DR07 - Dixie City Jam (14 page)

After I dropped him at his office, I
made one final stop in
New Orleans—at Hippo Bimstine's house, down by the
Mississippi levee.
The rain had almost quit, and he was in his backyard, dipping leaves
out of his swimming pool with a long pole. He wore wraparound black
sunglasses, plaid Bermuda shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt printed with
brown-skinned girls dancing in grass skirts. The fatty rings in his
neck were bright with sweat.

'Yeah, that colored cop Motley told me all about it,' he said.
'This tattooed guy sounds like some kind of zomboid, though. I don't
think we're talking the first team here.'

'I had to learn a hard lesson a long time ago, Hippo. The guy
who blows out your candle is the one who's at your throat before you
ever expect it.'

'A guy with a sword tattooed on his head, shooting dope in his
crotch with an eyedropper? Dave, give me a break. I got serious
enemies. I don't lose sleep over guys who get arrested in filling
station rest rooms.'

'You have a very copacetic attitude, Hippo.'

'You're trying to insult me? That's what we're doing here?'

'I don't think you want me asking you hard questions.'

He set down the pole on a stone bench, removed his sunglasses,
and wiped his face on his sleeve. The air was hot and muggy, and
raindrops dripped from the trees into the pool.

'I got no secrets. Everybody in New Orleans knows my
politics,' he said.

'What's the Jewish Defense Organization?'

'It's the network I belong to. There's no mystery here. We got
a project called Operation Klan Kick. We find out who these cocksuckers
are, where they work, and we make some phone calls. You got a problem
with that, Dave?'

'Do you know why this guy Pelley might talk about "a gift" or
a group called The Sword?'

'What are you talking about
gift
and
sword?
Listen, you know why Tommy Lonighan wants that sub? Because I bother
him. Everything I do bothers him. You know why I bother him? Because
he's got a guilty conscience, like a big, black tumor always eating on
his brain.'

'Over what?'

'He killed my little brother.'

'He did what?'

'He didn't bother to tell you that, huh? We grew up across the
street from each other in the Channel. We were all playing in a
homemade cart, you know, made out of crates and planks with some roller
skates nailed on the bottom. Tommy wheeled my little brother out from
behind a car right into an ice truck. To this day, that sonofabitch has
never said he was sorry.'

'I didn't know that, Hippo.'

'Maybe there's some other stuff you don't know, either, Dave.
Come in my office.'

'What for?'

'Because you don't like the way me and my friends do business.
Because you think these shitheads should have their day in court.
Indulge me, blow five minutes of your day.'

We went inside the stucco cottage he used as an office. He
began clattering through a box of videocassette tapes. He took one out
and read the taped label on it.

'Some friends of mine got this off a bunch of guys who were
watching it for entertainment,' he said. 'In a cinder-block house, up
in a piney woods, just north of Pascagoula. When my friends got
finished with them, they weren't interested in watching old newsreels
anymore. So they really didn't mind giving up their cassette.'

'Who are your friends?'

'Some guys who could be great baseball players, you know what
I mean? Terrific guys with a bat.'

'You think it's a victory to become like the other side?'

'Dave, you're a laugh a minute. That's why I like you. You
already ate lunch, didn't you? Because this film seems to fuck up
people's appetite for some reason.'

He started the tape in the VCR under his television set. The
video was composed of a series of newsreels, Nazi propaganda footage,
and still photographs spliced together in a collage that was almost
like watching distilled evil: the profiles of Jews being superimposed
upon those of rats, Heinrich Himmler reviewing concentration camp
inmates in striped uniforms behind barbed wire, columns of children
with bundles, their faces distorted with terror, marching between rows
of black-helmeted SS; and finally a scene that was the most cruel I had
ever seen on film—nude Polish women, deep in a forest, their
arms
gathered over their breasts and pubic hair, lining up to be shot in the
back of the neck and flung into an open trench.

'On your worst day in Vietnam, you ever see anything like
that, Dave?'

'No.'

'It's back. On an international level. You don't buy it, do
you?'

'Maybe. But it doesn't change anything with us, Hippo. I think
my family and I are swimming into somebody else's field of fire. I
think you're responsible, too.'

He looked down at his hands, which were folded between his
thighs. He looked at them a long time.

'Hippo?'

His sleek, football-shaped face was morose when he looked back
up at me.

'Who can plan how things turn out?' he said. 'What I do or
don't do no longer matters. There're people, I'm talking about cretins
like that pervert at your house, who believe you can find that sub.
It's what they
believe
that counts, Dave.'

'Why's it important to them?'

'Why does a tumblebug like to roll in shit?'

'Cut the Little Orphan Annie routine, Hippo. I'm getting tired
of it.'

'They like shrines.'

'Not good enough.'

'I don't want you killed. Forget about the sub. I'll find it
on my own or I won't. Don't come around here anymore. I'm going to put
out the word that you're a waste of time, you couldn't find
your butt
with both hands. Maybe they'll believe it.'

'It's too late for contrition, Hippo. This guy Buchalter has
left my wife a memory that she'll never quite get rid of.'

'You can put out a hit in this town for five hundred bucks.
Did you know that, Dave? For a hundred, you can have a guy remodeled
with a ball peen hammer and Polaroids left for you in a bar on
Claiborne. You want a phone number? Or you want to keep hanging your
ass out in the breeze and blaming me for your troubles?'

'I didn't know you and Tommy Bobalouba grew up together,
Hippo. It explains a lot.'

'No kidding?'

'No kidding.'

'Sounds real clever.'

'Not really. You're both full of shit!'

'I wish I had a wit like that,' he said, then held up the
videocassette in his hand. 'Then I could explain how there're people
can watch stuff like this for fun in my own country and nobody cares.
Hey, Dave, if they ever fire up the ovens again, I'll probably be one
of the first bars of soap off the conveyor belt. But you and your kind
won't be far behind. You don't mind letting yourself out, do you?'

I drove back toward New Iberia,
through Baton Rouge, across
the wide yellow sweep of the Mississippi into the western sun and the
Atchafalaya marsh. I noticed a wallet stuck down in the crack of the
passenger's seat. It was Clete's and must have slipped out of his back
pocket before I dropped him off at his office. When I got off I-10 at
Breaux Bridge I stopped at a convenience store and called him on a pay
phone, then headed down the back road through St. Martinville, past the
old French church and the spreading oaks on Bayou Teche where
Evangeline and her lover are buried, and through the cooling afternoon
and waving fields of green sugarcane into New Iberia.

I pulled into the dirt drive and parked under the oaks at the
foot of my property. The house was deep in shadow, my neighbor's cane
field and the woods that bordered it silhouetted against a blazing
sunset. Bootsie's car was parked by the side of the house, the trunk
open and sacked groceries still inside. The front rooms of the house
were dark, the rose-print curtains fluttering in the windows, but the
light was on in the kitchen. Batist was out on the dock, pushing pools
of rainwater out of the folds in the awning with a broom handle.

'You need any help closing up?' I called.

'Ain't much bidness this afternoon. The rain brung in
everybody early,' he said.

'Is Alafair down there?'

'She gone to the show wit' some ot'er children.'

I waved at him and walked up the slope toward my house, lifted
two sacks of groceries out of Bootsie's car trunk, and walked around to
the back door. Fireflies had started to light in the trees, and the
dome of lavender sky overhead reverberated with the drone of cicadas.
The house was still; no sound came from the radio on the kitchen
windowsill, which Bootsie almost always listened to while she fixed
supper.

I hefted the grocery sacks in my arms, opened the back screen
with my shoe, and let it slam behind me. The wood planks of the back
porch were littered with pet bowls and dry cat food. Through the
doorway all the surfaces in the kitchen looked bright and clean, but I
could smell okra burning and hear water hissing through a kettle top
and scorching in the fire.

'Bootsie?' I said.

Out front, the tin roof on the gallery pinged in the cooling
air.

'Bootsie?' I said again, hitching the sacks up against my
chest.

I walked into the kitchen and started to set the sacks on the
drain board; I saw her sitting at the breakfast table, motionless, her'
posture rigid, her eyes straight ahead, one hand resting on top of the
other.

'Bootsie, what's wrong?' I said.

Then I saw the film of perspiration on her brow and upper lip,
the flutter in her throat, the rise and fall of her breasts. Her mouth
opened stiffly, and her eyes broke and fastened on mine; they were
charged with a light I had never seen in them before.

'Get out, Dave. Run! Please!' she said, her voice seeming to
crack and rise from a great depth at the same time.

But it was too late. The blond man with a neck like a tree
stump, with hands that had the power of vise grips, stepped out of the
hallway into the light. He wore a Panama hat with a flowered band
tilted on his head and a boyish, lopsided smile. His pleated white
slacks, tropical shirt printed with green and yellow parrots, and
shined, tasseled loafers gave him the appearance of a health enthusiast
you might see on a morning television show, perhaps with a beach at his
back. In the shadow of his hat brim you could hardly see the spray of
blackheads that fanned back from his eyes like cat's whiskers.

'Come on in, Dave. I'm glad you're here. We weren't sure when
you'd be back. We're going to work this thing out. Hey, I was listening
to your records. I love them,' he said.

Behind him, seated on a chair turned backwards in the hallway,
was a small man with defective eyes and a head shaped like a tomato.
There was even a furrow in his scalp, with a twist of hair in it, like
the indentation and stem of a tomato freshly torn from the vine. In his
hands was a military-issue crossbow, the kind sometimes used in special
operations, with a steel-flanged arrow mounted on the bowstring. The
small man's elbows were propped on the back of the chair, and his eyes,
which were crossed, one locking intermittently by the bridge of his
nose, were sighted in their peculiar way along the arrow's shaft at the
side of Bootsie's face.

They had drawn the blinds on the
windows now, and the small
man with crossed eyes was drinking from a bottle of milk at the
breakfast table and spitting pistachio shells into a paper bag. After
he had locked my wrists behind me with the handcuffs he'd found on my
dresser he bound Bootsie's forearms to her chair with electrician's
tape, then crisscrossed it through her breasts and wrapped it around
the back of the chair. The man named Buchalter watched with a small .25
caliber Beretta in the palm of his hand, a torn smile like that of Will
Rogers at the corner of his mouth.

'You remember me?' he said.

'No.'

'You saw me in the helicopter. Out on the gulf,' he said.

'This is of no value to you, or your cause, or whatever it is
you're after,' I said. 'You've got the wrong people.'

He pulled up a chair and sat between me and Bootsie. He pushed
his hat back on his head. A strand of fine blond hair fell in his eyes.

'Are you mad at me? Because of what I did to Mrs. Robicheaux?'
he said.

I stared at his face, his unblinking, inquisitive eyes, and
didn't answer. I could feel the handcuffs biting into my wrists,
cutting off the blood, swelling the veins.

'We don't know why you've come here. You have nothing to gain
by being here. Don't you understand that?' Bootsie said.

'I wouldn't say that. There're always possibilities in every
situation. That's what I like to believe, anyway,' he said, and reached
out, touched my cheek with his hand, and let his glance rove lazily
over my face.

I saw tears well in Bootsie's eyes.

'Try to hear this, Buchalter,' I said. 'I'm a police officer.
I work with people who'll square this one way or another. No matter
what happens here tonight, they'll find you and blow up your shit, I
guarantee it.'

He made shushing noises with his lips, and again his hand
reached up and touched my face and brushed gingerly around the corners
of my mouth. I could feel the grain of his skin against mine and smell
an odor on it like hair oil and the inside of a leather glove.

'You take your hands off him, you degenerate, you vile
animal—' Bootsie said. Her eyes were hot and receded, her
face as gray as cardboard.

Buchalter nodded to the small man with crossed eyes. He spat a
pistachio shell into the paper sack, then walked behind Bootsie's chair
and wound the electrician's tape across her mouth, wrapping it around
and around the thick swirls of her hair at the back of her head,
tightening it across her mouth each time he made a revolution. She
leaned forward and gagged on her tongue.