DR07 - Dixie City Jam (25 page)

'I got it down to three. Look, get me into a hospital and
maybe I can he'p y'all a whole lot better.'

'It doesn't work that way, partner,' I said, and slipped my
business card under the flat of his arm. 'Give us a call when your
memory clears up.'

A half hour later Lucinda and I took coffee and pastry from a
bakery downtown and sat on a stone bench in a small green park by the
capitol building. It was a blue-gold day, with a breeze off the
Mississippi, and the grass in the park looked pale green in the
sunlight.

'Why'd you keep asking him about a sword?' Lucinda said.

'I think it's the name or the logo of a group of neo-Nazis or
Aryan supremacists of some kind.'

'The tattoo looked like a bayonet to me.'

'Maybe. But he's a speed addict, too, just like the guy who
electrocuted himself in y'all's custody. Buchalter called me once
during what sounded like the downside of a drug bender. Maybe like
Hippo Bimstine says, we're talking about speed-fried Nazi zomboids.'

'You think Waylon Rhodes will give us anybody?'

'He'll try to, when he starts to come apart. But by that time
you won't be able to trust anything he tells you.'

'I believe him about the hit. When they lie, they're not
vague.'

I took a bite out of my pastry and drank from my paper cup.

'Why the silence?' she asked.

'No reason. What were you going to tell me about Nate Baxter?'

'I don't think he has designs on me, that's all.'

I nodded.

'A white supervisor trying to get into a black female
officer's pants doesn't make his kind of racial remarks,' she said.

'You don't have to tell me anything about Nate Baxter,
Lucinda.'

'He said Ben Motley got where he is by spitting watermelon
seeds and giving whitey a lot of "yas-suhs." He said I'd never have to
do that, because I'm smart and I have a nice ass. How do you like that
for charm?'

'Nate's a special kind of guy.'

'I don't think so. Not for a black woman, anyway.'

'Don't underestimate him, Lucinda. He raped and sodomized a
hooker in the Quarter. Then he ran her out of town before anybody from
Internal Affairs could talk to her.'

She stopped eating and looked across the grass at some
children running through the camellia bushes. Then she set the pastry
down on a napkin in her lap and brushed the powdered sugar off her
fingers.

'I was raised by my aunt,' she said. 'She was a prostitute. A
white man tried to rape her behind a bar on Calliope. She shot him to
death. What do you think about that?'

'Did she go up the road for it?'

'Yes.'

'So even in death he raped her. Drop the dime on Baxter if he
gets near you or makes another off-color remark.'

She stood up and walked cooly to a trash can, dropped her
paper cup and unfinished pastry in it, and sat back down on the stone
bench. Her flowered blouse puffed with air in the breeze.

'Don't try to stonewall me about this contract stuff,' she
said. 'Who is it the greaseballs don't clip?'

'Politicians.'

'Who else?'

'Ordinary people who are on the square. Particularly
influential ones.'

'Come on, Robicheaux.'

'Would you not call me by my last name, please? It reminds me
of the army.'

'Who else?'

'They don't do made guys without the commission's consent.'

'That's it?'

'Cops,' I said.

She looked me evenly in the eyes, biting down softly on the
corner of her lip.

That night I dreamed of a desolate
coastline that looked like
layered white clay. On it was a solitary tree whose curled, dead leaves
were frozen against an electrical blue sky. The ocean should have been
teeming with fish, but it, like the land, had been stricken, its
chemical green depths empty of all life except the crew of a German
submarine, who burst to the surface with emergency air tanks on their
backs, their bone-hard, white faces bright with oil. They gathered
under the tree on the beach, looking over their new estate, and I
realised then that they had the jowls and mucus-clotted snouts of
animals.

They waited for their leader, who would come, as they had,
from the sea, his visage crackling with salt and light, and, like
Proteus, forever changing his form to make himself one of us.

A psychologist would smile at the dream and call it a world
destruction fantasy, the apocalyptic fear that a drunk such as myself
carries around in his unconscious or that you see on the faces of
religious fundamentalists at televised revivals.

But when I woke from the dream I sat in the dark and thought
about the preacher's words, about things coming apart at the center,
about blood-dimmed tides and mackerel-crowded seas that could wrinkle
from continent to continent with the reverberating brass gong of the
millennium, and I did not sleep again until the trees outside were
black and stiff with the coming of the gray dawn.

Two days later, at five-thirty on
Saturday morning, Bootsie
heard a car turn into our driveway. She stood at the window in her
nightgown and looked through the curtain.

'It's somebody in a pink Cadillac,' she said.

'Maybe he's just turning around,' I said from the bed. There
was mist in the trees outside and a cool smell blowing through the
window.

'No, they're just sitting there. Two people.'

'Batist probably hasn't opened the shop yet. I'll go down,' I
said.

'Dave—'

'It's all right. Bad guys don't park in your drive at sunrise.'

I dressed in a pair of khakis, old loafers, and a denim shirt,
and walked out on the gallery. The light was on in the bait shop. The
Cadillac was parked in the shadows under the trees, but I could see two
figures in the front seat. The air smelled like flowers and damp earth.
I walked across the yard toward the car. To my right I could hear
Tripod scratching against the screen on his hutch.

Tommy Bobalouba got out on the driver's side, dressed in
striped, dark brown slacks, tasseled loafers, and a form-fitting
canary-yellow polo shirt. Across the bridge of his nose was a thick,
crusted scab where I had pistol-whipped him. He was smiling. He put his
finger to his lips and motioned me away from the automobile.

'Charlotte's sleeping,' he whispered. 'She ain't used to being
up this early.'

'What are you doing at my house, Tommy?'

'It's the weekend. Sometimes I like a drive in the country.
Maybe I can rent a boat, you can take us out.'

He combed his white hair while he gazed approvingly at the
surroundings.

'You didn't come here to square a beef, did you, partner?' I
said.

'You got a cup of coffee?'

'We can walk down to the bait shop.'

'The bait shop? What is this, the white trash treatment I get?'

'My wife's not dressed yet.'

'I want a favor from you.'

'Tommy, I'm having a hard time with your presence here.'

'What? I'm a germ?'

'I'm the guy who hit you across the face with a forty-five.
Now you're at my house.'

'I don't hold a grudge.'

'Good. Then you won't be offended when I recommend that you
give me a call during business hours at the office.'

'You made some remarks at my house. About stuff that's maybe
on my conscience. So maybe I'm gonna try to set it right. You don't
want to help me, then run it up your hole.'

'I'd appreciate it if you'd watch what you say around my
house.'

The door on the passenger's side opened, and the ash blond
lady named Charlotte got out and stretched sleepily.

'Oh, Mr. Robicheaux, our favorite daytime nightmare,' she said.

'We're gonna have some coffee. Down at his shop,' Tommy said.

'Breakfast among the worms. How could a girl ask for more?'
she said.

'His wife ain't up yet,' Tommy said. Then with his back to the
woman, he moved his lips silently so I could read the words
Give
me some fucking help, man
.

I took a quiet breath and put my hands in my back pockets.

'I apologize for not inviting y'all in,' I said. 'But Batist
has some doughnuts and some ham-and-egg sandwiches that I can heat up.'

'Boy, that sounds good. I could go for that,' Tommy said. He
hit me hard on the arm with the flat of his hand.

The three of us walked down the slope to the dock. I couldn't
begin to explain Tommy Blue Eyes' mercurial behavior. He walked on the
balls of his feet, talking incessantly, his shoulders rolling, his eyes
flicking from the bayou to the outboards leaving the dock to a flight
of black geese dissecting the early sun.

He and the woman named Charlotte sat at a spool table under
the canvas awning while I went inside and brought out coffee and
doughnuts on a tray.

'Call Hippo for me,' Tommy said.

'What for?'

'Maybe I don't want to be enemies anymore. Maybe we ought to
work together.'

'Call him yourself,' I said.

'I get three words out and he hangs up.'

'Write him a letter.'

'What I look like, St. Valentine or something?' He glanced at
his wristwatch, then shook it close to his ear. 'You got the time?'

'It's ten to six,' I said.

'Look, why should Hippo and me be always cutting a piece out
of each other? We're both in the casino business. Hippo's a good
businessman, he'd be a good partner, he doesn't steal from people. I
want you to tell him I said that.'

'I think you got some damn nerve, Tommy.'

He took his coffee cup away from his mouth and pointed four
stiffened fingers into his chest. 'You come out to my house, you give
me a lecture on conscience and responsibility, you hit me in the face
with a gun, now I get another lecture?'

'Is there anything else you want to tell me? I have some work
to do.'

He pushed a knuckle against his teeth, then clamped his hand
across my forearm when I attempted to rise. He took it away and made a
placating gesture.

'It's not easy for me to talk to Hippo,' he said. I saw his
blue eyes fill with a pained, pinched light. 'He just doesn't listen,
he sees it one way, it's always been like that, he'd just walk off when
I tried to say I was sorry about his little brother. I tried a whole
bunch of times.'

'When?'

'When we were growing up.'

'It's between you and him, Tommy. But why don't you say it to
him once more, as honestly as you can, then let it go?'

'
He's
not. He sees me on the street, he
looks at me like I was butt crust.'

'So long, Tommy. About the other day, I didn't want to hit
you. I'm sorry it happened.' I nodded to the woman as I got up to go.

He wiped part of a doughnut off his mouth with his wrist.

'We're gonna rent a boat and some gear, do some fishing,' he
said. 'If you're around later, we'll buy you lunch.'

'I'm tied up. Thanks, anyway,' I said, and walked up the dock
toward my house just as Alafair was coming down the slope, with Tripod
on his chain, to get me for breakfast.

At noontime Batist and I were outside in the cool lee of the
bait shop, serving our customers barbecue chickens from our
split-barrel pit, when I saw Tommy and the woman named Charlotte coming
up the bayou in one of our boat rentals. The engine was out of the
water, and I Tommy was paddling against the current, his face heated
and knotted with frustration as the boat veered from side to side. It
had rained hard at midmorning, then had stopped abruptly. The woman's
hair and sundress were soaked. She looked disgusted.

A few minutes later they came into the bait shop.

Without asking permission the woman went around behind the
counter and unrolled a huge wad of paper towels to dry her hair.

'I owe you some money. I ran the motor over a log or
something,' Tommy said.

'It's in the overhead,' I said.

He hit on the surface of his watch with his fingers.

'What time is it?' he said.

I pointed at the big electric clock on the wall.

'Twelve-fifteen. Boy, we were out there a long time,' he said.
'A
snake ate my fish, too. It came right up to the boat and sucked it off
my stringer. Are they supposed to do that?'

'Take an ice chest next time.'

'That's a good idea.' He opened two long-necked beers from the
cooler and gave one to the woman, who sat in a chair by a table,
rubbing the towels back over her long hair. 'I guess we better hit the
road. I didn't know it was already afternoon.'

They went out the screen door, then I saw Tommy stop in the
shade,
tap one fist on top of another, turn in a circle, then stop again. He
looked back through the screen at me and raised his fists momentarily
in a boxer's position, as though he wanted to spar. He reminded me of a
mental patient spinning about in a bare room.

I walked outside. It was breezy and cool in the shade, and the
sun was bright, like yellow needles, on the water.

'What's on your mind, podna?' I said.

He craned a crick out of his neck and pumped his shoulders.
The cords in his neck flexed like snakes. Then he shook my hand without
speaking. His palm felt like the hide on a roughened baseball.

'You got to understand something, Dave. You mind if I call you
Dave?'

'You always have, Tommy.'

'I go by the rules. I don't break rules, not the big ones,
anyway. The greaseballs got theirs, cops got 'em, guys like me, micks
who've made good from the Channel I'm talking about, we got ours, too.
So when somebody breaks the rules, I got no comment. But I don't want
to get hurt by it, either. You understand what I'm saying here?'

'No.'

'I never hurt anybody who didn't try to do a Roto-Rooter on me
first.'

'A hit's going down that you don't like?'

'I said that? Must be a ventriloquist around here.'