DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (11 page)

     
It took twenty
minutes to get him on the phone.

     
"You was right.
I should have listened to you. A bunch of the black boys caught him in the tool
shack this morning," the captain said.

     
He'd had to walk from
the field and he breathed hard into the telephone.

     
"Is he
dead?" I asked.

     
"You got it
turned around. He killed two of them sonsofbitches with his bare hands and
liked to got a third with a cane knife. That old man's a real shitstorm, ain't
he?"

b
ootsie alafair
and
I
were eating
supper in the kitchen that evening when the phone
rang on the counter. Bootsie got up to answer it. Outside, the clouds in the
west were purple and strung with curtains of rain.

     
Then I heard her say,
"Before I give the phone to Dave, could you put Karyn on? I left her a
couple of messages, but she probably didn't have time to call. . . I see . . .
When will she be back? . . . Could you ask her to call me, Buford? I've really
wanted to talk with her . . . Oh, you know, those things she said about Dave to
the sheriff. . . Hang on now, here's Dave."

     
She handed me the
phone.

     
"Buford?" I
said.

     
"Yes." His
voice sounded as though someone had just wrapped a strand of piano wire around
his throat.

     
"You all
right?" I said.

     
"Yes, I'm fine,
thanks . . . You heard about Crown?" he said.

     
"A guard at the
prison told me."

     
"Does this give
you some idea of his potential?"

     
"I hear they
were cruising for it."

     
"He broke one
guy's neck. He drowned the other one in a barrel of tractor oil," he said.

     
"I couldn't
place your friend this morning. He's Clay Mason, isn't he? What are you doing
with him, partner?"

     
"None of your
business."

     
"That guy was
the P. T. Barnum of the acid culture."

     
"As usual, your
conclusions are as wrong as your information."

     
He hung up the phone.
I sat back down at the table.

     
"You really
called Karyn LaRose?" I asked.

     
"Why? Do you
object?" she said.

     
"No."

     
She put a piece of
chicken in her mouth and looked at me while she chewed. My stare broke.

     
"I wish I hadn't
gone out to see her, Boots."

     
"He's mixed up
with that guru from the sixties?" she said.

     
"Who knows? The
real problem is one nobody cares about."

She waited.

     
"Aaron Crown had
no motivation to kill Ely Dixon. I'm more and more convinced the wrong man's in
prison," I said.

     
"He was in the
Klan, Dave."

     
"They kicked him
out. He busted up a couple of them with a wood bench inside a Baptist
church."

     
But why, I thought.

     
It was a question
that only a few people in the Louisiana of the 1990s could answer.

H
is name was Billy Odom and he ran a junkyard on a stretch of state
highway west of Lafayette. Surrounded by a floodplain of emerald green rice
fields, the junkyard seemed an almost deliberate eyesore that Billy had
lovingly constructed over the decades from rusted and crushed car bodies, mountains
of bald tires, and outbuildings festooned with silver hubcaps.

     
Like Aaron Crown, he
was a north Louisiana transplant, surrounded by papists, blacks who could speak
French, and a historical momentum that he had not been able to shape or influence
or dent in any fashion. His face was as round as a moonpie under his cork sun
helmet, split with an incongruous smile that allowed him to hide his thoughts
while he probed for the secret meaning that lay in the speech of others. A
Confederate flag, almost black with dirt,
was nailed among the
yellowed calendars on the wall of the shed where he kept his office. He kept
licking his lips, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes squinting as though he
were staring through smoke.

     
"A fight in a
church? I don't call it to mind," he said.

     
"You and Aaron
were in the same klavern, weren't you?"

     
His eyes shifted off
my face, studied the motes of dust spinning in a shaft of sunlight. He cocked
his head philosophically but said nothing.

     
"Why'd y'all run
him off?" I asked.

     
'"Cause the man
don't have the sense God give an earthworm."

     
"Come on,
Billy."

     
"He used to make
whiskey and put fertilizer in the mash. That's where I think he got that stink
at. His old woman left him for a one-legged blind man."

     
"You want to
help him, Billy, or see him hung out to dry at Angola?"

     
His hands draped over
his thighs. He studied the backs of them.

     
"It was 'cause
of the girl. His daughter, what's her name, Sabelle, the one runs the bar down
at the Underpass."

     
"I don't follow
you."

     
"The meeting was
at a church house. She wasn't but a girl then, waiting outside in the pickup
truck. Two men was looking out the window at her. They didn't know Crown was
sitting right behind them.

     
"One goes, 'I
hear that's prime.'

     
"The other one
goes, 'It ain't bad. But you best carry a ball of string to find your way back
out.'

     
"That's when
Crown put the wood to them. Then he tore into them with his boots. It taken
four of us to hold him down."

     
"You kicked him
out of the Klan for defending his daughter?" I said.

     
Billy Odom pried a
pale splinter out of his grease-darkened desk and scratched lines in his skin
with it.

     
"When they're
young and cain't keep their panties on, the old man's in it somewhere," he
said.

     
"What?"

     
"Everybody had
suspicioned it. Then a woman from the welfare caught him at it and told the
whole goddamn town. That's how come Crown moved down here."

     
"Aaron and his
daughter?" I said.

T
he man who had seen the accident did not report it for almost
three days, not until his wife was overcome with guilt herself and went to a
priest and then with her husband to the St. Martin Parish sheriff's office.

     
Helen Soileau and I
stood on the levee by a canal that rimmed Henderson Swamp and watched a diver
in a wetsuit pull the steel hook and cable off the back of a wrecker, wade out
into the water by a row of bridge pilings, sinking deeper into a balloon of
silt, then disappear beneath the surface. The sky was blue overhead, the moss
on the dead cypress lifting in the breeze, the sun dancing on the sandbars and
the deep green of the willow islands. When a uniformed sheriff's deputy kicked
the winch into gear and the cable clanged tight on the car's frame, a gray
cloud of mud churned to the surface like a fat man's fist.

     
Helen walked up on
the wood bridge that spanned the canal, rubbed her shoe on one unrailed edge,
and walked back down on the levee again. The front tires of the submerged car,
which lay upside down, broke through a tangle of dead hyacinths.

     
The man who had seen
the accident sat on the levee with his wife at his side. He wore a greasy cap,
with the bill pulled low over his eyes.

     
"Go through it
again," I said.

     
He had to crane his
head upward, into the sunlight, when he spoke.

     
"It was dark. I
was walking back to the camp from that landing yonder. There wasn't no moon. I
didn't see everything real good," he replied. His wife looked at the steel
cable straining against the automobile's weight, her face vaguely ashamed, the
muscles collapsed.

     
"Yes, you
did," I said.

     
"He fishtailed
off the levee when he hit the bridge, and the car went in. The headlights was
on, way down at the bottom of the canal."

     
"Then what
happened?" I asked.

     
He flexed his lips
back on his teeth, as though he were dealing with a profound idea.

     
"The man floated
up in the headlights. Then he come up the levee, right up to the hard road
where I was at. He was all wet and walking fast." He turned his face out
of the sunlight again, retreated back into the shade of his cap.

     
I tapped the edge of
my shoe against his buttock.

     
"You didn't
report an accident. If we find anything in that car we shouldn't, you'd better
be in our good graces. You with me on this?" I said.

     
His wife, who wore a
print-cotton dress that bagged on her wide shoulders, whispered close to his
face while her hand tried to find his.

     
"He tole me to
forget what I seen," the man said. "He put his mout' right up against
mine when he said it. He grabbed me. In a private place, real hard." The
flush on the back of his neck spread into his hairline.

     
"What did he
look like?" Helen said.

     
"He was a white
man, that's all I know. He'd been drinking whiskey. I could smell it on his
mout'. I ain't seen him good 'cause the moon was down."

     
"You see that
power pole there? There's a light on it. It comes on every night," I said.

     
The diver walked out
of the shallows next to the overturned Lincoln as the winch slid it up on the
mud bank. All the windows were closed, and the interior was filled from the
roof to the floor with brown water. Then, through the passenger's side, we saw
a brief pink-white flash against the glass, like a molting fish brushing
against the side of a dirty aquarium.

     
The diver tried to
open the door, but it was wedged into the mud. He got a two-handed ball peen
hammer, with a head the size of a brick, and smashed in the passenger window.

 
    
The water burst through the folded glass,
peppering the levee with crawfish, leeches, a nest of ribbon-thin cottonmouths
that danced in the grass as though their backs were broken. But those were not
the images that defined the moment.

     
A woman's hand, then
arm, extended itself in the rushing stream, as though the person belted to the
seat inside were pointing casually
to an object in the grass.
The fingers were ringed with costume jewelry, the nails painted with purple
polish, the skin eaten by a disease that had robbed the tissue of its color.

     
I squatted down next
to the man who had seen the accident and extended my business card on two
fingers.

     
"He didn't try
to pull her out. He didn't call for help. He let her drown, alone in the darkness.
Don't let him get away with this, podna," I said.

C
lete called the bait shop Saturday morning, just as I was laying
out a tray of chickens and links on the pit for our midday fishermen.

     
"You got a boat
for rent?" he asked.

     
"Sure."

   
  
"Can you rent the guy with me some
gear?"

     
"I have a rod he
can borrow."

     
"It's a fine day
for it, all right."

     
"Where are
you?"