DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (41 page)

     
"I'm fixing to
pinch off your pipe for good, old man. That mean you don't get no more air.
You'll just gurgle on the floor like a dog been run over across the t'roat. . .
Where Robicheaux at?" the intruder said.

W
hen Batist woke up, he was on his side, in the middle of the
living room floor, his knees drawn up before him. The house was quiet, and he
could see rain blowing through the screen, wetting the cypress planks in the
floor, and he thought the hatted man in the rubber coat was gone.

     
Then he felt the
intruder's gloved hand close on the bottom of his chin and tilt his face toward
him, as though the intruder were arranging the anatomical parts on a store
dummy.

     
"You went to
sleep on me, old man. That's 'cause I shut off the big vein that goes up to
your brain," the intruder said. He was squatted on his haunches, sipping
from a half-pint bottle of apricot brandy. His
eyes were turquoise,
the scalp above his ears shaved bare, the color of putty.

     
"You best get
out of here, nigger, while you still can," Batist said.

     
The intruder drank
from the bottle, let the brandy roll on his tongue, settle in his teeth, as
though he were trying to kill an abscess in his gum.

     
Batist raised himself
into a sitting position, waiting for the intruder to react. But he didn't. He
sipped again from the brandy, nestled one buttock more comfortably against the
heel of his boot. His shirt and the top of his coat were unbuttoned, and a
necklace of blue shark's teeth was tattooed across his collarbones and around
his upper chest. Cupped in his right hand was a banana knife, hooked at the
tip, the edge filed into a long silver thread.

     
"Fishing any
good here?" he asked.

     
He reached out with
one finger and touched Batist on the end of his nose, then tilted the brandy
again, his eyes closing with the pleasure the liquor gave him.

     
Batist drove the
bottle into the intruder's mouth with the flat of his hand, shattering the
glass against the teeth, bursting the lips into a torn purple flower.

     
The intruder's face
stiffened with shock, glistened with droplets of brandy and saliva and blood.
But instead of reeling from the room in pain and rage, he rose to his feet and
his right foot exploded against the side of Batist's head. He cleaned bits of
glass out of his mouth with his fingers, spitting, as though there were peanut
brittle on his tongue, his gashed lips finally reforming into a smile.

     
He bent over, the
hooked point of the banana knife an inch from Batist's eye. He started to
speak, then paused, pressed his mouth against his palm, looked at it, and wiped
his hand on his raincoat.

     
"Now you made me
work for free. You ain't got nowhere to go for a while, do you?" he said,
and thumbed the buttons loose on his coat.

F
orty miles away,
in the Atchafalaya Basin,
the
same night the intruder came to my house, Aaron Crown threaded an outboard
through a nest of canals until he reached a shallow inlet off the river, where
a steel-bottomed oyster boat lay half-sunk in the silt. The decks and hull were
the color of a scab, the cabin eaten to the density of aged cork by termites
and worms. The entrance to the inlet was narrow, the willows on each side as
thick as hedges, the river beyond it running hard and fast and yellow with
foam.

     
He sat on a wood
stool inside the cabin, his skin slathered with mud, the stolen Enfield rifle
propped between his legs, his eyes fixed on the river, which they would have to
cross. The light was perfect. He could see far into the distance, like a
creature staring out of a cave, but they in turn could not see him. He had told
them no helicopters, not even for the news people. If he heard helicopters, he
would be gone deep into the canopy of the swamp before anyone could reach the
entrance to the inlet.

     
The state police
administrator had said it was all a simple matter. Aaron only had to wade into
the sunlight, his rifle over his head. No one would harm him. Television
cameras would record the moment, and that night millions of people would be
forced to acknowledge the struggle of one man against an entire state.

     
He remembered his
original arrest for the murder of the NAACP leader and the national attention
it brought him. How many men were allowed to step into history twice?

     
The state policeman
had confirmed the arrangement, two or three years in a federal old folks
facility, no heavy work, no lockdown, good food, a miniature golf course, a
television and card room, long distance access to news reporters whenever he
wanted.

     
But what if it went
down wrong tonight? Even that could be an acceptable trade-off. Buford LaRose
would be out there somewhere. Aaron squeezed the stock of the Enfield a little
tighter in his palms, the dried mud on his palms scraping softly on the wood,
his loins stirring at the thought.

     
He opened a can of
potted meat and dipped a saltine cracker into it and chewed the cracker and
meat slowly and then drank from a hot can of Coca-Cola. When the potted meat
was almost gone, he split a cracker in half and furrowed out the meat from the
seams at the bottom of the can, not missing a morsel, and lay the cracker on
his tongue and drank the last of his Coca-Cola. He started to roll a cigarette,
then saw a curtain of rain moving across the river's surface toward him, and
inside the rain he saw three large powerboats with canvas tarps behind the
cabins and the faces of uniformed men behind the water-beaded windows.

     
But where was the
boat with the news people on it?
      
He rose to his feet and let the tobacco roll off his cupped cigarette
paper and stick to his pants legs and prison work boots. The wind was blowing
harder now, whipping the willow and cypress trees, capping the river's surface.
The uniformed men in the boats hadn't seen him yet and had cut back their
throttles and were drifting in the chop, the canvas tarps flapping atop the
decks.

     
South of the squall,
the sky was filled with purple and yellow clouds, like smoke ballooning out of
an industrial fire. He squinted into the rain to see more clearly. What were
they doing? The state police administrator, what was his name, Tauzin, should
have been out on the deck with a bullhorn, to tell him what to do, to take
control, to make sure the news people filmed Aaron wading out of the swamp, his
rifle held high above his head, a defiant hill-country man whose surrender had
been personally negotiated by the governor of the state.

     
Something was wrong.
One, two, three, then a total of four men had come out the cabin doors onto the
decks of their boats, cautious not to expose themselves, the bills of their
caps turned backward on their heads.

     
It couldn't be what
he thought. The offer had come through a man he trusted in the Iberia Parish
Sheriff's Department. The state policeman had given his word, also. And where
was that damn Buford LaRose? Aaron knew Buford would never miss an opportunity
like this one, to stand before the cameras, with a wetlands background, his
aristocratic face softened by the lights of humanity and conscience.

     
Then a terrible
thought appeared in a bright, clear space in the center of his mind with such
vividness that his face burned once again with a memory that was sixty years
out of his past, a little boy in rent overalls being shoved into a school yard
puddle by a boy whose father owned the cotton gin, the words hurled down at
him,
Aaron, you 're dumber than a nigger trying to hide in a snowbank.
It
was the old recognition that his best efforts always turned out the same: he
was the natural-born victim of his betters. In this case the simple fact was
that Buford LaRose had already been elected. He didn't have to prove anything
to anybody. Aaron Crown was nothing more than a minor nuisance of whom the world
had finally tired and was about to dispose of as you would an insect with a
Flit can.

     
Aaron saw this
thought as clearly as he saw the face of the man with the inverted cap working
his way forward on the lead boat, between the gunnel and cabin. They were like
two bookends facing each other now. But Aaron refused to wince or cower, to let
them see the fear that made his bowels turn to water.
You'd like to do it,
yessiree Bob, blow hair and bone all over the trees, but you're one of them
kind won't drop his britches and take a country squat till somebody tells you
it's all right.
Aaron's hand crushed the aluminum soda can in his palm, the
bottom glinting like a heliograph.

     
He was wrong.

     
The muzzle of the
M-16 rifle flashed in the rain just as the boat's bow rose in the chop, and the
.223 round thropped past Aaron's ear, punching a neat hole in the wall behind
him, its trajectory fading deep in the swamp. A second later the other
uniformed men cut loose in unison, firing tear gas and M-16's on full automatic
and
twelve-gauge pump Remingtons loaded with
double-ought buckshot.

     
But Aaron was running
now, and not where they thought he would. While gas shells hissed on the deck
and buckshot and .223 rounds perforated the oyster boat's cabin, crisscrossing
the gloomy interior with tubular rays of light, he slid down the ladder inside
the ship's steel hull, his rifle inverted on its sling, then exited the boat
through the far side, where the plates had been stripped from a spar by a
salvager. As he ran through a chain of sandbars and stagnant pools of water, he
could hear the steady dissection of the cabin, glass breaking, bullets whanging
off metal surfaces, shattered boards spinning out into the trees like sticks
blown from a forest fire.

     
He glanced once over
his shoulder after he kicked over the outboard.
Fire.
He hadn't imagined
it. Their magazines had been loaded with tracers, and the oyster boat's cabin
was liquid with flames.

     
Inside the caked
patina of mud on Aaron's face, his eyes were as pink as Mercurochrome, filmed
with the reflected glow of what he knew now had been the final demonstrable
evidence of the lifetime conspiracy directed at him and his family. Somehow
that gave him a satisfaction and feeling of confirmation that was like being
submerged and bathed in warm water. He bit down on his molars with an almost
sexual pleasure but could not tell himself why.

     
Late that same night,
a voice with a peckerwood accent that did not identify itself left a message on
my recording machine: "Buford got to you. I don't know how. But I'd just
as lief cut the equipment off two shithogs as one."

T
he account of
Aaron Crown's escape
from the
state police is my re-creation of the story as it was related to me by a St.
Martin Parish deputy in the waiting room down the hall from Batist's room at
Iberia General. Clete Purcel and I watched the deputy get into the elevator and
look back at us blank-faced while the doors closed behind him.

     
"What are you
thinking?" Clete asked.

     
"It's no
accident Mookie Zerrang came to my house the same night Crown was set up for a
whack."

     
Clete leaned forward
in his chair and rubbed one hand on the other, picked at a callus, his green
eyes filled with thought. He had driven from New Orleans in two and a half
hours, steam rising from the hood of his Cadillac like vapor off dry ice when
he pulled under the electric arc lamps in the hospital parking lot.

     
"Zerrang's got
to go off-planet, Streak," he said.

     
"He will."

 
    
"It won't happen. Not unless you or I
do it. This guy's juice is heavy-voltage, mon."

     
I didn't answer.

     
"You know I'm
right. When they deal it down and dirty, we take it back to them under a black
flag," he said.

     
"Wrong
discussion, wrong place."

     
"There's a geek
in Jefferson Parish. A real sicko. Even the wiseguys cross the street when they
see him coming. But he owes five large to Nig. I can square the debt. Mookie
Zerrang will be walking on stumps . . . Are you listening?"