James Burke - Dixie City Jam

Beyond the duck pond, right by the remnant of my collapsed barn, I saw two fresh sets of footprints glistening in the mud, leading through the barbed-wire fence into the field. I lifted up the top strand of barbed wire and stepped into the cane. It grew so thick that the earth was still dry inside the rows. The sound of the rain on the leaves was like marbles striking dry sheets of newspaper. I saw a bolt of lightning splinter the sky and pop in the woods, and when the thunder echoed off the trees, my neighbor's cattle began lowing in terror at the bottom of the coulee.

There was no wind inside the cane, and the air was heated and alive with insects. Ahead, I could see a winding pattern, like a faint serpentine tunnel, through the rows where somebody had either wedged the stalks sideways or cracked them at the base with his shoe. I knelt in the row and listened. At first I heard only the sound of the rain clicking on the leaves overhead, then there was a voice, one man calling out to another, just as lightning burst in a white tree all over the southern horizon and thunder rumbled across the fields.

They must have gotten all the way to the wooded knoll, almost to the pecan orchard and the four corners down the bayou road, I thought. I stepped back outside the sugarcane and began running toward the far side of the field, toward the elevated grove of oak trees whose leaves were flickering with a silver light in the wind off the marsh.

Long ago Clete Purcel had made his separate peace with the system of rules that govern the justifiable taking of human life. I never questioned the validity of Clete's moral vision, no more than I would have questioned his loyalty and courage and his selfless devotion to me during the worst periods in my life. In truth, I often envied the clarity of line that he used to distinguish between right and wrong. I had also harbored fears since I first became a street patrolman in New Orleans that I would one day wrongly exercise the power of life and death over an individual, through accident or perhaps fearful impetuosity or maybe even by self-righteous design.

But Buchalter was not an ordinary player. Most of the psychological mutants with whom a police officer comes in contact daily are bumbling, ineffectual losers who sneak through life on side streets and who often seek out authority and self-validation through their adversarial relationship with police and parole officers, since in normal society they possess about the same worth as discarded banana peels.

Psychopaths like Ted Bundy and Gary Gilmore have a way of committing their crimes in states which practice capital punishment. Then they turn their trials and executions into televised theater of world-class proportions.

The Will Buchalters have no such plan for themselves. They don't leave paperwork behind; they stay out of the computer. When they do get nailed, they make bond and terrify witnesses into perjuring themselves; they convince psychologists that they have multiple personalities that cannot be simultaneously put on trial; their fall partners either do their time or are murdered in custody. No one is ever sure of how many people they actually kill.

Will Buchalter belonged to that special group of people who live in our nightmares.

I could still smell his odor; it was like animal musk, like lotions that were at war with his glands, like someone who has just had sex. I could still feel the grain and oil of his skin on mine.

I pressed my hand tighter around the butt of the.38. The hand-worn walnut grips felt smooth and hard against my palm.

As I neared the end of the cane field I heard a strand of fence wire twang against a post, heard someone curse, as though he were in pain or had fallen to the ground. I swung wide of the field to broaden my angle of vision; then I saw two silhouettes against the veiled moon-one man on his buttocks, holding his ankle, the other man bent over him, trying to lift him up, and I remembered the old fence that my neighbor had crushed flat with his tractor so his livestock could drink at the coulee.

They saw me, too. Before I could squat into a shooting position and yell at them to put their hands on their heads, a small-caliber pistol popped in the darkness, then popped again, just like a firecracker. I ran for the lee of the sugarcane, out of their line of vision, and squatted close into the stalks away from the moon's glow, which streaked the rain with a light like quicksilver.

I heard someone burrow into the cane, thrash through several rows, then stop.

Were there one or two men inside the field now? I couldn't tell. There was no sound except the rain hitting on the leaves over my head.

I worked my way down a furrow, deeper into the cane. I could smell something dead in the trapped air, a coon or possum, an odor like that of a rat that has crawled inside a wall and died. My eyes stung with salt, and the dirt cut into my knuckles and knees like pieces of flint. I saw a wood rabbit bolt across the rows, stop and look at me, his ears flattened on his head, then begin running again in a zigzag pattern. He crashed loudly through the edge of the cane and was gone.

Not twenty feet from me a man rose from his knees in the midst of the cane, his body almost totally obscured by the thickly spaced stalks and long festoons of leaves around him. He tried to ease quietly through the rows to the far side of the field, which opened onto a flat space and the wooded knoll and the pecan orchard.

I pulled my shirt up and wiped my face on it, then aimed as best I could at the man's slowly moving silhouette. I cocked the hammer on the.38 and brought the sight just below an imaginary line that traversed his shoulder blades.

Now! I thought.

'Throw your weapon away! Down on your face with your hands out in front of you!' I yelled.

But he wanted another season to run.

He tore through the sugarcane, flailing his arms at the stalks, stumbling across the rows. I was crouched on one knee when I began shooting. I believe the first shot went high, because I heard a distant sound in a tree, like a rock skipping off of bark and falling through limbs. And he kept plowing forward through the cane, trying to hack an opening with his left hand, shielding a weapon with his right.

But the second shot went home. I know it did; I heard the impact, like a cleated shoe connecting with a football, heard the wind go out of his lungs as he was driven forward through the cane.

But he was still standing, with a metallic object in his right hand, its flat surfaces blue with moonlight, and he was turning on one foot toward me, just as a scarecrow might if it had been spun in a violent-wind.

Clete had loaded only five rounds in the cylinder and had set the hammer on an empty chamber. I let off all three remaining rounds as fast as I could pull the trigger. Sparks and fine splinters of lead flew from the sides of the cylinder into the darkness.

His left arm flipped sideways, as if jerked by a wire, his stomach buckled, then his chin snapped back on his shoulder as if he had been struck by an invisible club.

The hammer snapped dryly on the empty sixth chamber. Then something happened that I didn't understand. As he crumpled sideways to the earth, breaking the stalks of cane down around him, he yelled out in pain for the first time.

I walked across the rows to where he lay on his back, his crossed eyes opening and closing with shock. He kept trying to expel a bloody clot from his mouth with the tip of his tongue. My last round had hit him in the chin and exited just above the jawbone. His left arm was twisted in the sleeve like a piece of discarded rope. He had taken another round in the side, with no exit wound that I could see, and blood was leaking out of his shirt into the dirt. Then I saw his right hand quivering uncontrollably above the feathered shaft of the aluminum arrow that had discharged from his crossbow when he fell. The flanged point had sliced down into the thigh and emerged gleaming and red through the kneecap.