Cadillac Jukebox

by James Lee Burke

  “Your husband’s a pimp.”

  “And you’re an idiot, far out of his depth,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  Either the feminists had reached into the mob or the New Orleans spaghetti heads had spawned a new generation.

  * * *

  I used my overtime to take the afternoon off and went to Red Lerille’s Health and Racquet Club in Lafayette. I did four sets of curls and military and bench presses with free weights, then went into the main workout room, which had a glass wall that gave onto a shady driveway and the adjacent tennis courts and was lined with long rows of exercise machines. Because it was still early in the day, there were few people on the machines. A half dozen off-duty steroid-pumped Lafayette cops were gathered around a pull-down bar, seemingly talking among themselves.

  But their eyes kept drifting to the end of the room, where Karyn LaRose lay on a bench at an inverted angle, her calves and ankles hooked inside two cylindrical vinyl cushions while she* raised herself toward her knees, her fingers laced behind her head, her brown thighs shiny with sweat, her breasts as swollen as grapefruit against her Harley motorcycle T-shirt.

  I sat down on a Nautilus leg-lift machine, set the pin at 140, and raised the bar with the tops of my feet until my ankles were straight out from my knees and I could feel a burn grow in my thighs.

  I felt her on the corner of my vision. She flipped her sweat towel against my leg like a wet kiss.

  “Our bodyguard isn’t speaking these days?” she said.

  “Hello, Karyn.”

  She wiped her neck and the back of her hair. Her black shorts were damp and molded to her body.

  “You still mad?” she said.

  “I never worry about yesterday’s box score.”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “Sorry, bad metaphor,” I said.

  “If you aren’t a handful.”

  “How about requesting me off y’all’s security?” I asked.

  “You’re stuck, baby love.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a cutey, that’s why.” She propped her forearm on top of the machine. She let her thigh touch mine.

  “Sounds like control to me,” I said.

  “That’s what it’s all about, sweetie.” She bumped me again.

  “Stop playing games with people, Karyn. Aaron Crown’s out there. He doesn’t care about clever rhetoric.”

  “Then go find him.”

  “I think he’ll find us. It won’t be a good moment, either.”

  She looked down the aisle through the machines. The off-duty Lafayette cops had turned their attention to a dead-lift bar stacked with one-hundred-pound plates. Karyn sucked on her index finger, her eyes fastened on mine, then touched it to my lips.

  * * *

  Later, I drove to Sabelle Crown’s bar down by the Lafayette Underpass. Even though the day was bright, the bar’s interior was as dark as the inside of a glove. Sabelle was in a back storage shed, her body crisscrossed with the sunlight that fell through the board walls, watching two black men load vinyl bags bursting with beer cans onto a salvage truck.

  “I wondered when you’d be around,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “He wouldn’t come here. I don’t know where he is, either.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Suit yourself . . .” She turned to the black men. “Okay, you guys got it all? Next week I want you back here on time. No more ‘My gran’mama been sick, Miz Sabelle’ stuff. There’re creatures with no eyes living under the garbage I got back here.”

  She watched the truck, its slatted sides held in place with baling wire, lumber down the alley. “God, what a life,” she said. She sat down on a folding chair next to the brick wall and took a sandwich out of a paper bag. A crazy network of wood stairs and rusted fire escapes zigzagged to the upper stories of the building. She pushed another chair toward me with her foot. “Sit down, Dave, you’re making me nervous.”

  I looked at a smear of something sticky on the seat and remained standing.

  “There’s only one person in the world he cares about. Don’t tell me he hasn’t tried to contact you,” I said.

  “You want a baloney sandwich?”

  “We can still turn it around. But not if he hurts Buford.”

  “Buford was born with a mammy’s pink finger up his butt. Let him get out of his own problems for a change.”

  “How about your father?”

  “Nobody will ever change Daddy’s mind about anything.”

  Her expression was turned inward, heated with an unrelieved anger.

  “What did Buford do to you?” I asked.

  “Who said he did? I love the business I run, fighting with colored can recyclers, mopping out the john after winos use it. Tell Buford to drop by. I’ll buy him a short-dog.”

  “He said he didn’t know you.”

  Her eyes climbed into my face. “He did? Wipe off the chair and sit down. I’ll tell you a story about our new governor.”

  She started to rewrap her sandwich, then she simply threw it in an oil barrel filled with smoldering boards.

  * * *

  That evening it was warm enough to eat supper in the backyard.

  “You have to work in Lafayette tonight?” Bootsie said.

  “Worse. Buford has a breakfast there in the morning. I’ll probably have to stay over.”

  “They’re really making their point, aren’t they?”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  “You mind if I come over?”

  “I think it’s a swell idea.”

  “Oh, I forgot. Somebody left a letter in the mailbox with no stamp on it.”

  “Who put it in there?”

  “Batist said he saw a black man on a bicycle stop out on the road . . . It’s on the dining room table.”

  I went inside and came back out again. My name and address were printed in pencil, in broken letters, on the envelope. Bootsie watched my face while I read the note inside.

  “It’s from him, isn’t it?”

  I lay the sheet of Big Chief notebook paper on the picnic table so she could read it.

  I killed the two blak boys in the tool bin cause they wuldnt let me be. But I still aint to blame for the first one. Tell that bucket of shit done me all this grief he aint going make Baton Rouge. You was good to me. So don’t be standing betwix me and a man that is about to burn in hell wich is where he shud have been sent a long time ago.

  Yours truly,

  Aaron Jefferson Crown

  “He uses a funny phrase. He’s says he ‘aint to blame’ rather than ‘innocent,’ ” I said.

  “He probably can’t spell the word.”

  “No, I remember, he always said ‘I ain’t did it.’ ”

  “Forget the linguistics, Dave. Pay attention to the last sentence. I’m not going to let you take one for Buford LaRose.”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “You’ve got that right. I’m going to have a talk with our friend Karyn.”

  “Don’t complicate it, Boots.”

  “She’s a big girl. She can handle it.”

  “When the sheriff wants me off, he’ll pull me off.”

  “Nice Freudian choice, Streak. Because that’s what she’s doing—fucking this whole family.”

  * * *

  I still had a half hour before I had to drive to the Hotel Acadiana on the Vermilion River, where Buford and Karyn were being hosted by a builders’ association. I sat at the picnic table and took apart my 1911 model U.S. Army .45 automatic that I had bought for twenty-five dollars in Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. It felt cool and heavy in my hand, and my fingers left delicate prints in the thin film of oil on the blueing. I ran the bore brush through the barrel, wiped the breech and the outside of the slide free of the burnt powder left from my last visit to the practice range, slid each hollow-point round out of the magazine, oiled the spring, then replaced them one at a time until the eighth round snugged
tight under my thumb.

  But guns and the sublimated fantasies that went along with cleaning them were facile alternatives for thinking through complexities. The main problem with this case lay in the fact that many of the players were not professional criminals.

  Sabelle’s story was not an unusual one. In small southern towns, since antebellum times, the haves and the have-nots may have either despised or feared one another in daylight, but at night both sexual need and the imperious urge had a way of dissolving the social differences that were so easily defined in the morning hours.

  I say it wasn’t an exceptional story. But that doesn’t mean it is any less an indicator of the people we were. I just didn’t know if it had a bearing on the case.

  He had never really noticed her at New Iberia High. She had been one grade behind him, one of those girls who wore a homemade tattoo on her hand and clothes from the dry goods section of the five-and-dime and trailed rumors behind her that were too outrageous to be believed. She was arrested for shoplifting, then she left school in the eleventh grade and became a waitress in the drive-in and bowling alley at the end of East Main. The summer of his graduation he had gone to the drive-in for beers in his metallic green Ford convertible with three other ballplayers after an American Legion game. He was unshowered, his face flushed with victory and the pink magic of the evening, his uniform grass stained, his spikes clicking on the gravel when he walked to the service window and saw her wiping the moisture off a long-necked Jax with her cupped hand.

  She leaned over the beer box and smiled and looked into his eyes and at the grin at the corner of his mouth and knew that he would be back later.

  He drove his friends home and bathed and changed clothes and sat at one of the plank tables under the live oaks and drank beer and listened to the music that was piped from the jukebox into loudspeakers nailed in the tree limbs, until she finally walked out in the humid glare of the electric lights at midnight and got into his car and reached over and blew his horn to say good night to the other waitresses who stood giggling behind the drive-in’s glass window. He took no notice of her presumption and seemingly proprietary display; he even grinned good-naturedly. No one else was in the lot except an elderly Negro picking up trash and stuffing it in a gunny sack.

  They did it the first time on a back road by Lake Martin, in the way that she expected him to, on the backseat, the door open, his pants and belt around his ankles, his body trembling and awkward with his passion, his jaws already going slack and his voice a weak and hoarse whisper before he had fully penetrated her.

  Three nights later he went by her home, the Montgomery Ward brick house on the coulee, and convinced her to call in sick at work. This time they drove down the Teche toward Jeanerette and did it in the caretaker’s cottage of a plantation built on the bayou by West Indies slaves in 1790, which Buford’s father had bought not because of its iron-scrolled verandas or oak-canopied circular drive or wisteria-entwined gazebos or the mini6 balls drilled in its window frames by Yankee soldiers but simply as a transitory real estate investment for which he wrote a check.

  As the summer passed, Buford and Sabelle’s late-night routine became almost like that of an ordinary young couple who went steady or who were engaged or whose passion was so obviously pure in its heat and intensity that the discrepancy in their family backgrounds seemed irrelevant.

  In her mind the summer had become a song that would have no end. She looked at calendar dates only as they indicated the span of her periods. The inept boy who had trembled on top of her that first night by Lake Martin, and who had sat ashamed in the dark later, his pants still unbuttoned over his undershorts while she held his hand and assured him that it had been a fine moment for her, had gradually transformed into a confident lover, realizing with the exhalation of her breath, the touch of her hands in certain places, the motion of her hips, what gave her the most pleasure, until finally he knew all the right things to do, without being told, and could make her come before he did and then a second time with him.

  His triangular back was corded with muscle, his buttocks small and hard under her palms, his mouth always gentle on her body. From the bed in the caretaker’s cottage she could look down the corridor of oaks that gave onto the Teche, the limbs and moss and leaves swelling in the wind, and through the dark trunks she could see the moon catch on the water like a spray of silver coins, and it made her think of a picture she had once seen in a children’s book of biblical stories.

  The picture was titled the Gates of Eden. As a child she had thought of it as a place of exodus and exclusion. Now, as she held Buford between her legs and pressed him deeper inside, she knew those gates were opening for her.

  But in August he began to make excuses. He had to begin early training for the football season, to be asleep early, to go to Baton Rouge for his physical, to meet with coaches from Tulane and Ole Miss and the University of Texas who were still trying to lure him away from L.S.U.

  On the last Saturday of the month, a day that he had told her he would be in New Orleans, she saw his convertible parked outside Slick’s Club in St. Martinville, with three girls in it, sitting up on the sides, drinking vodka collins that a Negro waiter brought them from inside.

  She was in her father’s car. One headlight was broken and the passenger window was taped over with cardboard and the body leaked rust at every seam. She drove around the block twice, her hands sweating on the wheel, her heart beating, then she pulled up at an angle to the convertible and got out, her words like broken Popsicle sticks in her throat.

  “What?” one of the girls said.

  “Where is Buford? You’re with Buford, aren’t you? This is his car,” Sabelle said. But her voice was weak, apart from her, outside of her skin, somehow shameful.

  The girls looked at one another.

  “Buford the Beautiful?” one of them said. The three of them started to laugh, then looked back at her and fluttered their eyes and blew their cigarette smoke at upward angles into the warm air.

  Then a huge, redheaded crewcut boy, his hair stiff as metal with butch wax, with whiskey-flushed cheeks, in a gold and purple L.S.U. T-shirt, erupted out the door of the club with someone behind him.

  The crewcut boy, who had been an All-State center at New Iberia High, took one look at Sabelle and turned, his grin as wide and obscene as a jack-o’-lantern’s, and held up his palms to the person behind him, saying, “Whoa, buddy! Not the time to go outside. Not unless you want the family jewels on her car aerial.”

  She saw Buford’s face in the neon light, then it was gone.

  She couldn’t remember driving home that night. She lay in the dark in her bedroom and listened to the frogs in the woods, to her father getting up to urinate, to her neighbor, a trash hauler, crushing tin cans in the bed of his truck. She watched an evangelist preacher on the black-and-white television set in her tiny living room, then a movie about nuclear war. The movie made use of U.S. Army footage that showed the effects of radiation burns on living animals that had been left in pens five hundred yards from an atomic explosion.

  As she listened to the bleating of the animals, she wanted everyone in the movie to die. No, that wasn’t it. She believed for the first time she understood something about men that she had never understood before, and she wanted to see a brilliant white light ripple across the sky outside her window, burn it away like black cellophane, yes, a perfect white flame that could superheat the air, eat the water out of the bayou, and instantly wither a corridor of oaks that in the moonlight had become biblical gates in a children’s book.

  But her anger and the relief it gave her melted away to fatigue, and when the dawn finally came it was gray and wet and the rain ran down inside the walls of the house, and when she heard the trash hauler’s wife yelling at her children next door, then striking one of them with a belt, viciously, the voice rising with each blow, Sabelle knew that her future was as linear and as well defined as the nailheads protruding from the buckled linoleum at her feet.<
br />
  * * *

  I hadn’t watched the time. I went to get in my truck and head for Lafayette, but Bootsie’s Toyota was parked behind me. I heard her open Alafair’s bedroom window behind me.

  “Take my car,” she said. “I can use the truck.”

  “See you in Lafayette,” I said.

  “What’s your room number?”

  “I don’t know. Ask at the desk.”

  I backed out into the dirt road and looked once again at my truck parked in the opening of the old barn that we used as a garage. I almost went back and got it, but it had been running fine since I had gotten it out of the shop.

  And I was running late.

  What a bitter line to remember.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Years ago Pinhook Road in Lafayette had been a tree-lined two-lane road that led out of town over the Vermilion River into miles of sugarcane acreage. Just before the steel drawbridge that spanned the river was an antebellum home with arbors of pecan trees in the yard. The river was yellow and high in the spring, and the banks were green and heavily wooded. Feral hogs foraged among the trees. The only businesses along the river were a drive-in restaurant called the Skunk, where college and high school kids hung out, and the American Legion Club on the far side of the bridge, where you could eat bluepoint crabs and drink pitcher beer on a screened porch that hung on stilts above the water.

  But progress and the developers had their way. The oaks were sawed down, the root systems ground into pulp by road graders, the banks of the river covered with cement for parking lots. Overlooking all this new urban environment was the Hotel Acadiana, where builders and developers and union officials from all over the state had come to pay a three-hundred-dollar-a-plate homage to their new governor.

  “Do you hear little piggy feet running toward the trough?” Helen Soileau said. We were standing like posts by one side of the banquet room entrance. A jazz combo was playing inside. Helen kept stoking her own mood.

  “What a bunch . . . Did you see Karyn in the bar? I think she’s half in the bag,” she said.

  “I don’t think she’s entirely comfortable with her new constituency.”