DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (33 page)

     
"Tell somebody
about it, Jerry Joe. Like your mom said." I tried to smile.

     
He reached around
behind him and picked up the cardboard box from the seat. "I brought you
something belongs to you. It was still buried behind the old house."

     
I rested the box on
the window and lifted the top. The hand crank to our old phonograph lay in the
middle of a crinkled sheet of white wrapping paper. The metal was deformed and
bulbous with rust, and the wood handle had been eaten by groundwater.

     
"So I returned
your property and I got no reason to be mad at you," he said. He was
smiling now. He closed his car door and started his engine.

     
"Stay on that
old-time R&B," I said.

     
"I never been
off it."

     
I walked the rest of
the way home. The sun was gone now and the air was damp and cold, and the last
fireflies of the season traced their smoky red patterns in the shadows.

W
HEN
your stitches are
popping
loose and your elevator has already plummeted past any
reasonable bottom and the best your day offers is seeds and stems at sunrise to
flatten the kinks or a street dealer's speedball that can turn your heart into
a firecracker, you might end up in a piece of geography as follows:

     
A few blocks off
Canal, the building was once a bordello that housed both mulatto and white
women; then in a more moral era, when the downtown brothels were closed by the
authorities and the girls started working out of taxicabs instead, the building
was partitioned into apartments and studios for artists, and finally it became
simply a "hotel," with no name other than that, the neon letters
emblazoned vertically on a tin sign above a picture glass window that looked in
upon a row of attached theater seats. Old people seemingly numbed by the
calamity that had placed them in these surroundings stared vacantly through the
glass at the sidewalk.

     
The Mexican man had
climbed the fire escape onto the peaked roof, then had glided out among the
stars. He hit the courtyard with such an impact that he split a flagstone like
it was slate.

     
The corridor was dark
and smelled of the stained paper bags filled with garbage that stood by each
door like sentinels. Clete opened the dead man's room with a passkey.

     
"A Vietnamese
boat lady owns the place. She found the guy's pay stub and thought I could get
his back rent from the state," he said.

     
Most of the plaster
was gone from the walls. A mattress was rolled on an iron bed frame, and a pile
of trash paper, green wine bottles, and frozen TV dinner containers was swept
neatly into one corner. A flattened, plastic wallet and a cardboard suitcase
and a guitar with twelve tuning pegs and no strings lay on top of a plank
table. The sound hole on the guitar was inlaid with green and pink mollusk
shell, and the wood below the hole had been cut with scratches that looked like
cat's whiskers.

     
"What was he
on?" I said.

     
"A couple of the
wetbrains say he was cooking brown skag with ups. The speed is supposed to give
it legs. The mamasan found the wallet under the bed."

     
It contained no
money, only a detached stub from a pay voucher for ninety-six dollars, with
Buford LaRose's name and New Iberia address printed in the upper left-hand
corner, and a Catholic holy card depicting a small statue of Christ's mother,
with rays of gold and blue light emanating from it. Underneath the statue was
the caption
La Virgin de Zapopan.

     
I unsnapped the
suitcase. His shirts and trousers and underwear were all rolled into tight
balls. A pair of boots were folded at the tops in one corner. The toes were
pointed and threadbare around the welt, the heels almost flat, the leather worn
as smooth and soft as felt in a slipper. Under the boots, wrapped in a towel,
was a solitary roweled spur, the cusp scrolled with winged serpents.

     
"It looks like
the guy had another kind of life at one time," Clete said.

     
"Does NOPD know
he worked for Buford LaRose?"

     
"The mamasan
called them and got the big yawn. They've got New Orleans cops pulling armed
robberies. Who's got time for a roof flyer down here in Shitsville?"

     
"Dock Green says
a kid's buried on the LaRose property."

     
"You try for a
warrant?"

     
"The judge said
insufficient grounds. He seemed to think I had personal motivations as
well."

     
"You're going
about it the wrong way, Streak. Squeeze somebody close to LaRose."

     
"Who?"

     
"That old guy,
the poet, the fuckhead left over from the sixties, he was working his scam out
at Tulane last night. He's doing a repeat performance up on St. Charles this
afternoon."

     
He drummed the square
tips of his fingers on the face of the guitar.

     
"No grand
displays, Clete," I said.

     
"Me?"

C
lay Mason's poetry reading was in a reception hall above a
restaurant in the Garden District. From the second-story French doors you could
look down upon a sidewalk cafe, the oaks along the avenue, the iron streetcars
out on the neutral ground, a K&B drugstore on the corner whose green and
purple neon hung like colored smoke in the rain.

Clete and I sat on folding chairs in the back of the hall. We were
lucky to get seats at all. College kids dressed in Seattle grunge lined the
walls.

     
"Can you believe
anybody going for this guy's shuck today?" Clete said.

     
"It's in."

     
"Why?"

     
"They missed all
the fun."

     
In reality, I
probably knew a better answer. But it sounded like a weary one, even to myself,
and I left it unsaid. Presidents who had never heard a shot fired in anger
vicariously revised the inadequacy of their own lives by precipitating
suffering in the lives of others, and they were lauded for it. Clay Mason well
understood the nature of public memory and had simply waited for his time and a
new generation of intellectual cannon fodder to come round again.

     
His pretentiousness,
his feigned old man's humility and irreverence toward the totems, were almost
embarrassing. He had been an academic for years, but he denigrated universities
and academics. He spoke of his own career in self-effacing terms but gave the
impression he had known the most famous writers of his time. In his eccentric
western clothes, a Stetson hat cocked on his white head, a burning cigarette
cupped in his small hand, he became the egalitarian spokesman for the Wobblies,
the railroad hobos of Woody Guthrie and Hart Crane, the miners killed at
Ludlow, Colorado, the girls
whose bodies were incinerated like bolts
of cloth in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

     
His poems were full
of southwestern mesas and peyote cactus, ponies that drank out of blood-red
rivers, fields blown with bluebon-nets and poppies, hot winds that smelled of
burning hemp.

     
His words seemed to
challenge all convention and caution, even his own death, which one poem
described in terms of a chemical rainbow rising from the ashes of his
soul.
      

     
The audience loved
it.
      

     
Clete craned forward
in his seat.
      

     
"Check it out by
the door, big mon," he said.
      

     
Karyn LaRose was
dressed in a pale blue suit and white hose, with a white scarf about her neck,
her legs crossed, listening attentively to Clay Mason. The horn-rimmed glasses
she wore only added to her look of composure and feminine confidence. Two state
troopers stood within five feet of her, their hands folded behind them, as
though they were at parade rest.

     
"Why do I feel
like a starving man looking at a plate of baked Alaska?" Clete said.
"You think I could interest her in some private security?"

     
A middle-aged woman
in front of us turned and said, "Would you kindly be quiet?"

     
"Sorry,"
Clete said, his face suddenly blank.

     
After Clay Mason
finished reading his last poem, the audience rose to its feet and applauded and
then applauded some more. Clete and I worked our way to the front of the hall,
where a cash drink bar was open and a buffet was being set up.

     
"Watch out for
the Smokies. It looks like they're working on their new chevrons," Clete
said.

     
Clay Mason stood with
a group by Karyn's chair, his weight resting on his cane. When he saw me, the
parchment lines in his pixie face seem to deepen, then he smiled quickly and
extended his hand out of the crowd. It felt like a twig in mine.

     
"I'm flattered
by your presence, sir," he said.

     
"It's more
business than pleasure. A Mexican kid who worked for Buford took a dive off a
flophouse roof," I said.

     
"Yeah,
definitely bad shit. They had to put the guy's brains back in his head with a
trowel," Clete said.

     
I gave Clete a hard
stare, but it didn't register.

     
"I'm sorry to
hear about this," Clay Mason said.

     
On the edge of my
vision I could see Karyn LaRose seated not more than two feet from us.

     
"What's
happening, Karyn?" I said, without looking at her.

     
"You gentlemen
wouldn't contrive to turn a skunk loose at a church social, would you?"
Clay Mason said, a smile wrinkling at the corner of his mouth.

     
I took the pay stub
from my shirt pocket and looked at it. "The guy's name was Fernando
Spinoza. You know him?" I asked.

     
"No, can't say
that I do," Clay Mason said.

     
"How about you,
Karyn?" I asked.

     
The redness in her
cheeks looked like arrowpoints. But her eyes were clear with purpose and she
didn't hesitate in her response.

     
"This man is a
detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," she said to the
two troopers. "He's annoyed me and my husband in every way he can. It's my
belief he has no other reason for being here."

     
"Is that right,
sir?" one of the troopers said, his eyes slightly askance, rising slightly
on the balls of his feet, his hands still folded behind him.

     
"I'm here
because of a kid who had to be blotted off a flagstone," I said.

     
"You have some
kind of jurisdiction in New Orleans? How about y'all get something to eat over
at the buffet table?" the trooper said. His face was lumpy, not unpleasant
or hostile or dumb, just lumpy and obsequious.

     
"Here's today's
flash, buddy," Clete said. "This old guy you're a doorman for, he
popped his own wife. Shot an apple off her head at a party with a forty-four
Magnum down in Taco Ticoville. Except he was stinking drunk and left her hair
all over the wallpaper. Maybe we should be telling that to these dumb kids who
listen to his bullshit."

     
The conversation
around us died as though someone had pulled the plug on a record player. I
looked over at Clete and was never prouder of him.

B
ut our moment with Clay Mason wasn't over. Outside, we saw him
walk from under the blue canvas awning at the front entrance of the
restaurant toward a waiting limo, Karyn LaRose at his side,
leaning on his cane, negotiating the peaked sidewalk where the roots of oak
trees had wedged up the concrete. A small misshaped black and brown mongrel
dog, with raised hair like pig bristles, came out of nowhere and began barking
at Mason, its teeth bared and its nails clicking on the pavement, advancing and
retreating as fear and hostility moved it. Mason continued toward the limo, his
gaze fixed ahead of him. Then, without missing a step, he suddenly raised his
cane in the air and whipped it across the dog's back with such force that the
animal ran yipping in pain through the traffic as though its spine had been
broken.