Dixie City Jam

by James Lee Burke

  'They's a man got some other men tied up on the mudflat. Somebody got to get down there. He's fixin' to-' he said.

  'Slow down, podna. It's gonna be all right. He's fixin' to what?' the deputy said.

  'He's got one of them lil chain saws. Back yonder, right by the marsh.'

  The deputy was young and only eight months with his department. He radioed his dispatcher, then made a U-turn in the middle of the highway and bounced down an abandoned board road that wound through thickly spaced trees and mounds of briar bushes webbed with dead morning glory vines. Sheets of stagnant water and mud splashed across his windshield, and an old road plank splintered under one wheel and whanged and clattered against his oil pan. But in the distance, through the blowing mist and the black silhouette of tree trunks, he could see a brilliant white chemical flame burning against the darkness. Then he heard the surge of a chain saw, and a second later, even louder than the erratic, laboring throb and shriek of the saw and the roar of his car engine, the sustained and unrelieved scream of a man that rose into the sky like fingernails scraping on slate.

  The deputy snapped a tie-rod and spun out into a tangle of willow and cypress trees fifty yards before the road dead-ended at the marsh. He pulled his twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, sawed off at the pump and loaded with double-ought buckshot, from the clip on the dashboard and began running with it at port arms through the undergrowth.

  In a clearing by the swamp's edge, next to a parked pickup truck with a camper shell in the bed, a Coleman lantern hissed on the ground like a phosphorous flare. The deputy could see the shadow of a huge man moving about on the far side of the truck. On the ground, partly obscured by the truck's tires, were the shapes of two prone men, their arms pinioned behind them, their faces bloodless and iridescent in the soft rain and the hissing light of the lantern.

  The chain saw was idling on a piece of cardboard now. Then the deputy saw the large man bending over the shapes on the ground, a bouquet of roses scattered about his booted feet, pulling, working at something with his hands. The water and trees in the swamp were black, the shadows in the clearing changing constantly with the frenetic movements of the man, whose hands the deputy now knew were laboring at something tribal and dark, far beyond the moral ken of a youthful law officer, a glimpse into a time before the creation of light in the world, hands as broad as skillets, popping with cartilage, scarlet to the wrist, the fingers wet with the lump of heart muscle that they lifted from a man's chest cavity.

  The deputy vomited on a tree, then tried to step into the clearing with his shotgun aimed at the man who had suddenly raised erect, a rain hat tied under his chin, a disjointed and maniacal stare in his eyes.

  He wanted to yell Down on your face, hands on your head, or any other of the dramatic verbal commands that always reduce television criminals to instant prisoners, but the words hung like pieces of wet newspaper in his throat and died in the heavy air, and he tripped over a tangle of morning glory vines as though he were stumbling about in a dream.

  Then the large man was running into the marsh, his legs ripping through islands of lily pads, water splashing to his waist, his shoulders humped, when the deputy let off the first round and sent a shower of sparks out into the dark. At first the deputy thought he had missed, had fired high, and he jacked another shell into the chamber, aimed at the base of the running man's spine, and pulled the trigger. Then he fired twice more and saw the man's shirt jump, heard the slugs whunk into his back.

  But the running man crashed and tunneled through the flooded cypress and willows and was gone. The deputy's fifth shot peeled away through the trees like marbles rattling down a long wooden chute. He would swear later that he saw a half dozen rents in the shirt of the fleeing man. He would also get off duty that night and get so drunk in a Lockport bar that his own sheriff would have to drive him home.

  'The pickup truck was boosted in Lafitte that morning,' Clete said. 'The guy with the silver beard was Jody Hatcher. He was a four-time loser, including one time down as an accessory in the rape of a child. The guy named Freddy is a blank. The feds think he might be a guy who dynamited a synagogue in Portland, but they're not sure… Streak, look at the bright side. There're two less of these guys on the planet. I tell you something else. They made a real balloon payment when they checked out. The M.E. said there was a look frozen in their eyes even he had trouble dealing with.'

  Batist was cranking an engine out on the bayou. The wind was wrinkling the water and ruffling the cane in the sunlight.

  'None of it makes any sense,' I said.

  'It does to me. Buchalter doesn't leave loose ends.'

  'Why does he go to the trouble of using the vigilante's MO?'

  'Maybe he likes roses. Maybe he has shit for brains.'

  'Maybe we're not dealing with Buchalter, either. What's this stuff about the deputy planting double-ought bucks in his back?'

  'Maybe the guy doesn't want to admit he was so scared he couldn't hit a billboard with bird shot.'

  I stood up to go inside. A pain spread out of my loins into my abdomen.

  'You beat Buchalter, Streak. That's all that counts,' Clete said. 'I don't think I could have cut it. I'd have rolled over.'

  'No, you wouldn't.'

  He crushed his empty beer can in his hand.

  'Let me take y'all to supper tonight,' he said.

  'That sounds very copacetic,' I said.

  'My second day in Vietnam a hard-nosed gunny gave me some advice about fear and memory and all that stuff: "Never think about it before you do it, never think about it after it's over."'

  'No kidding?' I said, with the screen half opened.

  'I tried,' he answered, and held up his palms and made half-moons of his eyebrows.

  chapter twenty-one

  On Saturday morning, when I walked down to the dock, I noticed a pickup truck with a David Duke sticker parked by the shell boat ramp. Inside the bait shop, Alafair and Batist were working behind the counter and two fishermen were eating chilli dogs with forks and drinking bottled beer at one of the tables. Batist did little more than nod when I said good morning.

  'What's wrong with him?' I asked Alafair while we were pulling the canvas awning out on the wires over the spool tables.

  'Batist made a mistake with those men's change,' she answered. 'One man said, the one with the big face, he said, "Louisiana's got fifteen percent unemployment, and this place hires something like that to run the cash register."'

  I went back through the screen door. The two men, both dressed in the khaki clothes of heavy equipment operators, were sharing a smoked sausage now and drinking their beer. I picked up the cash register receipt from their table, flattened it on the counter, added up the price of the beer and sausage and sales tax, rang open the cash drawer, and placed four one-dollar bills and thirty-six cents in coins on their table.

  'This table's closed,' I said, and picked up their beer bottles and the paper shell with the sliced sausage in it.

  'What the hell do you think you're doing?' the larger of the two men said. His head looked like granite, and his closely cropped hair was lightly oiled and shaved neatly on his neck.

  'You were rude to my employee. I don't want your business.'

  'Just hold on a minute, there.'

  'End of discussion, gentlemen.'

  'Well then… well… well then… Fuck you, then.'

  After they were gone, I wiped off their table. Then, before I realized it, Batist had walked down the dock, gotten into his truck, and driven south toward the four corners and his house.

  Oh boy.

  'Watch the store, Alf. I'll be back in about twenty minutes,' I said.

  'Why'd Batist leave?'

  'He has his own way of doing things.'

  He lived in a rambling, paintless house that had been built on to randomly by three generations of his family. The tin roof was orange with rust, the dirt yard strewn with chicken coops, tractor and car parts. On the sagging gallery were stacks of collapsib
le crab traps and an old washing machine that he had turned into a barbecue pit. His small farm had once been part of a plantation where Federal and Confederate troops had fought a furious battle during General Banks's invasion of southwestern Louisiana. Through the pines on the far side of the coulee which bordered Batist's property, you could see the broken shell and old brick pillars and chimneys of a burned-out antebellum home that the Federals first looted and then fired as they pushed a retreating contingent of Louisiana's boys in butternut brown northward into New Iberia. Every spring, when Batist cracked apart the matted soil in his truck patch with a singletree plow, minie balls, shards of broken china, and rusted pieces of canister would peel loose from the earth and slide back off the polished point of the share like the contents of a fecund and moldy envelope mailed from the year 1863.

  I found him in his backyard, raking leaves onto a compost pile that was enclosed with chicken wire. The dappled sunlight through the oak branches overhead slid back and forth across his body like a network of yellow dimes.

  'If you're going to take off early, I'd appreciate your telling me first,' I said.

  'When I tole you you gotta t'row people out the shop 'cause of me?'

  'Those were low-rent white people, Batist. I don't want them on my dock. That's my choice.'

  'If a white man got to look out for a black man, then ain't nothin' changed.'

  'This is what you're not understanding, partner. We don't let those kind of people insult Alafair, Bootsie, you, or me. It doesn't have anything to do with your race.'

  He stopped work and propped his hands on the wood shaft of the rake. His wash-faded denim shirt was split like cheesecloth in back.

  'Who you tellin' this to? Somebody just got off the train from up Nort'?' he said.

  'Next time I'll keep my hand out of it. How's that?'

  'Get mad if you want. T'rowin' them white men out ain't solvin' nothin'. It's about money, Dave. It's always about money. The white man need the nigger to work cheap. That ain't no mystery to black people. It's white folk don't figure it out, no.'

  'I need you to help close up tonight,' I said.

  'I'm gonna be there. Hey, you runnin' round in circles lookin' for this man been killin' dope dealers, this man who hurt you so bad the ot'er day, it don't have nothin' to do with no vigilante. When somebody killin' black people, it don't matter if up in a tree, or breakin' in a jail and hangin' a man on a beam, they can say it's 'cause he raped a white woman, or he killed a white man, or he done some ot'er t'ing. But it's over money. It means the black man stay down at the bottom of the pile. The dumbest nigger in Lou'sana know that.'

  His eyes lingered indulgently on mine. He squeezed the rake handle, and his callused palm made a soft grating sound like leather rubbing against wood.

  Monday morning I returned to work. The first telephone call I received was from Lucinda Bergeron.

  'Fart, Barf, and Itch are no help on Will Buchalter,' she said. 'I don't understand it. Is the guy made out of air?'

  'He didn't seem like it to me.'

  'Then why doesn't he show up in the system?'

  'You can't throw an electronic net over every psychopath in the country.'

  'Somebody has to know who this guy is. Being around him must be like getting up in the morning and biting into a shit sandwich for breakfast.'

  Too much time around squad rooms, Lucinda, I thought.

  'How's Zoot doing?' I said.

  'He's fine, thank you.'

  'What's the problem?'

  'He said you thought he should join "the Crotch." That's swinging-dick talk, isn't it? Quite a vocabulary you guys have.'

  'How about your own?' I said.

  'I'm not the one encouraging a seventeen-year-old boy to drop out of school.'

  'He wanted me to talk to you about joining the Corps. He can get a GED there. I don't think it's the worst alternative in the world.'

  'He can forget about it.'

  'You do him a disservice. Why'd you call, Lucinda?'

  Her anger seemed almost to rise from the perforations in the telephone receiver.

  'That's a good question. When I figure it out, I'll tell you.' Then she made that sound again, like she had just broken a fingernail. A moment later, she said, 'We're operating a sting out of a motel dump by Ursulines and Claiborne. You want in on it?'

  'What for?'

  'We're going to roll over some dealers from the Iberville Project.'

  'You think they're going to tell you something about the vigilante?'

  'They're the bunch most likely to undergo open-heart surgery these days.'

  'You think this will lead you back to Buchalter?'

  'Who knows? Maybe there's more than one guy killing black dope dealers.'

  'Lucinda, listen to me on this one. Buchalter doesn't have any interest in you or Zoot. Don't make it personal. Don't bring this guy into your life.'

  'That sounds strange coming from you.'

  'Read it any way you want. Zoot and I were lucky. The time to go home is after you hit the daily double.'

  'You want in on the sting or not?'

  'What's the address?'

  I talked with the sheriff, arranged to have a deputy stay at the house until I returned sometime that evening, then signed out of the office and went home to change into street clothes. Bootsie's car was gone, and Alafair was at school. I used the Memo button on our telephone answering machine to leave Bootsie a recorded message. I gave her both Lucinda Bergeron's and Ben Motley's extension numbers, and, in case she couldn't reach me any other way, I left the name and address of the motel off Claiborne where the sting was being set up.

  It seemed a simple enough plan.

  On the way back down the dirt road, on the other side of the drawbridge, I saw the flatbed truck, with the conical loudspeakers welded on the roof, of the Reverend Oswald Flat, banging in the ruts and coming toward me in a cloud of dust. Crates of machinery or equipment of some kind were boomed down on the truck bed.

  Oswald Flat recognized my pickup and clanked to a halt in the middle of the road. His pale eyes, which had the strange, nondescript color of water running over a pebbled streambed, stared at me from behind his large, rimless glasses. His wife sat next to him, eating pork rinds out of a brown bag.

  'Where you running off to now?' he said.

  'To New Orleans. I'm in a bit of a hurry, too.'

  'Yeah, I can tell you're about to spot your drawers over something.'

  'Today's not the day for it, Reverend.'

  'Oh, I know that. I wouldn't want to hold you back from the next mess you're about to get yourself into. But my conscience requires that I talk to you, whether you like hit or not. Evidently you got the thinking powers of a turnip, son. Now, just stop wee-weeing in your britches a minute and pull onto the side of the road.'

  'Os, I told you to stop talking to the man like he's a mo-ron,' his wife said, dabbing at the rings of fat under her chin with a handkerchief.

  I parked in a wide spot and walked back toward his truck. Through the slats in one of the crates fastened to the flatbed with boomer chains I could see the round brass helmet, with glass windows and wing nuts, and the rubber and canvas folds of an ancient diving suit.

  'I hate even to ask what you're doing with that,' I said.

  'Bought hit at a shipyard outside Lake Charles-air hoses, compressor, weighted shoes, cutting torch, stuff I don't even know the name of. Now I got to get aholt of a boat.'

  'You're going to try to find that sub?'

  He smiled and didn't answer.

  'Do you know what's in it?' I asked.

  'I'd bet on a lot of Nazis ready for a breath of fresh air.'

  'I think you're going to get hurt.'

  'Hit's something they want. So I'll do everything I can to make sure they don't get hit.'

  'Don't do this, sir.'

  'I cain't fault you. You mean well. But you still don't get hit. You ain't chasing one man, or even a bunch of men. Hit's something wants to
take over the earth and blot out the sun. Hit's evil on a scale the likes of ordinary people cain't imagine.'

  His eyes searched in mine like those of a man who would never find words to adequately explain the enigmas that to him had the bright, clear shape of a dream.

  'You lost your son to forces you couldn't control, Reverend,' I said. 'I lost my wife Annie in a similar way. I was full of anger, and after a while I came to believe the whole earth was a dark place.'

  He was already shaking his head before I could finish.

  'I was on a tanker got torpedoed. Right out yonder,' he said, and pointed toward the southern horizon. 'There ain't no way to describe hit for somebody ain't been there. Holding on to the life jacket of a man whose face is burnt off… Boilers blowing apart under the water… Men crawling around on the hull like ants just before she slips to the bottom… Somebody screaming out there inside an island of flaming oil. You don't never want to hear a sound like that, Mr. Robicheaux.'

  'Sometimes you have to let things go, partner.'

  'They got to make people afraid. That's the plan. Make 'em afraid of the coloreds, the dope addicts, the homeless, the homosexuals, hit don't matter. When they got enough people afraid, that's when they'll move.'

  'Who?'

  'The Book of Revelation says the Beast will come from the sea. In the Bible the sea means politics.'

  'I think you're a decent man. But don't go down after that sub with this junk.'

  'Just leave things alone… Don't be messin'… Let the law handle hit… You put me in mind of a woodpecker tapping away on a metal light pole.' He pursed his lips and began to whistle, then opened the door to the truck cab and reached behind the seat. 'Tell me what you make of this?'

  'An iron rose.'

  'Hit was probably tore off a tomb or a gate. But this morning hit was on my front porch. The stem was stuck through the heart on a valentine card.'

  It was heavy in my palm, the iron black with age, the edges of the petals thin and serrated with rust.