DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (28 page)

     
"You're the
best, Cletus."

     
He put his arm on my
shoulder, and we walked together toward the elevator like two impaired Siamese
twins trying to get in sync with each other.

T
he next morning I was part of the caravan that escorted Karyn and
Buford back to their home on the Teche. It was balmy and gray after the rain,
and you could smell the wet earth in the fields and hear the clanging of the
sugarcane refinery down the bayou. It was a fine, late-fall morning, disjointed
from the events of last night, as though I had experienced them only in a
drunken dream.

     
From my car I watched
Karyn and her husband enter their front door, their faces opaque, perhaps still
numb from the alcohol of the night before, or perhaps masking the secrets they
waited to share or the buried anger they would vent on each other once inside.

     
Bootsie was in the
backyard, at the redwood picnic table, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette
when I parked in the drive. She wore sandals and a terrycloth red shirt and a
pair of khakis high on her hips.

     
"Hi," I
said.

     
Her legs were
crossed, and she tipped her ashes in an inverted preserve jar cap and looked at
the ducks skittering across our pond.

  
   
"You don't smoke," I said.

     
"I'm
starting."

     
I sat down across
from her. Her eyes moved up to meet mine.

     
"I told you the
truth last night," I said.

     
"For
some reason that doesn't make it any easier."

     
"Why?"

     
"How'd she come
to have this obsession with you? What's your end of it?"

     
"I didn't want
to go out to their house when we were first invited there. I tried to avoid
her."

     
"Who are you
putting on?"

     
I felt my throat
close. My eyes burned, as though I were looking into a watery glare.

     
She threw her
cigarette in a flower bed full of dead leaves by the back wall of the house.
Her cheeks were hot and streaked with color. Before I went into the house, I
removed the burning cigarette from the leaves and mashed it out in the jar cap
in front of her, my gesture as foolish as my words were self-serving.

T
he wall phone was ringing in the kitchen. I picked it up, my eyes
fixed on Bootsie's back through the window. Her hair was thick and woven with
gold in the gray light.

     
"Aaron Crown
dumped the boat down by Maurice," the sheriff said.

     
"Did anybody see
him?"

     
"No, just the
boat."

     
"He'll be
back."

     
"You say that
almost with admiration."

     
"Like an old
gunbull said, Aaron's a traveling shit storm."

     
"Anyway, you got
your wish. You're off it."

     
When I didn't reply,
he said, "You're not going to ask me why?"

     
"Go ahead,
Sheriff."

     
"Buford called
and said you're resentful about the assignment. He said you don't need to come
around his house again."

     
"He did, did
he?"

     
"That's not all.
He said you made a pass at his wife last night."

     
"He's a
liar."

     
"I believe you.
But why did he decide to make up a story about you now?"

     
"Ask him."

     
"I will . . .
Dave, you still there?"

     
"I'll talk to
you later, Sheriff. I have to go somewhere."

     
"I always knew
this job would bring me humility . . . Say, you're not going out to get in
Buford LaRose's face, are you?"

I
drove Bootsie's Toyota to the mechanic's garage, exchanged it for
my truck, and asked the mechanic to drive the Toyota back to my house, then I
headed out to the LaRose plantation.

     
But I was not the
only person who had a grievance with Buford that day. Jerry Joe Plumb's blue
Buick was pulled at an angle to the old LaRose company store, and Jerry Joe
stood on the gallery between the two wooden pecan barrels that framed the
double front doors, his hands on his hips, speaking heatedly into Buford's
face.

     
I crunched across the
shell parking lot and cut my engine. They both looked at me, then stepped
inside the double doors with the oxidized and cracked windows and continued
their argument, Jerry Joe jabbing his finger in the air, his cheeks pooling
with color.

     
But I could still
hear part of it.

     
"You're shorting
me. Your old man wouldn't do this, Buford."

     
"You'll get your
due."

     
"Three of the
jobs you promised are already let to Dock Green."

     
"I gave you my
word. You stop trying to cadge favors because you knew my family."

     
"Persephone let
you put your head up her dress?"

     
Jerry Joe's back was
to me. His shoulders looked stiff, rectangular, his triceps swollen with tubes
of muscle, like a prizefighter's while he waits for the referee to finish
giving instructions before the bell.

     
But Buford turned
away from the insult and lit a cigar, cupping and puffing it in the gloom as
though Jerry Joe was not there.

     
Jerry Joe's
leather-soled oxblood loafers were loud on the gallery when he came out the
double doors.

     
"What's the
haps, Jerry?" I said.

     
He balanced on his
soles, his face still glowing.

     
"He asks me the
haps? Here's a lesson. You take up with piranha fish, don't expect them to go
on a diet."

     
"Buford stiffed
you?"

     
"That guy don't
have the lead in his Eversharp to stiff anybody. Hey, keep your hammer in your
pants or get you a full-body condom," he said, and got into his Buick and
started the engine.

     
I got out of my truck
and put my hand on his door window. He rolled it down with the electric motor.

     
"Spell it
out," I said.

     
"You're in the
way. She knows how to combine business and pleasure. Don't pretend you're a
dumb shit." He pushed the window button again and scorched two lines in
the shell parking lot out to the state highway.

     
I picked a handful of
pecans out of one of the barrels by the door and went inside the store.

     
"You again. Like
bubble gum under the shoe," Buford said.

     
The store was dark,
the cypress floor worn as smooth as wood inside a feed bin, the half-filled
shelves filmed with cobwebs. I put a half dollar for the pecans next to the
brass cash register on the counter and cracked two of them together in my palm.

     
"Why are you
telling lies about me to the sheriff?" I said.

     
"You
propositioned Karyn at the Acadiana. What do you expect?"

     
"Who told you
this?"

     
"Karyn, of
course."

     
"Bad source.
Your wife's a pathological liar."

     
"Your job's
finished here. Go back to doing whatever you do, Dave. Just stay off my
property."

     
"Wrong. As long
as Aaron Crown is running loose, I'll come here anytime I want, Buford."

     
He combed his thick,
curly hair back with his fingernails, a dark knowledge forming in his face.

     
"You want to
bring me down, don't you?" he said.

     
"You're a
fraud."

     
"What did I ever
do to you? Can you answer that simple question for me?"

     
"You and your
wife use each other to injure other people . . . You know what a
bugarron
is?"

     
The skin trembled
along the lower rim of his right eye.

     
"Are you calling
me a—" he began.

     
"You serve a
perversity of some kind. I just don't know what it is."

     
"The next time
you come here, I'll break your jaw. That's a promise."

     
He turned and
walked down the length of the counter, past the display shelves that were
covered with dust, and out the back screen door into the light. The screen
slammed behind him like the crack of a rifle.

I
took the rest of the day off and raked piles of wet leaves and
pecan husks out of the lawn. The wind was still warm out of the south and the
tops of the trees in the swamp were a soft green against the sky, and the only
sound louder than my own thoughts was Tripod, Alafair's three-legged coon,
running up and down on his chain in the side yard. I burned the leaves in the
coulee, then I showered, took a nap, and didn't wake until after sunset. While
I was dressing, the phone rang in the kitchen. Bootsie answered it and walked
to the bedroom door.

     
"It's Batist,"
she said.

     
"What's he
want?"

     
"He didn't
say." She went into the living room, then out on the gallery and sat on
the swing.

     
"That movie
fella get a hold of you?" Batist asked.

     
"No. What's
up?"

     
"He was down
here wit' a truck and some people wit' cameras. I tole him he ought to talk to
you about what he was doing. I seen him talking on one of them cordless phones.
He ain't called you?"

     
"This man's not
a friend, Batist. Is he there now?"

     
"No. He ain't
the reason I called you. It's that big black man. He ain't up to no good."

     
"Which black
man?"

     
"The biggest one
I ever seen around here."

     
"I'll be down in
a minute."

     
I went out on the
gallery. Bootsie still sat in the swing, pushing it back and forth with one
foot.

     
"I need to go
down to the dock for a few minutes," I said.

     
"Right."

     
"Boots, you've
got to cut me some slack."

     
"You don't see
it."

     
"What?"

     
"You hate the
LaRoses and what they stand for. That's the power they have over you."

     
"I'm a police
officer. They're corrupt."

     
"You say they
are. Nobody else does." She went inside. The swing twisted emptily on its
chains under the bug light.

     
I walked down the
slope through the trees to the dock. The string of lights was turned on over
the dock, and you could see bream night feeding off the insects that fell into
the water. Batist was cleaning out the coffee urn inside the bait shop.

     
"Tell me about
the black guy," I said.

     
Batist looked up from
his work and studied my face. His head was titled, one eyebrow arched.

     
"What you mad
about?" he asked.

     
"Nothing."

     
"I can see that,
all right. . . That movie fella rented a boat and took pictures up and down the
bayou. That's when I first seen this black man up the road in a pickup truck,
watching the bayou out the window. Later he come on in and axed if a movie's
getting made here.

     
"I say that's
what it looks like. He axed me if it's a movie about this white man broke out
of Angola, the one killed that black civil rights man in Baton Rouge a long
time ago. When I tole him I don't know, he said he's got a story he can give
this movie fella, if he gets any money for it, he's gonna give me some, but
he's got to find out where the movie man's staying at first.