DR07 - Dixie City Jam (42 page)

'Anyway, the transvestite is no ordinary fruit. He looks like
Frankenstein in a dress and panty hose. He starts sobering up and
realizes this isn't a Crisco party. That's when he starts ripping puke
ass, I mean busting slats out of the walls with these guys. The pukes
made an instant conversion to law and order and called the sheriffs
office.

'Right now Frankenstein's in a holding cell, scared shitless.
Guess who he called to bail him out?'

'Lonighan?'

'Right. Then twenty minutes go by, and guess who calls back on
the fruit's behalf?'

'I don't know, Ben.'

'A lawyer who works for the Calucci brothers. That's when the
St. Charles sheriff called us. Why do the Caluccis want to help a
cross-dresser with feathers and pig flop in his hair?'

'Is the guy's name Manuel?'

'Yeah, Manuel Ruiz. The sheriff thinks he's a lobotomy case.
He's probably illegal, too.'

'How long has he been in custody?'

'Two hours.'

'I'll get back to you. Thanks, Ben.'

An hour later Manuel Ruiz was still in the holding cell, a
narrow, concrete, barred room with a wood bench against one wall and a
drain hole and grate in the floor. There were dried yellow stains on
the grate and on the cement around the hole. He was barefoot and wore a
black skirt with orange flowers on it and a torn peasant blouse with
lace around the neck; his hair was matted and stuck together in spikes.
His exposed chest looked as hard and flawless in complexion as sanded
oak.

'You remember me, Manuel?' I asked.

The eyes were obsidian, elongated, unblinking, lidless, his
wide, expressionless mouth lipsticked like a fresh surgical incision.

'I just talked with the prosecutor's office,' I said. 'The
boys aren't pressing charges. You can go home with me if you want.'

The skin at the corner of one eye puckered, like tan putty
wrinkling.

'Or you can wait for the Caluccis' lawyer to get here. But he
left word he's running late.'

'Caluccis no good. No want.' His voice sounded as though it
came out of a cave.

'Not a bad idea. The other problem we might have is the INS,
Manuel.'

He continued to stare at me, as though I were an anomaly caged
by bars and not he, floating just on the edge of memory and recognition.

'Immigration and Naturalization,' I said, and saw the words
tick in his eyes. 'Time to get out of town. Hump it on down the road.
¿Vamos
a casa?
Tommy's house?'

He hit at a fly with his hand, then looked at me again and
nodded.

'I'll be back in a minute,' I said.

I walked back to the jailer's office. The jailer, a crew-cut
man with scrolled green tattoos and black hair on his arms, sat behind
his desk, reading a hunting magazine.

By his elbow, a cigar burned in an ashtray inset in a
lacquered armadillo shell.

'He's agreed to leave with me,' I said. 'How about a towel and
a bar of soap and some other clothes?'

'He hosed down when he come in.' He looked back at his
magazine, then rattled the pages. 'All right. We want everybody tidy
when they leave. Hey, Clois! The Mexican's going out! Walk him down to
the shower!' He looked back down at his magazine.

'What about the clothes?'

'Will you mail them back?'

'You got it.'

'Clois! Find something for him to wear that don't go with
tampons!' He smiled at me.

It was cool and raining harder now as we drove toward New
Orleans on old Highway 90. Manuel sat hunched forward, his arm hooked
outside the passenger's door, his jailhouse denim shirt wet all the way
to the shoulder. We crossed a bridge over a bayou, and the wind swirled
the rain inside the cab.

'How about rolling up the window?' I said.

'Don't want smell bad in truck,' he said.

'You're fine. There's no problem there. Roll up the window
please.'

He cranked the glass shut and stared through the front window
at the trees that sped by us on the road's edge and the approaching
gray silhouette of the Huey Long Bridge.

'Do you do some work for the Calucci brothers, Manuel?' I said.

'
Trabajo por
Tommy.'

'Yeah, I know you work for Tommy. But why do Max and Bobo want
to get you out of jail, partner?'

His jug head remained motionless, but I saw his eyes flick
sideways at me.

'Max and Bobo don't help people unless they get something out
of it,' I said.

He picked up the paper sack that held his soiled clothes and
clutched it in his lap.

'Where you from, Manuel?'

His face was dour with fatigue and caution.

'I'm not trying to trap you,' I said. 'But you're living with
bad people. I think you need help with some other problems, too. Those
boys who took you out in the marsh are sadists. Do you understand what
I'm saying to you?'

But if he did, he gave no indication.

I shifted the truck into second and began the ascent onto the
massive steel bridge that spanned the Mississippi. Down below, the
water's surface was dimpled with thousands of rain rings, and the
willow and gum trees on the bank were deep green and flattening in the
wind off the gulf.

'Look, Manuel, Tommy Lonighan's got some serious stuff on his
conscience. I think it's got to do with dope dealers and the vigilante
killings in the projects. Am I wrong?'

Manuel's hands closed on the sack in his lap as though he were
squeezing the breath out of a live animal.

'You want to tell me about it?' I said.

'
¿
Quién
es usted?'

'My name's Dave Robicheaux. The man you saw at Tommy's house.'

'No. Where work? Who are?'

'I live in New Iberia. I'd like to help you. That's on the
square. Do you understand me?'

'I go to jail because of boys?'

'Forget those guys. They're pukes. Nobody cares about them.'

'No jail?'

'That's right. What do you know about the vigilante, Manuel?'

He twisted his face away from me and stared out the passenger
window, his lips as tight as the stitched mouth on a shrunken head. His
leathery, work-worn hands looked like starfish clutched around the sack
in his lap.

It was still raining a half hour later when I drove down Tommy
Lonighan's drive, past the main house to the cottage where Manuel
lived. Steam drifted off the coral-lined goldfish ponds; the door to
the greenhouse banged like rifle shots in the wind. I cut the engine.
Manuel sat motionless, with his hand resting on the door handle.

'Good luck to you,' I said.

'Why do?'

'Why do what?'

'Why help?'

'I think you're being used.' I took my business card out of my
wallet and handed it to him. 'Call that telephone number if you want to
talk.'

But it was obvious that he had little comprehension of what
the words on the card meant. I slipped my badge holder out of my back
pocket and opened it in front of him.

'I'm a police officer,' I said.

His hairline actually receded on his skull, like a rubber mask
being stretched against bone; his nostrils whitened and constricted, as
though he were inhaling air off a block of ice.

'All cops aren't bad, Manuel. Even those guys at the jail
wanted to help you. They could have called Immigration if they had
wanted.'

Bad word to use. The top of his left thigh was flexed like
iron and trembling against his pants leg. I reached across him and
popped the door open.

'Adios,' I said. 'Stay away from the pukes. Stay off Dauphine
Street. Okay? Good-bye.
Hasta
whatever.'

I left him standing in the rain, his black hair splayed on his
head like running paint, and drove back down the driveway. The gateman,
a rain hat pulled down on his eyes, opened up for me. I rolled my
window down as I drew abreast of him.

'Where's Tommy?' I said.

'He went out to the St. Charles Parish jail to pick up the
Indian. He's gonna be a little pissed when he gets back.'

'It's not Manuel's fault.'

'Tell me about it. I'm working his shift. The guy's a fucking
savage, Robicheaux. He eats mushrooms off the lawn, he's got a fucking
blowgun in his room.'

Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought. You frighten and confuse a
retarded man, then leave him to the care of a headcase like Tommy
Lonighan.

'Leave the gate open,' I said.

I made a U-turn in the street and headed back up the drive. I
got out of the truck, a newspaper over my head, and walked toward
Manuel's cottage. Then I stopped. At the rear of the greenhouse,
kneeling in the rain, Manuel was chopping a hole through the roots of a
hibiscus bush with a gardener's trowel. When the hole was as deep as
his elbow, he dropped the trowel inside and began shoving the mound of
wet dirt and torn roots in on top of it. The, hibiscus flowers were red
and stippled with raindrops, puffing and swelling in the wind like
hearts on a green vine.

Ten minutes later I called Ben Motley from a pay phone outside
a drugstore. A block away I could see the water whitecapping out on
Lake Pontchartrain and, in the distance, the lights glowing like tiny
diamonds on the causeway.

'Get a warrant on Tommy Lonighan's place,' I said.

'What for?'

I told him what I had seen and where they should dig.

'The vigilante is some kind of headhunter or cannibal?' he
said.

'I don't know, Ben. But if you bust him, don't let the
Caluccis or their lawyer bond him out.'

'The poor ignorant fuck.'

Welcome to Shit's Creek, Manuel.

The word
death
is never abstract. I
think of my father high up on the night tower, out on the salt, when
the wellhead blew and all the casing came out of the hole, the water
and oil and sand geysering upward through the lights just before a
spark flew from metal surface and ignited a flame that
melted the steel spars into licorice; I think of his silent form, still
in hobnailed boots and hard hat, undulating in the groundswell deep
under the gulf, his hand and sightless face beckoning.

Death is the smell that rises green and putrescent from a body
bag popped open in a tropical mortuary; the luminescent pustules that
cover the skin of VC disinterred from a nighttime bog of mud and
excrement when the 105's come in short; the purple mushrooms that grow
as thick and knotted as tumors among gum trees, where the boys in
butternut brown ran futilely with aching breasts under a rain of
airbursts that painted their clothes with torn rose petals.

But there are other kinds of endings that serve equally well
for relocating your life into a dead zone where there seems to be
neither wind nor sound, certainly not joy, or even, after a while, the
capacity to feel.

You learn that the opposite of love is not hate but an attempt
at surrogate love, which becomes a feast of poisonous flowers. You
learn to make love out of need, in the dark, with the eyes closed, and
to justify it to yourself, with a kiss only at the end. You learn that
that old human enemy, ennui, can become as tangible and ubiquitous a
presence in your life as a series of gray dawns from which the sun
never breaks free.

I wasn't going to let it happen.

Bootsie and I met at a dance on Spanish Lake in the summer of
'57. It was the summer that Hurricane Audrey killed over five hundred
people in Louisiana, but I'll always remember the season for the
twilight softness of its evenings, the fish fries on Bayou Teche and
crab boils out on Cypremort Point, the purple and pink magic of each
sunrise, the four-o'clocks that Bootsie would string in her hair like
drops of blood, and the rainy afternoon we lost our virginity together
on the cushions in my father's boathouse while the sun's refraction off
the water spangled our bodies with brown light.

It was the summer that Jimmy Clanton's 'Just a Dream' played
on every jukebox in southern Louisiana. I believed that death happened
only to other people, and that the season would never end. But it did,
and by my own hand. Even at age nineteen I had learned how to turn
whiskey into a weapon that could undo everything good in my life.

'What're you thinking about, bubba?' Bootsie said behind me.

'Oh, just one thing and another.' I stopped cleaning the
spinning reel that I had taken apart on top of the picnic table. The
air was wet and close, the willows dripping with water along the coulee.

'I called you twice through the window and you didn't hear me.'

'Sorry. What's up?'

'Nothing much. What's up with you?'

I turned around and looked at her. She wore a pair of white
shorts and a T-shirt that was too small for her, which exposed her
navel and her tapered, brown stomach.

'Isn't anything up with you?' she asked, and rested one knee
on the bench, her arms on my shoulders, and leaned her weight into my
back.

'What are you doing?' I said.

'Ummm,' she answered, and her hand moved down my chest.

I reached behind me and held the backs of her thighs and
arched my neck and head between her breasts. She widened her legs and
drew me tightly against her.

'Let's go inside,' she said, her voice husky and close to my
ear.

'Alafair'll be home in a half hour.'

'A half hour will do just fine,' she said.

She drew the curtains in the bedroom, undressed completely,
and pulled back the bedspread. Her skin was flushed and hot when I
touched her.

'Are you okay, Boots?'

She pressed me down on the pillows and got on top of me, then
cupped my sex with both hands and put it inside her. Her mouth opened
silently, then her eyes became veiled and unfocused and she propped
herself on her arms above me and adjusted her weight so that I was deep
inside her, lost now in a place where breath and the heart's blood and
the thin sheen of sweat on our bodies all became one. The only sound I
could hear was a moist
click
in her throat when
she swallowed, and the wind arching a thick, rain-slick oak limb
against the window.