
cojones
,
Dave,' he said. 'But you're going through all this pain to prevent us
from having what's ours. That makes no sense for anybody.'

He slipped a folded white handkerchief out of his back pocket
and blotted my nose and mouth with it. Then he motioned the other two
men out of the room. When they opened the door I smelled grease, engine
oil, the musty odor of rubber tires.

'Freddy and Hatch aren't the sharpest guys on the block, Dave.
But armies and revolutions get built out of what's available,'
Buchalter said. His eyes glanced down at my loosened trousers. He
picked up one of the generator's wires and sucked wistfully on a canine
tooth. 'I promise you you'll walk out of it. We have nothing to gain by
hurting you anymore or killing you. Not if you give us what we want.'

A bloody clot dripped off the end of my tongue onto my chin.

'Go ahead, Dave,' he said.

But the words wouldn't come.

'You're worried about the Negro?' he said. 'We'll let him go,
too. I promise I won't let Freddy get out of control like that again,
either. He's just a little peculiar sometimes. When he was a kid some
wogs took a liking to him in the back room of a pub, you know what I
mean?'

He placed his palm across my forehead, as though he were
gauging my temperature, then pressed my head gently back into the post.
His eyes studied mine.

'It's almost light outside,' he said. 'You can have a shower
and hot food, you can sleep, you can have China white to get rid of the
pain, you can have a man's love, too, Dave.'

He brought his face closer to mine and smiled lopsidedly.

'It's all a matter of personal inclination, Dave. I don't mean
to offend,' he said. He looked at the smear of blood and
saliva across his squared handkerchief, folded it, and slipped it back
into his pocket. Then the light in his eyes refocused, as though he
were capturing an elusive thought. 'We're going to take back our
cities. We're driving the rodents back into the sewers. It's a new
beginning, Dave, a second American Revolution. You can be proud of your
race and country again. It's going to be a wonderful era.'

He shifted his weight and settled himself more comfortably on
one knee, like a football coach about to address his players. He
grinned.

'Come on, admit it, wouldn't you like to get rid of them all,
blow them off the streets, chase them back into their holes, paint
their whole end of town with roach paste?' he said. He winked and poked
one finger playfully in my ribs.

'I apologize, it's a bad time for jokes,' he said. 'Before we
go on, though, I need to tell you something. In your house you said
some ugly things to me. I was angry at the time, but I realize you were
afraid and your only recourse was to try to hurt and manipulate me. But
it's all right now. It makes our bond stronger. It's pain that fuses
men's souls together. We're brothers-in-arms, Dave, whether you choose
to think so or not.'

He got to his feet, went to the desk, and returned with a
nautical chart of the Louisiana coast unrolled between his hands. He
squatted in front of me again. In the shadow of his hat the spray of
blackheads at the corners of his eyes looked like dried scale.

'Dave, the sub we want had the number U-138 on the conning
tower. It also had a wreathed sword and a swastika on the tower,' he
said. 'Is that the one you found? Can you tell me that much?'

A floor fan vibrated in the silence. I saw him try to suppress
the twitch of anger that invaded his face. He put his thumb on a spot
south of Grand Isle.

'Is this the last place you saw it?' he asked.

The red, black, and white flag puffed and ruffled against the
cinder-block wall in the breeze from the fan.

His hand slipped over the top of my skull like a bowl. I could
feel the sweat and water oozing from under his palm.

'You going to be a hard tail on me? Are the Jews and Negroes
worth all this?' he said. He slowly oscillated my head, his mouth open,
his expression pensive, then wiped his palm on the front of my shirt.
'Do you want me to let Hatch and Freddy play with your hands?'

He waited, then-said, rising to his feet, 'Well, let's have
one more spin with army surplus, then it's on to Plan B. Freddy and
Hatch don't turn out watchmakers, Dave.'

He walked past the corner of my vision and opened the door.

'It's going to be daylight. I need to get 'ome to me mum,
Will,' Freddy said.

'He's right. We're spending too much time on these guys,' the
man named Hatch said. 'Look at my pants. The burrhead was swallowing
the rag I put in his mouth. When I tried to fix it for him, he kicked
me. A boon putting his goddamn foot on a white man.'

'We're not here to fight with the cannibals, Hatch,' Buchalter
said. 'Dave's voted for another try at electro-shock therapy. So let's
be busy bees and get this behind us.'

I hea
r the rotary gears gain
momentum, then the
current surges into my loins again, vibrating, binding the kidneys,
lighting the entrails, but this time the pain knows its channels and
territory, offers no surprises, and nestles into familiar pockets like
an old friend. The hum becomes the steady thropping of helicopter
blades, the vibrations nothing more than the predictable shudder of
engine noise through the ship's frame. The foreheads of the wounded men
piled around me are painted with Mercurochromed M's to indicate the
morphine that laces their hearts and nerve endings; in their clothes is
the raw odor of blood and feces. The medic is a sweaty Italian kid from
Staten Island; his pot is festooned with rubber spiders, a crucifix, a
peace symbol, a bottle of mosquito dope. My cheek touches the slick
hardness of his stomach as he props me in his arms and says, 'Say
good-bye to Shitsville, Lieutenant. You're going home alive in
'sixty-five. Hey, don't make me tie your hands. It's a mess down there,
Loot
.'

But I'm not worried about the steel teeth
embedded in my side and thighs. My comrades and I are in the arms of
God and Morpheus and a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from
Galveston, Texas, who flew the dust-off in through a curtain of
automatic weapons fire that sounded like ball peen hammers whanging
against the fuselage
,
and now, with the windows
pocked and spiderwebbed,
the floor yawing, the hot wind sucking through the doors, the squares
of flooded rice plain flashing by like mirrors far below, we can see
green waves sliding toward us like a wet embrace and a soft pink sun
that rises without thunder from the South China Sea.

Oh, fond thoughts. Until I hear the bucket filling
again under a cast-iron tap and the water that stinks of gasoline
explodes in my face.

'Time I had a go at 'im, Will,' Freddy said.

Then the door opened again, and I could hear leather soles on
the concrete floor. The three men's faces were all fixed on someone
behind me.

'Give me another hour and we'll have it resolved,' Buchalter
said.

'E's a tight-ass fouker,' Freddy said. 'We give him a reg'lar
grapefruit down there.'…

'It's all getting to be more trouble than it's worth, if you
ask me,' Hatch said. 'Maybe we should wipe the slate clean.'

The person behind me lit a cigarette with a lighter. The smoke
drifted out on the periphery of my vision.

'You want to call it?' Buchalter said.

'AH I ask is ten fouking minutes, one for each finger,' Freddy
said. 'It'll come out of 'im loud enough to peel the paint off the
stone.'

'I've had a little problem in controlling some people's
enthusiasms,' Buchalter said to the person behind me.

'You've got a problem with acting like a bleeding sod
sometimes,' Freddy began.

'You're not calling me a sodomist, are you, Freddy?'

'We're doing a piece of work. You shouldn't let your emotions
get mixed up in it, Will. That's all I'm trying to get across 'ere,'
Freddy said.

I heard the person behind me scrape up a steel ruler that had
been lying on a workbench. Then the person touched the crown of my
skull with it, idly teased it along my scalp and down the back of my
neck.

'I think Dave'll come around,' Buchalter said. 'He just needs
to work out some things inside himself first.'

Whoever was behind me bounced the ruler reflectively on my
shoulder and pushed a sharp corner into my cheek.

Buchalter kept staring at the person's face, then he said,
reading an expression there, 'If that's the way you want it. But I
still think Dave can grow.'

I heard the cigarette drop to the floor, a shoe mash it out
methodically against the cement; then the door opened and shut again.

Freddy smiled at Hatch. His skin was so white it almost
glowed. He shook a pair of pliers loose from a toolbox. Hatch was
smiling now, too. They both looked down at me, expectant.

Will Buchalter bit a piece of skin off the ball of his thumb.
He crouched down in front of me, removed his Panama hat, and rested it
on one knee. His blond hair was as fine as a baby's and grew outward
from a bald , spot the size of a half-dollar in the center of his
scalp. He lifted up my chin gently with the wood baton.

'Last chance. Don't make me turn it over to them,' he said.

I lifted my eyes to his and felt my lips part dryly.

'What is it, Dave? Say it,' Buchalter said.

My lips felt like bruised rubber; the words were clotted with
membrane in my throat.

'It's all right, take your time,' Buchalter said. 'You've had
a hard night… Get him a drink of water.'

A moment later Buchalter held a tin cup gingerly to my lips.
The water sluiced over my chin and down my throat; I gagged on my chest.

'Dave, I understand your pain. It's the pain of a soldier and
a brave man. Just whisper to me. That's all it takes,' Buchalter said.

Hatch was bent down toward me, too, his hands on his knees,
his face elfish and merry. Buchalter leaned his ear toward my mouth,
waiting. I could see the oil and grain in his skin, the glistening
convolutions inside his ear.

I pushed the words out of my chest, felt my lips moving, my
eyes blinking with each syllable.

A paleness like the color of bone came into Buchalter's face.
One hobnailed boot scratched against the cement as he rose to his feet.

'What'd 'e say?' Freddy asked.

'He said Will was a cunt,' Hatch answered, his grin scissoring
through his beard. He and Freddy rocked on the balls of their feet,
hardly able to keep their mirth down inside themselves.

Then Hatch said, 'Sorry, Will. We're just laughing at the guy.
He hasn't figured out yet who's on his side.'

'That's right, Will,' Freddy said. ''E's a stupid fouk for
sure. Go have breakfast. Me and Hatch'll finish it up here.'

But the insult had passed out of Buchalter's face now. He
began pulling on a pair of abbreviated gray leather gloves, the kind a
race driver might wear, with holes that allowed the ends of the fingers
to extend above the webbing. He dried each of his armpits with a towel,
then positioned himself in front of me.

'Stand him up,' he said.

'Maybe that's not a good idea, Will,' Freddy said. 'Unless
you've given up. Remember what happened out in Idaho. Like an egg
breaking, it was.'

'I say tear up his ticket, Will,' Hatch said. 'He's in with
Hippo Bimstine. You're gonna trust what he tells you? Rip his ass.'

Then, as though he had given permission for his own anger to
feed and stoke and fan itself, Hatch's hands began to shake, his teeth
glittered inside his beard, and he wrenched me under one arm and tried
to tug me upward against the wood post, his breath whistling in his
nostrils.

'You know what's lower than a Jew?' he said. 'An Aryan who
works for one. You think you're stand-up, motherfucker? A punk like you
couldn't cut a week on Camp J. See how you like the way Will swings.'

Freddy grabbed my other arm, and they raked me upward against
the post like a sack of feed. I could feel splinters biting into my
forearms, my ankles twisting sideways with my weight.