DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (20 page)

     
"How's he
doing?" Jude said.

     
"He's a
worker," I said.

     
"That's
good." He looked over at the black family's shack. A little girl was
playing with a doll on the gallery. "Y'all been working straight
through?"

     
"Yes, sir,
haven't missed a beat," I said.

     
"I don't want
him playing with anybody back here."

     
I tried to keep my
focus on Buford and the sled at the end of the row, let the words pass, like it
wasn't really important I hear them.

     
"You understand
what I'm saying?" Jude said.

     
"Yes, sir.
You're pretty clear."

     
"You bothered by
what I'm telling you?"

     
"That's the
little girl who works with her mom at the cafe, ain't it?"

     
"Don't look at
something else when you talk to me, Jerry Joe."

     
I raised my eyes up
to his. He looked cut out of black cloth against the sun. My eyes burned in the
heat and dust.

     
"It's time the
boy learns the difference, that's all," he said.

     
"I'm not here to
argue, Mr. Jude."

     
"You may intend
to be polite, Jerry Joe. But don't ever address a white man as a person of
color would."

     
Jude knew how to take
your skin off with an emery wheel.

I
liked Mrs. LaRose. She cooked big breakfasts of eggs and
smokehouse ham and refried beans and grits for all the hands and was always
baking pies for the evening meal. But she seemed to have a blind spot when it
came to Jude. Maybe it was because he was a war hero and her father died in one
of Hitler's ovens and Jude brought her here from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus.
What I mean is, he wasn't above a Saturday night trip down into Mexico with his
foreman, a man who'd been accused of stealing thoroughbred semen from a ranch
he worked over in Presidio. One Sunday morning, when the foreman was still
drunk from the night before and we were driving out to the rig, he said,
"Y'all sure must grow 'em randy where you're from."

     
"Beg your
pardon?" I said.

     
"Bringing back a
German heifer ain't kept Jude from milking a couple at a time through the
fence."

     
Later, he caught me
alone in the pipe yard. He was quiet a long time, cleaning his nails with a
penknife, still breathing a fog of tequila and nicotine. The he told me I'd
better get a whole lot of gone between me and the ranch if I ever repeated what
he'd said.

     
Don't misunderstand,
I looked up to Jude in lots of ways. He told me how scared he'd been when they
flew into German
ack-ack.
He said it was like a big box of torn black
cotton, and there was no way to fly over or around or under it. They'd just have
to sit there with their sweat freezing in their hair while the plane shook and
bounced like it was breaking up on a rock road. Right after Dresden a piece of
shrapnel the size and shape of a twisted teaspoon sliced through his flight
jacket and rib cage so he could actually put his hand inside and touch the
bones.

     
I blame myself for
what happened next.

     
Buford and me were
hoeing weeds in the string beans at the end of the field, when this old Mexican
hooked one wheel of the pump truck off the edge of the irrigation ditch and
dropped the whole thing down on the axle. I left Buford alone and got the jack
and some boards out of the cab, and the old man and me snugged them under the
frame and started jacking the wheel up till we could rock it forward and get
all four wheels on dirt again. Then I looked through the square of light under
the truck and saw Buford across the field, playing under a shade tree with the
little black girl just as Jude came down the road in his station wagon.

     
I felt foolish, maybe
cowardly, too, for a reason I couldn't explain, lying on my belly, half under
the truck, while Jude got out of his station wagon and walked toward his son
with a look that made Buford's face go white.

     
He pulled Buford by
his hand up on the black family's gallery, went right through their door with
no more thought than he would in kicking open a gate on a hog lot, and a minute
later came back outside with one of the little girl's dresses wadded up in his
hand.

     
First, he whipped
Buford's bare legs with a switch, then pulled the dress down over his head and
made him stand on a grapefruit crate out in the middle of the field, with all
the Mexicans bent down in the rows, pretending they didn't see it.

     
I knew I was next.

     
He drove out to where
the pump truck was still hanging on the
jack, and stared out
the car window at me like I was some dumb animal he knew would never measure
up.

     
"You didn't mind
your priorities. What you see yonder is the cost of it," he said.

     
"Then you should
have took it out on me."

     
"Don't be a
hypocrite on top of it. If you had any guts, you'd have spoken up before I
whipped him."

     
I could feel my eyes
watering, the words quivering in my mouth.
      
"I think you're a sonofabitch, Jude."

     
"He's a LaRose.
That's something you won't ever understand, Jerry Joe. You come from white
trash, so it's not your fault. But you've got a chance to change your life
here. Don't waste it."

     
He dropped the
transmission in first gear, his face as empty of feeling as a skillet, and left
me standing in the weeds, the dust from his tires pluming in a big cinnamon
cloud behind his car.

I
'd like to tell you I drug up that night, but I didn't. Jude's
words burned in my cheeks just like a slap, like only he knew, of all the
people in the world, who I really was.

     
It's funny how you
can become the reflection you see in the eyes of a man you admire and hate at
the same time. The family went back to Louisiana in the fall, and I stayed on
and slant drilled, brought wets across the river, killed wild horses for a dog
food company, and fell in love every Saturday night down in Chihuahua. Those
boys from Huntsville pen and the pea farm at Sugarland didn't have anything on
me.

     
When he died of lung
cancer ten years later, I thought I'd go to the funeral and finally make my
peace with him. I made it as far as the door, where two guys told me Mr. LaRose
had left instructions the service was to be attended only by family members.

     
Ole Jude really knew
how to do it.

CHAPTER
 
14

I
t was dark now
and rain was falling
on the
bayou and the tin roof of the bait shop. Jerry Joe drank out of a thick white
coffee cup across the table from me. A bare electric light bulb hung over our
heads, and his face was shadowed by his fedora.

     
"What's the
point?" I said.

     
"You're a parish
cop in a small town, Dave. When's the last time you turned the key on a rich
guy?"

     
"A DWI about
twenty years ago."

     
"So am I getting
through here?"

     
"It doesn't
change anything."

     
"I saw Buford
pitch in a college game once. A kid slung the bat at him on a scratch single.
The kid's next time up, Buford hit him in the back with a forkball. He acted
sorry as hell about it while the kid was writhing around in the dirt, but after
the game I heard him tell his catcher, 'Looks like we made a Christian
today.'"

     
"Buford's not my
idea of a dangerous man."

     
"It's a way of
mind. They don't do things to people, they let them happen. Their hands always
stay clean."

     
"If you're
letting the LaRoses use you, that's your problem, Jerry Joe."

     
"Damn, you make
me mad," he said. He clicked his spoon on the
handle of his cup and looked out at the rain falling through the
glare of the flood lamps. His leather jacket was creased and pale with wear,
and I wondered how many years ago he had bought it to emulate the man who had
helped incinerate the Florence of northern Europe.

     
"Take care of
what you got, Dave. Maybe deep-six the job, I'll get you on with the union.
It's easy. You get a pocketful of ballpoint pens and a clipboard and you can
play it till you drop," he said.

     
"You want to
come up and eat with us?"

     
"That's sounds
nice . . ." His face looked melancholy under his fedora. "Another time,
though. I've got a gal waiting for me over in Lafayette. I was never good at
staying married, know what I mean? . . . Dave, the black hooker who saw the
screenwriter popped, you still want to find her, she works for Dock Green . . .
Hey, tomorrow I'm sending you a jukebox. It's loaded, podna—Lloyd Price, Jimmy
Clanton, Warren Storm, Dale and Grace Broussard, Iry LeJeune ... Don't
argue."

     
And he went out the
screen door into the rain. The string of electric bulbs overhead made a pool of
yellow light around his double shadow, like that of a man divided against
himself at the bottom of a well.

D
ock Green was an agitated, driven, occasionally vicious,
ex-heavy-equipment operator, who claimed to have been kidnapped from a
construction site near Hue by the Viet Cong and buried alive on the banks of
the Perfume River. His face was hard-edged, as though it had been layered from
putty that had dried unevenly. It twitched constantly, and his eyes had the
lidless intensity of a bird's, focusing frenetically upon you, or the person
behind you, or the inanimate object next to you, all with the same degree of
wariness.

     
He owned a
construction company, a restaurant, and half of a floating casino, but Dock's
early money had come from prostitution. Whether out of an avaricious fear that
his legitimate businesses would dry up, or the satisfaction he took in
controlling the lives of others, he had never let go of the girls and pimps who
worked the New Orleans convention trade and kicked back 40 percent to him.

     
He had
married into the Giacano family but soon became an embarrassment to them.
Without warning, in a restaurant or in an elevator, Dock's voice would bind in
his throat, then squeeze into a higher register, like a man on the edge of an
uncontrollable rage. During these moments, his words would be both incoherent
and obscene, hurled in the faces of anyone who tried to console or comfort him.

     
He had a camp and
acreage off of old Highway 190 between Opelousas and Baton Rouge, right by the
levee and the wooded mudflats that fronted the Atchafalaya River. His metallic
gray frame house, with tin roof and screened gallery, was surrounded by palm
and banana trees, and palmettos grew in the yard and out in his pasture, where
his horses had snubbed the winter grass down to the dirt. Clete and I drove
down the service road in Clete's convertible and stopped at the cattleguard.
The gate was chain-locked to the post.

     
A man in khakis and a
long-sleeve white shirt with roses printed on it was flinging corn cobs out of
a bucket into a chicken yard. He stopped and stared at us. Clete blew the horn.

     
"What are you
doing?" I said.

     
"He's crazy.
Give him something to work with."

     
"How about
waiting here, Clete?"

     
"The guy's got
syphilis of the brain. I wouldn't go in his house unless I put Kleenex boxes
over my shoes first."

     
"It's Tourette's
syndrome."

     
"Sure, that's
why half of his broads are registered at the VD clinic."

     
I climbed through the
barbed wire fence next to the cattleguard. Dock Green was motionless, the bale
of the bucket hooked across his palm as if it had been hung from stone. His
thin brown hair was cut short and was wet and freshly combed. I saw the
recognition come into his eyes, a tic jump in his face.