DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (17 page)

     
"I never broke
no rules. It feels funny," he said.

     
"Who's setting
it up, Mingo?"

 
    
"How many guys could I put inside?
You figure it out."

     
"You ever hear
of a
bugarron?"
I asked.

     
"No . . . Don't
ask me about crazy stuff I don't know anything about. I'm not up for it."
His shoulders were rounded, his chest caved-in. "You've read a lot,
haven't you, I mean books in college, stuff like that?"

     
"Some."

     
"I read
something once, in the public library, up on St. Charles. It said . . . in your
life you end up back where you started, maybe way back when you were little. The
difference is you understand it the second time around. But it don't do you no
good."

     
"Yes?"

     
"That never made
sense to me before."

T
hat night a guard escorted Mingo Bloomberg down to the shower in
his flipflops and skivvies. The guard ate a sandwich and read a magazine on a
wood bench outside the shower wall. The steam billowed out on the concrete,
then the sound of the water became steady and uninterrupted on the shower
floor. The guard put down his magazine and peered around the opening in the
wall. He looked at Mingo's face and the rivulets of water running down it,
dropped the sandwich, and ran back down the corridor to get the count man from
the cage.

I
T
was sunrise when
I
turned into
Buford LaRose's house
the next morning. I saw him at the back of his property, inside a widely spaced
stand of pine trees, a gray English riding cap on his head, walking with a
hackamore in his hand toward a dozen horses that were bolting and turning in
the trees. The temperature had dropped during the night, and their backs
steamed like smoke in the early light. I drove my truck along the edge of a
cleared cane field and climbed through the railed fence and walked across the
pine needles into the shade that smelled of churned sod and fresh horse
droppings.

     
I didn't wait for him
to greet me. I took a photograph from my shirt pocket and showed it to him.

     
"You recognize
this man?" I asked.

     
"No. Who is he,
a convict?"

     
"Mingo
Bloomberg. He told me he delivered money to your house for Jerry Joe
Plumb."

     
"Sorry. I don't
know him."

     
I took a second
photograph from my pocket, a Polaroid, and held it out in my palm.

     
"That was taken
last night," I said. "We had him in lockup for his own protection.
But he hanged himself with a towel in the shower."

     
"You really know
how to get a jump start on the day, Dave. Look,
Jerry Joe's
connected to a number of labor unions. If I refuse his contribution, maybe I
lose several thousand union votes in Jefferson and Orleans parishes."

     
"It sure sounds
innocent enough."

     
"I'm sorry it
doesn't fit into your moral perspective . . . Don't go yet. I want to show you
something."

     
He walked deeper into
the trees. Even though there had been frost on the cane stubble that morning,
he wore only a T-shirt with his khakis and half-topped boots and riding cap.
His triceps looked thick and hard and were ridged with flaking skin from his
early fall redfish-ing trips out on West Cote Blanche Bay. He turned and waited
for me.

 
    
"Come on, Dave. You made a point of
bringing your photographic horror show to my house. You can give me five more
minutes of your time," he said.

     
The land sloped down
through persimmon trees and palmettos and a dry coulee bed that was choked with
leaves. I could hear the horses nickering behind us, their hooves thudding on
the sod. Ahead, I could see the sunlight on the bayou and the silhouette of a
black marble crypt surrounded by headstones and a carpet of mushrooms and a
broken iron fence. The headstones were green with moss, the chiseled French
inscriptions worn into faint tracings.

     
Buford pushed open
the iron gate and waited for me to step inside.

     
"My
great-grandparents are in that crypt," he said. He rubbed his hand along
the smooth stone, let it stop at a circular pinkish white inlay that was
cracked across the center. "Can you recognize the flower? My
great-grandfather and both his brothers rode with the Knights of the White
Camellia."

     
"Your wife told
me."

     
"They weren't
ashamed of it. They were fine men, even though some of the things they did were
wrong."

     
"What's the
point?"

     
"I believe it's
never too late to atone. I believe we can correct the past, make it right in
some way."

     
"You're going to
do this for the Knights of the White Camellia?"

     
"I'm doing it
for my family. Is there something wrong with that?" he said. He continued
to look at my face. The water was low and slow moving in the bayou and wood
ducks were swimming along the edge of the dead hyacinths. "Dave?"

     
"I'd better be
going," I said.

     
He touched the front
of my windbreaker with his fingers. But I said nothing.

     
"I was speaking
to you about a subject that's very personal with me. You presume a great
deal," he said. I looked away from the bead of light in his eyes.
"Are you hard of hearing?" He touched my chest again, this time
harder.

     
"Don't do
that," I said.

     
"Then answer
me."

     
"I don't think
they were fine men."

     
"Sir?"

     
"Shakespeare
says it in
King Lear.
The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. They
terrorized and murdered people of color. Cut the bullshit, Buford."

     
I walked out the gate
and back through the trees. I heard his feet in the leaves behind me. He
grabbed my arm and spun me around.

     
"That's the last
time you'll turn your back on me, sir," he said.

     
"Go to
hell."

     
His hands closed and
opened at his sides, as though they were kneading invisible rubber balls. His
forearms looked swollen, webbed with veins.

     
"You fucked my
wife and dumped her. You accuse me of persecuting an innocent man. You insult
my family. I don't know why I ever let a piece of shit like you on my property.
But it won't happen again. I guarantee you that, Dave."

     
He was breathing
hard. A thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, had come into his eyes,
stayed a moment, then left. He slipped his hands stiffly into his back pockets.

     
The skin of my face
felt tight, suddenly cold in the wind off the bayou. I could feel a dryness, a constriction
in my throat, like a stick turned sideways. I tried to swallow, to reach for an
adequate response. The leaves and desiccated twigs under my feet crunched like
tiny pieces of glass.

     
"You catch me
off the clock and repeat what you just said . . . ," I began.

     
"You're a
violent, predictable man, the perfect advocate for Aaron Crown," he said,
and walked through the pines toward the house. He flung the hackamore into a
tree trunk.

T
hat night I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling, then sat on
the side of the bed, my thoughts like spiders crawling out of a paper bag I
didn't know how to get rid of. A thick, low fog covered the swamp, and under
the moon the dead cypress protruded like rotted pilings out of a white ocean.

     
"What is
it?" Bootsie said.

     
"Buford
LaRose."

     
"This
morning?"

     
"I want to tear
him up. I don't think I've ever felt like that toward anyone."

     
"You've got to
let it go, Dave."

     
I rubbed my palms on
my knees and let out my breath.

     
"Why does he
bother you so much?" she asked.

     
"Because you
never let another man talk to you like that."

     
"People have
said worst to you." She lay her hand on my arm. "Put the covers over
you. It's cold."

     
"I'm going to
fix something to eat."

     
"Is it because
of his background?"

     
"I don't
know."

     
She was quiet for a
long time.

     
"Say it,
Boots."

     
"Or is it
Karyn?" she asked.

     
I went into the
kitchen by myself, poured a glass of milk, and stared out the window at my
neighbor's pasture, where one of his mares was running full-out along the fence
line, her breath blowing, her muscles working rhythmically, as though she were
building a secret pleasure inside herself that was about to climax and burst.

T
he next morning I parked my truck on Decatur Street, on the edge
of the French Quarter, and walked through Jackson Square, past St. Louis
Cathedral, and on up St. Ann to the tan stucco building with the arched
entrance and brick courtyard where Clete Purcel kept his office. It had rained
before dawn, and the air was cool and bright, and bougainvillea hung through
the grill work on the balcony upstairs. I looked through his window and saw him
reading from a manila folder on top of his desk, his shirt stretched tight across
his back, his glasses as small as bifocals on his big face.

     
I opened the door and
stuck my head inside.

     
"You still
mad?" I said.

     
"Hey, what's
goin' on, big mon?"

     
"I'll buy you a
beignet," I said.

     
He thought about it,
made a rolling, popping motion with his fingers and hands, then followed me
outside.

     
"Just don't talk
to me about Aaron Crown and Buford LaRose," he said.

     
"I won't."

     
"What are you
doing in New Orleans?"

     
"I need to check
out Jimmy Ray Dixon again. His office says he's at his pool hall out by the
Desire."

     
He tilted his porkpie
hat on his head, squinted at the sun above the rooftops.

     
"Did you ever
spit on baseballs when you pitched American Legion?" he said.

     
We had beignets and
coffee with hot milk at an outdoor table in the Cafe du Monde. Across the
street, sidewalk artists were painting on easels by the iron fence that
bordered the park, and you could hear boat horns out on the river, just the
other side of the levee. I told him about Mingo Bloomberg's death.

     
"It doesn't
surprise me. I think it's what they all look for," he said.

     
"What?"

     
"The Big Exit.
If they can't get somebody to do it for them, they do it themselves. Most of
them would have been better off if their mothers had thrown them away and
raised the afterbirth."

     
"You want to
take a ride?"

     
"That
neighborhood's a free-fire zone, Streak. Let Jimmy Ray slide. He's a walking ad
for enlistment in the Klan."

     
"See you later,
then."

     
"Oh, your
ass," he said, and caught up with me on the sidewalk, pulling on his
sports coat, a powdered beignet in his mouth.

     
The pool room was six
blocks from the Desire welfare project. The windows were barred, the walls
built of cinder blocks and scrolled with spray-painted graffiti. I parked by
the curb and stepped up on the sidewalk, unconsciously looked up and down the
street.