DR07 - Dixie City Jam (32 page)

'Have you lost your mind?' I said.

'What's wrong?'

'You're going to end up in the bag or get your P.I. license
pulled. Why do you keep clowning around with these guys? It doesn't get
the score changed.'

'They loan-sharked the Caddy out of a builder in Baton Rouge.
The last thing Max wants is a police report filed on it. Lighten up,
noble mon. You've been around the local Rotary too much.'

Then I saw his eyes look into mine and his expression change.
I looked away.

'You really spit in Buchalter's face?' he said.

'It wasn't a verbal moment.'

'I'm proud of you, mon.'

His eyes kept wandering over my face.

'Will you cut it out, Clete?'

'What?'

'Staring at me. I'm all right. Both the guys with Buchalter
are fuckups and aren't going to be hard to find. Particularly the
cockney. We've got the feds in on it now, too.'

He made tiny prints with the ball of his index finger in the
moisture and salt on top of his beer can.

'You think Buchalter's some kind of Nazi superman?' I said.
'He's not. He's a psychotic freak, just like dozens of others we sent
up the road.'

'NOPD and the sheriff's office in Lafourche Parish probably
haven't gotten hold of your boss yet. But they will.'

'What are you talking about?'

'You're right. Those two were fuckups. That's why they're off
the board now.'

The sunlight seemed to harden and grow cold on the garden.

As best as I could reconstruct it, this is how Clete (and
later a Lafourche sheriff's deputy) told me the story:

The previous night, out in a wetlands area southwest of New
Orleans, a man who had been gigging frogs emerged terrified from the
woods, his face whipped by branches and undergrowth, and waved down a
parish sheriffs car with his shirt. It had started to rain, and ground
fog was blowing out of the trees.

'They's a man got some other men tied up on the mudflat.
Somebody got to get down there. He's fixin' to—' he said.

'Slow down, podna. It's gonna be all right. He's fixin' to
what?' the deputy said.

'He's got one of them lil chain saws. Back yonder, right by
the
marsh.'

The deputy was young and only eight months with his
department. He radioed his dispatcher, then made a U-turn in the middle
of the highway and bounced down an abandoned board road that wound
through thickly spaced trees and mounds of briar bushes webbed with
dead morning glory vines. Sheets of stagnant water and mud splashed
across his windshield, and an old road plank splintered under one wheel
and
whanged
and clattered against his oil pan.
But in the distance, through the blowing mist and the black silhouette
of tree trunks, he could see a brilliant white chemical flame burning
against the darkness. Then he heard the surge of a chain saw, and a
second later, even louder than the erratic, laboring throb and shriek
of the saw and the roar of his car engine, the sustained and unrelieved
scream of a man that rose into the sky like fingernails scraping on
slate.

The deputy snapped a tie-rod and spun out into a tangle of
willow and cypress trees fifty yards before the road dead-ended at the
marsh. He pulled his twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, sawed off at the
pump and loaded with double-ought buckshot, from the clip on the
dashboard and began running with it at port arms through the
undergrowth.

In a clearing by the swamp's edge, next to a parked pickup
truck with a camper shell in the bed, a Coleman lantern hissed on the
ground like a phosphorous flare. The deputy could see the shadow of a
huge man moving about on the far side of the truck. On the ground,
partly obscured by the truck's tires, were the shapes of two prone men,
their arms pinioned behind them, their faces bloodless and iridescent
in the soft rain and the hissing light of the lantern.

The chain saw was idling on a piece of cardboard now. Then the
deputy saw the large man bending over the shapes on the ground, a
bouquet of roses scattered about his booted feet, pulling, working at
something with his hands. The water and trees in the swamp were black,
the shadows in the clearing changing constantly with the frenetic
movements of the man, whose hands the deputy now knew were laboring at
something tribal and dark, far beyond the moral ken of a youthful law
officer, a glimpse into a time before the creation of light in the
world, hands as broad as skillets, popping with cartilage, scarlet to
the wrist, the fingers wet with the lump of heart muscle that they
lifted from a man's chest cavity.

The deputy vomited on a tree, then tried to step into the
clearing with his shotgun aimed at the man who had suddenly raised
erect, a rain hat tied under his chin, a disjointed and maniacal stare
in his eyes.

He wanted to yell
Down on your face, hands on your
head
, or any other of the dramatic verbal commands that
always reduce television criminals to instant prisoners, but the words
hung like pieces of wet newspaper in his throat and died in the heavy
air, and he tripped over a tangle of morning glory vines as though he
were stumbling about in a dream.

Then the large man was running into the marsh, his legs
ripping through islands of lily pads, water splashing to his waist, his
shoulders humped, when the deputy let off the first round and sent a
shower of sparks out into the dark. At first the deputy thought he had
missed, had fired high, and he jacked another shell into the chamber,
aimed at the base of the running man's spine, and pulled the trigger.
Then he fired twice more and saw the man's shirt jump, heard the slugs
whunk
into his back.

But the running man crashed and tunneled through the flooded
cypress and willows and was gone. The deputy's fifth shot peeled away
through the trees like marbles rattling down a long wooden chute. He
would swear later that he saw a half dozen rents in the shirt of the
fleeing man. He would also get off duty that night and get so drunk in
a Lockport bar that his own sheriff would have to drive him home.

'The pickup truck was boosted in
Lafitte that morning,' Clete
said. 'The guy with the silver beard was Jody Hatcher. He was a
four-time loser, including one time down as an accessory in the rape of
a child. The guy named Freddy is a blank. The feds think he might be a
guy who dynamited a synagogue in Portland, but they're not
sure… Streak, look at the bright side. There're two less of
these guys on the planet. I tell you something else. They made a real
balloon payment when they checked out. The M.E. said there was a look
frozen in their eyes even he had trouble dealing with.'

Batist was cranking an engine out on the bayou. The wind was
wrinkling the water and ruffling the cane in the sunlight.

'None of it makes any sense,' I said.

'It does to me. Buchalter doesn't leave loose ends.'

'Why does he go to the trouble of using the vigilante's MO?'

'Maybe he likes roses. Maybe he has shit for brains.'

'Maybe we're not dealing with Buchalter, either. What's this
stuff about the deputy planting double-ought bucks in his back?'

'Maybe the guy doesn't want to admit he was so scared he
couldn't hit a billboard with bird shot.'

I stood up to go inside. A pain spread out of my loins into my
abdomen.

'You beat Buchalter, Streak. That's all that counts,' Clete
said. 'I don't think I could have cut it. I'd have rolled over.'

'No, you wouldn't.'

He crushed his empty beer can in his hand.

'Let me take y'all to supper tonight,' he said.

'That sounds very copacetic,' I said.

'My second day in Vietnam a hard-nosed gunny gave me some
advice about fear and memory and all that stuff: "Never think about it
before you do it, never think about it after it's over."'

'No kidding?' I said, with the screen half opened.

'I tried,' he answered, and held up his palms and made
half-moons of his eyebrows.

On Saturday morning, when I walked
down to the dock, I noticed
a pickup truck with a David Duke sticker parked by the shell boat ramp.
Inside the bait shop, Alafair and Batist were working behind the
counter and two fishermen were eating chilli dogs with forks and
drinking bottled beer at one of the tables. Batist did little more than
nod when I said good morning.

'What's wrong with him?' I asked Alafair while we were pulling
the canvas awning out on the wires over the spool tables.

'Batist made a mistake with those men's change,' she answered.
'One man said, the one with the big face, he said, "Louisiana's got
fifteen percent unemployment, and this place hires something like that
to run the cash register."'

I went back through the screen door. The two men, both dressed
in the khaki clothes of heavy equipment operators, were sharing a
smoked sausage now and drinking their beer. I picked up the cash
register receipt from their table, flattened it on the counter, added
up the price of the beer and sausage and sales tax, rang open the cash
drawer, and placed four one-dollar bills and thirty-six cents in coins
on their table.

'This table's closed,' I said, and picked up their beer
bottles and the paper shell with the sliced sausage in it.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' the larger of the
two men said. His head looked like granite, and his closely cropped
hair was lightly oiled and shaved neatly on his neck.

'You were rude to my employee. I don't want your business.'

'Just hold on a minute, there.'

'End of discussion, gentlemen.'

'Well then… well… well then…
Fuck you, then.'

After they were gone, I wiped off their table. Then, before I
realized it, Batist had walked down the dock, gotten into his truck,
and driven south toward the four corners and his house.

Oh boy.

'Watch the store, Alf. I'll be back in about twenty minutes,'
I said.

'Why'd Batist leave?'

'He has his own way of doing things.'

He lived in a rambling, paintless house that had been built on
to randomly by three generations of his family. The tin roof was orange
with rust, the dirt yard strewn with chicken coops, tractor and car
parts. On the sagging gallery were stacks of collapsible crab traps and
an old washing machine that he had turned into a barbecue pit. His
small farm had once been part of a plantation where Federal and
Confederate troops had fought a furious battle during General Banks's
invasion of southwestern Louisiana. Through the pines on the far side
of the coulee which bordered Batist's property, you could see the
broken shell and old brick pillars and chimneys of a burned-out
antebellum home that the Federals first looted and then fired as they
pushed a retreating contingent of Louisiana's boys in butternut brown
northward into New Iberia. Every spring, when Batist cracked apart the
matted soil in his truck patch with a singletree plow, minie balls,
shards of broken china, and rusted pieces of canister would peel loose
from the earth and slide back off the polished point of the share like
the contents of a fecund and moldy envelope mailed from the year 1863.

I found him in his backyard, raking leaves onto a compost pile
that was enclosed with chicken wire. The dappled sunlight through the
oak branches overhead slid back and forth across his body like a
network of yellow dimes.

'If you're going to take off early, I'd appreciate your
telling me first,' I said.

'When I tole you you gotta t'row people out the shop 'cause of
me?'

'Those were low-rent white people, Batist. I don't want them
on my dock. That's my choice.'

'If a white man got to look out for a black man, then ain't
nothin' changed.'

'This is what you're not understanding, partner. We don't let
those kind of people insult Alafair, Bootsie, you, or me. It doesn't
have anything to do with your race.'

He stopped work and propped his hands on the wood shaft of the
rake. His wash-faded denim shirt was split like cheesecloth in back.

'Who you tellin' this to? Somebody just got off the train from
up Nort'?' he said.

'Next time I'll keep my hand out of it. How's that?'

'Get mad if you want. T'rowin' them white men out ain't
solvin' nothin'. It's about money, Dave. It's always about money. The
white man need the nigger to work cheap. That ain't no mystery to black
people. It's white folk don't figure it out, no.'

'I need you to help close up tonight,' I said.

'I'm gonna be there. Hey, you runnin' round in circles lookin'
for this man been killin' dope dealers, this man who hurt you so bad
the ot'er day, it don't have nothin' to do with no vigilante. When
somebody killin' black people, it don't matter if up in a tree, or
breakin' in a jail and hangin' a man on a beam, they can say it's
'cause he raped a white woman, or he killed a white man, or he done
some ot'er t'ing. But it's over money. It means the black man stay down
at the bottom of the pile. The dumbest nigger in Lou'sana know that.'

His eyes lingered indulgently on mine. He squeezed the rake
handle, and his callused palm made a soft grating sound like leather
rubbing against wood.

Monday morning I returned to work. The first telephone call I
received was from Lucinda Bergeron.

'Fart, Barf, and Itch are no help on Will Buchalter,' she
said. 'I don't understand it. Is the guy made out of air?'

'He didn't seem like it to me.'

'Then why doesn't he show up in the system?'

'You can't throw an electronic net over every psychopath in
the country.'

'Somebody has to know who this guy is. Being around him must
be like getting up in the morning and biting into a shit sandwich for
breakfast.'

Too much time around squad rooms, Lucinda, I thought.

'How's Zoot doing?' I said.