DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (8 page)

     
"I don't have
that kind of juice."

     
"I want out of
lockdown."

     
"Main pop may
not be a good place for you, Mingo."

     
"You live on
Mars? I'm safe in main pop. I got problems when I'm in lockdown and cops with
blood on their shoes think I'm gonna rat 'em out."

     
"You're a
material witness. There's no way you're going into the main population,
Mingo."

     
The skin along his
hairline was shiny with perspiration. He screwed a cigarette into his mouth but
didn't light it. His blue eyes were filled with light when they stared into
mine.

     
"You worked with
those guys. You get word to them, I didn't see anything happen to the boon.
I'll go down on a perjury beef if I have to," he said.

     
I let my eyes wander
over his face. There were tiny black specks in the blueness of his eyes, like
pieces of dead flies, like microscopic
traces of events
that never quite rinse out of the soul. "How many people have you pushed
the button on?" I asked.

     
"What? Why you
ask a question like that?"

     
"No reason,
really."

     
He tried to
reconcentrate his thoughts. "A Mexican guy was at your place, right? A guy
with fried mush. It wasn't an accident he was there."

     
"Go on."

     
"He was muleing
tar for the projects. They call him Arana, that means 'Spider' in Spanish. He's
from a village in Mexico that's got a church with a famous statue in it. I know
that because he was always talking about it."

     
"That sure
narrows it down. Who sent him to my bait shop?"

     
"What do I
get?"

     
"We can talk
about federal custody."

     
"That's worse.
People start thinking Witness Protection Program."

     
"That's all I've
got."

     
He tore a match from
a book and struck it, held the flame to his cigarette, never blinking in the smoke
and heat that rose into his handsome face.

     
"There's stuff
going on that's new, that's a big move for certain people. You stumbled into it
with that peckerwood, the one who killed Jimmy Ray Dixon's brother."

     
"What
stuff?"

     
He tipped his ashes
in a small tin tray, his gaze focused on nothing. His cheeks were pooled with
color, the fingers of his right hand laced with smoke from the cigarette.

     
"I don't think
you've got a lot to trade, Mingo. Otherwise, you would have already done it."

     
"I laid it out
for you. You don't want to pick up on it..." He worked the burning end of
the cigarette loose in the ashtray and placed the unsmoked stub in the package.
"You asked me a personal question a minute ago. Just for fun, it don't
mean anything, understand, I'll give you a number. Eleven. None of them ever
saw it coming. The guy with the fried head at your place probably wasn't a
serious effort.

     
"I say
'probably.' I'm half-Jewish, half-Irish, I don't eat in Italian restaurants.
I'm outside the window looking in a lot of the time. Hey, you're a bright guy,
I know you can connect on this."

     
"Enjoy it,
Mingo," I said, and hit on the door with the flat of my fist for the
turnkey to open up.

L
ater that same day, just before I was to sign out of the office,
the phone on my desk rang.

     
It was like hearing
the voice of a person who you knew would not go away, who would always be
hovering around you like a bad memory, waiting to pull you back into the past.

     
"How's life,
Karyn?" I said.

     
"Buford will be
in Baton Rouge till late tonight. You and I need to talk some things out."

     
"I don't think
so."

     
"You want me to
come to your office? Or out to your house? I will, if that's what it
takes."

     
I left the office and
drove south of New Iberia toward my home. I tried to concentrate on the
traffic, the red sky in the west, the egrets perched on the backs of cattle in
the fields, the cane wagons being towed to the sugar mill. I wasn't going to
give power to Karyn LaRose, I told myself. I owed her nothing. I was sure of
that.

     
I was still trying to
convince myself of my freedom from the past when I made an illegal U-turn in
the middle of the road and drove to the LaRose plantation.

S
he wore a yellow sundress, with her platinum hair braided up on
her head, a Victorian sapphire broach on a gold chain around her neck.

     
"Why'd you park
in back?" she said when she opened the door.

     
"I didn't give
it much thought," I said.

     
"I bet."

     
"Let's hear what
you have to say, Karyn. I need to get home."

     
She smiled with her
eyes, turned and walked away without speaking. When I didn't immediately
follow, she paused and looked back at me expectantly. I followed her through
the kitchen, a den filled with books and glass gun cases and soft leather
chairs, down a darkened cypress-floored hallway hung with oil paintings of
Buford's ancestors, into a sitting room whose windows and French doors reached
to the ceiling.

     
She pulled the velvet
curtains on the front windows.

     
"It's a little
dark, isn't it?" I said. I stood by the mantel, next to a
bright window that gave onto a cleared cane field and a stricken
oak tree that stood against the sky like a clutch of broken fingers.

     
"There's a
horrid glare off the road this time of day," she said. She put ice and
soda in two glasses at a small bar inset in one wall and uncorked a bottle of
Scotch with a thick, red wax seal embossed on it.

     
"I don't care
for anything, thanks," I said.

     
"There's no whiskey
in yours."

     
"I said I don't
want anything."

     
The phone rang in
another room.

     
"Goddamn
it," she said, set down her glass, and went into a bedroom.

     
I looked at my watch.
I had already been there ten minutes and had accomplished nothing. On the
mantel piece was a photograph of a U.S. Army Air Corps aviator who was sitting
inside the splintered Plexiglas nose of a Flying Fortress. The photo must have
been taken at high altitude, because the fur collar on his jacket was frozen
with his sweat, like a huge glass necklace. His face was exhausted, and except
for the area around his eyes where his goggles had been, his skin was black
with the smoke of
ack-ack
bursts.

     
I could hear Karyn's
voice rising in the next room: "I won't sit still for this again. You rent
a car if you have to . . . I'm not listening to that same lie . . . You're not
going to ruin this, Buford . . . You listen . . . No . . . No . . . No, you
listen . . ."

     
Then she pushed the
door shut.

     
When she came out of
the room her eyes were electric with anger, the tops of her breasts rising
against her sundress. She went to the bar and drank off her Scotch and soda and
poured another one. I looked away from her face.

     
"Admiring the
photo of Buford's father?" she said. "He was one of the bombardiers
who incinerated Dresden. You see the dead oak tree out by the field? Some of
Buford's other family members, gentlemen in the Knights of the White Camellia,
hanged a Negro and a white carpetbagger there in 1867. If you live with Buford,
you get to hear about this sort of thing every day of your life."

     
She drank three
fingers of Scotch on ice, her throat swallowing methodically, her mouth wet and
cold-looking on the edge of the glass.

     
"I'd better get
going, Karyn. I shouldn't have bothered you," I said.

     
"Don't be
disingenuous. I brought you here, Dave. Sometimes I wonder how I ever got mixed
up with you."

     
"You're not
mixed up with me."

     
"Your memory is
selective."

     
"I'm sorry it
happened, Karyn. I've tried to indicate that to you. It's you and your husband
who keep trying to resurrect the past or bring me into your lives."

     
"You say 'it.'
What do you mean by 'it'?"

     
"That night by
the bayou. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say."

     
"You don't
remember coming to my house two weeks later?"

     
"No."

     
"Dave?" Her
eyes clouded, then looked into mine, as though she were searching for a lie.
"You have no memory of that afternoon, or the next?"

     
I felt myself swallow.
"No, I don't. I don't think I saw you again for a year," I said.

     
She shook her head,
sat in a deep leather chair that looked out onto the dead tree.

     
"That's hard to
believe. I never blamed you for the worry and anxiety and pain I had to go
through later, because I didn't make you take precautions. But when you tell
me—"

     
Unconsciously I
touched my brow.

     
"I had blackouts
back then, Karyn. I lost whole days. If you say something happened, then—"

     
"Blackouts?"

     
"I'd get loaded
at night on Beam and try to sober up in the morning with vodka."

     
"How lovely.
What if I told you I had an abortion?"

     
The skin of my face
flexed against the bone. I could feel a weakness, a sinking in my chest, as
though weevil worms were feeding at my heart.

     
"I didn't. I was
just late. But no thanks to you, you bastard . . . Don't just look at me,"
she said.

     
"I'm going
now."

     
"Oh no, you're
not." She rose from the chair and stood in front of me. "My husband
has some peculiar flaws, but he's still the best chance this state has and I'm
not letting you destroy it."

     
"Somebody tried
to open me up with a machete. I think it had to do with Aaron Crown. I think I
don't want to ever see you again, Karyn."

     
"Is that right?"
she said. The tops of her breasts were swollen and hard, veined with blue
lines. I could smell whiskey on her breath, perfume from behind her ears, the
heat she seemed to excrete from her sun-browned skin. She struck me full across
the face with the flat of her hand.

     
I touched my cheek,
felt a smear of blood where her fingernail had torn the skin.

     
"I apologize
again for having come to your home," I said.

     
I walked stiffly
through the house, through the kitchen to the backyard and my parked pickup
truck. When I turned the ignition, I looked through the windshield and saw her
watching me through the back screen, biting the corner of her lip as though her
next option was just now presenting itself.

I
t rained all that
night.
At false dawn a white
ground fog rolled out of the swamp, and the cypress trees on the far bank of
the bayou looked as black and hard as carved stone. Deep inside the fog you
could hear bass flopping back in the bays. When the sun broke above the horizon,
like a red diamond splintering apart between the tree trunks, Batist and I were
still bailing out the rental boats with coffee cans. Then we heard a car on the
road, and when we looked up we saw a purple Lincoln Continental, with Sabelle
Crown in the passenger's seat, stop and back up by our concrete boat ramp.

     
It wasn't hard to
figure out which American industry the driver served. He seemed to consciously
dress and look the part—elk hide halftop boots, pleated khakis, a baggy cotton
shirt that was probably tailored on Rodeo Drive, tinted rimless glasses, his
brown hair tied in a pony tail.