DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (42 page)

     
I went to the cold
drink machine, then put my change back in my pocket and kept on walking to the
nurses' station.

     
"I have to talk
to my friend," I said.

     
"Sorry, not
until the doctor comes back," the nurse said. She smiled and did not mean
to be impolite.

     
"I apologize,
then," I said, and went past her and into Batist's room.

     
He was turned on his
side, facing the opposite wall, his back layered with bandages. The intruder
had used a type of ASP, a steel bludgeon, sold in police supply stores, that
telescopes out of a handle. The one used by the intruder was modified with an
extension that operated like a spring or whip, with a steel ball the size of a
small marble attached to the tip. The paramedics had to cut away Batist's
overalls and T-shirt with scissors and peel the cloth off his skin like cobweb.

     
His head jerked on
the pillow when he heard me behind him.

     
"It's okay,
partner," I said, and walked around the foot of the bed.

     
His right eye was
swollen shut, his nose broken and X-ed with tape.

     
"I ain't felt a
lot of it, Dave. He hit me upside the head first, 'cause I raised up and caught
him another one in the mout'," he said.

     
I sat down on a chair
by his bedside.

     
"I promise we'll
get this guy," I said.

     
"It ain't your
fault, no."

     
"I helped set up
Aaron Crown, Batist. I didn't know it, but I was giving somebody permission to
wipe me off the slate, too."

     
"Who been doing
all this, Dave? What we done to them?"

     
"They're right
up there on the Teche. Buford and Karyn LaRose."

     
His eyes closed and
opened as though he were on the edge of sleep or looking at a thought inside
his mind.

     
"It ain't their
way," he said.

     
"Why?"

     
"Their kind
don't never see bad t'ings, Dave. Any black folk on a plantation tell you that.
The white folk up in the big house don't ever want to know what happen out in
the field or down in the quarters. They got people to take care of that for
them."

     
The nurse and the
doctor came through the door and looked at us silently.

     
"You going to be
all right for a while?" I said.

     
"Sure. They been
treating me good," Batist said.

     
"I'm sorry for
this," I said.

     
He moved his fingers
slightly on the sheet and patted the top of my hand as my father might have
done.

C
lete followed me home and went to sleep in our guest room. I lay
in the dark next to Bootsie, with my arm over my eyes, and heard rainwater
ticking out of the trees into the beds of leaves that tapered away from the
tree trunks. I tried to organize my thoughts, then gave it up and fell asleep
when the stars were still out. I didn't wake until after sunrise. The room, the
morning itself, seemed empty and stark, devoid of memory, as it used to be when
I'd wake from alcoholic blackouts. Then the events of the previous night came
back like a slap.

     
Batist's first
reaction when he had seen me in the hospital had been to prevent me from
worrying about his pain. He'd had no thought of himself, no desire for revenge,
no sense of recrimination toward me or the circumstances that placed him in the
path of a sadist like Mookie Zerrang.

     
I spent ten months in
Vietnam and never saw a deliberate atrocity, at least not one committed by
Americans. Maybe that was because most of my tour was over before the war
really warmed up. I saw a ville after the local chieftain had called in the
105's on his own people, and I saw some Kit Carsons bind the wrists of captured
Viet Cong and wrap towels around their faces and pour water onto the cloth a
canteen at a time until they were willing to trade their own families for a
teaspoon of air. Someone always had an explanation for these moments, one that
allowed you to push the images out of
your mind
temporarily. It was the unnecessary cruelty, the kind that was not even
recognized as such, that hung in the mind like an unhealed lesion.

     
A mental picture
postcard that I could never find a proper postage stamp for: The mamasan is
probably over seventy. Her dugs are withered, her skin as shriveled as a dried
apple's. She and her granddaughter clean hooches for a bunch of marines, wash
their clothes, burn the shit barrels at the latrine. Two enlisted men fashion a
sign from cardboard and hang it around her neck and pose sweaty and barechested
with her while a third marine snaps their photo with a Polaroid camera. The
sign says
miss north Dakota.
If
the mamasan comprehends the nature of the insult, it does not show in the
cracked parchment of her face. The marines are grinning broadly in the photo.

     
Voltaire wrote about
the cruelty he saw in his neighbor who was the torturer at the Bastille. He
described the impulse as insatiable, possessing all the characteristics of both
lust and addiction to a drug. Had he not been hired by the state, the neighbor
would have paid to continue his tasks in those stone rooms beneath the streets
of Paris.

     
Mookie Zerrang was
not simply a hit man on somebody's payroll. He was one of those who operated on
the edges of the human family, waiting for the halt and the lame or those who
had no voice, his eyes smiling with anticipation when he knew his moment was at
hand.

     
I couldn't swallow my
food at breakfast. I went into the living room and finished cleaning the spot
on the floor where we had found Batist. I stuffed the throw rug he had lain on
and the paper towels I had used to scrub the cypress planks into a vinyl
garbage bag

     
"I'm going down
to the bait shop," I said to Bootsie.

     
"Close it up for
today," she replied.

     
"It's Saturday.
There might be a few customers by."

     
"No, you want to
make a private phone call. Do it here. I'll leave," she said.

     
"We didn't get
much sleep, Boots. It's not a day to hurt each other."

     
"Tell it to
yourself."

     
There was nothing for
it. I unlocked the bait shop and dialed Buford LaRose's home number.

     
"Hello?"
Karyn said.

     
"Where's
Buford?"

     
"In the
shower."

     
"Put him on the
phone."

     
"Leave him
alone, Dave. Go away from us."

     
"Maybe I should
catch him another time. Would the inauguration ball be okay?"

     
"It's by
invitation. You won't be attending . . ." She paused, as though she were
enjoying a sliver of ice on her tongue. "By the way, since you're a
conservationist, you'll enjoy this. I talked to someone about the swamp area
around your bait shop being turned into a wilderness preserve. Of course, that
will mean commercial property like yours will be acquired by the state or
federal government. Oh, Buford's toweling off now. Have a nice day, Dave."

     
She set the phone
down on a table and called out in a lilting voice, "Guess who?"

     
I heard Buford scrape
the receiver up in his hand.

     
"Don't tell
me," he said.

     
"Shut up,
Buford—"

     
"No, this time
you shut up, Dave. Aaron Crown didn't do what he was told. He was supposed to
throw his rifle in the water. Instead, he flashed a soda can or something in a
window and a trooper started shooting. I tried to stop it."

     
"You were
there?"

     
"Yes, of
course."

     
"I think you're
lying," I said. But his explanation was disarming.

     
"It's what
happened. Check it out."

     
"The black man
who works for me was almost beaten to death last night."

     
"I'm sorry. But
what does that have to do with me?"

     
I felt my anger and
confidence wane. I rubbed at one eye with the heel of my hand and saw
concentric circles of red light receding into my brain. My hands felt cold and
thick and I could smell my own odor. I started to speak but the words wouldn't
come.

     
"Dave, are you
okay?" he said. His voice was odd, marked with sympathy.

     
I hung up and sat at
the counter and rested my forearms on the counter, my head bent forward, and
felt a wave of exhaustion and a
sense of personal impotence wash through
me like the first stages of amoebic dysentery. Through the window I heard
Bootsie's car back into the road, then I saw her and Alafair drive away through
the long corridor of oaks toward town. A small metallic mirror hung on a post
behind the counter. The miniature face of the man reflected inside it did not
look like someone I knew.

C
LETE
and
I
went back to Iberia
General to visit
Batist, then drove to Red Lerille's Gym in Lafayette. Clete ordered a baked
potato smothered with cheese and sour cream and bacon strips and green onions
at the cafe outside the weight room and ate it at a table by the glass wall and
watched me while I worked out for a half hour on the machines. Then he put on a
pair of trunks and swam outside in the heated pool and later met me in the
steam room.

 
    
"How you feel?" he said.

     
"All right. It's
just a touch of the mosquito."

     
A man sitting next to
us folded the newspaper he was reading and lay it on the tile stoop and went
out. Clete waited until the man closed the door behind him.

     
"You're beating
up on yourself unfairly, big mon," he said.

     
"People are
dead. No one's in custody. A man like Batist is attacked by a degenerate. Tell
me what I've done right."

     
"You listen to
me," he said, and raised his finger in my face. The skin of his massive
shoulders and chest looked boiled and red in the steam. "You're a police
officer. You can't ignore what you see happening around you. If you fuck up,
that's the breaks. In a firefight you stomp ass and take names and let somebody
else add up the arithmetic. Get off your own case."

     
"One day we're
going to get your shield back," I said.

     
He cupped his hand
around the back of my neck. I could feel the moisture and grease ooze out from
under his palm and fingers. "If I had to play by the rules, I couldn't
cover my old podjo's back," he said.

     
His smile was as
gentle as a girl's.

I
dropped him off at a motel by the four-lane in New Iberia and
drove home alone. I waved at the deputy parked in a cruiser by the bait shop
and turned into our dirt driveway and cut the engine and listened to it cool
and tick while I looked at Bootsie's car and the doves that rose out of my
neighbor's field against the late sun and then at Bootsie's face in the middle
of a windy swirl of curtains at a window in the rear of the house before she
turned away as though I were not there.

     
I started toward the
back door, forming words in my mind to address problems I couldn't even define,
then stopped, the way you do when thinking doesn't work anymore, and walked
down the slope to the bait shop, into the green, gaslike odor of the evening,
the pecan husks breaking under my shoes, as though I could walk beyond the box
of space and time and loveless tension that my father's hand-hewn cypress house
had become.

     
The string of
electric lights was turned on over the dock and I could hear music through the
screens.

     
"What are you
doing, Alf?" I said.

     
"I got the key
to the jukebox out of the cash register. Is that all right?"