DR09 - Cadillac Jukebox (50 page)

     
"Can Tripod have
some more eggnog ice cream? "

     
"Sure."

     
"Those creeps
are gone, aren’t they? "

     
"Yeah, the worst
of the lot are. The rest get it somewhere down the road. We just don’t see
it."

     
I thought perhaps I
might have to explain my remarks, but I didn’t. She actually lived through more
than I had in her young life, and her comprehension of the world was oftentimes
far better than mine.

     
She went inside the
house with Tripod under her arm, then came back out on the step.

     
"I forgot. We
ate it all," she said.

     
"There’s some in
the freezer down at the shop. I’ll get it," I said.

     
I walked down the
slope through the leaves drifting out of the oak and pecan branches overhead. I
had strung Christmas lights around the bait shop’s windows and hung wreaths
fashioned from pine boughs and holly and red ribbon on the weathered cypress
walls, and Alafair had glued a Santa Claus made from satin wrapping paper to
the door. The bayou was empty of boats, and the sound of my shoes was so loud
on the dock that it echoed off the water and sent a cloud of robins clattering
out of the trees.

     
I had gotten the ice
cream from the game freezer and was about to lock up again when I saw Dock
Green park a black Lincoln by the boat ramp and walk toward me.

     
"It’s Christmas.
We’re closed," I said.

     
"LaRose has got
my wife up at his house," he said.

     
"I don’t believe
that’s true. Even if it is, she’s a big girl and can make her own
choices."

     
"I can give you
that guy, diced and fried."

     
"Not interested."

     
"It ain’t
right."

     
He sat down at a
spool table and stared out at the bayou. His neck was as stiff as a chunk of
sewer pipe. A muscle jumped in his cheek.

     
"I think you
were involved with Jerry Joe’s death. I just can’t prove it. But I don’t have
to talk to you, either. So how about getting out of here?" I said.

     
He rubbed the heel of
his hand in one eye.

     
"I never killed
nobody. I need Persephone back. It ain’t right he can steal my wife, pull a gun
on me, I can’t do nothing about it. . .I told Seph this is how it'd be if we
messed with people was born with money . . . They take, they don't give,"
he said.

     
Then I realized he
was drunk.

     
"Get a motel
room or go back to your camp, Dock. I'll get somebody to drive you," I
said.

     
He rose to his feet,
as though from a trance, and said, more to the wind than to me, "He
controls things above the ground, but he don't hear the voices that's down in
the earth . . . They can call me a geek, it don't matter, her and me are
forever."

     
I went back into the
shop and called for a cruiser. When I came outside again, he was gone.

T
hat night Alafair and Bootsie and I went out to eat, then drove
down East Main, through the corridor of live oaks, looking at the lights and
decorations on the nineteenth-century homes along Bayou Teche. We passed the
city hall and library, the flood-lit grotto, which contained a statue of
Christ's mother, where the home of George Washington Cable had once stood, the
darkened grounds and bamboo border around the Shadows, and in the center of
town the iron-and-wood drawbridge over the Teche.

     
I drove past
the old Southern Pacific station and up the St. Martinville road, and, without
thinking, like a backward glance at absolved guilt, I let my eyes linger on the
abandoned frame house where Karyn LaRose had grown up. The garage that had
contained her father's boxes of gumballs and plastic monster teeth and vampire
fingernails still stood at the front of the property, the doors padlocked, and
I wondered when she drove past it if she ever saw the little girl who used to
play there in the yard, her hands sticky with the rainbow seepage from the gum
that mildewed and ran through the cracks inside.

     
"Look, up the
road, y'all, it's a fire," Alafair said.

     
Beyond the next curve
you could see the reddish orange bloom in the sky, the smoke that trailed back
across the moon. We pulled to the side of the road for a firetruck to pass.

     
"Dave, it's
Buford and Karyn's house," Bootsie said.

     
We came around the
curve, and across the cleared acreage the house looked like it was lit from
within by molten metal. Only one
pump truck had arrived, and
the firemen were pulling a hose from the truck toward the front porch.

     
I stopped on the
opposite side of the road and ran toward the truck. I could already feel the
heat from the house against my skin.

     
"Is anybody in
there?" I said. The faces of the firemen looked like yellow tallow in the
light from the flames.

     
"Somebody was at
the window upstairs but they couldn't make it out," a lieutenant said.
"You're from the sheriff's department, aren't you?"

     
"Right."

     
"There's a trail
of gasoline from the back of the house out to the stables. What the hell kind
of security did y'all have out here?"

     
"Buford worried
about Aaron Crown, not Dock Green," I said.

     
"Who?" he
said.

     
Another pump truck
came up the road, but the heat had punched holes in the roof now, the poplars
against the side wall were wrapped with fire, and the glow through the
collapsing shingles bloomed in an ever-widening circumference, defining
everything in red-black shapes that was Buford's—the brick stables and tack
rooms, the fields that had already been harrowed for next year's planting, the
company store with the barrels of pecans on each side of the front doors, the
stark and leafless tree that his ancestors in the Knights of the White Camellia
had used to lynch members of the carpetbag government, the horses with Mexican
brands that spooked and thudded through the rolling hardwoods as though they
had never been bridled or broken.

     
Then I saw Buford
come through the front door, a water-soaked blanket held in a cone over his
head.

     
He tore the blanket
away and flung it aside, as though the blanket itself contained the heat that
had scalded his body. He smelled like ashes and charcoal and scorched hair, and
smoke rose in dirty strings from his clothes.

     
"Where is
she?" he said, staring wild-eyed at the firemen in his yard.

     
"Who? Who else
is in there?" a fireman said.

     
"Where is she,
Dave?"

     
"I don't know,
Buford," I replied.

     
"She was on the
stairs, right next to me . . ."

     
"She didn't make
it out, partner," I said.

     
I reached out to take
his arm in my hand. I felt the smooth hardness of his triceps brush my palm,
then he was gone, running toward the rectangle of flame beyond the Greek
pillars on the front porch. A fireman in a canvas coat and a big hat tried to
tackle him and hit hard and empty-armed against the brick walkway.

     
Buford went up the
steps, his arms in front of his face, wavering for just a moment in the heat
that withered his skin and chewed apart the interior of his house, then he
crossed his forearms over his eyes and went through the flames and disappeared
inside.

     
I heard a fireman
yell, "Pour it on him, pour it on him, pour it on him, goddamn it!"

     
The pressurized spray
of water caromed off the doorway and dissected the vortex of fire that was
dissolving the stairway, filling the chandeliers with music, eating the floor
away, blowing windows out into the yard.

     
Then we saw them,
just for a moment, like two featureless black silhouettes caught inside a
furnace, joined at the hip, their hands stretched outward, as though they were
offering a silent testimony about the meaning of their own lives before they
stepped backward into the burning lake that had become their new province.

S
pring didn't come for a long time that year. The days were cold
well into March, the swamp gray with winterkill. Batist would run his trotlines
each morning at sunrise, his pirogue knocking against the swollen base of the
cypress trunks. I would watch him from the bait shop window while he retrieved
each empty hook and rebaited it and dropped it back in the water, wiping the
coldness off his hand on his trousers, the mist rising about his bent
shoulders. Then he would come back inside, shivering unduly inside his quilted
jacket, and we would drink coffee together and prepare the chickens and sausage
links for the few fishermen or tourists who might be in that day.

     
Persephone and Dock
Green were never seen again; some say they fled the country, perhaps to South
America. The irony was that even though a filling station attendant in St.
Martinville identified Dock as the man who had bought gas in a can from him on
the night Buford and Karyn died, the gas can found on the LaRose plantation had
no fingerprints on it, and without an eyewitness to the arson Dock would have
never been convicted.

     
The greater truth was
that Dock Green's strain of madness had always served a function, just as Aaron
Crown's had, and the new governor of Louisiana, a practical-minded businessman,
was not
given to brooding over past events and
letting them encumber his vision of the future.

     
Jimmy Ray Dixon?

     
He has a late-hour
radio talk show in New Orleans now, and with some regularity he tells his
listeners that his brother's spirit has finally been laid to rest. Why now? He
doesn't answer that question. He's not comfortable with the mention of Mookie
Zerrang's name, and when he hears it, his rhetoric becomes more religious and abstruse.

     
Dock Green's girls
still work the same bars and street corners, Jimmy Ray jerks his listeners
around and they love him for it, and Aaron Crown sits in a maximum security
unit at Angola, denying his guilt to European journalists who have done front-page
features on him.

     
The players don't
change, just the audience.

     
But maybe that's just
a police officer's jaded interpretation of things, since few seem interested in
the death of Short Boy Jerry, a man who everyone knew operated by choice on the
edge of the New Orleans underworld and hence invited his fate.

     
No draconian sword
fell into the life of Clay Mason, either. He was expelled from Mexico and his
property seized, but in a short while he was visiting college campuses again,
being interviewed on the Internet, selling his shuck on TV. A patron of the
arts bought him a home in the hills outside Santa Fe, where his proselytes and
fellow revelers from the 1960s gathered and a famous New York photographer
caught him out on the terrace, his face as craggy and ageless as the blue ring
of mountains behind him, a sweat-banded Stetson crimped on his head, his pixie
eyes looking directly into the camera. The cutline under the photo read,
"A Lion in Winter."

     
But I think I've
learned not to grieve on the world's ways, at least not when spring is at hand.

     
It rained hard the
third week in March, then the sky broke clear and one morning the new season
was upon us and the swamp was green again, the new leaves on the flooded stands
of trees rippling in the breeze off the Gulf, the trunks of the cypress painted
with lichen.

     
Alafair and I rode
her Appaloosa bareback down the road, like two wooden clothespins mounted on
its spine, and put up a kite in the wind. The kite was a big one, the paper
emblazoned with an
American flag, and it rose quickly into
the sky, higher and higher, until it was only a distant speck above the
sugarcane fields to the north.

     
In my mind's eye I
saw the LaRose plantation from the height of Alafair's kite, the rolling
hardwoods and the squared fields where Confederate and federal calvary had
charged and killed one another and left their horses screaming and disemboweled
among the cane stubble, and I wondered what Darwinian moment had to effect
itself before we devolved from children flying paper flags in the sky to
half-formed creatures thundering in a wail of horns down the road to Roncevaux.