DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (18 page)

     
"We're way up
the Mekong, Dave. Hang your buzzer out," Clete said.

     
I took out my badge
holder and hooked it through the front of my belt, listened to somebody shatter
a tight rack and slam the cue stick down on the table's edge, then walked
through the entrance into the darkness inside.

     
The low ceiling
seemed to crush down on the pool shooters like a fist. The bar and the pool
tables ran the length of the building, a tin-hooded lamp creating a pyramid of
smoky light over each felt rectangle. No one looked directly at us; instead,
our presence was noted almost by osmosis, the way schooled fish register and adjust
to the proximity of a predator, except for one man, who came out of the rest
room raking at his hair with a steel comb, glanced toward the front, then
slammed out of a firedoor.

     
Jimmy Ray Dixon was
at a card table in back, by himself, a ledger book, calculator, a filter-tipped
cigar inside an ashtray, and a stack of receipts in front of him. He wore a
blue suit and starched pink shirt with a high collar, a brown knit tie and gold
tie pin with a red stone in it.

     
"I seen you on
TV, still frontin' points for the man killed my brother," he said, without
looking up from his work. He picked up a receipt with his steel hook and set it
down again.

     
"I need your
help," I said. I waited but he went on with his work. "Sir?" I
said.

     
"What?"

 
    
"Can we sit down?"

     
"Do what you
want, man."

     
Clete went to the bar
and got a shot and a beer, then twisted a chair around and sat down next to me.

     
"Somebody put a
hit on Mingo Bloomberg," I said.

     
"I heard he hung
himself from a water pipe in y'all's jail," Jimmy Ray said.

     
"Word gets
around fast."

     
"A dude like
that catch the bus, people have parades."

     
"He told me a
black guy out of Miami had a contract on him. He said a guy who looks like a
six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit."

     
Clete scraped a
handful of peanuts from a bowl on the next table, his eyes drifting down the
bar.

     
"Maybe you ought
to give some thought to where you're at," Jimmy Ray said.

     
"You heard about
a mechanic out of Miami?" I said.

     
"I tell you how
I read this sit'ation. You put a snitch jacket on a guy and jammed him up so he
didn't have no place to run. So maybe somebody's conscience bothering him, know
what I mean?" he said.

     
"I think the
same hitter popped Lonnie Felton's scriptwriter."

     
"Could be. But
ain't my bidness."

     
"What is your
business?"

     
"Look, man, this
is what it is. A smart man got his finger in lots of pies. Don't mean none of
them bad. 'Cause this guy's a brother, you ax me if I know him. I don't like to
give you a short answer, but you got a problem with the way you think. It ain't
much different than that cracker up at Angola."

     
Clete leaned forward
in his chair, cracked the shell off a peanut, and threw the peanut in his
mouth.

  
   
"You still pimp, Jimmy Ray?" he
asked, his eyes looking at nothing.

     
"You starting to
burn your ticket, Chuck."

     
"I count eight
bail skips in here. I count three who aren't paying the vig to the Shylock who
lent them the bail. The guy who went out the door with his hair on fire snuffed
one of Dock Green's hookers in Algiers," Clete said.

     
"You want to use
the phone, it's a quarter," Jimmy Ray said.

     
"No black hitter
works the town without permission. Why let him get the rhythm while you got the
blues?" Clete said.

     
"All my blues is
on the jukebox, provided to me by Mr. Jerry Joe Plumb, boy you grew up
with," Jimmy Ray said to me.

     
"Crown has to
stay down for Buford LaRose to go to Baton Rouge.
      
Tell me you're not part of this, Jimmy Ray," I said.

     
He looked up at the
clock over the bar. "The school kids gonna be out on the street. Y'all got
anything in your car you want to keep? . . . Excuse me, I got to see how much
collards I can buy tonight."

     
He began tapping
figures off a receipt onto his calculator.

T
hat evening, under a gray sky, Alafair and I raked out the shed
and railed horse lot where she kept her Appaloosa. Then we piled the straw and
dried-out green manure in a wheelbarrow and buried it in the compost pile by
our vegetable garden. The air was cool, flecked
with rain, and
smelled like gas and chrysanthemums.

     
"Who's that man
down on the dock, Dave?" Alafair said.

     
He was squatted down
on his haunches, with his back to us. He wore a fedora, dark brown slacks, and
a scuffed leather jacket. He was carving a stalk of sugarcane, notching thick
plugs out of the stalk between his thumb and the knife blade, feeding them off
the blade into his mouth.

     
"He was in the
shop this afternoon. He has a red parachute tattooed on his arm," she
said.

     
I propped my foot on
the shovel's blade and rested my arm across the end of the shaft. "Jerry
Joe Plumb," I said.

     
"Is he a bad
man?"

     
"I was never
sure, Alf. Tell Bootsie I'll be along in a minute."

     
I walked down to the
end of the dock and leaned my palms on the rail. Jerry Joe continued to look
out at the brown current from under the brim of his fedora. He folded his
pocketknife against the heel of his hand. The blade was the dull color of an
old nickel.

     
"You figure I
owe you?"

     
"What for?"

     
"I took
something out of your house a long time ago."

     
"I don't
remember it."

     
"Yeah, you do. I
resented you for it."

     
"What's up,
partner?"

     
The scar at the
corner of his eye looked like bunched white string.

     
"My mom used to
clean house for Buford LaRose's parents . . . The old man could be a rotten
bastard, but he gave me a job rough-necking in West Texas when I was just
seventeen and later on got me into the airborne. It was the way the old man
treated Buford that always bothered me, maybe because I was part responsible
for it. You think they won't take you off at the neck because they're rich?
It's not enough they win; somebody's got to lose. What I'm saying is,
everybody's shit flushes. You're no exception, Dave."

     
"You're not
making any sense."

     
"They'll grind
you up."

     
What follows is my
best reconstruction of Jerry Joe's words.

B
y San Antone I'd
run out of bus
and food money
as well as confidence in dealing with the Texas highway patrol, who believed
patching tar on a country road was a cure for almost anything. So I walked five
miles of railroad track before I heard a doubleheader coming up the line and
took off running along the gravel next to a string of empty flat wheelers,
that's boxcars with no springs, my duffle bag banging me in the back, the cars
wobbling across the switches and a passenger train on the next track coming up
fast, but I worked the door loose, running full-out, flung my duffle on the
floor, and crawled up inside the warm smell of grain sacks and straw blowing in
the wind and the whistle screaming down the line.

     
It was near dawn when
I woke up, and I knew we were on a trestle because all you could hear was the
wheels pinching and squealing on the rails and there wasn't any echo off the
ground or the hillsides. The air was cold and smelled like mesquite and
blackjack and sage when it's wet, like no one had ever been there before, no
gas-driven machines, no drovers fording the river down below, not even Indians
in the gorges that snaked down to the bottoms like broken fingers and were
cluttered with yellow rocks as big as cars.

     
There were sand flats
in the middle of the river, with pools of water in them that were as red as
blood, and dead deer that turkey buzzards
had eaten from the
topside down so that the skeletons stuck out of the hides and the buzzards used
the ribs for a perch. Then we were on a long plateau, inside an electric storm,
and I begin to see cattle pens and loading chutes and busted windmills that
were wrapped with tumbleweed, adobe houses with collapsed walls way off in the
lightning, a single-track dirt road and wood bridge and a state sign that
marked the Pecos, where the bottom was nothing but baked clay that would crack
and spiderweb under your boots.

     
The old man, Jude
LaRose, told me the name of the town but not how to get to it. That was his
way. He drew lines in the dirt, and if you fit between them, he might be generous
to you. Otherwise, you didn't exist. The problem was you never knew where the
lines were.

     
I hadn't realized I'd
climbed aboard a hotshot, a straight-through that doesn't stop till it reaches
its destination. I dropped off on an upgrade, just before another trestle, hit
running, and slid all the way down a hill into a wet sand flat flanged with
willows that had once been a riverbed and was pocked with horses hooves and
deer tracks that were full of rainwater. I walked all day in the rain, crossed
fences with warning signs on them in Spanish and English, saw wild horses
flowing like shadows down the face of a ridge, worked my way barefoot across a
green river with a soap-rock bottom and came out on a dirt readjust as a
flatbed truck boomed down with drill pipe and loaded with Mexicans sleeping
under a tarp ground through a flooded dip in the road and stopped so the man
leaning against the top of the cab with an M-1 carbine could say, "Where
you think you goin', man?"

     
I guess I looked like
a drowned cat. I hadn't eaten in two days, and my boots were laced around my
neck and the knees were tore out of my britches. He had on a blue raincoat and
a straw hat, with water sluicing off the brim, and his beard was silky and
black and pointed like a Chinaman's.

     
"Jude LaRose's
place. It's somewhere around here, ain't it?" I said.

     
"You on it now,
man."

     
"Where's he live
at?"

     
"Why you want to
know that?"

     
"I'm a friend of
his. He told me to come out."

     
He leaned down to the
window of the cab and said to the Mexicans inside,
"Dice que es amigo
del Señor LaRose."
They laughed. The
ones in back had the
tarp pushed up over their heads so they could see me, and two of them were
eating refried beans and tortillas they had folded into big squares between
their fingers. But they were a different sort, not the kind to laugh at other
people.
      

     
"You know where
his house is at?" I said.

     
He'd already lost
interest. He hit on the roof with his fist, and they drove off in the rain,
with the drill pipe flopping off the back of the bed and the Mexicans in back
looking out at me from under the tarp.
      

     
I found Jude LaRose's
town that evening. It was nothing more than a dirt crossroads set in a cup of
hills that had gone purple and red in the sunset. It had a shutdown auction
barn and slaughterhouse, a dried-out hog feeder lot next to a railroad bed with
no track and a wood water tank that had rotted down on itself, and a
shingle-front two-story saloon and cafe, where a little black girl was laying
out steaks on a mesquite fire in back. The sidewalk was almost higher than the
pickups and horses in front of it, iron-stained with the rusted cusps of
tethering rings and pooled with the blood of a cougar someone had shot that day
and had hung with wire around the neck from the stanchion of an electric Carta
Blanca sign that was the same blue as the glow above the hills.