DR07 - Dixie City Jam (31 page)

'Get your fouking head up,' Freddy said.

'Strap his belt around his neck,' Hatch said.

'Step back, both of you,' Buchalter said.

Strands of hair were glued in my eyes, and a foul odor rose
from my lap. I heard Buchalter's boots scrape on the cement as he set
himself.

'I'm going to hit you only three times, Dave, then we'll talk
again,' Buchalter said. 'If you want to stop before then, you just have
to tell me.'

'Your juices are about to fly, Mr. Robicheaux,' Freddy said.

Then the three men froze. The Nazi flag rippled along the
cinder blocks with pockets of air from the floor fan.

'It's glass breaking,' Freddy said.

'I thought you said the Negro was tucked away,' Buchalter said.

'E was, Will. I locked 'im in the paint closet,' Freddy said.

'The paint closet? It's made of plywood. You retard, there're
upholstery knives in there,' Buchalter said.

'Hatch didn't tell me
that
. Nobody told
me
that
. You quit reaming me, Will,' Freddy said.

But Buchalter wasn't listening now. He ripped Hatch's Luger
from a holster that hung above the workbench and moved quickly toward
the door behind the post where I was tied, the muscles in his upper
torso knotting like rope. But even before he flung the metal door back
against the cinder blocks, I heard more glass breaking, cascading in
splintered panes to the cement, as though someone were raking it out of
window frames with a crowbar; then an electric burglar alarm went off,
one with a horn that built to a crescendo like an air-raid siren,
followed by more glass breaking, this time a more congealed, grating
sound, like automobile windows pocking and folding out of the molding,
while automobile alarms bleated and pealed off the cement and
corrugated tin roof.

'He's out the door!' Buchalter said.

'The guy who owns this place uses a security service. They're
probably already rolling on that alarm,' Hatch said.

'Y'all had a fucking security service into a place where you
meet?' Buchalter said.

'How'd anybody know you'd want to use it for an interrogation?
I told you to pop the burrhead last night, anyway.'

'Get out there and stop that noise,' Buchalter said.

'The shit's frying in the fire, it is. Time to say cheery-bye
and haul it down the road, Will,' Freddy said..

'Can't you rip a wire out of a mechanism? Do I have to do
everything myself?' Buchalter said.

'No, I can drive very nicely by meself, thank you. Since
that's me van out there, I'll be toggling to me mum's now. I think
you've made a bloody fouking mess of it, Will. I think you'd better get
your fouking act together,' Freddy said.

The Luger dripped like a toy from Buchalter's huge hand. The
smooth, taut skin of his chest was beaded with pinpoints of sweat; his
eyes raced with thought.

Freddy unbolted a door at the far end of the room and stepped
out into the gray dawn.

'Fuck it, I'm gone, too, Will,' Hatch said. 'Snap one into
this guy's brainpan and clean him out of your head… All
right, I'm not gonna say anything else. Don't point my own piece at me,
man. It ain't my place to tell you what to do.'

Hatch backed away from Buchalter, then paused, chewing on his
beard, his eyes trying to measure the psychodrama in Buchalter's face.
He unhooked the Nazi flag from the wall and draped it over his arm.

'I'm taking the colors with me,' he said. 'Will, all this
stuff tonight don't mean anything. It goes on, man. We're eternal. You
know where you can find me and Freddy later. Hey, if you decide to
smoke him, lose my piece, okay?'

Then he, too, was gone into the brief slice of gray light
between the door and jamb.

Buchalter's thumb moved back and forth along the tip of the
Luger's knurled grip. His tongue licked against the back of his teeth;
then it made a circle inside his lips. As though he had stepped across
a line in his own mind, he slipped the Luger into the top of his
trousers and bent his face three inches from mine. He twisted his
fingers into my hair and pulled my head back against the post.

'I'm stronger inside than you are, Dave. You can never get
away from me, never undo me,' he' said. 'I gave Bootsie a gift to
remember me by. Now one for you.'

He tilted his head sideways, his eyes closing like a lover's,
his mouth approaching mine. The Luger was hard and stiff against his
corded stomach. In the next room the burglar and car alarms screamed
against the walls and tin roof.

I sucked all the spittle and blood out of my cheeks and spat
it full into his face.

His face went white, then snapped and twitched as though he
had been slapped. His skin stretched against his skull and made his
brow suddenly simian, his eye sockets like buckshot. He wiped a strand
of pink spittle on his hand and stared at his palm stupidly.

But he didn't touch me again. He straightened to his full
height with a level of hate and cruelty and portent in his eyes that I
had never seen in a human being before, then, working his tropical
shirt over one arm, snugging the Luger down tight in his belt, one eye
fixed on me like a fist, he went out the door into the gray mist. But I
believed I had now seen the face that inmates at Bergen-Belsen and
Treblinka and Dachau had looked into.

Five minutes later Zoot Bergeron, his face swollen like a
bruised plum, sawed loose the rope and leather straps that bound my
wrists, and in the wail of the approaching St. Mary Parish sheriffs
cars, we slammed the door back on its hinges and stumbled out into the
wet light, into the glistening kiss of a new dawn, into an
industrial-rural landscape of fish-packing houses, junkyards, shrimp
boats rocking in their berths, S.P. railway tracks, stacks of
crisscrossed ties, a red-painted Salvation Army transient shelter among
a clump of blue-green pine trees, oil-blackened sandspits, gulls
gliding over the copper-colored roll of the bay, two hoboes running
breathlessly over the gravel to catch a passing boxcar, the smells of
diesel and salt-water, creosote, fish blood dried on a dock, nets stiff
with kelp and dead Portuguese men-of-war, flares burning on offshore
rigs, freshly poured tar on natural gas pipe, the hot, clean stench of
electrical sparks fountaining from an arc welder's torch.

And in the distance, glowing like a chemical flame in the fog,
was Morgan City, filled with palm-dotted skid-row streets, sawdust
bars, hot pillow joints, roustabouts, hookers, rounders, bouree
gamblers, and midnight ramblers. Zoot helped me stand erect, and I
wiped my eyes on my sleeve and looked again at the two hoboes who had
belly flopped onto the floor of the boxcar and were now rolling smokes
as the freight creaked and wobbled down the old Southern Pacific
railroad bed. Their toothless, seamed faces were lifted into the salt
breeze with an expression of optimism and promise that made me think
that perhaps the spirits of Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Jack Kerouac
were still riding those pinging rails. But the scene needed no
songwriter or poet to make it real. It was a poem by itself, a softly
muted, jaded, heartbreakingly beautiful piece of the country that was
forever America and that you knew you could never be without.

At home the next day, I sat in the
cool shade of the gallery
and listened to Clete Purcel talk about his latest encounter with the
Calucci brothers. The cane along the bayou's banks looked dry and
yellow in the wind, and hawks were gliding high above the marsh against
a ceramic blue sky. I had the same peculiar sense of removal that I had
experienced after I was wounded seriously in Vietnam. I felt that the
world was moving past me at its own pace, with its own design, one that
had little to do with me, and that now I was a spectator who listened
to interesting stories told by other people.

'You remember how we used to do it when the greaseballs
thought they could take us over the hurdles, I mean when they got the
mistaken idea they were equal members of the human race and not
something that should have run down their mother's leg?' he said. 'We'd
show up in the middle of their lawn parties, have their limos towed in,
roust them on nickel-and-dime beefs in public, flush their broads out
of town, use a snitch to rat-fuck 'em with the Chicago Outfit, hey, you
remember the time we blew up Julio Segura's shit in the backseat of his
car? They had to wash him out with a hose, what a day that was.'

Clete ripped the tab on a can of beer, drank the foam, and
smiled at me. His face was pink with a fresh sunburn, and the corners
of his eyes crinkled with white lines.

'So that's what I did, big mon,' he said. 'I started following
Max and Bobo all over town. Bars, restaurants, a couple of massage
parlors they own, three fuck pads, black slum property, dig this,
they've actually got a guy fronting a bail bonds office for them in
Metairie, an escort service, a PCB incinerator out on the river. Dave,
these two guys get up in the morning and go across Jefferson and
Orleans parishes like a disease, it's impressive.

'The problem is, I've got a convertible now, and it's a little
hard to be inconspicuous. After a while Max and Bobo are doing big
yawns when they see me and I'm starting to feel like part of the
scenery while the neighbourhood dogs hose down my tires. So yesterday,
when the Caluccis and all their gumballs go to lunch at Mama Lido's, I
decide it's time to shift it on up into overdrive and I get a table out
on the terrace, three feet behind one of Max's broads.

'It was perfect timing, the ultimate New Orleans lowlife
geek-out. Guess who shows up first? Tommy Blue Eyes and his main punch,
what's her name, Charlotte, with her ta-tas sticking out of her
sundress like a couple of muskmelons, and of course the Caluccis' hired
help are winking at each other and squeezing their floppers under the
table while Tommy's trying to act big-shit and order Italian dishes
like he knows what he's doing, except he sounds like he's got Q-tips
shoved up his nose.

'Then Tommy's Indian zombie pulls up in front of the
restaurant with Mrs. Lonighan in the passenger's seat. Have you ever
seen her? Think of a fire hydrant with bow legs. She charges out onto
the terrace, her glasses on crooked, spittle flying from her mouth,
shouting about Tommy and the punch leaving a used rubber under her bed,
and when the maître d' tries to calm her down, she squirts a
bottle of
seltzer water in his face.

'Naturally, the Caluccis and the other greaseballs and their
broads are loving all this. Tommy's face is getting redder and redder,
his punch is using a little brush to powder her ta-tas, and the Indian
is standing there like a lobotomy case who needs a spear in his hand
and a bone in his nose. Then Mrs. Lonighan storms out of the place,
gets in her car without the Indian, and drives across the curb into a
bunch of garbage cans down the street.

'So Tommy tries to blow it all off by talking about how the
Jews are taking over legalized gambling in Louisiana. Then he starts
telling these anti-Semitic jokes that have got people at the other
tables staring with their mouths open, you know, stuff like "This Nazi
officer told these Jewish concentration camps inmates, 'I got good news
and bad news for you guys. The good news is you're going to Paris. The
bad news is you're going as soap."'

'Anyway, the greaseballs are roaring at Tommy's jokes, and I'm
wondering why I'm letting these guys act like I've used up my potential
and I'm not a factor in their day anymore. So I lean over and tap Tommy
on the shoulder with a celery stick and say, "Hey, Tommy, too bad you
left your peter cheater lying around for Miz Bobalouba to step on. You
ought to get you a fuck pad in the Pontalba like Max and Bobo here."

'The whole place goes quiet except for the sound of the Indian
slurping up his squids. I'm thinking,
Ah, show time
.
Wrong. Bobo calls the maître d' and has me thrown out. Can you
dig it?
Here's a collection of people that would turn the stomach of a
proctologist, but I get eighty-sixed out on the street, right in front
of a busload of Japanese tourists who are on their way back from the
battleground at Chalmette.

'I'm thinking. What's wrong with this picture? I was humping
it outside Chu Lai while Max and Bobo were boosting cars and doing
hundred-buck hits for the Giacano family. Plus I look back at the
terrace and the maître d' is picking up my silverware and
changing the
tablecloth like some guy with herpes on his hands had been eating there.

'I look down the street and some guys are taking a break from
pouring a concrete foundation for a house. You remember that story you
told me about how this mob guy in Panama City got even with his wife
for giving a blow job to a judge behind a nightclub?

'The guy in charge of the cement truck is a union deadbeat and
a part-time bouncer in the Quarter I went bail for about two years ago.
I say, "Mitch, you mind if I drive your truck around the block, play a
joke on a friend?" He says, "Yeah, we were just going to have a beer
and a shot across the street if somebody'd stand the first round." I
say, "Why don't you let me do that, Mitch? I think I have a tab there."
He goes, "I was just telling my friends here you're that kind of guy,
Purcel."

'I pull the truck right up to Max's Caddy convertible. It's
gleaming with a new wax job, the top's down, the dashboard's made of
mahogany, the seats are purple leather and soft as warm butter. I get
out of the truck, clank that feeder chute over the driver's door, and
let 'er rip. Streak, it was beautiful. The cement splatters all over
the dashboard and the windows, covers the floors, oozes up over the
seats, and hangs in big gray curtains over the doors. Even with the
mixer roaring I could hear people yelling and going crazy out on the
terrace. In the meantime, the Japanese have piled back off the bus in
these navy blue business suits that look like umpire uniforms, laughing
and applauding and snapping their Nikons because they think a movie is
being made and this is all part of the tour, and while Max and Bobo are
trying to fight their way through the crowd, the springs on the Caddy
collapse, the tires pop off the rims, the cement breaks out the front
windows and crushes the hood down on the engine. You remember that
character called "The Heap" in the comic books? That's what the Caddy
looked like, two headlights staring out of this big, gray pile of wet
cement-.'