DR07 - Dixie City Jam (21 page)

His house servant came out the back door with a huge,
rope-handled wood tray between his hands and began setting
silver-topped containers of scrambled eggs, grits, sausage links,
bacon, and peeled oranges and grapefruit in front of us. The servant
was the same enormous man I had seen on my earlier visit. His Indian
face was as expressionless and flat as a cake pan, his brown,
skillet-sized hands veined with scar tissue like tiny bits of white
string.

'You're staring, Mr. Robicheaux,' Charlotte said.

'Excuse me?'

'At Manuel. It's rude to stare at people,' she said.

'He didn't mean anything,' Tommy said. 'Dave's a gentleman.
He's got a college degree. In English literature, right, Dave? We're
talking fucking class guy here.'

He winked at me as he spread his napkin.

The house servant named Manuel brushed against me when he
poured my coffee. I could smell chemical fertilizer and garden dirt in
his clothes. He never spoke, but after he went back inside the house, I
saw his face look back at me from a kitchen window.

'Dig this,' Tommy said. 'Manny looks like he just got up out
of a grave in
Night of the Living Dead
, but
actually he's a fruit. He's gonna be in a music video called 'She's a
Swinging Stud.' Hey, y'all quit looking at me like that. You think I
could make up something like that? They show these kinds of videos in
those homo joints on Dauphine.'

'Your mother was in the American-German Bund, Tommy,' I said.

'What?' His face looked as though ice water had been poured on
it.

'I guess it's common knowledge in the Channel. That's why you
know what's in that sub, isn't it, partner?' I smiled at him.

'You're sitting at my breakfast table…' He cleared
his throat and tried to regain his words. 'Right here at my table, at
my own house, you're making insults about my mother?'

'That's not my intention.'

'Then clean the fucking mashed potatoes out of your mouth.'

The woman named Charlotte put her hand in his lap.

'It's one way or the other, Tommy,' I said.

'What is?'

'You either know something about the sub through your mother,
or you've got a serious personal problem with Hippo Bimstine that
you're not talking about.'

His tangled, white eyebrows were damp with perspiration
against his red face. I saw the woman named Charlotte biting her lip,
kneading her hand in his lap.

'What problem you talking about?' he said.

'You want it right down the pipe?'

'Yeah, I do.' But his face looked like stretched rubber, like
that of a man about to receive a spear through the breastbone.

'He says you killed his little brother.'

His breath went in and out of his mouth. His eyes looked
unfocused, impaired, as though he had been staring at a welder's
electric arc. He pinched his nose and breathed hard through his
nostrils, rolled his head on his neck.

But it was the woman who spoke.

'You filthy bastard,' she said.

'You want a free shot, Tommy?' I said.

'If I want to take a shot, you won't know what hit you,' he
said. But his voice was suddenly hoarse and somehow separate from
himself.

'Maybe it was a rough thing to say. But Will Buchalter is
doing a number on my wife,' I said. 'It has to stop, Tommy. You
understand what I'm saying to you? When you create a free-fire zone, it
works both ways. We're not operating on the old rules here.'

'Where you get off talking free-fire zone? I had a Chinese
bayonet unzip my insides when you were still fucking your fist.'

'You want one of my Purple Hearts?'

'You're a sonofabitch, Robicheaux,' he said.

'You don't make a convincing victim, Tommy.'

'We were all kids. It was an accident. What's the matter with
you, what kind of guy you think I am? Why you doing this?'

'Are you going to help me out?'

'Get off my property.'

'All right,' I said, and stood up to go. Then I saw Zoot
Bergeron jogging up the drive in black gym shorts, a red bandanna tied
around his forehead. I looked down at Tommy Lonighan.

'I've got a deal for you,' I said. 'You put Buchalter in my
custody, you'll probably never see me again. But if he comes back
around my house, I'm going to punch your ticket.'

'Yeah?' he said, the rims of his nostrils whitening. 'That's
what you're gonna do? You can't bust the right people, you can't
protect your own wife, you need somebody to wipe your ass for you, you
come around making threats, telling me I killed a child, I'm about to
take your fucking head off, Dave, you got that?'

'We'll see who walks out of the smoke, Tommy,' I said, and
walked across the sun-spangled, blue-green lawn toward my truck. I
didn't look back.

Zoot slowed from his jog, his sleek chest rising and falling,
his sweat-soaked gym shorts twisted around his loins.

'What are you doing here, partner?' I asked.

'Mr. Tommy give me a job around his yard, let me work out wit'
him.'

'You're staying here?'

'I did last night.'

'Why?' He didn't answer, and I said it again, 'Why's that,
Zoot?'

'She got a man at the house.' His eyes avoided mine. 'A white
man she goes out wit' sometimes. I come over here and Mr. Tommy let me
stay.'

'I don't want to tell you what to do, Zoot, but I think Tommy
Lonighan is a gangster and a racist prick who you ought to avoid like
anthrax.'

Then, too late, I saw the alarm in Zoot's eyes as they focused
on something behind me.

Tommy Lonighan was moving fast when he hit me between the
shoulder blades and drove me into the side of my truck. Before I could
turn, he had ripped my .45 loose from my belt holster. He clenched it
at an upward angle in front of me, his neck corded with veins, his
nostrils flaring, and pulled back the slide, feeding a hollow-point
round into the chamber. I could hear the gravel crunch under the soles
of his shoes.

'Don't be a dumb guy, Tommy,' I said.

'You think you can punch my buttons, make me ashamed of myself
in front of people?'

'Give me the piece, Tommy.'

'You want it? Then you got it, cocksucker.'

He jammed the butt into my palm, but he didn't let go. He
wrapped both his hands around mine, tightening his fingers until they
were white with bone, and pointed the .45's barrel into his sternum.
His blue eyes were round and threaded with light; his breath stank of
the pieces of meat wedged in his teeth.

'You talk war record, you talk Purple Hearts, you got the
balls for this?' he said.

The hammer was cocked, the safety off, but I was able to keep
my fingers frozen outside the trigger housing.

'Step back, Tommy.'

His breath labored in his chest; there was a knot of color
like a red rose in his throat.

'I didn't kill no kid back there in the Channel,' he said. 'It
was an accident. Everybody knows it but that mockie. He won't let go of
it.'

For just a moment the focus in his eyes seemed to turn inward,
and his words seemed directed almost at himself rather than at me. I
felt the power go out of his grip.

I flipped up the safety on the slide, jerked the .45 loose
from his grasp, and whipped the barrel across his nose. He stood
flat-footed, his fists balled at his sides, his eyes the same color as
the sky, a solitary string of blood dripping from his right nostril. I
started to hit him again.

But his face broke, just like a lamp shade being burned in the
center by a heat source from within. One eye seemed to knot, as though
someone had put a finger in it; his mouth became a crimped, tight line,
downturned at the corners, and the flesh in one cheek suddenly filled
with wrinkles and began to tremble. He turned and walked into his
house, his back straight, his arms dead at his sides, his eyes hidden
from view.

I stared openmouthed after him, my weapon hanging loosely from
my hand like an object of shame.

I had always wanted to believe that I
had brought the violence
in my life with me when I came back from Vietnam. But one of the most
violent moments in my life, or at least the most indefensible, came at
the end of my first marriage and not because I was a police officer or
a war veteran.

My first wife was a beautiful, dark-haired girl from
Martinique who loved thoroughbred horses and racetrack betting as much
as I, but she also developed a love for clubhouse society and men who
didn't daily mortgage their tomorrows with Beam straight up and a Jax
draft on the side.

We were at an afternoon lawn party on Lake Pontchartrain. The
sky was storm-streaked, the water out on the lake slate green and
capping, the sailboats from the yacht club dipping hard in the swells.
I remember standing at the drinks table, next to my wife, while a black
waiter in a white butler's jacket was shaking a silver drink mixer.
Then my wife's current lover, a geologist from Houston, was next to
her, chatting with her, idly stroking the down on her forearm as
though I were not there.

I could hear the palm fronds rattling overhead, a jazz combo
playing on the terrace, the words of my wife and her lover disappearing
like bubbles in the wind. He was an athlete and mountain climber and
had the profile and rugged good looks of a gladiator. Then I remember a
sound like Popsicle sticks breaking and a wave of red-black color
erupting behind my eyes.

When they pulled me off him, he was strangling on his own
tongue.

Later, I pretended that he had deserved it, and that my wife
had deserved to be shamed and humiliated in front of her friends. But I
was deceiving myself, as was my way in those days when I sincerely
believed that I could experience no worse fate in this world than to be
deprived of charcoal-filtered whiskey and the amber radiance with which
it animated and filled my life. I had simply made my wife and her lover
pay for events that had occurred many years earlier.

My father, whose name was Aldous, who was also called Big Al
in the oil field, where he worked as a derrick man up on the monkey
board, was a huge, dark, grinning Cajun with fists the size of
cantaloupes. He loved to fight in bars, sometimes taking on three or
four adversaries at once. Oil field roughnecks would break their hands
on his head; bouncers would splinter chairs across his back; but no one
ever hurt Big Al except my mother, who worked in a laundry with Negro
women to support us while he was in the parish jail.

When he went back to Marsh Island for the muskrat season, a
man named Mack, a bouree dealer from Morgan City who wore a fedora,
zoot slacks, suspenders, French cuffs, and two-tone shoes, began to
come by the house and take her for rides in his Ford coupe.

One day in late fall I came home early from school. There was
no sound in the house. Then I walked past my parents' bedroom door. My
mother was naked, on all fours, pointed toward the head of the bed, and
Mack was about to mount her. He had a thin, white face, oiled black
hair parted in the center, and a pencil mustache. He looked at me with
the momentary interest that he might show a hangnail, then entered my
mother.

I sat on a sawhorse in the barn until it was almost dusk. The
air was raw, and leaves were blowing across the dirt yard. Then Mack
was standing in the barn door, his silhouette etched with the sun's
last red light, a bottle of beer in his left hand. I heard him tilt it
up and drink from it.

'What you t'ink you seen?' he said.

I looked at my shoes.

'I ax you a question. Don't be pretend you ain't heard me,' he
said.

'I didn't see anything.'

'You was where you didn't have no bidness. What we gonna do
'bout that?' He held out his right hand. I thought he was going to
place it on my shoulder. Instead, he put the backs of his fingers under
my nose. 'You smell that? Me and yo' mama been fuckin', boy. It ain't
the first time, neither.'

My eyes were full of water, my face hot and small under his
stare.

'You can tell yo' daddy 'bout this if you want, but you gotta
tell on her, too.' He drank out of the beer bottle again and waited.
'What's you gonna do, you? Sit there and cry?'

'I'm not going to do anything.'

'That's good,' he said. ''Cause you do, I'm gonna be back.'

Then he was gone, out of the red light, and down the dirt lane
to his car. The pecan and oak trees around the house were black-green
and coated with dust; the dry coldness of the air felt like a windburn
against the skin. I hid when my mother called me from the back porch.
Behind the barn, I sat in the weeds and watched our two roosters peck a
blind hen to death. They mounted her with their talons, their wings
aflutter with triumph, and drove their beaks deep into her pinioned
neck. I watched them do it for a long time, until my mother found me
and took me back inside the kitchen and, while she fixed our supper,
told me that Mack had helped her find a good job as a waitress at a
beer garden in Morgan City.

The day after my trouble with Tommy
Lonighan, I received a
phone call from Clete Purcel at my office.

'I hear you pistol-whipped Tommy Bobalouba,' he said.

'Who told you that?'

'A couple of the Caluccis' lowlifes were talking about it in
the Golden Star this morning.'

'Ah, the Caluccis again.'

'That's what I was trying to tell you, mon. They're going
across tribal lines.'

'Who were these two guys?'

'Nickel-and-dime gumballs. Were you trying to sweat Tommy
about that sub?'

'Yeah, but I didn't get anywhere.'

'Dave, maybe there's another way to get Buchalter out of the
woodwork. What if you
can
find that sub again,
you mark it, then you tell
The Times-Picayune
and
every salvage company in town about it?'

'It's a thought.'