DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (12 page)

     
"Right up the
road at the little grocery store. The guy's sitting out in my car. But he
doesn't like to go where he's not invited, know what I'm saying, Dave? You want
Mingo? Anytime I got to run down a skip, all I got to do is talk to the guy in
my car. In this case, he feels a personal responsibility. Plus, y'all go back,
right?"

     
"Clete, you
didn't bring Jerry Joe Plumb here?" I said.

H
e was notorious by the time he was expelled from high school his
senior year—a kid who'd grin just before he hit you, a bouree player who won
high stakes from grown men at the saloon downtown, the best dancer in three
parishes, the hustler who cast aluminum replicas of brass knuckles in the metal
shop foundry and sold them for one dollar apiece with the ragged edges unbuffed
so they could stencil daisy chains of red flowers on an adversary's face.

     
But all that happened
after Jerry Joe's mother died his sophomore year. My memory was of a different
boy, from a different, earlier time.

     
In elementary school
we heard his father had been killed at Wake Island, but no one was really sure.
Jerry Joe was one of those boys who came to town and left, entered and withdrew
from school as his
mother found work wherever she could. They
used to live in a shack on the edge of a brickyard in Lafayette, then for
several years in a trailer behind a welding shop south of New Iberia. On
Sundays and the first Fridays of the month we would see him and his mother
walking long distances to church, in both freezing weather and on
one-hundred-degree afternoons. She was a pale woman, with a pinched and fearful
light in her face, and she made him walk on the inside, as though the passing
traffic were about to bolt across the curb and kill them both.

     
For a time his mother
and mine worked together in a laundry, and Jerry Joe would come home from
school with me and play until my mother and his came down the dirt road in my
father's lopsided pickup. We owned a hand-crank phonograph, and Jerry Joe would
root in a dusty pile of 78's and pull out the old scratched recordings of the
Hackberry Ramblers and Iry LeJeune and listen to them over and over again,
dancing with himself, smiling elfishly, his shoulders and arms cocked like a
miniature prizefighter's.

     
One day after New
Year's my father came back unexpectedly from offshore, where he worked as a
derrick man, up on the monkey board, high above the drilling platform and the
long roll of the Gulf. He'd been fired after arguing with the driller, and as
he always did when he lost his job, he'd spent his drag-up check on presents
for us and whiskey at Provost's Bar, as though new opportunity and prosperity
were just around the corner.

     
But Jerry Joe had
never seen my father before and wasn't ready for him. My father stood
silhouetted in the doorway, huge, grinning, irreverent, a man who fought in
bars for fun, the black hair on his chest bursting out of the two flannel
shirts he wore.

     
"You dance
pretty good. But you too skinny, you. We gone have to fatten you up. Y'all come
see what I brung," he said.

     
At the kitchen table,
he began unloading a canvas drawstring bag that was filled with smoked ducks,
pickled okra and green tomatoes, a fruit cake, strawberry preserves, a jar of
cracklings, and bottle after long-necked bottle of Jax beer.

     
"Your mama work
at that laundry, too? . . . Then that's why you ain't eating right. You tell
your mama like I tell his, the man own that place so tight he squeak when he
walk," my father said. "Don't be
looking at me like
that, Davie. That man don't hire white people lessen he can treat them just
like he do his colored."

     
Jerry Joe went back
in the living room and sat in a stuffed chair by himself for a long time. The
pecan trees by the house clattered with ice in the failing light. Then he came
back in the kitchen and told us he was sick. My father put a jar of preserves
and two smoked ducks in a paper bag for him and stuck it under his arm and we
drove him home in the dark.

     
That night I couldn't
find the hand crank to the phonograph, but I thought Jerry Joe had simply
misplaced it. The next day I had an early lesson about the nature of buried
anger and hurt pride in a child who had no one in whom he could confide. When
the school bus stopped on the rock road where Jerry Joe lived, I saw a torn
paper bag by the ditch, the dog-chewed remains of the smoked ducks, the
strawberry preserves congealed on the edges of the shattered Mason jar.

     
He never asked to
come to our house again, and whenever I saw him he always conveyed the feeling
I had stolen something valuable from him rather than he from us.

C
lete parked his dinged, chartreuse Cadillac convertible by the
boat ramp and walked down the dock with Jerry Joe toward the bait shop. Jerry
Joe was ebullient, enthused by the morning and the personal control he brought
to it. His taut body looked made of whipcord, his hair thick and blond and
wavy, combed in faint ducktails in back. He wore oxblood tasseled loafers,
beige slacks, a loose-fitting navy blue sports shirt with silver thread in it.
I said he walked down the dock. That's not true. Jerry Joe rolled, a Panama hat
spinning on his finger, his thighs flexing against his slacks, change and keys
ringing in his pockets, the muscles in his shoulders as pronounced as oiled
rope.

     
"Comment la
vie,
Dave? You still sell those ham-and-egg sandwiches?" he said, and
went through the screen door without waiting for an answer.

     
"Why'd you do
this, Clete?" I said.

     
"There're worst
guys in the life," he replied.

     
"Which
ones?"

     
Jerry Joe bought a
can of beer and a paper plate of sliced white boudin at the counter and sat at
a table in back.

     
"You're sure
full of sunshine, Dave," he said.

     
"I'm off the
clock. If this is about Mingo, you should take it to the office," I said.

     
He studied me. At the
corner of his right eye was a coiled white scar. He speared a piece of boudin
with a toothpick and put it in his mouth.

     
"I'm bad for
business here, I'm some kind of offensive presence?" he asked.

     
"We're way down
different roads, Jerry Joe."

     
"Pull my jacket.
Five busts, two convictions, both for operating illegal gambling equipment.
This in a state that allows cock fighting . . . You got a jukebox here?"

     
"No."

     
"I heard about
the drowned black girl. Mingo's dirty on this?"

     
"That's the name
on the warrant."

     
"He says his car
got boosted."

     
"We've got two
witnesses who can put him together with the car and the girl."

     
"They gotta
stand up, though. Right?" he asked.

     
"Nobody had
better give them reason not to."

     
He pushed his plate
away with the heel of his hand, leaned forward on his elbows, rolling the
toothpick across his teeth. Under the bronze hair of his right forearm was a
tattoo of a red parachute and the words
101st Airborne.

     
"I hire guys
like Mingo to avoid trouble, not to have it. But to give up one of my own
people, even though maybe he's a piece of shit, I got to have . . . what's the
term for it. . . compelling reasons, yeah, that's it," he said.

     
"How does aiding
and abetting sound, or conspiracy after the fact?"

     
He scratched his face
and glanced around the bait shop. His eyes crinkled at the corners. "You
like my tattoo? Same outfit as Jimi Hendrix," he said.

     
I pushed a napkin and
a pencil stub toward him. "Write down an address, Jerry Joe. NOPD will
pick him up. You won't be connected with it."

     
"Why don't you
get a jukebox? I'll have one of my vendors come
by and put one in.
You don't need no red quarters. You keep a hundred percent," he said.
"Hey, Dave, it's all gonna work out. It's a new day. I guarantee it. Don't
get tied up with this Aaron Crown stuff."

     
"What?"

     
But he drank his
beer, winked at me as he fitted on his Panama hat, then walked out to the
Cadillac to wait for Clete.

M
onday morning,
when
I
went into work,
I walked past Karyn LaRose's
blue Mazda convertible in the parking lot. She sat behind the wheel, in dark
glasses with a white scarf tied around her hair. When I glanced in her
direction, she picked up a magazine from the seat and began reading it, a pout
on her mouth.

     
"There's a guy
talks like a college professor waiting to see you, Dave," Wally, the
dispatcher, said. His great weight caused a perpetual flush in his neck and
cheeks, as though he had just labored up a flight of stairs, and whenever he
laughed, usually at his own jokes, his breath wheezed deep in his chest.

     
I looked through the
doorway of the waiting room, then pointed my finger at the back of a
white-haired man.

     
"That gentleman
there?" I asked Wally.

     
"Let's see, we
got two winos out there, a bondsman, a woman says UFOs is sending electrical
signals through her hair curlers, the black guy cleans the Johns, and the
professor. Let me know which one you t'ink, Dave." His face beamed at his
own humor.

     
Clay Mason, wearing a
brown narrow-cut western coat with gold and green brocade on it, a snap-button
turquoise shirt, striped vaquero pants, and yellow cowboy boots on his tiny
feet, sat in
a folding chair with a high-domed pearl
Stetson on his crossed knee.

     
I was prepared to
dislike him, to dismiss him as the Pied Piper of hallucinogens, an
irresponsible anachronism who refused to die with the 1960s. But I was to learn
that psychedelic harlequins don't survive by just being psychedelic harlequins.

     
"Could I help
you, sir?" I asked.

 
    
"Yes, thank you. I just need a few minutes," he
said, turning to look up at me, his thought processes broken. He started to
rise, then faltered. I placed my hand under his elbow and was struck by his fragility,
the lightness of his bones.

     
A moment later I
closed my office door behind us. His hair was as fine as white cornsilk, his
lined mouth and purple lips like those of an old woman. When he sat down in
front of my desk his attention seemed to become preoccupied with two black
trusties mowing the lawn.

     
"Yes, sir?"
I said.

     
"I've interposed
myself in your situation. I hope you won't take offense," he said.

     
"Are we talking
about the LaRoses?" I tried to smile when I said it.

     
"She's contrite
about her behavior, even though I think she needs her rear end paddled. In lieu
of that, however, I'm passing on an apology for her." The accent was soft,
deep in the throat, west Texas perhaps. Then I remembered the biographical
sketches, the pioneer family background, the inherited oil fortune, the
academic scandals that he carried with him like tattered black flags.

     
"Karyn lied, Dr.
Mason. With forethought and malicious intent. You don't get absolution by
sending a surrogate to confession."

     
"That's damn
well put. Will you walk with me into the parking lot?"

     
"No."

     
"Your feelings
are your feelings, sir. I wouldn't intrude upon them." His gaze went out
the window. He flipped the back of his hand at the air. "It never really
changes, does it?"

     
"Sir?"

     
"The black men
in prison clothes. Still working off their indenture to the white race."

     
"One of those
guys molested his niece. The other one cut his wife's face with a string
knife."

     
"Then they're a
rough pair and probably got what's coming to
them," he said,
and rose from his chair by holding on to the edge of my desk.