DR07 - Dixie City Jam (35 page)

The vigilante, like the plainclothes detective in the motel
who was determined to emotionally twist and break Albert on the rack,
was selective about his sacrificial offerings, and his purpose had
nothing to do with ending the problem they were associated with.

But the preacher had said something on the dirt road by my
house that would not go away, that hung on the edge of my consciousness
like an impacted tooth that throbs dully in your sleep.

What if, instead of a particular crime, we were dealing with
people, or forces, who wished to engineer a situation that would allow
political criminality, despotism masked as law and order, to become a
way of life?

Was it that hard to envision? The elements to pull it off
seemed readily at hand.

Financial insecurity. Lack of faith in traditional government
and institutions. Fear and suspicion of minorities, irritability and
guilt at the visibility of the homeless and the mentally ill who
wandered the streets of every city in the nation, the brooding, angry
sense that things were pulling apart at the center, that armed and
sadistic gangs could hunt down, rape, brutally beat, and kill the
innocent at will. Or, more easily put, the general feeling that it was
time to create examples, to wink at the Constitution, and perhaps once
again to decorate the streetlamps and trees with strange fruit.

Hitler had to set fire to the Reichstag and place the blame on
a Communist student in order to gain power.

The sight of Los Angeles burning, of motorists being torn
apart with tire irons on live television, might serve just as well.

I was out of the office three hours that afternoon on a
shooting in a black juke joint south of town. The wounded man, who was
shot in the thumb, refused to identify the shooter, walked out of the
emergency room at Iberia General without being treated, then drove out
in the parish with a kerosene-soaked rag wrapped around his hand and
tried to run down his common-law wife's brother in the middle of a
sugarcane field. The brother refused to press charges. Bottom line: big
waste of time.

It rained that afternoon, then the sun came out again and the
air was bright and cool and the palm and oak trees along the street had
a green-gold cast to them. Just as I was signing out of the office at
five, Wally, the dispatcher, whose great bulk made his breath wheeze
even when he was seated, looked up from a message that he was writing
on a piece of memo paper.

'Oh hi, Dave. I didn't know you were still here,' he said.
'The monsignor called from the bishop's office in Lafayette. His
message was—' He squinted at his own handwriting. 'Yes, he
knows Sister Guilbeaux and he wants to know is she in any kind of
trouble.'

'Did he say anything else?'

'No, not really. He seemed to wonder why the sheriffs office
is interested in a nun. What's going on? A big bingo raid coming down?'
His round face beamed at his own humor.

'You're up at the hospital sometimes. Did you ever see a nun
there with reddish gold hair, about thirty or thirty-five years old?'

'I don't place her. What's the deal, the nuns been rapping the
patients on the knuckles?' He smiled again.

'How about giving it a break, Wally?'

Then Wally raised himself from his chair, just far enough to
stick his head out the dispatcher's window and look both ways down the
hall. His face was ruddy from hypertension, and his shirt pocket bulged
with fat, cellophane-wrapped cigars.

'Can I tell you something serious, Dave?' he said. 'All that
stuff going on over in New Orleans, leave it alone. It's blacks killing
blacks. Ain't we got enough problems here? Let them people clean up
their own shit.'

'Thanks for taking the message, Wally.'

'Hey, don't walk out of here mad. People round here care about
you, Dave. This Nazi guy been causing all this grief, he gets caught in
the right situation, it's gonna get squared, you'd better believe it,
yeah. You ain't got no doubt about what I mean, either, podna.'

He peeled the cellophane off a cigar, rolled it wetly in the
center of his mouth, and scratched a kitchen match across the bottom of
his desk drawer.

That night I couldn't sleep. At
one-thirty in the morning I
heard the
tink
of a tin can on the baling wire I
had strung around the house. I took the AR-15 with the thirty-round
magazine from the top of the closet, slid a shell into the chamber, and
walked outside with it. It was windy in the trees, and the sky was full
of moonlight. There was nobody in the yard or down by the bait shop.
Tripod had gotten out of his hutch and was digging in an armadillo's
hole by the tractor shed. I picked him up in my arms, refilled his food
and water bowls, and put him back inside his hutch. Then I sat down on
an upended bucket, under the darkness of an oak tree, the AR-15 propped
against the trunk, and waited ten minutes to make sure that the noise I
had heard earlier had been caused by Tripod.

The moonlight was the color of pewter on the dead cypress in
the marsh. My neighbor had been burning the sugarcane stubble in the
field behind my house, and the air was hazy with smoke and dense with a
smell like burnt cinnamon. In the quietness of the moment, in the wind
that blew through the leaves overhead, in the ruffling of the moonlight
on the bayou's surface, and in the perfect black silhouette of my
cypress and oak house against the handkerchiefs of flame that twisted
and flickered out of the scorched dirt in my neighbor's field, I felt
almost as if I had stepped into a discarded film negative from my
childhood, in another time, another era.

In the wind I thought I could hear the fiddle and accordion
music and the words to '
La Jolie Blonde
.' For some
reason I remembered a scene clipped out of the year 1945. It was V-J
Day, and my parents had taken me with them to a blue-collar bar with a
colonnade and a high sidewalk in front and big, green-painted,
collapsible shutters that folded flush with the walls. My mother wore a
plum-colored pillbox hat with a white veil pinned up on top, and a
purple sundress printed with green and red flowers. My father, Aldous,
had just been paid, and he was buying beers for the bar and dancing
with my mother, while the jukebox played:

The doors on the bar were all open to let in the cool air
after the rain, and the evening shadows and the sun's afterglow had the
soft purple-and-gold tone of sugarcane right before the harvest. The
streets were filled with people, some of them in uniform, some of them
a little drunk, all of them happy because the lights were about to go
on again all over the world.

Then my mother picked me up and balanced me on her hip while
my father grinned and set his battered fedora on my head. My mother
smelled like milk and bath powder, like the mint leaves and
bourbon-scented cherries from the bottom of her whiskey glass. It was a
happy time, one that I was sure would never end.

But both my parents were dead and so was the world in which I
had grown up.

Then another image floated behind my eyes, a fearful and
perhaps solipsistic projection of what it might be like if the Will
Buchalters of the world were ever allowed to have their way. In my
mind's eye I saw a city like New Orleans at nighttime, an avenue like
St. Charles, except, as in the paintings of Bavarian villages by Adolf
Hitler, there were no people. The sky was a black ink wash, the
mosshung oaks along the sidewalks as motionless as stone; the houses
had become prisons that radiated fear, and the empty streets were
lighted with the obscene hues of sodium lamps that allowed no shadows
or places to hide. It was a place where the glands had replaced the
heart and the booted and head-shaved lout had been made caretaker of
the sun.

The next morning I called the bishop's
office again. This time
I was told the bishop had gone to Washington and the monsignor was in
Opelousas and would not be back until that afternoon. I left my number.

At noon I got a phone call from Tommy Bobalouba.

'I'll treat you to some étouffée,' he said.

'I'm working right now.'

'I drove all the way over here to talk. How about getting your
nose out of the air for a little while?'

'The last time you were over here, you set me up as your alibi
while somebody tried to clip Nate Baxter.'

'So you lost money? It don't mean I don't respect you.'

'What do you want?'

'I want to
talk
. I got a heavy fucking
problem, man. It's something I can't talk to nobody else about. You
don't got thirty minutes, then fuck you, Dave.'

'Where are you?' I said.

I drove up to the seafood restaurant on the back road to St.
Martinville and found him inside, seated on a tall stool at the bar,
eating raw oysters from a tray. He had covered each oyster with Tabasco
sauce,.and sweat was trickling out of his meringue hair. I recognized
three of his crew at one of the tables, dour-faced Irish hoods with the
mental capabilities of curb buttons, who had always run saloons or
upstairs crap games for Tommy or shut down the competition when it
tried to establish itself in areas Tommy had staked out for himself.

But Tommy had never used bodyguards and, always desirous of
social acceptance by New Orleans's upper classes, did not associate
openly with his employees.

'What are you looking at?' he said.

'Your crew seem to be enjoying their meal,' I said.

'I can't bring my boys to your town for a lunch?'

'What's up, partner?'

'I got some personal trouble.' He wiped his mouth with his
hand and looked at it.

I waited.

He looked around, closed and opened his eyes, his face flexing
like rubber, then stared disjointedly out into space. Then he tried to
smile, all in seconds.

'Hey, Dave, you went to Catholic school, you boxed in Golden
Gloves,' he said. 'You ever have a mick priest for a coach, guy who'd
have all the fighters say a Hail Mary in the dressing room, then tell
them to get out there and nail the other guys in the mush?'

'It sounds familiar, Tommy.'

'It was good coming up like that, wasn't it? Them was good
days
back then.'

'They weren't bad. Are you going to tell me what's on your
mind?'

'I tried to get out of this prostate operation. The doc said
it
might leave me wearing a diaper. So we tried other stuff. Three days
ago the doc tells me it's spread. Like a big worm eating its way
through my insides. I ain't got to worry about an operation anymore.
You understand what I'm saying? It's a funny feeling. It's like you're
looking at a clock somebody just snapped the hands off.'

Then I saw it in his face, the grayness and the pinched
quality around the mouth, the remoteness in the eyes, the knowledge
that he had entered a piece of psychological moonscape on which there
was no traveling companion.

'I'm sorry, Tommy,' I said.

He used a folded paper napkin to blot the perspiration around
his hairline. He glanced through the big plate glass window at the back
of the restaurant. Outside was a small, dark lake, and dead leaves were
falling into the water.

'You still go to Mass?' he said.

'Yes.'

'I mean, for real, not just to make your old lady happy or
something like that?'

'What can I do for you?'

'Look, if a guy maybe knows about something, maybe about even
some people being clipped, people maybe even that's got it coming, but
he don't do it himself, like it's out of his hands, you know what I
mean, then it ain't on his soul, right?'

I tried to assimilate what he had said, but that was like
trying to make ethical or theological sense out of Sanskrit read
backwards.

'You want to float that one by me again?' I said.

'Look, I took out one guy in my life, I mean besides Korea.
That was the guy I did with the fire hose. This guy was such a bum even
the judge said he ought to be dug up again and electrocuted. I don't go
around killing people, Dave. But what if I knew what was going on,
maybe like there was other people doing it, and I figure it's their
choice, I don't make people do what they got to do, I just hold on to
my ass and walk through the smoke, it's a rough fucking town to keep a
piece of, the hair ends up on the wallpaper, that's the way it shakes
out sometimes, right?'

'I'm a police officer, Tommy. Maybe you'd better give some
thought to what you're telling me.'

'I'm standing on third base here. You gonna come to the bone
yard to arrest me? What if I made a contribution to the church? Maybe
you know a priest don't go through everything with a garden rake. It
ain't easy for me to figure all this stuff out, talk about it with
people I don't know. I get a headache.'

His knuckles and eyebrows were half-mooned with scar tissue;
his blue eyes had a bright sheen like silk. What do you say to an
uneducated, confused, superstitious, angry man, with a frightened child
inside him, as he tries to plea-bargain his sins and cop to a fine
before he catches the bus?

'I can introduce you to a priest, a friend of mine,' I said.
'Just tell him what you told me. I wouldn't get into the area of
contributions at that point, though.'

'What? It sound like bribery?'

'You might say that.'

'Oh.'

'Tommy, do you know something about the vigilante killings? Is
that what we're talking about here?'

He wiped at the tip of his nose with one knuckle.

'If that's the case, why not come clean on it, get it out of
the way?' I said.

His eyes bulged, and he poked me in the chest with his
stiffened finger.

'Hey, I don't dime, I don't rat-fuck, you saying I do, Dave,
you and me are about to remodel this place.'