DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (29 page)

     
"I said, 'What
you want here?'

     
"He had on this
straw hat, with a colored band around it. He took it off and the side of his
head was shaved down to the scalp. He goes, 'I'm so strong I got muscles in my
shit, old man. I'd watch what I say.' All the time smiling with gold all over
his teet'.

     
"I go, 'I'm
fixing to clean up. You want to buy somet'ing?'

     
"Dave, this
man's arms was big as my thigh. His shoulders touched both sides of that do'
when he come in. He goes, 'You sure that movie fella ain't tole you where he
stay at?'

     
"I go, 'It ain't
my bidness. Ain't nobody else's here, either.'

     
"He kept looking
at me, grinning, messing with the salt shaker on top of the counter, like he
was fixing to do somet'ing.

     
"So I said,
'Nigger, don't prove your mama raised a fool.'

     
"He laughed and
picked up a ham sandwich and crumpled up a five-dollar bill and t'rew it on the
counter and walked out. Just like
that. Man didn't no more care
if I insulted him than a mosquito was flying round his head."

     
"Call me if you
see him again. Don't mess with him."

     
"Who he is,
Dave?"

     
"He sounds like
a guy named Mookie Zerrang. He's a killer, Batist."

     
He started to wipe
down the counter, then flipped his rag into the bucket.

     
"They ain't
nothing for it, is they?" he said.

     
"Beg your
pardon?"

     
"They out there,
they in here. Don't nobody listen to me," he said, and waved his arm
toward the screened windows, the floodlighted bayou, the black wall of shadows
on the far bank. "It ain't never gonna be like it use to. What for we
brought all this here, Dave?"

     
He turned his back to
me and began dropping the board shutters on the windows and latching them from
the inside.

e
arly saturday
morning
I
made coffee
and fixed a bowl of
Grape-Nuts and blueberries in the bait shop and ate breakfast by myself at the
counter and watched the sun rise over the swamp. It had rained, then cleared
during the night, and the bayou was yellow with mud and the dock slick with
rainwater. A week ago Jerry Joe's vending machine company had delivered a
working replica of a 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox while I wasn't in the shop; it sat
squat and heavy in the corner, its plastic casing marbled with orange and red
and purple light, the rows of 45 rpm records arrayed in a shiny black
semicircle inside the viewing glass. I had resolved to have Jerry Joe's people
remove it.

     
I still hadn't made
the phone call.

     
I punched Jimmy
Clanton's "Just a Dream," Harry Choates's 1946 recording of "La
Jolie Blon," Nathan Abshire's "Pine Grove Blues."

     
Their voices and
music were out of another era, one that we thought would never end. But it did,
incrementally, in ways that seemed inconsequential at the time, like the
unexpected arrival at the front gate of a sun-browned oil lease man in khaki
work clothes who seemed little different from the rest of us.

     
I unplugged the
jukebox from the wall. The plastic went dead and crackled like burning
cellophane in the silence of the room.

     
Then I drove to the
University of Southwestern Louisiana library in Lafayette.

B
uford's bibliography was impressive. He had published historical
essays on the Knights of the White Camellia and the White League and the violent
insurrection they had led against the federal occupation after the War Between
the States. The articles were written in the neutral and abstruse language of
academic journals, but his sentiments were not well disguised: the night riders
who had lynched and burned had their roles forced upon them.

     
His other articles
were in psychological and medical journals. They seemed to be diverse, with no
common thread, dealing with various kinds of phobias and depression as well as
hate groups that could not tolerate a pluralistic society.

     
But in the last five
years he seemed to have changed his professional focus and begun writing about
the science of psychopharma-cology and its use in the cure of alcoholics.

     
I returned the
magazines and journals to the reference desk and was about to leave. But it
wasn't quite yet noon, and telling myself I had nothing else to do, I asked the
librarian for the student yearbooks from the early 1970s, the approximate span
when Karyn LaRose attended U.S.L.

     
She hadn't been born
into Buford's LaRose's world. Her father had been a hard-working and likable
man who supplied gumballs and novelties, such as plastic monster teeth and
vampire fingernails, for dimestore vending machines. The family lived in a
small frame house on the old St. Martinville road, and the paintless and
desiccated garage that fronted the property was rimmed along the base with a
rainbow of color from the gumballs that had rotted inside and leaked through
the floor. If you asked Karyn what her father did for a living, she always
replied that he was in the retail supply business.

     
Most of us who
attended U.S.L. came from blue-collar, French-speaking families or could not
afford to attend L.S.U. or Tulane. Most of us commuted from outlying parishes,
and as a result the campus was empty and quiet and devoid of most social life
on the weekends.

     
But not for Karyn.
She made the best of her situation, and her
name and photograph
appeared again and again in the yearbooks that covered her four years at U.S.L.
She made the women's tennis team and belonged to a sorority and the honor
society; she was a maid of honor to the homecoming queen one year, and
homecoming queen the next. In her photographs her face looked modest and
radiant, like that of a person who saw only goodness and promise in the world.

     
I was almost ready to
close the last yearbook and return the stack to the reference desk when I
looked again at a group photograph taken in front of Karyn's sorority house,
then scanned the names in the cutline.

     
The coed on the end
of the row, standing next to Karyn, was Persephone Giacano. Both of them were
smiling, their shoulders and the backs of their wrists touching.

     
I began to look for
Persephone's name in other yearbooks. I didn't find it. It was as though she
had appeared for one group photograph in front of the sorority house, then
disappeared from campus life.

     
The administration
building was still open. I used the librarian's phone and called the
registrar's office.

 
    
"We have a Privacy Act, you
know?" the woman who answered said.

     
"I just want to
know which years she was here," I said.

     
"You're a police
officer?"

     
"That's
correct."

     
I heard her tapping
on some computer keys.

     
"Nineteen seventy-two
to nineteen seventy-three," she said.

     
"She dropped out
or she transferred to another school?" I asked.

     
She was quiet a
moment. The she said, "If I were you, I'd look through some of the campus
newspapers for that period. Who knows what you might find?"

     
It took a while. The
story was brief, no more than four column inches with a thin caption on page
three of a late spring 1973 issue of the
Vermilion,
written in the
laconic style of an administrative press handout that does not want to dwell
overly long on a university scandal.

     
A half dozen students
had been expelled for stealing tests from the science building. The article
stated the tests had been taken from a file cabinet, but the theft had been
discovered before the examinations
had been given, and the
professors whose exams would have been compromised had all been notified.

     
At the very bottom of
the article was the line,
A seventh U.S.L. student, Persephone Giacano,
voluntarily withdrew from the university before charges were filed against her.

     
I called the
registrar's office again, and the same woman answered.

     
"Can I look at
an old transcript?" I asked. "You send those out upon request,
anyway, don't you?"

     
"Why don't you
come over here and introduce yourself? You sound like such an interesting
person," she answered.

     
I walked across the
lawn and through the brick archways to the registrar's office and stood at the
counter until an elderly, robin-breasted lady with blue hair waited on me. I
opened my badge.

     
"My, you're
exactly what you say you are," she said.

     
"Does everyone
get this treatment?"

     
"We save it for
just a special few."

     
I wrote Karyn's
maiden name on a scratch pad and slid it across the counter to the woman. She
looked at it a long time. The front office area was empty.

     
"It's important
in ways that are probably better left unsaid," I said.

     
"Why don't you
walk back here?" she answered.

     
I stood behind her
chair while she tapped on the computer's keyboard. Then I saw Karyn's
transcript pop up on the blue screen. "She was here four years and
graduated in 1974. See," the woman said, and slowly rolled Karyn's
academic credits down the screen, shifting in her chair so I could have a clear
view.

     
Karyn had been a
liberal arts major and had made almost straight A's in the humanities. But when
an accounting class, or a zoology or algebra class rolled across the screen,
the grades dropped to C's, or Ws for "Withdrew."

     
"Could you drop
it back to the spring of 1973?" I asked.

     
The woman in the
chair hesitated, then tapped the "page up" button. She waited only a
few seconds before shutting down the screen. But it was long enough.

     
Karyn had made A's in
biology and chemistry the same semester that Persephone Giacano had been forced
to leave the university.

     
Karyn was nobody's
fall partner.

I
parked my truck in the alley behind Sabelle Crown's bar and
entered it through the back door. The only light came from the neon beer signs
on the wall and the television set that was tuned to the L.S.U. - Georgia Tech
game. The air was thick with a smell like unwashed hair and old shoes and sweat
and synthetic wine.

     
Sabelle was mopping
out her tiny office in back.

     
"I need Lonnie
Felton's address," I said.

     
She stuck her mop in
the pail and took a business card out of her desk drawer.

     
"He rented a
condo over the river. Good life, huh?" she said. She resumed her work, her
back to me, the exposed muscles in her waist rolling with each motion of her
arms.

     
"Aaron was here,
wasn't he?" I said.

     
"What makes you
think that?" she answered, her voice flat.

     
"He was carrying
the thirty-two I saw in that shoebox full of medals you keep behind the
bar."

     
She stopped mopping
and straightened up. Her head was tilted to one side.

     
"You didn't know
that?" I said.

     
She went out to the
bar and returned with the shoebox, slipped the rubber band off the top, and
poured the collection of rings and watches and pocketknives and military
decorations onto the desk.

     
Her gaze was turned
inward, as though she were reviewing a film-strip. I could hear her breathing
through her nose in the silence. Her fingernails were curled into the heels of
her hands.