DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (36 page)

     
I put on my khakis
and loafers and flannel shirt, took a flashlight out of the nightstand and my
.45 automatic out of the dresser drawer and walked to the end of the dock.

   
  
The light out in the trees was gone. The air
was gray with mist, the bayou dimpled by the rolling backs of gars.

     
"Who are
you?" I called.

     
It was quiet, as
though the person in the trees was considering my question, then I heard a
paddle or an oar dipping into water, raking alongside a wood gunnel.

     
"Tell me who you
are!" I called. I waited. Nothing. My words sounded like those of a fool
trapped by his own fears.

     
I unlocked the bait
shop and turned on the flood lamps, then unchained an outboard by the end of
the concrete ramp, set one knee on the seat, and shoved out into the bayou. I
cranked the engine and went thirty yards downstream and turned into a cut that
led back into a dead bay surrounded by cypress and willows. The air was cold
and thick with fog, and when I shut off the engine I heard a bass flop its tail
in the shallows. Nutrias perched on every exposed surface, their eyes as red as
sapphires in the glow of my flashlight.

     
Then, at the edge of
the bay, I saw the path a boat had cut in the layer of algae floating between
two stumps. I shined my light deep into the trees and saw a moving shape, the
shadow of a hunched man, a flash of dirty gold water flicked backward as a
pirogue disappeared beyond a mudbank that was overgrown with palmettos.

     
"Aaron?" I
asked the darkness.

     
But no one responded.

     
I tried to remember
the images in my mind's eye—the breadth of the shoulders, a hand pulling aside
a limb, a neck that seemed to go from the jaws into the collarbones without
taper. But the reality was I had seen nothing clearly except a man seated low
in a pirogue and—

     
A glistening, thin
object in the stern. It was metal, I thought. A chain perhaps. The barrel of a
rifle.

     
My flannel shirt was
sour with sweat. I could hear my heart beating in the silence of the trees.

I
came home for lunch that day. Alafair was at school and Bootsie
was gone. There was no note on the corkboard where we left messages for one
another. I fixed a ham and onion sandwich and a glass of iced tea and heated a
bowl of dirty rice and ate at the kitchen table. Batist called from the bait
shop.

     
"Dave, there's a
bunch of black mens here drinking beer and using bad language out on the
dock," he said.

     
"Who are
they?" I asked.

     
"One's got a
knife instead of a hook on his hand."

     
"A what?"

     
"Come see,
'cause I'm fixing to run 'em down the road."

     
I walked down the
slope through the trees. A new Dodge Caravan was parked by the concrete boat
ramp, and five black men stood on the end of the dock, their shirtsleeves
rolled in the warm air, drinking can beer while Jimmy Ray Dixon gutted a
two-foot yellow catfish he had gill-hung from a nail on a light post.

     
A curved and
fine-pointed knife blade, honed to the blue thinness of a barber's razor, was
screwed into a metal and leather cup that fitted over the stump of Jimmy Ray's
left wrist. He drew the blade's edge around the catfish's gills, then cut a
neat line down both sides of the dorsal fin and stripped the skin back with a
pair of pliers in his right hand. He sliced the belly from the apex of the V
where the gills met to the anus and let the guts fall out of the cavity like a
sack of blue and red jelly.

     
The tops of his
canvas shoes were speckled with blood. He was grinning.

     
"I bought it
from a man caught it in a hoop net at Henderson," he said.

     
"Y'all want to
rent a boat?"

     
"I hear the
fishing here ain't any good."

     
"It's not good
anywhere now. The water's too cool."

     
"I got a problem
with a couple of people bothering me. I think you behind it," he said.

     
"You want to
lose the audience?" I said.

     
"Y'all give me a
minute," he said to the other men. They were dressed in tropical shirts,
old slacks, shoes they didn't care about. But they weren't men who fished.
Their hands squeezed their own sex, almost with fondness; their eyes followed a
black woman walking on the road; they whispered to one another, even though
their conversation was devoid of content.

     
They started to go
inside the shop.

     
"It's
closed," I said.

     
"Hey, Jim, we
ain't here to steal your watermelons," Jimmy Ray said.

     
"I'd appreciate
it if you didn't call me a racial name," I said.

     
"Y'all open the
cooler. I'll be along," he said to his friends. He watched them drift in a
cluster down the dock toward the van.

     
"Here's what it
is," he said. "That cracker Cramer, yeah, you got it, white dude from
Homicide, smells like deodorant, is down at my pool hall, axing if I know why
Jerry the Glide was in the neighborhood when somebody broke all his
sticks."

     
Not bad, Cramer, I
thought.

     
"Then your
friend, Purcel, hears from this pipehead street chicken Mookie Zerrang's got
permission to burn his kite, so he blames me. I ain't got time for this,
Jack."

     
"Why
was
Jerry
Joe in your neighborhood?"

     
"It ain't my
neighborhood, I got a bidness there. I don't go in there at night,
either." He brushed the sack of fish guts off the dock with his shoe and
watched it float away in the current. "Why you got to put your hand in
this shit, man?"

     
"You know how it
is, a guy's got to do something for kicks."

     
"I hear it's
'cause you was fucking some prime cut married to the wrong dude. That's your
choice, man, but I don't like you using my brother to do whatever you doing.
Give my fish to the old man in there," he said, and started to walk away.

     
I walked after him
and touched his back with the ball of my finger. I could feel his wingbone
through the cloth of his shirt, see the dark grain of his whiskers along the
edge of his jaw, smell the faint odor of sweat and talcum in his skin.

     
"Don't use
profanity around my home, please," I said.

     
"You worried
about language round your home? Man put a bullet in mine and killed my brother.
That's the difference between us. Don't let it be lost on you, Chuck."

     
He got in the front
passenger's seat of the van, slid a metal sheath over the knife blade attached
to his stump, then unscrewed the blade and drank from a bottle of Carta Blanca,
his throat working smoothly until the bottle was empty. The bottle made a dull,
tinkling sound when it landed in the weeds by the roadside.

T
he next day I got the warrant to search the grounds of the LaRose
plantation. Helen Soileau parked the cruiser in the driveway, and I got out and
knocked on the front door.

     
Karyn was
barefoot and wore only a pair of shorts and a halter, with a thick towel around
her neck, when she opened the door. In the soft afternoon light her tan took on
the dark tint of burnt honey. The momentary surprise went out of her face, and
she leaned an arm against the doorjamb and brushed back her hair with her
fingers.

     
"What are we
here for today?" she said.

     
"Here's the
warrant. We'll be looking at some things back on the bayou."

     
"How did
you—" she began, then stopped.

     
"All I had to do
was tell the judge the state police warned me off y'all's property. He seemed
upset about people intruding on his jurisdiction."

     
"Then you should
scurry on with your little errand, whatever in God's name it is."

     
"Does Jerry
Joe's death bother you at all?"

     
Her mouth grew small
with anger.

     
"There're days
when I wish I was a man, Dave. I'd honestly love to beat the living shit out of
you." The door clicked shut.

     
Helen and I walked
through the coolness of the porte cochere into
the backyard. The
camellias were in bloom and the backyard was filled with a smoky gold light. I
could see Karyn inside the glassed-in rear corner of the house, touching her
toes in a crisscross motion, her thighs spread, the back of her neck slick with
a necklace of sweat.

     
"You ever read
anything about the Roman Coliseum? When gladiators fought on lakes of burning
oil, that kind of stuff?" Helen said.
      

     
"Yeah, I
guess."

     
"I have a
feeling Karyn LaRose was in the audience."
      

     
We walked past the
stables and through the hardwoods to the sloping bank of the Teche. A heavyset
black state trooper sat in a folding chair, back among the trees, eating
cracklings from a jar. His scoped rifle was propped against a pine trunk. He
glanced at my badge holder hanging from my coat pocket and nodded.

     
"Crown hasn't
tried to get through your perimeter, huh?" I said, and smiled.

     
"You ax me, he's
been spooked out," he answered.
      

     
"How's
that?" I asked.

     
"Man's smart.
See the mosquitoes I been swatting all day?"
      

     
"They're bad
after a rain," I said.

     
"They're bad in
these trees anytime. Man don't see nobody out yonder on the bank, he knows
what's waiting for him inside the woods.
That,
or somebody done tole
him."
      

     
"You take it
easy," I said.

     
Helen and I walked
along the bank toward the spot where I had thrown the oar lock. I could feel
her eyes on me, watching.
      

     
"You're damn
quiet," she said.
      

     
"Sorry, I didn't
mean to be."
      

     
"Dave?"
      

     
"What's
up?"

     
"I'm getting a
bad sense here."

     
"What's
that?" I said, my eyes focused on the gazebo that two carpenters were
hammering and sawing on around the bayou's bend.
      

     
"What that
trooper said. Did you warn Crown?"
      

     
"We don't
execute people in Iberia Parish. We want the man in custody, not in a
box."

     
"We didn't have
this conversation, Streak."

     
The carpenters were
on all fours atop the gazebo's round, peaked roof, their nail bags swinging
from their stomachs.

     
"That's quite a
foundation. Y'all always pour a concrete pad under a gazebo?" I said.

     
"High water will
rot it out if you don't," one man answered.

     
"What did y'all
do with the dirt you excavated?"

     
"Some guy hauled
it off for topsoil."

     
"Which
guy?"

     
"Some guy work
for Mr. LaRose, I guess."

     
"Y'all did the
excavation?"

     
"No, sir. Mr.
LaRose done that hisself. He got his own backhoe."

     
"I see. Y'all
doin'all right?"

     
"Yes, sir.
Anyt'ing wrong?"

     
"Not a
thing," I said.

     
I walked down on the
grassy bank, which was crisscrossed with the deep prints of cleated tires and
dozer tracks. A fan of mud and torn divots of grass lay humped among the
cattails at the bayou's edge. I poked at it with a stick and watched it cloud
and drift away in the current.