DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (25 page)

                                                                                                     
Yours truly,

                                                                                                   
  
Aaron Jefferson Crown

     
"He uses a funny
phrase. He's says he 'ain't to blame' rather than 'innocent,'" I said.

     
"He probably
can't spell the word."

     
"No, I remember,
he always said 'I ain't did it.'"

     
"Forget the
linguistics, Dave. Pay attention to the last sentence. I'm not going to let you
take one for Buford LaRose."

     
"It's not going
to happen."

     
"You've got that
right. I'm going to have a talk with our friend Karyn."

     
"Don't
complicate it, Boots."

     
"She's a big
girl. She can handle it."

     
"When the
sheriff wants me off, he'll pull me off."

     
"Nice Freudian
choice, Streak. Because that's what she's doing— fucking this whole
family."

I
still had a half hour before I had to drive to the Hotel Acadiana
on the Vermilion River, where Buford and Karyn were being hosted by a builders
association. I sat at the picnic table and took apart my 1911 model U.S. Army
.45 automatic that I had bought for twenty-five dollars in Saigon's Bring Cash
Alley. It felt cool and heavy in my hand, and my fingers left delicate prints
in the thin film of oil on the blueing. I ran the bore brush through the
barrel, wiped the breech and the outside of the slide free of the burnt powder
left from my last visit to the practice range, slid each hollow-point round out
of the magazine, oiled the spring, then replaced them one at a time until the
eighth round snugged tight under my thumb.

     
But guns and the
sublimated fantasies that went along with cleaning them were facile
alternatives for thinking through complexities. The main problem with this case
lay in the fact that many of the players were not professional criminals.

     
Sabelle's story was
not an unusual one. In small southern towns, since antebellum times, the haves
and the have-nots may have either despised or feared one another in daylight,
but at night both sexual need and the imperious urge had a way of dissolving
the social differences that were so easily defined in the morning hours.

     
I say it wasn't an
exceptional story. But that doesn't mean it is any less an indicator of the
people we were. I just didn't know if it had a bearing on the case.

     
He had never really
noticed her at New Iberia High. She had been one grade behind him, one of those
girls who wore a homemade tattoo on her hand and clothes from the dry goods
section of the five-and-dime and trailed rumors behind her that were too
outrageous to be believed. She was arrested for shoplifting, then she left
school in the eleventh grade and became a waitress in the drive-in and bowling
alley at the end of East Main. The summer of his graduation he had gone to the
drive-in for beers in his metallic green Ford convertible with three other
ballplayers after an American Legion game. He was unshowered, his face flushed
with victory and the pink magic of the evening, his uniform grass stained, his
spikes clicking on the gravel when he walked to the service window and saw her
wiping the moisture off a long-necked Jax with her cupped hand.

     
She leaned over the
beer box and smiled and looked into his eyes and at the grin at the corner of
his mouth and knew that he would be back later.

     
He drove his friends
home and bathed and changed clothes and sat at one of the plank tables under
the live oaks and drank beer and listened to the music that was piped from the
jukebox into loudspeakers nailed in the tree limbs, until she finally walked
out in the humid glare
of the electric lights at midnight and got
into his car and reached over and blew his horn to say good night to the other
waitresses who stood giggling behind the drive-in's glass window. He took no
notice of her presumption and seemingly proprietary display; he even grinned
good-naturedly. No one else was in the lot except an elderly Negro picking up
trash and stuffing it in a gunny sack.

     
They did it the first
time on a back road by Lake Martin, in the way that she expected him to, on the
backseat, the door open, his pants and belt around his ankles, his body
trembling and awkward with his passion, his jaws already going slack and his
voice a weak and hoarse whisper before he had fully penetrated her.

     
Three nights later he
went by her home, the Montgomery Ward brick house on the coulee, and convinced
her to call in sick at work. This time they drove down the Teche toward
Jeanerette and did it in the caretaker's cottage of a plantation built on the
bayou by West Indies slaves in 1790, which Buford's father had bought not
because of its iron-scrolled verandas or oak-canopied circular drive or wisteria-entwined
gazebos or the minie balls drilled in its window frames by Yankee soldiers but
simply as a transitory real estate investment for which he wrote a check.

     
As the summer passed,
Buford and Sabelle's late-night routine became almost like that of an ordinary
young couple who went steady or who were engaged or whose passion was so
obviously pure in its heat and intensity that the discrepancy in their family
backgrounds seemed irrelevant.

     
In her mind the
summer had become a song that would have no end. She looked at calendar dates
only as they indicated the span of her periods. The inept boy who had trembled
on top of her that first night by Lake Martin, and who had sat ashamed in the
dark later, his pants still unbuttoned over his undershorts while she held his
hand and assured him that it had been a fine moment for her, had gradually
transformed into a confident lover, realizing with the exhalation of her
breath, the touch of her hands in certain places, the motion of her hips, what
gave her the most pleasure, until finally he knew all the right things to do,
without being told, and could make her come before he did and then a second
time with him.

     
His triangular back
was corded with muscle, his buttocks small
and hard under her
palms, his mouth always gentle on her body. From the bed in the caretaker's
cottage she could look down the corridor of oaks that gave onto the Teche, the
limbs and moss and leaves swelling in the wind, and through the dark trunks she
could see the moon catch on the water like a spray of silver coins, and it made
her think of a picture she had once seen in a children's book of biblical
stories.

     
The picture was
titled the
Gates of Eden.
As a child she had thought of it as a place of
exodus and exclusion. Now, as she held Buford between her legs and pressed him
deeper inside, she knew those gates were opening for her.

     
But in August he
began to make excuses. He had to begin early training for the football season,
to be asleep early, to go to Baton Rouge for his physical, to meet with coaches
from Tulane and Ole Miss and the University of Texas who were still trying to
lure him away from L.S.U.

     
On the last Saturday
of the month, a day that he had told her he would be in New Orleans, she saw
his convertible parked outside Slick's Club in St. Martinville, with three
girls in it, sitting up on the sides, drinking vodka collins that a Negro
waiter brought them from inside.

     
She was in her
father's car. One headlight was broken and the passenger window was taped over
with cardboard and the body leaked rust at every seam. She drove around the
block twice, her hands sweating on the wheel, her heart beating, then she
pulled up at an angle to the convertible and got out, her words like broken
Popsicle sticks in her throat.

     
"What?" one
of the girls said.

     
"Where is
Buford? You're with Buford, aren't you? This is his car," Sabelle said.
But her voice was weak, apart from her, outside of her skin, somehow shameful.

     
The girls looked at
one another.

     
"Buford the
Beautiful?" one of them said. The three of them started to laugh, then
looked back at her and fluttered their eyes and blew their cigarette smoke at
upward angles into the warm air.

     
Then a huge,
redheaded crewcut boy, his hair stiff as metal with butch wax, with
whiskey-flushed cheeks, in a gold and purple L.S.U. T-shirt, erupted out the
door of the club with someone behind him.

     
The crewcut boy, who
had been an All-State center at New Iberia High, took one look at Sabelle and turned,
his grin as wide and obscene as a jack-o'-lantern's, and held up his palms to
the person behind him, saying, "Whoa, buddy! Not the time to go outside.
Not unless you want the family jewels on her car aerial."

     
She saw Buford's face
in the neon light, then it was gone.

     
She couldn't remember
driving home that night. She lay in the dark in her bedroom and listened to the
frogs in the woods, to her father getting up to urinate, to her neighbor, a
trash hauler, crushing tin cans in the bed of his truck. She watched an
evangelist preacher on the black-and-white television set in her tiny living
room, then a movie about nuclear war. The movie made use of U.S. Army footage
that showed the effects of radiation burns on living animals that had been left
in pens five hundred yards from an atomic explosion.

     
As she listened to
the bleating of the animals, she wanted everyone in the movie to die. No, that
wasn't it. She believed for the first time she understood something about men
that she had never understood before, and she wanted to see a brilliant white
light ripple across the sky outside her window, burn it away like black
cellophane, yes, a perfect white flame that could superheat the air, eat the
water out of the bayou, and instantly wither a corridor of oaks that in the
moonlight had become biblical gates in a children's book.

     
But her anger and the
relief it gave her melted away to fatigue, and when the dawn finally came it
was gray and wet and the rain ran down inside the walls of the house, and when
she heard the trash hauler's wife yelling at her children next door, then
striking one of them with a belt, viciously, the voice rising with each blow,
Sabelle knew that her future was as linear and as well defined as the nailheads
protruding from the buckled linoleum at her feet.

I
hadn't watched the time. I went to get in my truck and head for
Lafayette, but Bootsie's Toyota was parked behind me. I heard her open
Alafair's bedroom window behind me.

     
"Take my
car," she said. "I can use the truck."

     
"See you in
Lafayette," I said.

     
"What's your
room number?"

     
"I don't know.
Ask at the desk."

     
I backed out into the
dirt road and looked once again at my truck parked in the opening of the old
barn that we used as a garage. I almost went back and got it, but it had been
running fine since I had gotten it out of the shop.

     
And I was running
late.

     
What a bitter
line to remember.

CHAPTER
 
17

Y
ears ago Pinhook
Road in Lafayette
had been a
tree-lined two-lane road that led out of town over the Vermilion River into
miles of sugarcane acreage. Just before the steel drawbridge that spanned the
river was an antebellum home with arbors of pecan trees in the yard. The river
was yellow and high in the spring, and the banks were green and heavily wooded.
Feral hogs foraged among the trees. The only businesses along the river were a
drive-in restaurant called the Skunk, where college and high school kids hung
out, and the American Legion Club on the far side of the bridge, where you
could eat blue-point crabs and drink pitcher beer on a screened porch that hung
on stilts above the water.

     
But progress and the
developers had their way. The oaks were sawed down, the root systems ground
into pulp by road graders, the banks of the river covered with cement for
parking lots. Overlooking all this new urban environment was the Hotel
Acadiana, where builders and developers and union officials from all over the
state had come to pay a three-hundred-dollar-a-plate homage to their new
governor.