DR07 - Dixie City Jam (44 page)

'You do them composites with a machine, right? So a lot of
them look alike,' he said.

'Who's the worst guy you ever met inside?' I said.

'They only get so bad. Then they all about the same. They end
up in Camp J.'

'The guy I'm looking for is worse than anybody in Camp J. Do
you believe me when I say that?'

He took the drawing back from my hand and tilted it to catch
the light from the trailer. He tapped on the edges of the face. 'What's
that?' he said.

'You tell me,' I said.

'Dude had dirt in his skin, what d' you call 'em, blackheads
or something, made him look like he was wearing a mask around his eyes.
Look, it was t'ree, four mont's back. I stopped thinking about it.'

'Tell him the rest of hit, Jesse,' Oswald Flat said.

'There ain't no
rest
,' he said. 'Dude
say he give me a hundred dollars to record. I tole him I ain't
interested. That's it. I don't want to talk about it no more.'

'Are you scared of this man?' I said, and kept my eyes on his.

He took a breath that was between anger and exasperation.

'You know the feeling that dude give me? It was like when a
guy get made a slave up at Angola. When somebody turn out a kid, rape
him, then tell him, Haul your lil ass down the Walk. In a half hour
come back with ten dollars. In another half hour, I want ten dollars
more, then I want ten dollars more after that, or the next thing go in
your mouth got a sharp point on it and it don't come out. That's what
that dude's eyes made me think of.'

He became morose and sullen and would say little more. The
moon was up, and road dust and a sheen of diesel oil floated on the
dead current close under the willows. The air was cool and humid and
smelled of bait shrimp someone had left in a bucket. I asked the
reverend to wait for me out front.

'What'd you fall for, Jesse?' I said.

'Guy tried to joog me at a dance. I didn't want to, but I put
him down. Lawyer tole me to plea to manslaughter.'

'You have a family?'

'My wife's at the Charity. She got heart trouble. Our two
daughters is growed up and married, in California.'

'The man I want molested my wife. I'll show you what he does
when he gets his hands on people.' I stood up from my chair.

'What you doing, man? Hey, you taking off your—'

'Buchalter used an electrical generator on me, Jesse. That's
where he attached the terminals. It's quite an experience.'

He propped his hands on his thighs, twisted in his chair, and
focused his eyes on a cane pole that was stuck deep in the roots of a
cypress tree.

'Man, I'm serious, I don't want no more to do with this,' he
said.

'You had this guy made from the jump. You've got to help me,
Jesse.'

He wiped at his face as though insects were in his eyes.

'Dude comes up to me on Royal, right after the gig, offers me
a hundred bucks to play a half hour of my slide at his studio. I say, A
hundred bucks don't cut making a tape. He says it's a demo, he's gonna
offer it around, he's doing me a favor, usually a guy's got to pay for
his own demo.

'I'm looking into that cat's face, I'm thinking he ain't ever
gonna use the word
nigger
,
he ain't gonna call me
boon or tree climber or spear chucker, that ain't his way. He got that
lil smile playing around the corner of his mouth, just like them guys
in
the AB look at you up at the farm. They'll hoe next to you in the
soybean row, won't say nothing to you, chopping all the time like their
mind is full of cool thoughts. That night you go in the shower and that
same dude waiting for you with a shank in his hand.'

'You've got to give me something, Jesse.'

'He say his studio was one hour away. One hour there, one hour
back. He winked at me when he said it.'

'I think you're holding back on me.' I kept my eyes locked on
his.

'I ain't. He called once, man, right here at the trailer. I
tole him I still ain't interested. It sound like he was outdoors, pay
phone maybe. I could hear waves flopping, like on a beach.'

'He never mentioned a place? How about Grand Isle?'

'Not unless they moved Grand Isle over to Miss'sippi.'

'I'm not with you.'

'That day on Royal. I didn't pay the car no mind, but the
plates was from Miss'sippi. That good enough? 'Cause that's all there
is.'

I gave him my business card and picked up my coat from the
chair. He looked out into space while his hand closed and opened on the
card. Then he pressed it back into my palm.

'My wife deserve a trip after all the sickness she been
having. I think we going out to visit our children in California. Be
gone quite a while. You understand what I'm saying?'

The next afternoon, which was Friday
afternoon, Ben Motley
called me from New Orleans.

'Max Calucci dropped the charges against Purcel for destroying
his house,' he said.

'Quite a change of heart.'

'What's your take on it?'

'He probably started sweating marbles when he heard Lonighan's
Indian was in custody. That is, if he's mixed up in the vigilante
killings. The last thing he needs now is legal involvement with the
prosecutor's office. What's the insurance carrier, State Farm, going to
do?'

'They're out of luck if they want to put it on Purcel. The
witnesses now say they don't remember what the guy on the grader looked
like. But they're sure it wasn't Purcel. I left a message on his
recorder, but he didn't call back.'

'He's holed up in a fish camp someplace.'

'I went by his office. A secretary, a temp, was in there. She
said he retrieved the message off the machine. Why doesn't he answer
his calls?'

'I don't know, he's a little irresponsible sometimes. What's
the status on Manuel Ruiz?'

'No bond. We're holding him for the INS. By the way, tell
Purcel it's all right he doesn't call me back. Since he's already got
such good friends in the department. Like Nate Baxter.'

I left a message for Clete at both his office and his
apartment.

That evening I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did
three sets of dead lifts, bench presses, and curls in the backyard. My
neighbor was burning a pile of dried honeysuckle, and the air was hazy
and sweet with the smoke.

Tie it down,
think
, I told myself. What
were the ongoing connections in the Buchalter case?

Music, and now geography.

Two of Buchalter's hired meltdowns, Jack Pelley and Charles
Sitwell, had been in the rock 'n' roll band in the Block at Angola.
Buchalter evidently prowled stores that handled old records, like
Jimmie Ryan's, and had tried to make a studio recording of the slide
guitarist Jesse Viator.

He had been driving a car with Mississippi plates, had access
to a studio an hour from New Orleans, and had made a telephone call
within earshot of a beach.

The German skinhead who had been run down by his friends out
on the salt had been diving from a cabin cruiser he and his friends had
stolen from a berth in Biloxi.

Hippo Bimstine's friends had broken up a meeting of a hate
group with baseball bats and expropriated their Nazi film footage in a
cinder-block house north of Pascagoula.

I lowered the bar to my thighs, then curled it into my chest,
released it slowly again, pausing in midair as the muscles in my arms
burned and filled with blood. The air felt as cool as a knife blade in
my lungs.

Maybe the circle was starting to tighten on Will Buchalter.

Before we went to bed, Bootsie and I ate a piece of pie at the
kitchen table.

'Is something bothering you?' she said.

'I thought Clete might call.'

'Clete has his own way of doing things.'

'You're right about that.'

That night the wind blew hard out of the south, and I could
hear our rental boats knocking against the pilings in the dock. Then it
began to rain, and in my sleep I heard another sound, a distant one,
metal striking methodically against metal, one pinging blow after
another, muffled by the envelope of water it had to travel through.

In my dream I saw a group of Nazi sailors huddled in a
half-flooded compartment, salt water pinwheeling through the leaks
above their heads, their faces white with terror in the dimming light
while they breathed their own stink and the coldness crept above their
loins and one man kept whanging a wrench against the bulkhead.

I woke from the dream, my chest laboring for air. Through the
clicking of the rain in the trees, I could still hear the rhythmic
twang
of metal hitting against metal. I slipped on my loafers and khakis,
pulled a raincoat over my head, and, with a flashlight in my hand, ran
from the back door to the collapsed barn by my duck pond. A sheet of
corrugated tin roofing, purple with rust, was swinging from a broken
beam against the remains of my father's old hay baler.

I pulled the broken beam and sheet of tin loose from the pile
and threw them out into the field.

But I couldn't shake the dream. Why? What did I care about the
fate of Nazis drowned fifty years ago?

The dream was not about submariners. Someone close to me was
in trouble, maybe because of information I had given him, and I was
trying to deny that simple fact.

Where was Clete Purcel?

Tommy Lonighan had turned up the heat
inside his glassed-in
sunporch, even though it was seventy-five degrees outside and he was
wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. My face was moist
with heat, but his skin looked dry and gray; almost flaccid, as though
his glands had stopped secreting; he sat forward
on his reclining chair, his eyes still trying to follow the action in a
movie playing on his VCR, a furious conclusion working in his face.

'This is a piece of crap,' he said, pulled the cassette from
the VCR, and flung it clattering into a pile of other cassettes. 'You
saw that movie
Reservoir Dogs?
It's sickening. A
bunch of made guys are beating up and torturing a cop. No mobbed-up
guys would do something like that. The guy who wrote this don't know
dick about crime. You know what I think, it's the guy wrote this is
sick, not the fucking criminals.'

'Can you help me find Clete or not?'

'Where do you find an elephant? You go to the circus. How
should I know where he is? Ask his punch, the one getting in my face
about Jews.'

'I went by Martina's apartment this morning. No one's seen her
in two or three days.'

'Cause she's with Purcel. 'Cause he's got a warrant on him, he
don't wake up with a boner?'

'You're unbelievable, Tommy.'

'If Max or Bobo did something to him, I'd a heard about it,
and I ain't.' He freed something from a nostril and sniffed dryly. 'Can
I tell you something? I don't give a shit, either. I wish the Caluccis
would try to hit somebody now. Maybe they'd get taken down like they
deserve.'

'You're talking about my friend.'

'I should worry about Purcel? I got maybe three, four months,
then the doctor says he'll start me on morphine. Maybe it ain't gonna
do the job, either. You know why I got all this grief in my life? It's
punishment 'cause I got mixed up with those fucking greasebags. They're
immoral, they got no honor, they—'

'Then why not dime 'em and be done with it, Tommy?'

'I thought you knew.' His eyes were close-set, like BB's.
Blotches of color broke in his face. 'You guys don't use telephones,
you don't talk to each other?'

'What is it?' I said.

'Late yesterday, I spilled my guts, everything,' he said. 'I
haven't been charged yet, but they'll do that Monday.'

I waited. The room was ablaze with sunlight and
color—the
deep blue tile floor, the cane deck furniture and canary yellow
cushions—but in its midst Tommy looked stricken, like a man
who had
mistakenly thought the source of his abiding shame had at least become
known and accepted if not forgiven.

'Max and Bobo wanted to scare the coloreds out of the trade in
the projects,' he said. 'They used Manny to do three guys. They told
him these coloreds were evil spirits and had to be killed 'cause they
were selling dope and corrupting little kids. He comes from a bunch of
headhunters or cannibals that's got a flower and death cult or
something. Or maybe Max made him think he did after he got ahold of
this documentary on these prehistoric people that's running around in
South America. I don't know about that stuff.'

He scowled into space. White clouds were tumbling in the sky,
leaves blowing across the freshly clipped lawn.

'You think I'm toe jam, don't you?' he said.

I kept my face empty and brushed at the crystal on my watch
with my thumb.

'A couple of button guys did the other hits, I heard Jamaicans
out of Miami,' he said. 'It's been putting boards in my head. I feel
miserable. It's like nothing's any good anymore. There's some kind of
smell won't wash out of my clothes. Here, you smell it?'

He extended his shirt cuff under my nose.

'Where you going?' he said.

'I've got to find Clete.'

'Stay. I'll fix some chicken sandwiches.'

'Sorry.'

He blew his nose in a Kleenex and dropped the Kleenex in a
paper bag full of crumpled tissue, many of them flecked with blood.

'You seen Hippo?' he said.

'We're not on good terms, I'm afraid.'

'He ain't such a bad guy.' He stared disjointedly at the
leaves blowing against the windows. 'You see him again, tell him I said
that.'

'Sure.'

'You want to take some movie cassettes? I get them for two
bucks from a guy sells dubs in Algiers.'

'Dubs?'

'What world you hang out in, Dave? Anything that's
electronically recorded today gets dubbed and resold. Those music tapes
you see in truck stops, you think Kenny Rogers sells his tapes for
three-ninety-five? What, I'm saying the wrong thing again?'